Puerto Natales

PN is the gateway to Parque Nacional Torres del Paine. Torres means “towers”. Not clear to me what paine means. I think it might be someone’s name. It refers to these three towers of rock at one end of the park, which rise to 2800 meters. The entire mountain range is not part of the Andes system – according to the informational signs, it’s a chunk of granite that thrust up through the overlying sedimentary rocks 12 million years ago, and has since been eroded. It kind of reminds me of Mt. St. Helens, in that it’s a bowl with a lower opening on one side, that you hike into. It’s not volcanic, though, and it’s not a blowout that caused things to collapse, but erosion (wind, so far as I can tell.)

Anyway, more on that once we get there. PN is also the drop-off point for the Navimag ship south – this is passengers riding on a freight ship south through Chile’s version of the inside passage from Puerto Montt. It takes three or four days, and is on our list of things we will go back and do someday. Lots of glaciers, and a close knit atmosphere. The guidebook advises bringing an open attitude, playing cards, and plenty to drink – this is a real working ship that’s been half refitted as a cruise ship. You have to reserve in advance, and it would have cost about another thousand for two bunk beds in steerage, so we didn’t do it. But, it’s on the list. We flew instead, saving three precious days, and a little bit of money.

On getting into town, we decided we needed two nights to get ready for the trip into the park. We didn’t bring backpacking gear, other than packs, so we needed to rent tent, sleeping bags, sleeping pads, and stove. We also had very little information about the park itself. The town has the feel of one of those towns just outside an American national park, with guide services, restaurants, hotels, and shop after shop full of touristy crap. We vaguely remembered an important thing that the woman we went on the wine tour had told us: go to the Erratic Rock hostel for the “three o’clock talk”. This is a talk given by the American owner of the hostel, about how to hike in the park, what to see, what to take, etc. This was invaluable. This guy (Bill is his name, I think), bills himself as a backpacker, not a businessman, and he does run his hostel that way, but he knows his shit. He’s done all the hikes hundreds of times, and told us exactly what to do.

So, there are two major hikes in the park, and tons of minor ones, and tons and tons of supported treks/boat trips/horse trips/etc. The major backpacking is either the “W”, or the circuit. The W consists of walking up one side of the Torres massif, then back down, doing the same into the middle of the bowl, the back down, then over to the other side, up and down. On the eastern side, you can climb up for a close-up view of the towers themselves (this is a spectacular view, and the one you see on all the calendars, but the others are pretty spectacular as well.) The circuit does all this, but also goes around the backside. Most people do the W in 5 days, east to west. Bill suggested we do this, but add a one day approach hike, and do it west to east. This way we avoid a pricey boat trip for the pick up at the end, and we see slightly fewer people (and we do the easy stuff first, and have a chance to walk off a few pounds from our bodies, and eat a few from our packs.)

We decided that although his gear rental prices weren’t the absolute lowest in town, we were so happy for the advice, and trusted him so much afterwards, that we rented from him, for about 15 bucks a day. The gear was decent, although they did give me a crappy old down bag instead of a synthetic bag, despite my request, so I was a little bit cold (check this before you leave.) So, if you’re taking an extended trip, just rent the stuff when you get down here instead of carrying it all the way. Maybe there’s a problem with supply in late February, but in December, it wasn’t a problem. If you’re worried about supply (as we were, irrationally, but in accord with what every other traveler told us), just email Erratic Rock and ask them to reserve some stuff. They also don’t charge you for the day you rent it, figuring you can’t use it that day – a nice touch that other gear rental places were not willing to extend.

Anyway, we spent the rest of the day running errands, trying to gather all the food we needed, etc. I really wanted to just sit at a coffee shop or bar and relax and write up some blog posts, but every time we turned around, there was another thing to do. We didn’t want to come back to the same hostel after the hike, so we needed to get packed, and drop our stuff off at erratic rock (where we’d reserved a room) before the evening was over. Of course, there was no chance of this happening, so it had to be dropped off early the next morning, before getting on the bus. We left a Toblerone bar to make up for the inconvenience, which got us nice treatment when we got back (people seemed to know who we were.) (By the way, you’ll need either matches or a lighter to light your stove, and since you don’t smoke, you probably don’t have one. The Spanish word for lighter, as a kindly shopkeeper told us after some farcical “Spanish” and pantomime on our part, is incendido. We donated the two lighters we bought to the hostel afterwards, and encouraged them to just include one with each camp stove from now on – their gear guy thought that was a good idea, so maybe that will happen.)

Puerto Natales has a brewery, and we found a nice pizza joint pouring their beer. After two weeks of no beer (we once tried a bottle of the national brew, Cristal, and it’s… not as bad as our national brew, but that’s not saying much), their pale ale tasted awfully good. It’s called Cerveza Baguales. There’s another little coffee shop/pub a few doors down the street from the pizza place that sells it as well. Right on the Plaze de Armas. It was fun sitting there and reading three or four year old Spanish language music magazines from Barcelona while Ev typed away. It's light really late here. The outdoor picture (of the Plaza de Armas) was taken about 11PM.

