Argentina

From Natales to Calafate to El Chaltén and back to Calafate. Fotos around Santa Cruz province in Argentina. But you already knew that. The horsie shot is at Torres del Paine here in Chile.

Parts List

The builder passed me the materials list for the first level (wait a minute...what is this "passed me the list.."? Me pasó la lista. Am I starting to mix up the languages? )

Anyway, trying to renegotiate some of the taskings and establish better work flow and sequencing of specialty work over time. The "omega" material for the roofing wa supposed to be back in stock in Punta Arenas and in theory I should have some priority for filling the back order since it is already paid for. Ha ha. Overcome by other events... Chilean government workers on strike. Including Aduana/ Customs. Wondering if I will ever get that roof on.

Blood on the tracks

It had all the marks of a fine Spring day. Wind only light, and almost warm. Not a hint of rain on the horizon. And then in mid-morning, two of the workers came down from the site. One was holding a very bloody hand. I am still not clear exactly what happened but it seems as though he fell and somewhere along the way the sharp steel of the structure badly cut into one of his fingers. There is no doubt about the edges of that framing steel, and what it might do to body parts.

I am supposed to keep from driving the pickup until I can get a new cam belt idler installed, but now the truck was an ambulance. And of course the Chilean health workers are on strike. But they took the worker in to Emergency at the little hospital in Natales, still dripping blood. Later I learned that he was transferred to hospital in Punta Arenas.

Sunday in Bories

After an intriguing morning, a fine afternoon here in Puerto Bories. By about two there was bright sunlight, moderate wind, and the canto of the wild birds all around.








Caught a ride into Natales to collect the KLR I had ridden in last night (left it at the store garage since it was raining a bit too much for the 7 km ride home). While I was there a person asked how soon I would have the KLRs ready for rent. Tried to explain that the riding/rental season doesn't really start for us until December. But it seems that prospective clients are lining up. Coincidentally I had started the reassembly of the last KLR that was inside the cargo trailer. Fine views of the local scenery even while working inside the trailer.

Lucarna

A little labor dispute today. As if that were not enough, the steel I need to get the roof completed is still on backorder.

Nobody said it was going to be easy.

Getting to the roof. And the Culture of Suple

After days of rain and no work on the house, the building crew came in this morning and got back to work. Had a little meeting with their chief regarding some of the requested details for the first floor design and dimensions. The additions there should help deal with the excessive flex in the floor on the second level, something that I have been trying to address. I didn't want to build the downstairs just yet but it seems that doing so is required now. And there was the discussion about how the workers are paid. Number one, I don't pay them when they don't come to work. Sorry about the rain -- I don't control that. If it rains and you guys don't come in, then you don't get paid for that day. Want to consider working Sundays to make up for days of rain and no work? Think about it.

Part of the work done today included framing of the lucarna, the gable-room. It's going to be very much exposed to the high winds up there, so it may seem to be more of a ride than just a room.

I was going to write about the tendency to .... "suple." But that will come later.

Cuatro Aguas

Correspondents have been asking about this techo a cuatro aguas, the local 4-sided roof with a lower silhouette in order to better deal with the strong winds around here. So I include a couple of fotos of some of the houses in Puerto Natales with this style of roof.

And then, completely unrelated to that topic, a foto of one of the local fruit stores, for your listening enjoyment.



Actually the real reason I was loose on the streets of Natales was to get a quote for the windows at Casa 7 Bis, which have to be custom made. Here is the shop at Tecalum.

Casa 7 Bis: Progress 11 November

Progress has been slow since the workers don't come in when it looks like rain. Actually it didn't rain much here until about 5 pm. Oh, well.

Progress: 6 November

The work continues at Casa 7 Bis. That is, so long as it is not raining. The workers tend to pack it in when there is a good bit of rain, to avoid exposure to electical shock when working around the wet steel framing. Ground fault interruptor? What is that?

The perimeter framing for the second floor is in, along with most of the interior walls. This should provide a more rigid target for any big winds, which just a few days ago took down one of the second floor walls. Still, I have in mind some additional anchoring. I think the builder is going to call me Don Ancla... Mister Anchor.

Avanzando, as they say.

And thank you for asking, but no, I don't care to hear about the elections in some other country. I voted ....with my feet.

From home to town

Just a few shots in the afternoon light. A view of the work in progress. A shot looking toward Cerro Dorotea on the way into Natales. A view of the Navimag ship docked in Natales, a little less than crisp because of the telefoto and my clumsy handling.

To Río Gallegos

Weekend trip to Río Gallegos: The middle of spring here in southern Patagonia, and it felt just like... Colorado. It snowed on Friday night, with snow sticking almost down to sea-level. It continued snowing as we drove across the frontier at Dorotea and on to Río Turbio in Argentina. The tires on the little car were not well suited for any sort of snow. We took on fuel in Río Turbio, bought some good meat-and-cheese pastry at a panadería there, and asked ourselves why such a good panadería can't be found on the Chilean side.

