Month: November 2018

Traveling from the coast to Santiago is a quick bus ride, not more than an hour and a half, during which the outside temperature goes up by twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Welcome to Spring!

A friend of Lea’s from Chile (Hi, Alex!) assured us that once we got to Santiago, it would be just like Atlanta. Our first hour in the city gave us cause to doubt that assertion. Around the bus stop it was loud, crowded, dirty, and there wasn’t a single functioning ATM within twenty minutes walking distance. We discovered this while lugging around a combined 45kg of baggage on our backs and shoulders. Dispirited and short on rent money, we flagged down a taxi to the apartment we’d booked for the next two weeks.

Things got better.

And Alex was right. Once you get away from Central Station and make it to the other parts of town, Santiago is very much like any modern city in the U.S. and nicer than quite a few. It’s got more American-style shopping malls per square mile than any city I’ve ever seen. They love malls in Santiago, and they’re as full of American stores and restaurants as they are of Chilean equivalents. They also – and this was important – have theaters that show movies in English.

There are several things we wanted from Santiago. Thanksgiving Dinner was a high priority since we missed it last year (we were in Israel’s Negev Desert). We also wanted to stop moving, unpack, and live like humans in an apartment for a couple of weeks, not backpackers in a hostel. I needed a check-in with a neurologist (my doctor in Atlanta gave me a referral), I wanted to watch a movie in a theater instead of a bus (Bohemian Rhapsody was still showing and it was fantastic), and Lea and I both wanted Taco Bell.

My god, y’all. Taco Bell. Lea and I cringe every time we see a McDonald’s, and the only times on this trip that we’ve dipped into American chain food were starvation stops at Domino’s Pizza in Quito and Lima. (Fun fact: Domino’s is better in South America than in the U.S. It’s a sit-down restaurant and they go easier on the sauce.) But at some point after moving to Atlanta and enjoying its wide variety of Mexican cuisine I came to the conclusion that the appropriate scientific unit for measuring “happiness” is the Taco.

Imagine our horror once Lea and I realized that South America is almost completely bereft of tacos! The countries we’ve traveled in so far seem to actively scorn Mexican food and any time they attempt it they get it wrong. So picture my delight when I did a “what the hell” search on Google and discovered that Santiago has Taco Bell. It quickly became a priority.

We spotted one on our way to climbing a mountain. (More on that in a bit.) Once we came down the mountain we went straight there, hoping against hope that it was close to what we were used to back home. Dear readers, the menu was a little smaller than in the States but the food was exactly the same. They even had shredded cheese, something completely missing in every grocery store on this continent. (And to be clear, the stores don’t even sell cheese hard enough for you to shred yourself.)

We ordered more food than we normally would have, then went back and ordered seconds. Imagine the feast at the end of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle; Lea and I had the Taco Bell equivalent.

I think the main problem that Santiago has presented for me is that it’s so much like a city in the U.S. that it’s made me achingly homesick for the real thing. I don’t miss having a job and being mistreated by horrible customers (by which I mean all customers) but I do miss a lot of other things: my friends, my cat, my stuff, a real kitchen, and generally understanding what’s going on around me most of the time.

That’s not a good mindset to be in, since I’m not going to have any of that back for six more months. So, given the (American) holiday that was celebrated this week, here is a list of things in my life right now that I’m thankful for:

I’m thankful that my loving wife, Lea, called me up at work last year and asked how I felt about quitting my job and heading to South America. That’s not how the idea started, mind you – we’d planned to do this crazy thing years ago – but that’s how it got put back on the table. I’m thankful to be able to spend so much time with her, facing the world together and following our dreams.

I’m thankful for the lovely folks at the Black Rock Pub and their All-You-Can-Eat Thanksgiving Buffet. The proprietors of that fine establishment are Australian, but they cater to all sorts and draw a good crowd of expats for Turkey Slaughter Day. They even had American football on the telly, and Who Dat havin’ a good season this year? The Saints. If they make it to the Superbowl, I hope we can find a place in Argentina to watch it.