Anyway, we were up and waiting for the bus in front of our hostel at 715AM, like they told us. We figured, with a three hour trip, that we’d be hiking by 11. We didn’t read the guide very closely. The bus picked us up, and then proceeded to drive through town many times, past every hostel and hotel that exists. Many people were not ready, and so we waited for them to bolt some breakfast and get their shit together (I am particularly unenamored of a certain German woman with bad sunburn dandruff who made us wait, and then sat in front of me for three hours and scratched at her peeling scalp. Ten days later, as I write this, I still hate her.) We stopped at a gift shop at the edge of the park, for no good reason other than to buy stuff (like we’re going to load up on touristy crap on the way in - this was the same stuff you see in any store in any national park. DVDs, posters, little gimcracks you’ll never look at again.) We stopped in the middle of the road for 15 minutes, with no explanation. We were distracted by the antics of a guy who managed to get on the wrong bus and seemed to want the bus driver to do something about it (no sympathy for this guy, but it does seem like the driver could check the tickets before letting people on.) Long story short, I can’t claim that the other bus companies are better than Buses Gomez, but they couldn’t have been much worse. We finally got dropped at our particular trailhead at about 1215PM, and started hiking.

On the way in, I did see lots of wildlife. Lots of guanaco, and one rhea. Didn’t see any of this stuff again until the bus back out 5 days later. I guess the guanaco like the open plains where the puma can’t sneak up on them, and the rhea must just be rare or something. (This is from the window of the bus. I couldn't get the camera out in time to get the rhea I saw.)

Punta Arenas

First, the airport in Puerto Montt has three gates, but they seem to only use one. So, we were there about 2.5 hours early, as we were trying to account for any unforeseen things that might crop up, and none of them did, so we sat and read. Four other flights left from the same gate in that time, each time making us nervous that it was our flight, and we’d missed something in the announcements in Spanish.

But, we made it. When we got in, we experienced the first truly bad weather of our trip, as it was raining hard, and had been for days. We were in a place a long way from the bus drop off point. There’s no central bus terminal in PA, and each bus company has its own little terminal (typically a few parking spots on the road), which makes it hard to find stuff. We hired a cab to take us, and when we finally found the place, we found a nice little old lady who was renting out rooms in a rambling structure she’d extended from her house, and who tried to stick warm cups of tea in our hands as soon as we came in. She’s very nice, and can speak a little bit of English, and can help you arrange bus tickets, tours, etc. We stayed one night, before catching an afternoon bus to Puerto Natales (gateway to Parque Nacional Torres del Paine) the next day. The next day, it was bright and clear and windy, and the lakes of water that were standing on the roads the day before had somehow disappeared, so we explored. We tried to hit a few of the sights the guidebook listed, without a lot of luck.

Example: in Bruce Chatwin’s book In Patagonia, he visits the house his distantly related uncle lived in – this uncle had sent him a fossilized piece of giant sloth skin (the Milodon is big down here – just google “Milodon Patagonia” to learn more), which apparently inspired the trip to Patagonia in the first place. The guidebook mentions Charley Milward’s House as one of the tourist attractions. So, we went, found it, despite the wrong markings on the map, and it’s just a house surrounded by high hedges. No museum or tourist info except a plaque. I’m glad I was there, since when I re-read the book someday, I will remember standing in front of it, and being frustrated that there wasn’t even a brochure. The house is for sale, by the way – now that would be a fun piece of history to own, kind of.

Punta Arenas is a Chilean town, but was settled by equal parts Chileans, British, Italians, and Croatians – there is a Croatian consulate here that we stumbled across, and we’re told there’s still a Croatian language radio station. It was strange to see tourist info posted in English as well as Spanish. There is a series of touristy historical information plaques up around town, a large proportion of them having something to do with Ernest Shackleton (the plaque on Charley Milward’s house mentions Shackleton staying there, for example.) He apparently stayed in PA while regrouping to rescue the crew of his ship (which I didn’t know – I thought he took off directly from St. George’s island or wherever it was.)

The most interesting thing, which Lonely Planet for once got exactly right, was the town cemetery. They’ve run out of room, so part of it looks like a traditional cemetery, with graves and family crypts packed up against each other, the way you would expect to see in an American cemetery. But, for more recent graves, you see these coffin hotel structures, where there’s coffin sized crypts, six high, and right next to each other. Visitors access an area maybe 3 by 4 feet in a wall (big enough to shove a coffin into lengthwise, however big that is), which they decorate extensively. I don’t know if this is a catholic thing or a Latin thing, or both, but many of these areas were heavily decorated, not just with flowers, but pictures fading in the sunlight, yearbooks, medals, etc. I guess Catholics are against cremation, so you have to put the stiffs somewhere. And once you’ve put them somewhere, you can’t stop the survivors from turning it into a shrine. This whole thing was frequently behind plexiglass, to shield it from the elements. There were many many of these structures, six coffins high by maybe 50 or 100 long, on four sides. Most of the people here had Spanish surnames. In the more traditional section (not sure what else to call it), there were many English, Italian, and Croatian surnames scattered in – the older section had graves from the early 1900s or before.

In the morning, I ran the few blocks to the Straits of Magellan (Estrecho de Magallanes). It was pretty filthy with litter, and I could see Tierra del Fuego across the strait. We’re not going to make it over there this trip – there’s just too much to do, and it would be several more days. We need time to devote to hiking in the park, so that cuts out a few fun things. I think the main reason I wanted to go, though, was to see how far south I could go. Ushuaia, Argentina, bills itself as the southernmost city in the world. It isn’t quite, as Puerto Williams, Chile is farther south, but it only has a thousand people or something like that. Still, PA is very, very south. If you look on a map, we’re below New Zealand, way below the southern tip of Africa. It doesn’t really get dark here until about 11PM, and even then, it’s not really dark. At midnight, there’s still a glow to the southwest in the sky. Then it’s light enough to read again about 530AM. You can’t really see the stars down here, as it never really gets dark enough (and we’re so tired late at night, that we can’t stay up until 2AM, to see if that’s late enough.)

