Saturday, February 19, 2011

Chile: Pronounced Chili, not Chilay.

Welcome to Chile, home Pablo Neruda, the driest desert ever and rolling mountains of the Andes and of course, Patagonia. We`ve been here a good two weeks, and so its time for that bloggy fix.

So far on our trip, we`ve been having a pretty pain free and wonderful time. One of my favourite things about travelling over the last 8ish months has been that we`ve never HAD to be anywhere. If we like a place, we stay, if we don`t we move on, wonderful! Not even a deadline in the form of a plane ticket! We`ve had things pretty easy. No tails of horror or robbery. We haven`t had to deal with that hidious cash grabbing monster known as `High Season`.  Everything has been fantastic! Alas, all cheap things must come to an end. Since we only have a little over 6 weeks left on our trip and we really have a lot of space to cover, we`ve had to start `planning` and worse, `booking in advance!` *Shudder. Also, we`ve now hit high season in an already expensive country and we pretty much know where we`re going to be on any given day over the next six weeks. *Sigh.

And worst of all, we`ve had our first run in with thieves. My wonderful camera, and Ian`s largely redundant one have both been rubbado. Which means my avid readers, less pretty pictures. I`ll have to resort to stealing pictures from the internet again. Blame the thieves.

However, the show must go on and we still have most of South America to get around by D-Day (April 4th if you hadn`t heard.) If you trace us on a map, we`ve just come from the desert in San Pedro de Atacama, via poetic town of Valparaiso to Puerto Montt, the beginning of Patagonia. Thats about 3,500km give or take. If you thought the 252km from Cork to Dublin was far, think again!

Arriving from Bolivia into San Pedro was something of a shock for us. Firstly, there were roads and those roads were paved. Public transport seems to function, and there are huge supermarkets that are reasonably well stocked. The weather was hot and dry and we were guaranteed sunshine. Suddenly coca leaves were deemed socially unacceptable, and probably the most shocking of all, the cost of a bed in a dorm more than trebbled. In one night we went from paying $2-$4 a night for a dorm to paying $16. No longer did we have our pick of the Lonely Planet`s funkiest and hippest hostels, everywhere seemed to have this strange sign out front "Llena". It didn`t take long to figure out that these hostels were full. What were we to do?

Well, you could do worse than San Pedro. It is expensive since water is scarce and everything has to be brought in. There also seems to be a tourist town and a separate town for local people that doesn`t appear to be nearly as pretty. But, we spent some lovely days enjoying the sunshine and staring and strange sand dunes. Unfortunately, we couldn`t get over the $8 for a chicken sandwhich and decided it had to be cheaper further south. It just didn`t make sense that anywhere could be more expensive than home.

While we were in San Pedro, we did make the acquaintance of Dave. Now, Dave is a nice guy from England, travelling on his own, but I feel he deserves a mention. Due to all the aforementioned high prices, we ended up sharing a dorm with Dave. I`ve been trying to think of the best way to describe this experience for the better part of two weeks. The best I can come up with is this: imagine you`re a hobbit, in the land of Mordor. You´re alone and scared in a strange place. The firey depths of volcanoes errupt and spit lava and ash around you`re little group. You quiver with fear and dread. Suddenly, Hordes of Orcs begin to surround you, and as their numbers swell, all you can hear is the thumping of the war drums and the snarling of their twisted beasts. The battlecries of a mob of angry demonic like creatures pound your eardrums. The roar is deafening. That is what Dave`s snoring was like. It was so bad, Ian tried to sleep in a hammock outside (several metres away) and could still hear the orcish battlecry through the walls. Being a former snorer myself (Ian assures me I`ve kicked the habbit), I sympathise with Dave. Its a terrible feeling knowing that you`re keeping everyone around you awake. Normally a shout would suffice, unfortuantely Dave was unwakeable, if it weren´t for his snoring, I might have thought he was dead. Take heed potential travellers, chose your dorm buddies wisely if you can!