I’m thankful that our resupply package from home arrived. We had it shipped a few weeks ago from the States, with refills for stuff we’ve used up in our First Aid kit, replacement parts for my C-PAP machine, and cold weather clothes that we’re absolutely going to need in Tierra del Fuego. Which segues into:

I’m thankful for people willing to meet with us and help us out along the way. On our first weekend in town we hooked up with our new friend Gabriela from Couchsurfing.com and hiked to the top of Cerro San Cristóbal. We also connected with our friend-of-a-friend Arnulfo to whom we’d had our resupply package shipped and who went to the trouble of extracting it from Chilean customs. Long-term travel would be much harder and lonelier without awesome, generous people along the way.

I’m thankful to put my backpack away for two weeks, even if our apartment is hot and noisy. I’m thankful that we can do our own laundry without having to carry it somewhere blocks away. I’m thankful that Santiago has such a fantastic subway system, and that all the public transportation routes are available in Google Maps. I’m thankful for American fast food restaurants, bless their hearts, and being able to have a little unhealthy taste of home after months on the road.

Now for the touristy stuff!

Cerro San Cristóbal

The first thing we did once we’d settled in, found groceries, and figured out the Metro system, was to climb the highest mountain in town and take a photo of the Virgin on top. This isn’t the first time we’ve done something like that. Looking through my blog posts I came across an early entry where I stated that we’d take gondolas up to the top of mountains instead of climbing them. It appears we’ve broken that promise to ourselves. We should really reassess. At least we’re not as crazy as the people who biked up the mountain that day.

Sampled Local Cuisine

A signature Chilean dish we’d been told about even before leaving Atlanta was “Italiano” style hot dogs and sandwiches. There’s nothing Italian about them. It’s just that Chileans love to layer avocado, mayonnaise, and tomato on things so that it looks like the colors of the Italian flag. Lea and I both agree that to do this to hot dogs (which is all the rage here) is a crime against tubed meat, but we were willing to try it on sandwiches. It’s… okay. Color me redneck, but I still prefer cheddar cheese, bacon, caramelized onions, and BBQ sauce.

At lunch, Arnulfo chided us Americans for putting BBQ sauce on everything. Given that in Alabama I used to eat BBQ sushi, I could hardly dispute the point.

Broadened Our Minds

This week we visited the Parque De Las Esculturas (Park of the Sculptures), Museums of Fine Arts/Contemporary Art, and Museum of Visual Arts, all of which have the virtue of being free to the public. Half of the Sculpture Park was closed for renovation, but the part that was open was nice to walk through. The Museums of Fine/Contemporary Art (two separate museums in a connected building) are currently housing an exhibit of the work of Roberto Matta, whose art is both bizarre and refreshingly different from the unending displays of religious art we saw from Ecuador to Bolivia.

Went Up the Tallest Building in Latin America

That’s Sky Costanera. This one we did not climb. For a somewhat pricey ticket, there’s a lovely elevator that will take you to the observation deck on the 61^st floor, and you can take an escalator from there to the 62^nd to get even higher. The bottom five floors of the building are part of an enormous shopping mall. What did I tell you about Chileans and malls?

Accidentally Stumbled On the Procession of Saint Martin de Porres

We don’t find parades and processions in South America, they find us. For once, though, we caught one right at the beginning. We were in the Plaza de Armas just wandering around when we saw a banner on the Catedral Metropolitana announcing a procession beginning in less than an hour. We waited around for mass to let out, the band to start up, and for Saint Martin to very slowly process out of the church. Right outside they paused for photographs and dancing (!) and then turned up the street. Lea and I, sleepy from a large helping of Burger King, headed home.

That’s all for now, folks. Next week, the rest of our stay in Santiago and the start of our journey into Chile’s Lake District. The road awaits!