A word about names. Chile has a few founding fathers, and in every town, you find the streets named after them. There’s O’Higgins street, which is usually a main drag, there’s two different Montt streets, after two different presidents. There’s always a Baquedano, and so on. There are also occasionally streets named after holidays. September 11^th is big here, too, but not for the same reasons – something to do with a naval victory over Peru or something like that. You find yourself looking for addresses on the same four or five streets, no matter which town you wind up in.

We only spent the one night (we came back for another night after our adventure in the park.) We stayed up late talking to a british guy in the hostel who apparently was a stockbroker who one day chucked it all and has spent the last two years drifting from one volunteer project down here to another. He’s hoping to spend new years at the end of the world (Ushuaia, probably, unless he can get a cheap last minute ticket on a boat to Antarctica) before heading up to spend one last year one some project in Mexico before finally going home and getting retrained. He only knows how to be a stockbroker, and is no longer interested in that, so it’s retraining for him, he said.

We caught a bus the evening of that second day from here to Puerto Natales, which is the gateway to the park we’re here for.

Isla de Chiloe

Once we safely were on the overnight bus from Talca to Puerto Montt, we realized that one of the things we were going to do with the hour or so of free time we had at the bus station was to replenish our water supply. We had no time to do that, and only about a half liter of water in a bottle to last us all night. That was a pretty thirsty twelve hours. Then, on getting off the bus in Puerto Montt at about 630 AM, we found nothing open, not even the bus ticket terminals, and the soda machines were broken.

At 7AM, the bus terminals opened, and we bought tickets on a bus to Castro, on the island of Chiloe, leaving in about 5 minutes. So, our entire Puerto Montt experience was about 35 minutes long. That was enough. It’s a really gritty port town, a long way from anywhere. It serves as a transportation hub (note: we wound up back in PM a few weeks later, as the fastest way to get to the part of Argentina we want to wrap up the trip in – more on that when we write about it. Much nicer in the daylight than we thought earlier.)

Chiloe was the last stronghold of the Spanish in Chile at least (possibly Latin America). Its isolation allowed it to develop a character of its own – there wasn’t even a paved road the length of the island until the 1950s. It’s mainly a fishing and farming economy. Really pretty. I was reminded of driving around on the Olympic peninsula. Except you’re far more likely to get stuck behind a herd of cows than a Winnebago.

Three hours later, we finally got to Castro, and bought some water and soda on getting off the bus. Best. Diet Coke. Ever.

Castro is the town the guidebook told us to visit if we only had time to visit one town. So, we booked two nights in a hostel there, which overlooked what we thought was the main waterfront (turns out the main waterfront, and the rest of the town, were around a corner, something we didn’t discover until our last morning there, thanks to the crappy map in lonely planet (yeah, I know, but it’s the only resource we have.)) The view from our room was crazy – we had a direct view of the harbor, and could watch the tides come in and go out. Also, a colony of ibis were in a tree just down the hill, and would put on a show squabbling with each other right outside. They would frequently land on the roof outside our window (and early in the morning, the roof on top of our room), and squawk at each other, and dig at stuff in the roof with their long curved beaks. Beautiful birds. I got lots of pictures from no more than 10 feet away of these birds that are bigger than mallards. They give the impression of being waterfowl, but don’t have webbed feet or bills – they have more of an insect digging beak.

Castro is full of “palafitos”, which are just houses on stilts, built out on the tidal flats. The stilts have to be tall, as the town is near the place on the island with the greatest tide differential (I can’t remember if this was seven feet or seven meters. It was dramatic, either way.) They, too, color their houses in neat, bright pastel colors – the houses are not in great shape (no buildings are shiny and new here), but a fresh coat of yellow or blue or pink paint sure does spruce up the look. Americans should be painting their houses like this. It’s impossible to walk through a neighborhood like that and not smile.

So, we just kind of relaxed and messed around in the town while trying to figure out the best way to get down to Punta Arenas – the roads kind of stop at Puerto Montt, where the geography kind of becomes like the Alaskan Riviera. We finally settled on buying a few plane tickets out of Puerto Montt, saving 36 hours on a bus, and several days of recovery (at the cost of quite a bit of money.)

We had one day left before flying out, so we bused over to the other main town on the island, Ancud. We really liked the hostel here, too – we paid a bit too much (we still have the tendency of saying yes to whatever gets said to us in Spanish, then realizing 5 minutes later (once we work out exactly what was said), we could have made do with something cheaper – bano compartmentido is just as good as bano privado as far as we’re concerned. We’re getting better at this.) We’re hoofing it from the bus terminal to the hostel in Ancud, when some stranger pulls over his minivan and offers us a ride. Hmmm. I was all eager to get in, Evelyn was properly skeptical. It worked out fine, but we do need to stick to our travel rule that the one who isn’t being a moron gets to make the decisions. Turns out he runs a penguin viewing service, and offered us a brochure. We went for it, so after a few hours of resting, he came and picked us and a few others up and drove us out into the countryside.

