LAS NUEVAS FRONTERAS DEL TURISMO
along to help. He was amazed with the changes he saw in Coyhaique. Used to be that he knew everyone he saw but now, there were lots of people moving in from the north. There were restaurants and a movie theatre and new schools and plenty of government offices. Martin noticed a new office for CONAF, the Chilean Forest Service. They were in charge of managing the reserves, and helping to control the fires, and were replanting many of the burnt areas of the region with a new kind of tree from the United States. It was called “Oregon Pine”. Every now and then, Martin would see a couple of people with long hair and beards and great big packs on their backs walking along the road. A buddy from Coyhaique told him they were from Europe and were just walking around Patagonia to “see the world”. “Strange”, he thought. Around 1992, Martin had a visitor at his ranch. It was a young man from the United States. He spoke Spanish but really strangely, and Martin could barely understand him. The man asked his permission to walk across his ranch from time to time, with groups of students from his school. He told Martin he would pay a fee for each student that passed. He said the students came from the United States to learn about Patagonia and about leadership and adventure. Martin had never been asked permission by people for crossing his land. It was just the way – if you needed to go somewhere, you went. He approved, even though he found the whole thing strange, and every once in awhile he would watch as a group of people would cross on foot with those same huge packs on their backs he had seen on the long-haired people on the road. Once a year, the man would stop by and deliver the fees he promised. As time passed, more and more people asked Martin to cross his land. They wanted to see the glacier. He began to charge a small fee and lead small groups of tourists to the edge of the ice. They seemed to enjoy the hikes and took lots of pictures from the edge of the glacier. When Martin went to Coyhaique now, he saw more and more signs about “tourism”. They advertised glacier trips and horse-back riding; even that leadership school from the U.S. had a sign in front of the base camp. A few people from the United States and France had moved to the region to start companies that would run trips for these tourists. And the government said tourism would be a big part of the future. In fact, they said, they were going to put a new fish in the rivers and the lakes that would bring in the tourists in droves. Trout, it was called; brown and rainbow, and sure enough, once the fish took hold, the tourists came. Buses began to show up on the roads with groups of tourists and in Coyhaique there were new people during the spring and summer, people from the United States and from Europe, who would show the tourists where the fish were and how to catch them. The crazy thing was they didn’t keep the fish; they always threw them back. Martin thought they were nuts; especially when someone told him they paid thousands of dollars to come and fish in Aysén for a week. Around this time, a company out of Santiago bought land near one of the ports from one of the cattle companies. At the port, they built a big hotel. On the other land they built trails and a shelter and a visitor’s center. They called
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