This week we accomplished one of the major goals of our trip through South America – to visit San Alfonso del Mar, home of the largest swimming pool in the world. Here’s the view from above:

And here’s the view from our balcony:

But first, we went to Valparaiso. If you’re traveling down the coast of Chile, a stop in Valparaiso is mandatory. Because of its deep water harbor, Valparaiso was a city of major importance in the 1800s as a stopover for ships traveling the Atlantic – Pacific route. Today it’s mainly known for its steep hills with brightly painted houses perched on the cliffs going down to the sea.

Basically, Valparaiso looks as if someone cut La Paz in half, put an ocean at the bottom of it, then went berserk in the exterior paint aisle at Home Depot. The only problem with Valparaiso is that there really isn’t much to do there. The city itself is the attraction; all the tourist spots suggested in the guidebooks are hilltops you can take pictures from.

So we did that, choosing as we normally do to see where the dead people are. Valparaiso’s main cemetery is on top of one of the hills overlooking the bay, giving great views of the city. We could also see one of the working “ascensors” that people can ride to avoid climbing the stairs.

That’s the other problem with Valpariaso: the obscene number of stairs. Follow me up this: Our hostel was on a hill on the edge of the “flat” central section of town. To get to our hostel, we had to climb two long, steep stretches of uneven stone steps through a narrow alley between two buildings. Once we reached the hostel, there was a flight of steps from the gate at street level to the lobby. From the lobby and kitchen area, there was another steep flight of steps up to an eating area, then another flight of steps up to our room. From our room, if we wanted to sit down and relax, there was one last, tight spiral stair up to the patio on the roof.

If the gods and Elisha Graves Otis had wanted us to climb that many steps, they wouldn’t have invented elevators.

A strong point in Valpraiso’s favor: it’s full of cats and a lot of them are friendly. Lea and I have been cat-deprived since leaving Atlanta. Here we got some much-needed kitty time.

After three slow days in Valparaiso, we hopped on a bus to the village of Algorrobo and from there took a taxi up the coast to the resort of San Alfonso del Mar, where we’d rented a one-bedroom apartment with a kitchen, hot water and everything for two nights. Forty-eight hours of beach time, ahoy!

Sal Alfonoso del Mar isn’t a hotel. It’s a complex of eleven luxury apartment buildings facing the Largest Swimming Pool In the World (I can’t say that too many times). There are plenty of apartments for rent and in the off season a one-bedroom for two people goes for about $100 USD per night. That’s more than we’ve been paying for our other stays on this trip but less than a lot of hotels in the States with nowhere near this kind of view.

The thing about the off season is that everything is closed, including the big pool. When we were there, San Alfonso del Mar was a ghost town. In a complex that can house thousands and thousands of vacationers, we could count the number of other guests we saw each day on our fingers. Even the grocery stores nearby were only open on the weekend; we had to take a bus back into town to buy food and wine. Once we did that, though, we didn’t have to leave the resort at all. And we didn’t.

Now about that pool. I mentioned that it was closed, but the big pool isn’t for swimming anyway. Each apartment building has its own semi-circular swimming area extending out into the main pool and we could have gotten in that if we’d wanted to freeze our butts off. In late spring, the Chilean coast is still frigid. The big pool opens to the public on December 15, and it’s for sporting activities like kayaking, sailing, wind-surfing and dive training.

We were content merely to sit in the sun and look at it. On our first day we walked all the way around it, which took an hour. Aside from ourselves and a handful of other tourists, our only company was the cleaning staff and the crews working to scrub the pool clean before summer, which they did from slow-moving motorboats trailing very long suction hoses held aloft by small, inflatable buoys.

Our two days in San Alfonso del Mar were probably the quietest we’re going to have on our entire ten months around South America. I wish it had been warmer – even in the sun it was too cold to sit poolside due to the wind, so we spent a lot of time enjoying the view from our protected balcony. Nevertheless, it was definitely worth it to go, slow down, recharge, and watch the sunset over the ocean.

It occurred to me as we were leaving that even though we’ve got a month left in Chile and it’s a real skinny country, this may be the last we see of the Pacific. I don’t think the bay and fjords around Puerto Montt count as part of the open ocean, and when we get to Punta Arenas we’ll be on the Strait of Magellan, the frighteningly windy midwaters between the Pacific and Atlantic. So, adiós al Pacífico. I hope that when we finally reach the Atlantic it’s a little warmer.