The views along the way were great, and we snapped lots and lots of pictures – as I said, the countryside really is beautiful. He drove us to a “mirador” (nice view) on top of the tallest hill around, where they’ve located a schoolhouse with a neat fish sculpture, and some impressionistic sculptures of the local supernatural folk (local legend has a lot to say about “brujas”, witches, and “traucos”, forest gnomes whose job it is to give young girls impure dreams and the occasional “surprise” child (nice work if you can get it, I suppose.)) We decided we could be pretty happy in the little farmhouse just across the street from this school. We would get some sheep, and a dog to keep them busy, and just sit on the porch and stare at the view all day.

Anyway, all that picture taking wasn’t such a good idea, as when we made it to the penguin preserve, the camera promptly ran out of battery (I had been meaning to charge it for many days, and it finally caught up with us – still, a testament to just how long that camera’s battery lasts – it was about a week of vacation picture taking.) So, while we got to go out in a boat and see penguins and five or six other neat birds, we didn’t get too many pictures of them. We did see cormorants and a few new gulls. It was pretty neat. The whole thing cost 20 bucks each, and was well worth it, but would have been a lot more worth it if we had more pictures (note: we did see penguins again later in Punta Arenas, and got tons of pictures and movies (we didn’t even know the camera would take movies). More on this later.)

Ancud was nice to walk around, and I found myself wishing for a lot more time on the island. I’ve wanted to visit it since I read about it in a book of travel essays 15 years ago, probably, so I can finally cross that one off my list. But, I could easily give the place two weeks instead of three days – there are many more small towns and a big forest reserve/park to visit as well. It looks like it would be the perfect place to tour by bicycle.

From there, back across the channel to Puerto Montt and the airport. The channel crossing consists of these barge type ferries that the buses drive onto. A bus seems to leave every half hour during the day, so they must run pretty frequently. From the ferry deck (the crossing takes about 15 minutes, so you can get out and look around), we saw a whole bunch of some large bird circling in the air (surrounding a school of fish?) and we think we caught a glimpse of a few sea lions (or sea wolves – lobos del mar – as they’re called here.)

Talca

The town of Talca itself doesn't have much to offer, but it is the gateway to some fun stuff. We wound up staying in a fairly resort-y place way outside of town (this was accidental, and cost about twice as much as we thought it would – thanks again, lonely planet.) It was run by, and full to overflowing with, Germans, Austirans and Swiss. They offered a vegetarian dinner (a bowl of soup and a plate of noodles), so we signed up, and we were the only english speakers at the table – everyone else spoke German. They staff claimed that the week before, it had been all Dutch, but I'm not buying it.

Talca is a pretty dry place. Not as dry as Santiago/Valpo to the north, but still dry enough to require that everything be irrigated. It's perfect for grapes, and that's what they grow (more on this later).

Our first full day there, we took a trip to the foothills of the Andes to go on a hike. This was to a point/peak called El Enladrillado, about 2000m high, about 60 km south east of the town. One of the women at the dinner table wanted to go as well, and she speaks pretty good Spanish as well as English, so she was a great help to have along. To do this, you get a taxi from the hostel into town at 645. You catch the public bus running to Vilches at 715 AM. This also serves as the schoolbus, and we saw lots of students and teachers get on and off. 2 hours later, you get off at the entrance to the national reserve that this hike goes through. The bus leaves to go back at 515PM, so you don't want to miss it. We didn't actually make it all the way before we decided to turn around and not chance it. Good thing, as we only had about 10 minutes to spare when we got back.

The hike reminded me a lot of the eastern slope of the cascades, but with different vegetation. (It was probably a lot like the sierras, but I've never been there.) It was dry, with lots of trees and plants I've never seen before. Tons of lizards, colored bright green and blue. I saw a really big woodpecker, but he got away before I could take a decent picture (the little red dot is his head in the picture I took.)

When we got off the bus at the trailhead, after signing in, we got adopted by a local dog. At first, we thought he was a stray, but he was too well fed and well groomed. A beautiful medium sized dog with german shepherd markings (some other hikers later told us he was he belongs to the caretaker of the reserve we were in.) We figured he wanted food, and would go away after a little while. But, he stuck with us, through our strategies of ignoring him, yelling at him to go away, and even pretending to throw rocks at him (he wasn't fooled – somehow he knew we wouldn't really do that.) In fact, he trotted alongside the entire day, all the way to the turnaround point, and back to the bus at the end of the day. We couldn't think of a good name for him, so he remained "dog" all day. Every now and then, you'd realize that you hadn't seen him in awhile, and figure he had finally given up hope of a handout, and then you'd turn a corner, and he'd be standing there waiting for you. We figure that he probably does this trail every day, and just picks the first group of hikers each day, and adopts them. Near the end of the trail, every time we'd stop to take a picture, he'd stand 50 meters ahead of us and look back, as if to say, guys, what are you doing? We're almost there!

Near the end of the hike, we heard this strange sound, that kind of sounded like a person yelling way off in the distance. And a cow would moo in response. We finally rounded a bend and saw this cow, standing in the middle of the trail. I think it was her calf, lost, and they were trying to find each other. It was the last thing we expected to see – it surprised me more than a bear or a puma would have. We were miles from any pasture, in the woods. The mooing startled the dog, who acted like he'd never seen a cow before.

