Arrival in Cerro Castillo

A few days after Puerto Natales, we rolled our lilliputian rental car down Chilean Highway 9, a ribbon of smooth cement that took us to the Riverline Lodge in Cerró Castillo, half the way to famous Torres Del Paine National Park. Cerró Castillo isn’t much more than a wide spot in the road. Outside of a few pine-framed houses riveted over corrugated iron, there is one church, a single large motel that looks quite new, many sheep and a bar restaurant that promises in English “Fresh Eggs.” The Riverline itself stands alone on the pampas and has two lazy dogs and six cozy rooms clean as a hen’s teeth.

Cyndy and I had picked up colds in Puerto Natales and once settled, lay in bed feeling as though someone had filled our heads with concrete. Cyndy had a hacking cough and I had a triphammer going somewhere between my eyes. The bed was solid and comfortable. Outside the wind roared across the hay-colored and endless prairie, bending poplars that strained and then snapped upright with each gust. We lay there listening. And then I heard Cyndy humming. I smiled. Only Cyndy could hum Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtdemuzik feeling like she had been hit by a guanaco.

We have seen some gusty winds on our journey, sideways rain in Bonavista, Newfoundland; howling Zeyphrs in Minnesota that upended 12 eighteen-wheelers on our way to South Dakota; hot Chinooks from the Flat Irons in Boulder and LA's infamous Santa Anas. I even managed to find a hurricane in Miami before shipping out to Lima. But Patagonia’s wind is another creature. It flies out of the mountains and relentlessly assaults the flatlands.

Thankfully the Riverline was a warm little place, built close to the earth, and with its red tin roof and sturdy clapboard siding looked like it could withstand, and had withstood, just about anything. As evening approached, even though it was the dead of the Austral summer, a fine fire roared in the enclosed Pyrex and tile fireplace. It would’ve done any Nordic winter proud. Outside, flocks of clouds clustered ominously threatening more rain high above the mountains.

I sat by the fire and thumbed through the living room’s skinny library. There was FOSIL, a book filled with pictures of hydrosaurs, milodons, glyptodons, and a titanosaurus, the largest known dinosaur to ever prowl the planet. Apparently they all spent time among the Chilean pampas before the Chilean pampas existed. I fingered through another book entitled LAS ESTANCIAS MAGALLÁNICAS which I desperately wished I could read, and a worn coffee table book revealing everything beautiful about Chile.

In time I retired to our room, loving the gusts, and with the lights out finally slept, snoring no doubt along with our colds, deep into the Patagonian night.

Cerro Castillo Recommendations