We’ve been in Chile for two weeks. “Wait a minute,” you say, “weren’t you in Bolivia last week?” No, but I was writing about Bolivia. There was still a lot to recount and our first week in Chile wasn’t exactly action-packed. I mentioned in my last post that Lea and I had taxed our forty-something bodies’ tolerance for high altitude, cold showers, lugging backpacks up steep inclines, and what have you. After our mad dash through Peru and our month on the oxygen-deprived Altiplano, we’ve spent our first two weeks in Chile convalescing for want of a better word.

I spoke last week of my aching desire to get out of the mountains and down to a nice, pleasant beach. Did I get what I wanted? Well, yes and no. Here’s a Chilean beach:

THAT PICTURE LIES. It looks warm and pleasant, but no matter how bright the sun and how inviting the sand, the harsh reality is that Chile, even more than Ecuador or Peru, is plagued by the despicable Humboldt Current from Antarctica. This photo offers a much more honest appraisal of the Chilean coastline:

I’d be lying to say that it wasn’t at least pleasant to sit near the beach for a while, listen to the waves, and smell the ocean air. Lea and I just had to bundle up in warm clothes to do it. Let’s settle on this photo for a happy medium:

Serene, tranquil, crystal clear, and cold as a bucket of ice on a polar bear’s butt.

Anyway, here’s the travel report:

San Pedro de Atacama

As I mentioned last week, San Pedro is the sister city to Uyuni, Bolivia. It’s entirely a backpacker town, full of hostels and travel agencies. After coming down from the Andean Plateau, the main thing San Pedro has going for it is that it’s warm and has actual air pressure. Even though we were still higher in elevation than Denver, it made a world of difference. We took off our jackets, slung on our backpacks, and felt like superhuman demigods with all that oxygen suddenly coursing through our veins as we hiked to our hostel.

There’s a lot for a tourist to do around San Pedro de Atacama, but much of it seemed just like the stuff we’d covered in our three days across the Bolivian desert. The place we stayed was breezy with a nice porch looking over a garden and hot water in the shower. We got groceries and bus tickets, then didn’t leave the hostel for two days. (It would have been nice to do laundry, but there are no laundries in San Pedro. Oh well. Surely we’d be able to do it later…)

Caldera

Eight hours down the coast is the village of Caldera, which our Australian friend Simon (who had traveled ahead of us) recommended as a place to recoup. Instead of a room in a hostel, we found a little guest house right off the main square on AirBnB. It had a fridge and a microwave if not a full kitchen, so we went back out for dinner and groceries.

Oh My God. The grocery store was packed like the one open Piggly Wiggly on the night before Thanksgiving. Any comments we made about how crazy crowded the store was were met with a shrug and a rapid-fire blast of Chilean Spanish. We didn’t find out what was really going on until the next day, when we were down to our last clean anything and tried to take our clothes to the only laundry in town (open Monday, Wednesday, Friday). It was Friday, and it was closed. After much ringing of the doorbell and yelling “Hola!” someone appeared to tell us in Chilean Spanish (más despacio, por favor) that it was closed for the holiday and would be open the following Monday.

Side note: I keep saying “Chilean Spanish” because what the Chileans call Spanish isn’t Spanish any more than what a cattle auctioneer is speaking can legitimately be considered English.

Anyway, the holiday. November 2 was Reformation Day, a holiday that commemorates Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to a church door in Wittenberg in 1517. The holiday is only observed in Germany, Slovenia, and Chile. We knew that southern Chile at least was supposed to have some German influence. So far we haven’t seen any bratwurst. Instead, we got to wash clothes in our AirBnB’s (cold) shower and hang it in the courtyard for anyone walking to Caldera’s central plaza to see.