The next day was our last, as we'd decided to take the overnight bus down the coast to Chiloe, via Puerto Montt. It's a 12 hour bus ride, so we deliberately bought tickets leaving late, so we could save a night in a hotel, and not waste daylight on a bus. We checked out, stowed our stuff with the resort (their policy on the dorm rooms is to not have a lock, since there are so many people, so they didn't care if we left stuff there), and bought tickets and ordered a taxi to a few local wineries. The Chilean wine industry is now responsible for more export dollars than copper, I think, and the wineries are just starting to wake up to the idea of tourism, the way Napa valley did decades ago. The two closest wineries to the hostel are available for tours without a reservation, according to the staff of the resort. So, we bought tour tokens, for 10 bucks each, per tour (that kind of money will buy you many bottles of decent wine down here). Each tour lasts about an hour, including the tasting. And, we hired a taxi, who according to the staff had done this many time, and knew what he was doing. One of our roommates in the dorm wanted to tag along, so we got to split the taxi cost (and she spoke good Spanish, so again, a valuable friend.)

The taxi driver had clearly never been there before, and had no idea (and the map the resort gives out was kind of more a sketch than anything accurate.) We got to the first place, which is a really neat fourth generation family winery, that employs about 30 people, and has some 100 year old vines (interesting, our word "espalier" is related to a very similar sounding word in Spanish, which must mean to graft, as this was the word our guide used to describe the really ancient vines – I know it's fairly common to graft younger grapes onto old rootstock.)

Anyway, the hostel had never bothered to call, so the woman had no idea we were coming, but she had us wait a few minutes, put down what she was doing, and gave us a tour and tasting anyway. Really interesting, even in Spanish (our Australian friend translated some, but I was surprised by how much I felt I got.) Afterwards, she opened a bottle of her Chardonnay Reserva, and a bottle of her Cabernet Sauvingon Reserva. I figured each would be a 30 dollar bottle in the states. I don't like white wine, but the Chardonnay was really tasty. The cab was kind of bland, but had that expensive wine smoothness. Our tour-mate bought a bottle to take with.

The next place was a bigger industrial winery. They claimed it was all "by hand", but there were a lot of machines involved. They're owned by Kendall Jackson, the big American wine concern. They also had no idea we were coming, but gave us a quick tour. They weren't able to pour anything, but the tourguide (who spoke great English) felt bad about this, and gave us a few bottles to take with. We shared one with the Australian woman on the veranda when we got back, since we figured the glass wouldn't survive further travel, and we have no corkscrew anyway.

Then, our last big adventure of the day. We got a ride back to the local municipal bus terminal from the hostel staff, and got on the bus. Problem is, we had no idea what the stop in town looks like – we assumed it would be the same place we got on the bus three days ago, but it's not. By the time we realized something was wrong, we were way on the other side of town, and had to switch to another bus. We made it to the long distance bus terminal for our bus with two minutes to spare, instead of the planned hour. It would have only taken 30 seconds for the staff of the place dropping us off to explain what to look for, or mention to the bus driver, hey these white folks with the backpacks are going to the bus station, make them get off there, but they didn't bother. For a cheap hostel, I wouldn't expect that kind of thoroughness, but for resort prices (which we paid), I do. In ten minutes, I think we could easily make the place a lot more user friendly (we´d start by modifying their maps so that they were in Spanish as well as English and German, with distances, so that you could just hand them to a taxi-driver. We´d also put much better directions for getting there on their website.)

We've noticed that the cheap places tend to just charge one price. They may not offer a lot, but what they do offer is all included. The expensive places try to nickel and dime you for everything. Any finally, you just get tired of protesting that you just needed a few minutes on the computer to check a bus schedule, and you just pay the hourly charge. We like the cheap well-run places that don't offer much.

Valparaiso and Vina del Mar

Valparaiso was formerly Chile’s major port, and the first stop for ships bound for the west coast of the United States – it was the first port you got to after rounding Cape Horn (and, according to the brochures, was also an outlet for the export of Chilean wheat needed during the California gold rush.) When the Panama Canal was finished, business dried up. Recently, it’s become more of a tourist attraction, but is still an active port. It’s known as the “Cultural capital” of Chile, and Pinochet moved the parliament here in 1980, apparently to keep them out of the capital. This move was unpopular, and the locals want the parliament to move back out (they occupy a very interesting building by the bus station.) Vina del Mar is the next town up the coast, and is really just over the hill. It’s more of a resort town, with actual beaches (Valparaiso is a working waterfront, and there are docks, but no beach.)

Valpo is a small plane of flat land right on the water, surrounded by an amphitheater of hills that look down on it. These hills are very steep and are all built up with houses that cling to the hillside. One is reminded of San Francisco, but with hills. The easiest and most fun way to get up and down the hills is to take an “ascensor” – this is a cable car/funicular type thing that will climb two or three streets, and costs about 20 – 40 cents to ride. Many of these are over 100 years old, and the view from the top is amazing. Alternately, you can climb the streets yourself. This is hard work, but amazingly productive. By the time you think you’re getting tired, you turn around, and you’re amazed at home much you can see. The neatest thing is the local tradition of painting your house some bright pastel color. It makes for a very colorful city. Even pretty broken down looking buildings can have a nice green or yellow or red or blue paint job. It's nicest when there's a row of houses that each choose a different color.

