se está bañando desnuda,
Toda vestida de espuma.
(In the River Calle Calle the moon is bathing,
is bathing naked,
all clothed in foam.)
—Una canción de Valdivia (a song about Valdivia), “Camino de Luna” (Road of the Moon)
Valdivia is the capital of XIV, Région de los Ríos. We explored the main rivers—Río Valdivia (called the Río Calle Calle above the junction with the Cau Cau), Río Cau Cau, and Río Cruces—but there are many more nearby. Just a few miles to the north, Río Cruces is fed by five rivers: Río Tambillo, Río Santa Maria, Río Nanihue, Río Pichoy, and Río Cayumapua. I count seven named tributaries to the Río Valdivia between Lucy and Eduardo’s and the Pacific Ocean, no more than 15 kilometers (about ten miles). In addition, Lucy and Eduardo’s yard fronts on the Río Valdivia, so we studied it every day we were in Valdivia. The riverbank and the small, willow-shaded dock were good places to stand a while, watch the sun on the water, and enjoy the breeze.
Over time, we saw lots of boats and birds and sea lions along the rivers. The Coast Guard runs a cutter down to Niebla on the Pacific coast once a day. There are tour boats, sailboats, and fishing boats as well. For a list of the waterfowl, see Jane’s “TRECE/ Aves o Pájaros (Birds)” post.
On our trip in December 2006 and January 2007, we were focused on Lucy and Eduardo’s wedding and did not pay much attention to the rivers. This time, we resolved to engage the water more directly—to get on the water itself and also to survey it from above.
The Río Valdivia, looking downstream from the bridge to Isla Teja. Downtown Valdivia and waterfront on the left bank, Isla Teja on the right.Every day, tour boats leave Valdivia heading up the Río Cruces and downriver to Niebla. Jane and I took our first tour boat from Valdivia to Punucapa via Ríos Valdivia, Cau Cau, and Cruces. We hustled downtown on foot to catch the four o’clock boat and just made it.
Closeup of the waterfront, the downtown, and the Feria Fluvial.The trip began with a tour of the Valdivian waterfront, giving us a new perspective on the houses along General Lagos (the street we walked almost every day on our way to Lucy’s house). As we putted down the Río Valdivia to the mouth of the Río Cruces and back, we realized that the houses show their best side, or the front side, to the river, not to the street. Successful nineteenth-century German immigrants built their impressive houses to face the river.
After our second pass of the downtown waterfront and a stop back at the dock to pick up a few more passengers, the captain turned the boat west into the Río Cau Cau and then northward on Río Cruces into the Santuario de la Naturaleza Carlos Anwandter, a large protected area that extends well upriver. Río Cruces is one of the river valleys around Valdivia that flooded during the 1960 earthquake. The land in the valleys around Valdivia dropped seven meters (21 feet), and the water from the Pacific and other rivers came rushing in.
I took this and the two following photographs on a hill west of Valdivia in January 2007. They follow the Río Cruces from left (upstream) to right (downstream) as it approaches its junction with the Río Valdivia. The flooded Río Cruces valley is in the middle of this photo. On the opposite bank of the river is Isla Teja. (click on the photo to enlarge the image) 
In the flooded Río Cruces valley, the river surface is dotted with green reed beds. At the far right, you can see the beginning of the highway bridge over the Río Cruces and the Río Valdivia coming into view behind it.
On the right, you can see more of the bridge that crosses the the Río Cruces just above its mouth. The confluence of the two rivers is obscured by the trees at far right. I took the pictures of the sun on the Río Valdivia that are back at the beginning of this post (QUINCE/) from a dock in the trees just to the right of the large ship that is moored on the far shore of Río Valdivia. The land just beyond the bridge is the last bit of Isla Teja before the rivers join on their way to the Pacific Ocean.The 1960 earthquake measured 9.5 on the Richter scale, the strongest earthquake ever recorded. As a result of the earthquake, the Cruces valley is now an extensive area of marshland extending far to the north (left) of these photographs. These marshes are home to the black-necked swan (cisne de cuello negro) and other waterfowl. We saw hundreds of the swans on our way upriver through the natural area.