We promptly headed out, on Ruta 40 -- the "mistica" Ruta 40 as Claudio called it. It was over 200 miles to Río Gallegos, but we would leave Ruta 40 and stay on pavement, though the distance would be greater. A thermos of hot tea and some good pastry, the outcroppings of coal-seams along the cliffs by the river, the snowy road full of ruts and puddles....it doesn't get any better than this.

It continued to snow and in some places the snow was forming drifts in the low pressure areas along the highway. Claudio expressed his doubts about this little toy Korean car we were in (a Daihatsu Happy Hamster model, I think), about whether it could deal with the snow. For a time we ducked in behind a road-grader that was serving as a quitanieves, a snowplow.

We came upon some vehicles that were stopped along a slight curve in Ruta 40. One of them, an Argentine SUV, had gone into a ditch but was still upright.

Then, as we drew closer to Tapi Aike and the turnoff for the highway to Río Gallegos, the snow diminished, and we picked up speed. By the time we got to Esperanza, we were on dry pavement, with a strong tailwind that nevertheless still made driving the toy car a tiring handful. We stopped for a good cup of café con leche at Esperanza.

There had been enough recent rain and warming temperatures to bring out some of the early flowers, and the grass was started to turn greener. We passed by several old estancias, their cascos located in vain attempts to get out of the brutal wind, the alamos and other trees providing some degree of windbreak. Many of these buildings were based on British designs and materials.

Claudio, himself from families with Magellanic roots that go back a couple of generations, never fails to profess his affection for the old estancia buildings, particularly the ones well preserved and still in operation, shining still in good order and fresh paint. He would slow down as we passed these places, partly to allow me to consider a quick photo, but perhaps more from his own fondness and appreciation for the old places.



As it turned out, one of the books we picked up in Río Gallegos, on the history of pioneer Patagonian architecture, included a photo of a 1926 receipt from the lumber company owned by Claudio's great-grandfather, Aquilino Alonso, who ran the Aserradero "Isla Riesco." As was the custom of that time, as now, the dimensions of the lumber are given in inches rather than metric units. As I deal with the builders of the house here at Puerto Bories, there are some other items, such as roofing screws, that we describe in inches.




It is perhaps worthwhile mentioning that many of the earliest buildings in southern Patagonia were prefabricated structures, typically constructed in England and then disassembled and sent by ship. This was a practice also seen in the early days of the Falkland Islands, where there was very little useful local building material. During the initial assembly in England, the principal parts were identified by a numbering system. Even some of the huge shearing sheds seen in Tierra del Fuego still show these markings on the various wooden components. The estancia structure shown on this blog entry is at Guer Aike, just to the west of the Río Gallegos airport area, but on the north side of the river. The estancia was founded at the end of the 19th century and run by the Beatingcourt company, according to Silvia Mirelman's book, Arquitectura Pionera de la Patagonia Sur. The house in the blog photo was built on the Guer Aike site in 1915 and was a work of the London company, Humphrey's Iron Buildings, where it was initially assembled and then knocked down for shipment to the site. The use of a considerable number of north-facing windows in the gallery provided "solar heating" long before it became trendy. Guer Aike is evidently open to the public and it is on my list.

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Río Gallegos has certainly grown and changed since the first time I visited, more than thirty years ago. I attach a 1978 foto of me on the XS650 I rode down here from California. This was at a pier in the Ria, at Río Gallegos.




Superficially, there is not much to recommend it as a place to sightsee, and in fact we were only there for business, mostly for books and a few items for me including key blanks for the motorcycles that could not be had in Chile. Argentine industry may not be among the world's best, but it does fill some holes in availability of serviceable items that otherwise aren't available at this end of the hemisphere. It turns out that the key-makers we found were also quite competent. They were able to cross-reference from the Italian Silco blanks that I knew would work for Kawasaki KLR keys, and the cutting they did was sufficiently precise that all the keys for all the bikes worked just fine when I checked upon our return to Natales. Unfortunately, after the book and key tasks we ran out of time since the stores we needed were closed during most of the time we were in Río Gallegos.



Lodging was acceptable. Steak and pizza better than what we typically find on the Chilean side. During the time that the shops were closed, we kicked about the ría, the estuary, trying to find some of the old places. Alas, the muelle I was looking for has apparently gone. Likewise the old frigorifico. The hulls of old locomotives appear to be those from the old coal line that ran from the mines at Río Turbio to the port in the ría at Río Gallegos.









We got a fairly early start on Sunday, but paused long enough near the old center of the town to take some photos a couple of the older residences.



After the obligatory stop in Esperanza for coffee we pressed on toward Río Turbio again, and soon saw the Torres del Paine massif, and in time the towers themselves.

Then it was time to get out of Dodge and into the headwinds, which made for a very jerky and sometimes treacherous drive. Along the way we saw some relatively new gas well installations, which I photographed from a distance without stopping the bouncy little Happy Hamster car.






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Then into the coal-mining town of Río Turbio and with just brief delays at the frontier control points, we were back in Natales by early afternoon.