Post 2: The best holidays I've had.

 

The Summer of 2016 I had one of the experiences that have taken me the most to the limit: the summer camp from Cochamó to El Bolsón, Argentina. It all started as a crazy idea that we had with my leaders, Punky and Lily, at that time we were a group of 16 adolescents belonging to the “Avanzada de Pioneros” called “Antumilla Huequén” a group that was born from “Grupo de Guías y Scout La Merced de Valdivia”, to which I belonged for ten years.

Cochamó is a small town located east of Puerto Varas within the Los Lagos region. We got to the town and we had to walk a few kilometers to a campsite where we spent the first night, it was a place in the middle of green and pristine mountains, here we began to feel that the world is too big, and we know too little about the beautiful landscapes it has.

The second day the journey began. The goal was to cross the border from Chile to Argentina walking through "Paso el León" in seven days. I never thought I could achieve something like this in my life, less being only 16 years old and with a full and heavy backpack on my back, but every time I looked up and observed the trees, the immensity of the forest, the singing of the birds and breathed clean air, I felt so alive that I closed my eyes and tried to record that moment and those sensations in my memory forever.

But not everything was perfect. There was an afternoon in which we left very late from the place where we camped called “Los Toboganes” and it got dark before we reached the refuge. It was around 3 in the morning and we were still walking in the dark without being able to set up camp because, honestly, we were lost (which was quite irresponsible now that I look at the situation from another perspective). The worst happened when it started to rain. I remember a moment in which we stopped and burst into tears due to the frustration of the moment, because we were hungry, cold and did not know where to go, also the path had become muddy and many of us fell several times. Yes, it was dangerous and irresponsible, but in that time, scout was much wilder. Finally, at 4AM we managed to get to the shelter, make a fire and eat a hot meal. On the seventh day we reached the Argentine border, traveling a total of 100 kilometers.

Our next destination was “El Bolsón”, a very hippie town in the South of Argentina. We stayed in an ecological community "Bioconstruyendo Patagonia" whose head of the community was called “Pastor Silvestre” -as I told you, VERY hippie-. In this place we helped with the community tasks, which were organized as "loving services" where they formed groups to cook, build adobe houses, help in the community vegetable garden, clean the ecological toilets and other things.

It was a beautiful trip, full of learnings and new experiences, a trip that I definitely have to repeat in my life.