We didn’t actually have a lot of luck seeing things we wanted to see – we were there on Monday, the day everything remotely related to the government is closed here. We wanted to see Pablo Neruda’s house in Valpo as well, but it was closed on Monday, since things are closed on Monday, and on our way to see it on Tuesday, we met another tourist who told us she had just been there, and they were closed for some staff training day (it’s about a 2km walk uphill to get there, so I’m glad we met her close to the bottom of the hill.) So, no luck there.

Since nothing was open Monday, we took the metro up to Vina, and wandered around the parts of a big public arboretum you could get to (also home to a museum, closed Monday). Here, there’s a giant amphitheatre where apparently there is a huge music festival every February. The amphitheater was very modern and pretty, and reminded me of an exhibit of modern Spanish architechture we saw at MOMA a few years ago. I suspect that the architect is famous if you’re into that kind of thing. There were also some really neat trees with bright orange flowers and a close relative of the monkey-puzzle tree, with much narrower needles/scales, but still arranged in that distinctive spiral pattern which makes you think they’re from another planet.

On the way back from Vina, we got off at a metro stop that looked like it had access to the beach, and frolicked a bit. The surf was usually fairly calm, but occasionally and suddenly really violent. I rolled up my pantlegs, and was trying to be careful wading, but still got pretty soaked. You can still see the salt dried in (hopefully this will change when they come back from the laundry today.) There were kids running around in the surf like crazy people, getting knocked off their feet by the waves (one of them noticed us cracking up at how it had swept him off his feet, and started laughing himself, and soon a crowd of kids was laughing pretty hard, and trying to recreate the moment for us.)

Finally back to Valpo, we found a working ascensor, then kept climbing for a while. This was in the arty district – reminds you of a poor Capitol Hill. Lots and lots of public art/graffiti. At the top of each long climb, there’s a store selling cold pop and hellados – frozen ice cream treats (I have a theory that the “hel” in hellado (which means “ice”) is etymologically related to our word “gel” – haven’t had a chance to look this up yet, but I bet gel basically means ice.)

Back at the bottom of the hill, we found an Italian bar that was recommended in the guidebook, and ordered a small bottle of wine. Supposedly, there’s live music and singing and tangoing in this place, but bar life doesn’t really start here until about 9 PM, and we were there at 7PM, so it was just us and four or five bored waiters, and one old guy who was nursing glasses of pisco, which watching what I think was a soap opera on the television. He looked like he’d been on that barstool for 60 years. I can see the appeal of living in the same smallish port town like that and having a favorite barstool your entire life, but then we got up and left, and I was glad.

The hostel in Valpo was huge and dark, with 15 foot ceilings, I would guess. We got assigned a room with four beds, and satellite teevee. I worked on a paper that was due for class, while Ev surfed channels. Access to a kitchen is pretty standard here in the hostels, so we started our routine of making pasta sauce out of veggies from the local market combined with a packet of tomato sauce (they sell these here in single serving plastic sachets for about 30 cents.)

The next day, we explored an outdoor museum of murals painted on retaining walls and buildings by the local art school in 1992. You do this by climbing a complicated set of stairways and streets, kind of guessing your way along (we stared at a map posted on a wall, but we couldn’t memorize the whole thing.) We were initially really disappointed, as the lowest ones are covered in graffiti, but as you climb higher, they are cleaner and cleaner. That was fun, and we met the aforementioned other tourist who told us about the closed Neruda house, doing this, and traded info about where to go next to see more murals.

Chile has a serious graffiti problem. The problem is that some of it is quite good. A lot of what we saw in Valpo was really interesting and highly skilled. Some of it was just tagging, and not very interesting. Some of it was political (various regions want independence, or are opposed to salmon farming, or still are mad about Allende), which was interesting to me, but only linguistically, as I tried to puzzle out the meaning of the words. If the difference between graffiti and art is permission, it’s hard to say which was which. A lot of it was very good stencil graffiti – we saw lots of stuff way better than the stenciling you see in Seattle (robots and aliens are a popular theme for stencil graffiti the world over, it seems.) Outside of Valpo, I’ve found that the graffiti is no less frequent, but a lot less interesting.

Much better

Today, we had to get a few errands done, as it was our last day in Santiago. We had to switch rooms at the hostel (they we’re able to extend our stay in the same room, so they gave us another room.) Then, we raced over to Museo Chileno de Arte Precolumbino, where things are free on Sundays. We first took in a special exhibit: “Morir por Goboernar” (Dying to Rule) – a fun-filled exhibit about “Sexo y Poder” – sex and power in the death rituals of the ruler of the Moche people of northern Peru.

When the leader died, he had to go to the land of death, where there is no fertility, then the land of the ancestors, where there is. To make sure the land of death is gone through correctly, the ruler subjects his “staff” to various “non-procreative” sexual rituals, after which they are killed. They are likely pretty glad for death at this point, as many have had their eyelids, ears, nose and lips removed, to make them look more like skeletons. It wasn’t clear how the ruler managed all this while himself dead (I don’t think I really want to know.) The ruler supposedly comes back to life after all this, but they never actually explained who took his place.

This is documented in exhaustive and explicit detail in a ceramics collection the museum has assembled. It was all pretty disturbing, and just the explanations would have made a good entry into that new class of horror films coming out lately. You can only take so much of that. We stumbled out into the light, and then toured the rest of the museum on shaky legs. Not exactly what we were expecting.

