I climbed a volcano spotted with snow fields, sat on a plastic dish and sled all the way down to the bottom in one morning. I was back in town by lunchtime. It felt like a full day to be sure and it offered up a chance to revisit a skill base that I used to have — climbing and mountaineering. I was always a rookie at this skill set and even more so with time, but my first of two NOLS courses (National Outdoor Leadership School) was in the Wind River Range of Wyoming, and it had a mountaineering component to it. Preparing for the course back in 1997 was my first time holding an ice axe, and practicing how to actually use the axe while in the Winds was my first time getting real with mountaineering. The mountaineering was a modest portion of a four-week expedition, but it was from that experience that I vaguely knew how to maneuver an ice axe as my “brake” heading down the side of Volcan Villarrica. It felt good to circle back on such muscle memory, which would have otherwise been forgotten in my professional, desk-based life previously. My respect for the practice and refined craft of mountaineering was also reinvigorated.
Playing around with the selfie stick that my Brazilian climbing mates offered generously (credit: L. Hower, 2017).
The trek up the volcano had a familiar rhythm to it, with hiking groups in single Iines following switchbacks uphill and taking synchronized breaks for food and water. The weather was beautifully sunny but very windy, and the volcano had more active than usual in the past few days, so there was some restriction on how high we could ascend. But the morning trek and sleigh ride were marvelous, and I was able to share it with a Brazilian couple and our seasoned guide, Rodrigo.
On the ride home, I sat up front with Rodrigo and I asked him to share his thoughts on Pucon’s apparent growth and development. The cranes and scaffolding wrapped around new buildings — condominiums in town and around the lake — made it clear this area was past discovery and on its way to major growth. The conservationist in me knew this meant two things: increased economic development for the region, which would hopefully lift many people and “boats” but there’s no guarantee of wealth distribution; and an inherent tension with the local community and its resources. Rodrigo was forthright in his concern about all the building — the loss of forest, lake shore, the increasing crowds in high season, the pollution and litter, the already highly competitive tourism market that made it very hard to make a living as a guide (e.g. there are plenty of tourists to guide and so many guides flooding the market as well, enabling lower wages and a tourists’ market). I enjoyed Rodrigo’s company and was pleasantly exhausted after actively listening to his clipped Chilean Spanish monologues. I was also reminded of the cost of tourism. Being the tourist rather than the guide, I was humbled by the reality that while its exciting to see activities of interest grow in accessibility for me, the tourist, that growth is not free. It has people costs, natural resource costs, and sometimes irreversible side effects that can impact local communities often unseen by the tourist passing through Pucon on her three-night stay.
Top of Volcan Villarrica, just south of Pucon, Chile (credit: L. Hower, 2017).
I rubbed against the debate I find regularly, which is how can I practice truly sustainable tourism if locally-managed agencies are limited in quantity and hard to identify due to muted marketing. I’ll always want to employ the Rodrigos directly but the process to getting from my computer screen in San Francisco to Rodrigo’s pocket in Pucon can be a disjointed maze. A tension in the field of ecotourism, for sure.
The day after my volcano wander, I dove into a first-time activity for me: Hidrospeed. This is a derivative of white water rafting, except instead of a group in a large raft, each individual in a group holds a foam-based “raft” like a Boogie board and sails down river rapids. Our group had two guides (one with a GoPro camera), and a third in a raft for emergencies. I was slightly nervous about this activity given the likelihood of collision between body and rocks, but also because of my tender back and its fairly regular sciatic pain. After all, I had already pushed its limit with a sleigh ride down a volcano in an ice chute that had some significant drops and landings. But this Hidrospeed activity was AMAZING, and the back (and the rest of me) thrived. At one point, the river widened between rapids, and the Andes expanded in front of us in breathtaking fashion. Fully forested triangles with the river as their floor. Incredible beauty and a gift to be in the landscape so fully.
The GoPro photos were passed off to a crew of mid 20s German tourists all staying at the same hostel (I did not volunteer to lead the effort of collecting the guide’s memory card to then distribute photos to the group, though this would be an instinct of mine to volunteer in my professional sphere; the fewer details of managing other people’s logistics, the better for me on this sabbatical). I passed off my e-mail address to collect a link to a photo drive but my hopes were limited that they would follow through. I knew this oversight wouldn’t be personal, but a reality given the high logistics, fast-paced nature of travel hopping in parts of the world like this, where one books activities and transit daily, and all energy and focus are on those two energy flows. I remember that travel era as a recent college graduate with backpacks, friends and endless engagement in the next thing in front of you. To spend time ensuring the 39 year-old woman in your Hidrospeed group who you will never see again gets an e-mail with a photo link was low on the priority list. And I was good with this inevitability. It was fun to be present in their millennial energy and still feel grounded in the ease and seasoned contentment of my own. I still tried on a new activity, learned to move through water in a new way, and that’s what matters to me.