Our destination was Punucapa, a small town established in the 19th century that was built just high enough to escape the flooding. It’s a sleepy place with one gravel street and a gathering ground edged with very old trees: tall, huge-trunked alerce trees, and large pines, eucalyptus, and others. I sensed in that place the presence of the very old and the sacred. My sense of the sacredness of that space was enhanced by the Catholic church dedicated to the Virgin of Candelaria, a simple wooden building inside and out.
There is a festival in early February in Punacapa that features a procession honoring the Virgin of Candelaria and several days of fiesta on the gathering ground. We saw photographs of people carrying the statue of the virgin dressed in blue through crowds of people. I imagined the simple booths on the far side of the open area filled with food vendors during the festival, much like the food booths in Niebla where we have eaten local meat and seafood dishes prepared on the spot and drunk pints of Kunstmann in the hot sun.
The views out over the river from the edge of the gathering ground are beautiful. The mountains are covered in evergreen broadleaf and needle-leaved trees. We watched a persistent bank of brilliant white cloud or fog in the west over the ridge, illuminated by the sun but not blocking it. The beauty of the natural world is crosscut with a sense of the lives lost and the houses and farms and animals inundated by the flood after the earthquake, and by their continuing presence underneath the extensive reed beds and open water. Today there are no farms in this area, only fruit trees and berries in the pueblo, and miles of forest running down to the water’s edge. The townspeople sell jam and cider made with their fruit.
We spent a good bit of time just looking. I can still see the scene and sense an odd peacefulness that could change abruptly at any time or could go on this way, more or less undisturbed, for decades or more.
We saw the Río Cruces and Río Cau Cau from two other perspectives: from the heights of Cerro Oncol and from the water level in a kayak on the Río Cau Cau.
Cerro Oncol is a 715-meter-high peak (about 2350 feet) rising out the temperate rain forest of the coast range northwest of Valdivia. The peak is in an area protected by Arauco, the company that runs a pulp mill upstream on Río Cruces. The park is a public relations effort to offset the environmental damage caused by the discharges from the mill into Río Cruces.
The road to Oncol is gravel except the first half mile or so. It seemed like a long drive, but the fifteen-mile distance on an unpaved road likely protects the park from crowds. There is a once-a-day bus that takes you out from Valdivia in the morning and returns in the late afternoon, so a car is not required. Inside the park the road is very narrow and curvy, with lots of ups and downs—even slower going.
We hiked to the peak through a forest thick with bamboo and giant ferns in the understory and a variety of indigenous trees above. As with the other trails we walked, it’s steep hiking: up all the way out and down all the way back. From the peak, we could see the forest flowing away down to the Pacific Ocean to the west and to the long, winding, flooded valley of the Río Cruces to the east. In the foreground lay one of the flooded arms of the valley of Río San Ramón. From the heights, the scope of the inundation after the 1960 earthquake is clearer. The lower reaches of all the river valleys from the ocean for many miles inland have become expanses of wetland and broad water.
We got a third perspective of this area earlier by paddling a rented kayak from the waterfront in Valdivia up the Río Valdivia and then west on the Río Cau Cau. The Cau Cau is little more than a canal about two miles long that connects Río Cruces and Río Valdivia. The Cau Cau probably didn’t exist before the earthquake. I suspect the river was created by the flooding of low-lying land. Cau Cau created an island, Isla Teja, now the home of the Universidad Austral de Chile.
The two-person kayak was pretty heavy, and it was slow going on the way out because we were paddling into the wind. In the three hours we had the kayak, I had hoped that we would gain the Río Cruces easily and be able to go upriver to the north a bit and explore. I misjudged the distance, though, and we never quite made it to the Río Cruces.
We saw a few interesting birds, notably a white-necked heron (cocoi), similar in size, shape, and behavior to our great blue herons here. Just before we turned around to head back, we steered into the reeds and listened. We heard a lot of bird song but the reeds were so thick and tall that we couldn’t see much. Overall, I was disappointed in the sameness of the Cau Cau and its reedy wetlands. Later that day, when we were returning from Punucapa via the Cau Cau on the tour boat we realized that these wetlands are tidal; a sandbar we pulled up to earlier that day had disappeared under the rising water.
—Michael
No comments:
Post a Comment