08/12/2020
Like how a true lover wins your heart, the valley of LLanada Grande doesn’t reveal its best kept secrets at first glance. We entered on a bleak, wet and rainy day, waiting on an exposed windy pier for three hours for our turn on the little car ferry. The ferry could only take 7 cars at a go, and if you couldn’t squeeze on the first one, you waited about 3 hours for the next one. Or if you’re unlucky, overnight for the next morning’s ferry.
Our initial venture into the vast valley was a failure, with miscommunication with a park ranger from the nearby Tagua Tagua park leaving us waiting around in the rain alone for two hours, with no cellphone signal to find out what was going on. Turns out the ranger wanted to collect the park entrance fees (this park is a small private land at the start of the valley) the next day, and not the day we entered, and we had no way of finding that out until we gave up and drove 40 KM to the town of Llanada Grande to get mobile reception.
Having left the overnight hiking plans behind us, there was no reason to go exploring, and that we did, venturing deeper into the valley and coming upon crystal clear, absolutely pristine lakes after lakes, lush ancient forests and close to no tourists – we met only 3! – in the 8 days we spend hiking and driving all over the valley, getting real close to the Argentinian border at some point.
It’s incredibly different from the rest in Chile, not just in the preservation of nature (some trees are over two thousand years old), but in the local mindset as well. Farmers here are like a blast from the past, riding around on horseback to run their errands, dressed up like Game of Throne characters, with fur pelts to keep their calves warm, leather ponchos and a woolly beret to top it off. They don’t take more than necessary from mother nature, and the land is free from commercial logging or mining, and trees always line the roads and paths, protecting the soil from erosion. It’s perhaps the only place in Chile that is truly trash free. They have hand-carved and hand-painted signs for everything, from wooden dustbins (very little plastic is used), boat timing signboards and name of places. Everything blends in beautifully with the natural surroundings, from the wooden footbridges made of logs, to the little barn houses.
It felt like we left 2020 pandemic behind, coming close to nature and the way the good life should be led, drinking from glacier-fed streams, stumbling onto the abundant wildlife that’s sometimes curious, sometimes protective and often quite comical and just soaking up the endless green and blue on the sunny days.
I don’t know if such places exist anymore in other parts of the world, but one can only hope the magic of Llanada Grande lives on for the future generations to come.
