On from Pumalin Park

My heart is thumping in my chest. I’ve butterflies in my stomach. I can feel my heart pulsing throughout my body, red and hot through to my fingertips and toes. Its pouring down rain outside, and I’m sitting here in this beautiful architecturally designed house in Pumalin Park. With the fire behind me, and the best sushi in Patagonia in my belly. The reason for the bodily response is not because I am uncomfortable, it is in fact – the opposite. I have become too comfortable here, I have made a little life here, and I am afraid to leave.

We have a little family of four, scientists and nature lovers, all thrown together by fate two weeks ago and have spent Christmas and New Years here in Pumalin Park. It’s a strange experience to be stranded in a remote, tiny town due to the Carretera Austral road closure and being bitten by a dog and then to meet a Californian girl landing in a light aircraft from Patagonia park. All I can say is that stranger things have happened on this crazy South America adventure and I was glad to have her by my side as I navigated unfamiliar territory with my limited Spanish skills.

I have spent the last two weeks baking Christmas cookies for incredibly kind park rangers, helping record the natural soundscape, hiking volcanoes, swimming in thermal hot springs and temporarily overturning a predominantly vegetarian diet in response to my housemates bringing home an entire fresh leg of beef. I have been invited in like family, which seems to be the normal experience in Chile, and as I reflect on this I feel incredibly lucky that the dog decided to bite me.

Regardless of my fear, I’ll be leaving tomorrow. One last dinner in Chaiten by the ocean and then I’ll be jumping on the overnight ferry to bypass the road closure. It seems to me that my fear is an effective gauge for when I’ve stayed too long in a place. A trigger to move on, to keep pushing forward, to throw myself into the unknown. Because my comfort zone is a beautiful place but nothing grows there. I wonder what surprises the next leg of the adventure has in store.