Fire and dusty roads

The assortment of random tasks I have helped out with in El Bolson continues to grow. The new house of Pastor and Paz is still in a state of flux, and they use their contingent of volunteers to bring it that much closer to completion. Completion is sort of an imaginary concept when building your own house, I don´t think you ever really finish, and that´s half the joy of it.

There was the morning we hand sanded the beautiful wooden, surfboard-like countertop for their bathroom. Another time Pastor was blow-torching giant bamboo tubes to make them impermeable to water. Sometime I play with the kids when they`re bored: I`ll carry the youngest, Silvestre, around on my shoulders while he shouts ¨salte caballo!¨ (jump horse!). We had a jumping competition, and Silvestre´s cousin Gabby asked in awe ¨how can you jump so high?¨

One day we go about painting the exterior of the house. First up, there are the wooden trunks that make up the frame. I shimmy from ladder to roof and apply a few coats of some sort of stain. After painting the wood almost glows. The next task was to paint the exterior adobe with a natural waterproofer, made up of heated beeswax and oil. Perhaps you can see where this is going, I certainly didn´t at the time.

The clouds were high in the sky and we were having a grande old time in the sun, painting from a temporarily constructed second floor walkway that I began to trust more and more as the day went on. Paz would pass us freshly heated paint every few minutes and Pastor would advise me on my technique. Suddenly there was a shout, and Pastor took off. I didn´t think much of it, until Silvestre popped his head out the window and said something about a fire.

The two ingredients had boiled over the bucket and started a grease fire of sorts. I didn´t see it but I saw the after-effects: a charred bucket, it`s blackened contents all over the place, and two very unhappy looking home-owners clutching ice to their hands. That was it for painting that day.

Regardless, my three weeks in El Bolson have flown by, and all the little tasks and moving from house to house have reached their end. Tomorrow I say my goodbyes to El Bolson and some fine memories of wind chimes and vegetables. I have a small gift for my family, the quintessential maple syrup souvenir in a novelty maple leaf glass bottle. I am very excited to be the hero and give it to them, as I am sure the bottle alone will knock their socks off as a future centrepiece to embed in an adobe wall somewhere.

It`s great that I managed to save a bunch of money over the past few weeks, as I can now waste it all on a week of travel. Tomorrow a bus will take me to Puerto Montt, Chile. From this point in Chile, there´s no road that goes all the way to the bottom of the continent, you have to drive through Argentina. Since that is my return route, I`m opting to make the voyage south on the Navimag ferry.

I`m realizing that I enjoy the act of travel, just going from one exotic location to another. This ferry is the perfect embodiment of that: four days through fjords and across channels, skirting the Pacific Ocean. It is not a cruise, though all meals are included, since the boat is laden with supplies and food (and possibly even livestock) for the southern region. I`ll be in a dorm, hopefully with a window. There´s a bar and apparently some movies but it´s all pretty rustic, and certainly no internet. It is for this reason the blog has accumulated so much text today, and for the first time is caught up with my actual progress. Also in preparation I purchased the best English novel I could find in El Bolson - The Count of Monte Cristo. A classic. Looking forward to where this takes me, when we next speak I`ll be hovering around the 50th parallel, likely freezing my butt off.