As seen from Casa-Pangue
Puerto Blest consists only of a dock and a frame building which is the rest house for travelers and which is owned by the South Andes Transportation Company. Here one stops for the night to continue on the following morning the four-hours' steamer trip to the thirty-mile-distant Argentine town of San Carlos de Bariloche. Lake Nahuel Huapi is over fifty miles long by seven miles wide at its broadest place, and is very irregular in shape, having many antennæ or arms which reach into the mountain depressions. In its center is a large island whose proper name is Victoria Island. It is long, wooded, and mountainous and comprises about ten thousand acres. The Chileans call it Menendez Island after the wealthy family of Menendez whose seat is in Punta Arenas, and who formerly owned much property across the Chilean frontier not far from the lake. The Argentine government made a present of this island to a Señor Anchorena of Buenos Aires upon condition that in ten years time he would expend on it for improvements eighty-eight thousand dollars which was the amount that they considered it worth. His own idea, which he has carried out, was to make Victoria Island a private game reservation and to this end he has imported wild animals from the north of Europe which have here thrived and propagated. It abounds in deer, huanacos, and pheasants, but so far he has not improved it commercially.
The farther eastward that one goes on Lake Nahuel Huapi, the less beautiful and interesting the scenery becomes. The mountains become lower, rockier, and more treeless, until the trees become stunted and finally disappear so that the eastern end of the lake instead of having the beautiful sylvan nature that was omnipresent in Chile has now the sterile aspect of the west end of the Argentina pampa with barren mountains and plains of dried grass. San Carlos de Bariloche is a lonesome, God-forsaken village of about five hundred inhabitants on the south shore of the lake. On the wide semblance of a street are rough brick, adobe, and frame buildings with two churches, a parochial school, a bank, and a government office. The inn which goes by the name of Hotel Perito-Moreno is as much a disgrace to a hostelry as San Carlos de Bariloche is to the name town. The paper was falling off the walls and the broken windowpanes were repaired by having newspapers pasted over the apertures. Straw mattresses with blankets, which I imagine teemed with vermin, took the place of regular beds, while the food was so execrable that it was nauseating. As the place is rarely visited by anybody excepting cattle-buyers, it is not supposed to be up to date.
The inhabitants of wind-swept San Carlos, however, are not complaining. They have passed that stage and have resigned themselves to face whatever misery might present itself to them. There is talk of the Southern Railroad continuing from Neuquen to make the town its terminus. This would effect another Transadine route and open up the country to civilization. Not far from San Carlos de Bariloche the Prince of Schaumburg-Lippe has an eighty-thousand-acre ranch. It is said that he bought this to make his home on in case he should be deposed in Germany. For manager he has Baron von Bülow, the nephew of the former Chancellor of the German Empire.
San Carlos de Bariloche
CHAPTER XI
CHILLÁN. ASCENT OF VOLCANO CHILLÁN
While in Santiago in 1915 I met at the Hotel Oddo, a Señor Hugo Gumprecht who was a guest there. He is a German by birth, but in his youth emigrated to Australia where he married, became a naturalized British subject, and lived there for some time. He then went to South Africa and at the time of the Boer War enlisted in the British Army, became an officer, and received the Victoria Cross. When the war was over he went to Argentina and in the village of General Alvear in the Province of Mendoza, started a hardware store. Here he became naturalized as a citizen of the Argentine Republic and lived there up to a few days previous to my meeting him. Business had become dull in Argentina and as he is an experienced engineer he went to Chile to see if there was an opening for him there in his line, in the meantime leaving his family in Argentina until he would establish himself. He is an educated man about forty-eight years old, is comfortably well off, and in appearance is a double of Lloyd George, or rather looks like the pictures of Lloyd George that were taken ten years ago. When I returned to Santiago in 1916, Gumprecht was still in Santiago but living in a private house. As he had not yet found anything to his liking, he was about to make some trips to different parts of the republic to see what there was doing. I intended visiting the baths of Chillán out of curiosity and invited him to join me, which he did. I have never yet found a person that I have cared more to travel with than with him.