The Time Travel, part II

We are advancing fast with the mobile home of ours. He is now cladded with wooden boards and newly painted on the inside. We layed out the new vinyl-floor and are now finishing the very last details necessary to complete before leaving.

Today we went to check out our lot and the current conditions of the approx. 200 m of muddy dirt road in a very dubious state we have to pass when entering the “casita” to the designated site we want to live on. It was a spectacular day: cold but calm and with the most radiant blue sky. The ground covered in a small cap of snow and the mountains in the distance partly covered by a light and low fog that made them seems misty and to vanish gliding together with the horizon. The buzzard eagle paid us a visit as well as the more common chimango caracara and southern crested caracara. It was so very peaceful and quiet standing there just the 2 of us sharing a mate and taking deep breaths. At moments like these it is difficult to believe our luck and we silently agree that we a blessed and just a few steps away from living out a dream.

Shortly we will live here in our little house on 2 wheels. We will only have a roof, a bed and a small stove to begin with. Nothing more. No toilet, no fixed water supply, no bathroom, no electricity, no heating source, no internet or phone signal, in other words: no comfort at all and just a simple shelter to protect us from the winter elements and the cold. It’s dawning on me that it’s actually the ultimate challenge to say goodbye for good to everything we normally take for granted including the possibility to enter the warmth inside of a cozy heated house.

First of all we need to build something resembling a toilet for all the human solid waste. The liquids we have agreed to shed about keeping it separated from the solids. The idea is to use Euro pallets as floor and walls, all held together with metal bars which are fixed in the ground. Then we are going to build a wooden box with bottom and a hinged lid. In the lid we cut a hole corresponding to a normal toilet seat. The wood will receive a varnish to make cleaning easier. Inside the wooden box we place a bucket. The pallet walls will have a height that allows the person using the toilet to have a beautiful panoramic view of the cordillera while sitting on the toilet thrown. We might put in something that resembles a roof in case the winter weather is disturbing too much.

Next assignment is to build something like a pavilion attached to the “casita” providing us with a shelter we will heat up with our inherited chimney-fireplace. Here we will make room for a place to shower and maybe build an “outdoor kitchen”. This will be our home until we hopefully will qualify for the housing subsidy. This process will take months. In fact I don’t expect anything to happen until 2014. A requirement for qualifying is to own a bare piece of land without any fixed constructions nor the supply of water, electricity or gas, so as to not disqualify ourselves we are only living in an interim structure without any supply at all. That’s the deal and that’s what we are going to do. We receive a lot of head-shaking and questions from our closest family, but at the end it only enhances the desire to leave and start to live by ourselves, at our pace, living out all the crazy ideas that will occur. I love the thought of waking up at the dawn of light, make coffee and drink it looking at the mountains and hearing nothing but the wild and domesticated animals that lives in the vicinity. The day will pass quickly as we fix, build or invent on the lot, or visit the city to buy supplies, go to the gym or to yoga, visit family and friends or use the internet. When the dark falls we will read, study, play games or guitar or listen to music in the spare candlelight before going to bed looking up at the stars. That’s very far from the life I am used to live, but very close to the life I love when in the mountains. The life that really makes me happy and make me feel completely free.

At times I wonder if I am suited for this life. I am after all a city girl. Maybe I will be bored. Maybe I will never be warm. Maybe I can’t put in the work DEFY needs. Maybe I will feel isolated. After all I will be writing off all commodities I am used to. Then I think: The big move to the lot is tying together all ends of my current endevours and dreams. DEFY Patagonia and my future life with Luis which at some point will hopefully include having children. This is the beginning and beginning with just the pure basics is important to us. Thta means that each morning we will get out of bed and build on our future and our dreams. 

A very cold & beautiful day in Puerto Natales

Puerto Natales Coast line at 11 am on July 17 2013. 

 Puerto Natales Coast line at 5 pm on July 17 2013. 

The Time Travel

It’s freezing cold, very windy and dark when I finally step out of the machine in Punta Arenas at 6PM local time. Behind me I have just left the Scandinavian summer and a 32 hour journey from the first flight in Copenhagen. During this time I have had plenty of time to observe and not least reflect upon partly the past 7 months spent in Denmark and partly on my future that is laying ahead of me in Puerto Natales. I suppose you can say it’s a life-changing journey I have started, that brings me rapidly from my past to my future. A sort of Time Travelling:

In Copenhagen a Dane boards a plane. In Madrid she gets out now as a European citizen.  Just another westerner amongst other weterners. People here are in a hurry and are obviously very used to it. They are taking their part in the machinery seriously and keep the wheels of an international community turning. They hardly sense the presence of other people as they hurry by, properly on their way home after a meeting in a European capital or another big Spanish city. From here she goes to Santiago de Chile, the capital of one of South Americas most well-organized and internationalized countries, so the difference shouldn’t be too noticeable between 2 great and important capital cities with a distance of 13 ½ hours as the plane flies crossing the Atlantic and the South American continent including the Andes Mountain range. But it is. You see Santiago is hit by the winter vacation fever and filled with enthusiastic middle class families on their way somewhere in beautiful Chile. The tempo is very different and when I tell you that the international airport is very small and quickly overviewed and add that it has not been refurbished since the 80’ies, still holding the original look, I have made a journey back in time to a time when Denmark and Europe wasn’t in such a hurry. Maybe some odd 20 years ago when I was about 15 years old and soon would be leaving high school. Back then when we didn’t even lock the front door and no one had cell phones or computers.

I wait for 6 hours here listening to and enjoying the Chilean language spoken once again. That recognizable Spanish dialect expressed in a way that reflects the Chilean easy going way of life. I don’t need any distraction here. I just sit and observe.

And then finally I land in Punta Arenas in the extreme south of the continent. I am completely battered from the long journey in time. My husband awaits me here ready to take me back to Puerto Natales. Back to the future.

So here I am just one week in. I have picked up my permanent residency in Chile just before it expired! And I have formally opened DEFY Patagonia as a local tour operator in Puerto Natales to the national tax office. So while I wait to be summoned to the official signing ceremony of the Capital Semilla I am working in the motor home with Luis preparing the essentials before we head off to the outskirts of the city to live on our own piece of land. This is what makes me most excited at the moment. We had 5 days alone in the house before the rest of the family returned from a week of vacation. When I think about it I don’t think we have ever truly just been the 2 of us. It was incredible and what a delight to be able to do precisely what we wanted to do when we wanted to do it. I once had it this way so I know what I have renounced. But since then I have learned to co-exist and respect a sacred symbiosis of a Chilean family.

I leave you with a couple of photos of the “casita” of how it looked Tuesday when I arrived. Luis has cladded the outside plywood with metal plates, some new some re-used from the former roof. Inside we are currently putting up the brown look-alike-wooding Masonite plates over a layer of worn polystyrene-plates Luis is fileting. The upgrade of the “casita” is made mainly of re-use, left-overs from local construction sites and materials we pick up at the beach. Mostly because we at the same time are cleaning up some of the rubbish people through carelessly about, but also because our construction budget is very limited. To us it makes a lot of sense to do it this way. Little by little we are building our own empire with great respect and understanding of our environment.