Despite the frustration, we did get more recovery time on our surprise holiday weekend. The town has a pleasant park to hang out in, a nice little museum of paleontology with some megalodon fossils among other things, and a tiny beach with no shade or bars. We took a cab over to Bahia Inglesa, the supposed “tourist side” of the area, to find it wasn’t any more exciting. We did meet up with a guy named Jorge on Couchsurfing who took us careening over some sandy trails in search of seafood by the bay until finally settling on a restaurant in town. (The fried eel was fantastic, by the way.)

We had to get up before dawn on Sunday morning to catch our next bus. When we woke, not only was the shower still cold but all the power had gone out. We put on our wind-dried outfits, gathered our belongings by the light of our headlamps (Always be prepared!), gave up on the idea of washing ourselves, and once more hit the road.

La Serena

By now it had been a week since coming down from the mountains and it was time to ease back into seeing stuff and not hiding in our hostel. La Serena is the starting point for tours to the nearby Humboldt Penguin Reserve, one of the “must see” spots on our trip. But first we needed hot showers, clean clothes, and something to eat.

Instead of a hostel, we booked an honest-to-god apartment for four nights. The apartment had hot water, a kitchen, and an actual washing machine. Granted, it was small and had no dryer. There was a drying rack (also tiny) on the patio and two small bedrooms in addition to the master. Among our gear are two retractable clotheslines that we normally take camping to hang up towels. We strung those up in both the spare bedrooms and between them and the balcony were slowly able to do our own laundry over the course of several days.

The apartment was right around the corner from the travel agency (sweet!) and right across the street from a shopping mall with a supermarket. The less we eat out the more we save, so after rinsing several days of sand and dust out of our hair we set out across the giant American-style parking lot. As we approached the supermarket (called “Lider”) we saw a familiar logo. We thought, “That looks like… Surely it can’t be… No.”

Yep. For real, y’all. Chile has Wal-Mart.

Apparently Lider was a local chain that Wal-Mart bought out and kept the name. Everything inside, though, is just what you’d see in the States, down to Wal-Mart brands, sale stickers, and fonts on the labels. The arrangement of the store was confusing with plenty of quirks to remind us we were still in South America: huge wine selection, no cheese to speak of, and giant bone-in cuts of meat. But just like Wal-Mart back home, we had to keep going back every day for one more thing.

La Serena is split by the Pan-American Highway, east of which is the city proper with a green central park, some nice European architecture, the usual assortment of museums (that we didn’t visit) and a post office. Functioning post offices have been a rarity on this trip and postage rates in the first three countries we visited were sky-high, so we’ve lugged around an accumulation of items to be mailed back to the U.S., waiting for the right moment.

We pounced.

Going by the single data point of the post office in La Serena, the postal system of Chile is much more pleasant to interact with than our own. Not that that’s a high bar to clear.

Anyway, about those penguins…

On our last day in La Serena, with the last batch of clothes drying on lines spread through the apartment like the work of a giant spider, we got on a tour bus heading north to the coastal village of Choros, where we piled onto a boat and made our way to the islands where the penguins live.

Humboldt penguins are small, cute, and extremely shy – so skittish around humans that they’ve been known to jump off cliffs to get away from us. Therefore, you’re not allowed to get off the boat on the  islands where the penguins are. The penguins nest on top of the island and only come down to the shore to fish. According to our guide penguin populations are down this year for reasons unknown, but we were still able to spot a few as well as plenty of other birds, sea lions, and a pod of fin whales.

There is one penguin-free island where we were allowed to disembark, hike, and look at rocks, gulls, and cacti. The weather was cold, cold, cold. I looked up La Serena’s latitude and realized that it’s just as far south of the equator as Jacksonville, Baton Rouge, and El Paso are to the north. November is late spring, equivalent to May in the northern hemisphere, so why was I still freezing?

Geography. The Andes have more influence on weather patterns here than anything else. Chile’s central valley is warm. The coast is frigid. The temperature in La Serena fluctuates from 50⁰ to 70⁰F all year round, even in “high season” – which is January and February. If you want to experience spring and summer, you have to get away from the coast. Which we did.

