Riding Into The Pages Of A Tolkien Novel

Chile’s Lake District is full of life

As seen in The Toronto Star

 

Cochamó Valley, CHILE. Over the roar of the swollen river, I can barely make out the instructions the guide is yelling to our group. The Rio Cochamó (Cochamó River) is swallowing her words and spitting them out on the other side, deep into the dark tangle of the rainforest.

 

I leave it up to my trusty mount, Aroma, a solid Chilean horse of Criollo and Andean descent. (Admittedly, his Spanish name is not Aroma. But to my untrained ear it sounds similar and since he’s a horse, it seems fitting enough). Aroma presses on, tip-toeing across century’s old river stones, delivering me to the edge – and then into - the rushing river.

As the water level rises above Aroma’s knees, and starts to close in on his chest, the guide’s cryptic instructions finally gel. Unless I want to wear soggy hiking shoes for the next two days, I need to slip my feet out of the hand-carved wooden stirrups and lift my legs up to Aroma’s mane, near the base of his withers.

 

Teetering on my behind, with shaking stomach muscles and a white-knuckle grip on the front of the saddle (there’s no horn), I concentrate on staying seated because being swept away, I tell myself sternly, is not an option.

 

Just then I am alarmed to see the yellow lab - one of three dogs that have accompanied our group - paddling madly against the powerful current. Bobbing up and down, he looks tiny and helpless as he’s pushed further and further down stream.

 

This, I’m told later, is a typical day at Campo Aventura (www.campo-aventura.com). Owned by Luxemburg transplants Lex Fautsch, an engineer by trade and his wife Christiane Thill, a visual designer, the eco-tourism adventure company offers, among other trips, unique horseback riding excursions like this in the Cochamó Valley, the heart of Chile’s Lake District.

 

Christiane said experiencing the Cochamó Valley is like being in a time machine. The indigenous Alerce tree, which has similar characteristics to the Sequoia of the Northwest and can live up to 4,000 years, thrives in this virgin rainforest.

 

For now, the 250,000 hectares of native, temperate rainforest remain pristine. It’s an incredible feat considering Cochamó Valley has no legal or government protection from logging and Chile relies heavily on lumber as one of its most profitable exports. Yet Cochamó has managed to escape; its isolation and rugged terrain has been its saving grace.

Campo Aventura’s 10-day riding excursion follows the same 300 year-old Gaucho Trail once used by Indians, Spaniards and missionaries as well as the notorious outlaw duo, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Before their ill-fated demise in Bolivia in 1908, Cassidy and the Kid herded their cattle to auction on this very trail.

 

Today, approximately 300 families live in the surrounding mountains, embracing the traditional lifestyle of animal husbandry and subsistence farming. Since the mountain has no road, it takes three days just to ride down, which until recently prevented the mountain children from attending school. The Chilean government responded by spearheading a program to helicopter the kids to town, and back home again for Christmas and summer holidays. “They don’t have a lot,” Christiane said. “But they don’t want a lot either.”

 

The yellow lab expertly paddles to the other edge of the river and scrambles up the hill, where he nonchalantly shakes off his near-death encounter. Aroma delivers me to the other side without incident, while my husband’s horse and two other riders - a couple from Australia and England - follow close behind.

We stop just long enough to exchange adrenalin-charged looks of triumph and quickly move on. We have several more hours of riding before we reach the mountain lodge, where we are already anticipating a traditional Chilean dinner of barbecued pork.

 

Up until now, other than the river crossing, we’ve ridden mostly through open pastures and valleys. Now, as we enter the canopied rainforest, it’s as if someone has instantly dimmed the lights and turned down the thermostat.

 

It feels like we’ve just stepped into the pages of a JRR Tolkien novel. In an area that receives an average annual precipitation of 1900 mm, monster ferns and massive trees dripping in lichen grow with free abandon. Here, it’s not a stretch to see how Tolkien came up the idea of talking trees. Everything feels so alive.