Okay, so after that, we needed to metro all the way across town to buy our bus tickets for tomorrow morning. We did this, and then the guy who sold them to us said something about the terminal we would be leaving from “blah blah blah four blah blah…” It was clear it wasn’t this terminal, and we both heard “four”. We start wandering in the direction he waved us in, asking everyone wearing a badge along the way, they all pointed the same direction, and said something about “four”. We wander down the street for a very long time, and start to wonder if the four referred to miles, when we found it, and it turns out it’s the next metro stop from the one we got off at. So, should be an easy trip out tomorrow.

Then, we metro’d all the way to the other end of town to see a crafts/artisanal village. If you’ve been to Granville Island in Vancouver, you’ve been here, too. Even a guy making guitars (I didn’t see a kayak workshop, I admit.) Some of it was nice, but it all felt pretty tourist-trappy. Oh, well, at least we’ve seen it. We also got our first public bus experience.

We came home, Ev got a hot chocolate in a café on the square, and we sat awhile, watching people. Santiago is very family friendly. After dark, the square is still crowded with families wandering around. It’s the pedestrian access, I think. Many of the streets around the square are blocked to cars. So, they become markets, fun to wander through. We need something like that in Seattle – every other street is no longer a driving street – see what that does to the walkability of downtown.

Fun pictures

Time for some pics!

Here we are at the top of Cerro San Christobal. I'm the one on the right.















Here is a view of the city from above:
















Here is a fun lizard. He has yellow spots:




Here is a ludicrous aloe plant:





Finally, here is Evelyn, trying to make a point at the bar we liked. She had actually had very little to drink. She was just excited about something.

A Mixed Day

So, we stayed up last night, looking stuff up in our book and drawing out this great itinerary. There’s this walking tour of Santiago, that Lonely Planet (LP) touts. We decided to go on it, since it goes right by our hostel anyway. Then we’d end up at the Museum next to the Plaza de Armas (where the hostel is) – the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolumbino, which I had walked past after a run, without realizing what it was. The book says if you hit only one museum, make sure this is it.

(Well, our neighbor’s book said that. Ours was purchased used, and is missing one page. What it says is “If you only have time to visit one museum, this should be it.” at the top of page 75. But, page 74 is missing. Page 73 has a map on it, and someone ripped it out, and then sold the book. Our suite-mates here at the hostel have the same book, though, so I just borrowed it for a few minutes.)

So, we start out on our quest, once I finally managed to get Ev out of bed and get some food in her (some of you know what I’m talking about.) Things are going well for a while, until we find the fifth or sixth great building in a row that is supposed to be open on a Saturday, but is closed. We’re starting to get a little annoyed, but I know that at the end of the walk, right before we go to the museum, is the only vegetarian restaurant in Santiago. …and it was closed. No explanation. Okay, let’s at least get the museum done this morning, before we find some food and head out for the rest of the day. We sit in the courtyard before going in, so Ev can eat a sandwich we brought. We debate over the map a little bit, until the guard kicks us out, as the place is closing. He points to the sign saying, we close at 2PM on holidays. Holiday? Huh?

Immaculate Conception. Everything was closed because of some idol worship that needed to happen. Pagans. That’s why the only things that were open were the churches. Impressive idols altars.

Okay, so, let’s see stop back in at the hostel, use the bathroom, have a little lunch, then see if the subway is open, and we can go to Cerro San Christobal, which is this mountain/tower/hill thingy that looms over the city. There are cable car (“funicular”) rides up the side of it, and a big statue of the virgin at the top, which you can see from down here. We make our way over, find some fun shopping areas, and find an outdoor café to sit out of the sun awhile. Mood improving – things are open over here. We ride up one cable car, get off and look back – the view of the city is amazing. We’re hundreds of meters above it. There’s a giant religious ceremony going on up here (oh, yeah, that holiday), and there are pilgrims all over. But, they returned the favor of taking no notice of us (people really do pay no attention at all to us here.) There was a priest on a PA system, and people singing and praying along. Some sort of blessing was happening inside the statue.

We took another cable car over to another shoulder of the mountain, where there’s a really nice, and not very crowded, park. Also, the coolest public swimming pool ever, perched on the side of the hill (we really wished we’d brought something to swim in.) From the pool, it looked like you could look out over the valley, and they had built some of the natural rock outcroppings into the structure. Not crowded at all on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Then, after that, yet another cable car, and there was another park, and you could wander out into this quiet residential neighborhood.

Okay, back over the cable cars, and we walked down the mountain instead of taking the funicular down – this was tiring and steep but worth it. We then found this bar/restaurant LP recommended called “Off The Record”, where we tried the drink Chile is famous for, a Pisco Sour. This place is apparently where the arty/intelligentsia crowd hangs out, including the president. I was worried before we went in about my shorts and sandals. But, it was almost deserted. They played a video of a concert by Gal Costa, a Brazilian jazz/samba singer, which was fun. Not sure why they played it, but it was nice, and they were setting up for some live music.

Pisco is grape brandy, and it’s combined with some sort of foaming citrus stuff to make a drink that’s tasty, if a little strong for my tastes. Ev got a glass of Pisco straight up, and a bottle of coke to pour into it (we just nodded our heads to whatever the waitress said, and that’s what she got.) Not as good. We ordered one more Pisco Sour to split, then headed out for a restaurant LP had recommended.