Vicuña

In a dirt parking lot behind the Wal-Mart, we picked up the bus inland to Vicuña, gateway to the Elqui Valley (Chile’s wine country) and heart of the country’s astrotourism industry. With some of the clearest skies in the world, northern Chile is vitally important to the study of astronomy. There are many world-renowned research facilities, such as the cleverly named Very Large Telescope and the even more original Extremely Large Telescope in the Atacama Desert. While some facilities allow limited tours during the day, no way are they going to let you go at night. (Besides, modern research telescopes don’t have anything like an eyepiece you can just walk up and look through.)

Vicuña, on the other hand, has several observatories open to the public for night visits and stargazing tours. Having seen the night sky from the Altiplano (in the freezing cold) I wanted another good look before we went south into more humid, and probably cloudier, regions of the country. After hearing about some of the expensive private tours to observatories farther out of town, we elected the cheap route and chose to visit the nearby Mamalluca Observatory instead.

This may not have been the best choice. It saved us money, but we ended up being two of nearly sixty to eighty at the observatory that night. The English-language group had about twenty people, which means that even during a two hour tour the group was only able to view five celestial objects and no one individually got much telescope time. Not to mention all the idiots trying to take pictures of the sky with their iPhones using the flash.

However, the sky was clear and beautiful. We could see the Milky Way, and the guide pointed out the stars Canopus (brightest in the southern sky) and Alpha Centauri (nearest to our own Sun, if you count Proxima Centauri as part of the same system). When he pointed out the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, my brain blew a fuse and I stared at the sky like a cat fixated on a laser pointer.

A little background: The Magellanic Clouds are two smaller galaxies that orbit our own. They’re the Milky Way’s “moons” so to speak. Some personal background: I’ve been an astronomy nerd since I was a kid. It was my first career path, and I actually taught college-level astronomy for a couple of years in my early twenties. Alpha Centauri and the Magellanic Clouds were talked about in every book about the night sky that I devoured as a child, but I never thought I would see them. And there they were right in front of me. It was an exhilaration as powerful as what I’d felt watching humpback whales leaping from the water off the coast of Ecuador. I was looking at other galaxies with my naked eyes, and I hadn’t thought it was important to bring my camera.

D’oh!

The next day we did something that we hadn’t done since La Paz, and almost never did in Peru. We went to Jaime, the hostel owner (at Hostal Las Delicias, if you ever want to book a room) and asked to extend our stay.

Jaime’d helped us book a tour of the wine region that we were going on that morning. The original plan had been to leave town the next day. Instead, we decided to stay so we could go out at night to someplace dark and take pictures of the sky. Jaime called around to several cabbies and tour companies to see if anyone would drive us. We ended up going with the same company, Elki Magic, who would drive us on the morning tour as well.

The Elqui Valley is a splash of green amidst the Chilean desert thanks to the Elqui river and lots of irrigation. The valley is lined with vineyards, fruit groves, and quaint towns that have maximized the amount of greenery on display. They don’t just make wine in the Elqui region, though. They make Pisco.

Pisco is an amber-colored brandy made from Muscat grapes, a signature high-proof spirit from both Chile and Peru, and the key ingredient in the Pisco Sour, one of the finest beverages known to man. On the tour we visited Fundo Los Nichos, the oldest pisco distillery in the region. It smelled heavenly. We saw the distilling equipment, the fermentation chambers, and the old Masonic club room beneath the distillery in which the club’s members were entombed behind bottles of pisco. We tasted samples and I was shocked that no one tried to sell us a bottle or five on the way out. We would’ve been easy marks.

Later we went out and took pictures of the stars until midnight. The next day we slept in, lounged around, drank a bottle of Carménère pinot for lunch and had four pisco sours for dinner.

That’s all caught up for now. I’m logging this from sunny Valparaiso. Next week I’ll be able to report on the largest swimming pool in the world. Hasta later, dear readers.

P.S. We’re finally back where there are flowers! It’s time for more of:

Lea’s Macrophotography