At this point, we were having a great day, the holiday fiasco of the morning a distant memory. We should have stayed in the place we liked, but LP said there was an all you could eat pasta place, where we figured we could get some veggie options. They went on and on about the “pasta for your peso”, and had it in the budget section. We got in a good walk getting there, and figured we’d take the subway back.

On getting to “La Mia Pappa”, we sit down, and the waiter won’t give us a menu, as it’s a buffet. He goes on and on about how everything is included (I think.) He says there’s no menu, to our repeated requests. In retrospect, we should have gone and looked at the buffet first, or at least asked about the cost, but we were going with what LP told us. There wasn’t much we could eat at the buffet, and there was no pasta at all. A number of raw salad dishes, which we’re warned not to eat, and a few cooked piles of vegetables (looked like corn and peas from a can.) There were several casseroles that may or may not have contained noodles, and various other things we didn’t want to find out about. There was also a busy meat counter, which I bet was pretty yummy to the carnivores. So, we figured that LP got this one a little wrong, and we were probably going to pay at least twice what they listed (they said the meal of the day would be $3.) The bill came, and it was 41 bucks! Which is more than we pay in Seattle, typically.

Not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, and we’re not really poor hippie backpackers, though we play them on teevee, but that’s still a big hole in the budget, and LP missed by a mile. That’s a lot more than the “premium” listings they have. If you read LP, you get the impression that a 15 dollar meal here is really spendy.

Okay, so we’re really mad at LP, a little mad at ourselves for not asking more questions (I’m mad at myself for not speaking Spanish), and we try to find the subway, which is on the other side of the street , around the corner, behind a building and a block away from where it’s marked on the three different maps we had (we had to wander into a Blockbuster and ask directions.) And the subway closes at 1030! And the ticket selling booth closes at 1000. We had no card, we were just paying cash. We wandered all over the station, pressing buttons on various machines, trying to find one that would issue a card. Finally, we tried to ask a security guard, and he kind of surreptitiously let us in through the security gate and waved away our money (thank you, anonymous security guard, and thank you, strangers at blockbuster!)

We have one more full day in Santiago, then we’re off to Valparaiso, on the coast, where according to LP, there are lots of fun funiculars to ride up the hills. (But, it’s LP, so for all I know, the town doesn’t exist, and we will be lighting our beach campfire with this stupid book.)

We've got some cool pictures, that I'll put up soon.

¡Bienvenidos a Santiago!

We left Seattle at 1230 local time (having been good citizens and arrived at the airport 2.5 hours early.) We spent 3 hours flying to Dallas, where we waited three hours for the flight to Chile. This is about a 10 hour flight, and puts you 3 more time zones forward (we’re 5 hours ahead of Seattle here.)

So, we landed at 945AM local time. We paid our $100 “reciprocity” visa fee (our government must have pissed someone off, since Canada’s “reciprocity” fee is about 15 bucks.) It took us a while to get our bags (we were standing at the wrong carousel), then when we went to customs, where we hit our first snag. On our customs forms, I had marked that we weren’t carrying any agricultural products, assuming they meant (like everyone else) fresh agricultural products. They got a little annoyed at us when they scanned our bag and found food. All but a few things were packaged foods, like granola bars and dried fruit. The dried fruit especially, the officer didn’t like, since she’s allowed to let in “dehydrated” fruit, but not “dried” fruit, and she pointed out to me that the bag said “dried”. I started to say, “in our language, those are synonyms”, and then thought the better of it. Okay, toss it. So she got my dried fruit, which I had deliberately not eaten on the plane, saving it for a snack. Oh, well.

We took an overpriced taxi in (about 20 bucks), the experience and exhaustion having drained a little of our taste for adventure (we didn’t feel like figuring out the bus.) But, he dropped us right at the door of the hostel, and refused a tip. Our hostel is actually quite nice. We had brought some American cash with us to pay the visa fees, but the visa people took cards, so we still had a wad of dollars, and so we were able to take advantage of the hostel’s offer to not charge the 19 percent tax if we paid in dollars. It’s on the sixth floor of a building right on what appears to be the main square of the city. The view from the deck we share with another room is pretty amazing. The square is packed with people around quitting time on Friday night, and there seemed to be an outdoor performance of The Nutcracker. There was the requisite crazy guy yelling about his bible (he needed no translation) that I could hear from the balcony. Some guy doing beautiful chalk drawings, wowing a bunch of little kids, and making very little spare change, so far as I could tell. A subway station, right in the square, and some sort of national cathedral on one side, and the National Historical Museum on another side. We couldn’t have gotten luckier in the random picking of a hostel.

We have this place booked for two days, but we may decide to stay a little longer – we’re trying to read enough of the guide book to see what else we want to do here, before falling asleep. The historical museum was interesting, but as few of the signs had any English, it didn’t take long (I find I can usually make out the meaning of the first sentence, but it takes me a minute or two, and then in the second sentence, there’s invariably a word I just can’t work out, and so I give up and move to the next exhibit. Not so much a problem in an art museum, but in a historical museum, the words are kind of what you’re there for.) But, it only cost a dollar each – we got a discount as I had a 1,000 peso note and a 10,000 peso note. The guy had no change, and two tickets were 1,200. He just took the 1,000 and waved us through, and even fished whatever must be the local equivalent of a quarter out of his pocket so we could stuff our bags in a locker. Gracias!

By the way, if the rest of Dallas is anything like DFW, I think we should politely but firmly suggest to Mexico that they take Texas back. Yuck.