Wanting to fulfil a promise to a friend to visit the house of Pablo Neruda, we decided to bus south to Valparaiso and spend some time on the beach. (The bus is where the hateful thieving happend, so no pictures of SanPedro`s beautiful Church.) As a warning to other travellers, I´m going to tell you all quickly what happened. I was pretty tired after Dave´s performance the night before and decided to take a nap at 2pm on the bus. Ian thought I was awake and thinking that the bus was about to leave, he very quickly answered natures call. At this time, the two women behind us equipped with kid for distraction took my bag under my seat, removed my camera and walked off with Ian´s day pack. Peachy. It was pretty stressful, but not the end of the world.

That particular bus not only was the first time I was really robbed, but it was also the most embarassing moment of my life. In an attempt to help all others travelling long distance by bus, I´m going to share my other tale of woe in the hope that maybe you can avoid my fate. Answering nature´s call myself, I went to use the bathroom on the bus. I was quite sure the door was locked, but as the bus took a particularly sharp corner I fell face forward into the door and out into the aisle of the bus with my pants around my knees arse shown to half of Chile. Always make sure the door is locked. That´s my lesson for the day.

Arriving in Valparaiso, we had to do things like visit police stations. Also, we actually ended up staying outside of Valparaiso on the beach near a town called Quintero. We intended on spending 2 nights in this oasis called Ritoque Raices. This place seems to be some kind of Vortex that traps travellers. Anyone who could rearrange their transport out did so that they could stay longer. Which we inevitably did, 2 nights turned into 5. We lit fires in the evening and sat around with some wonderful people talking about the world and learning world history from an Argentinian genius named Agustin. What a guy, he nearly knew more about Irish history than I did and I have a degree in it. We also spent an entire evening explaining to a Swedish couple exactly WHY we pronounced Chile, Chili and not Chilay. Chilay would be knobbish. It took a while.

I also took my very first yoga class out here. Now, having never tried it before I wasn´t sure what to expect, but it sounded like fun and it was on the beach, so I think I know a good idea when I see one. Well, we trudged through sand dunes for a half an hour searching for The Sand Dune where the lesson was to take place. A pack of local dogs kept us company on the trek. I watched the sun set and the stars appear while listening to the crashing waves all with my knees around my ears. What a way to learn yoga! I´d highly recommend it.


When we finally decided we couldn´t put off leaving any more we moved onto Puerto Varas after a quick stop visiting Pablo Neruda´s gaff, possibly the first cultural thing we´ve done since we were in Bogota. Anyway, landing ourselves in Puerto Varas, we camped in the back garden of a hostel and exploed the town. Puerto Varas is a pretty little town that reminds of be America a little bit. Its very clean and proper. We walked down the the lake side beach and watched the sun set over the lake. It was probably the most spectacular sunset I´ve seen. We sat in our shorts at 9 at night and watched the sky turn pink and purple and blue. The snow capped mountains that surround the lake changed colour with the sky, so we had pink mountains. It was beautiful.




Before we headed off into southern, more popular Patagonia, we decided to explore Isla Grande Chiloe. You´d be hard pressed to tell the difference between the coast line here and in West Cork. Except for the penguins. You don`t usually see a colony of penguins hanging about Mizen Head, whereas there were hundreds of fluffy baby penguins shedding their furry coats in this place. As well as sea otters, a few of them were splashing about as well. Seeing penguins in their natural habitat was really special, it was definately one of the coolest things we`ve done so far, I got really excited about it. For some reason penguins bobbing about in the water looking like ducks and waddling around the rocks was just brilliant.






When we originally decided to come down to Ancud and Isla Chiloe, we wanted to see if we could get some diving in. After seeing their diving equipment, we took a rain cheque. Basically they use a compressor to compress air into a beer keg and they run a garden hose out to you in the sea. The local mussel fishermen use it all the time, so our diving sales man assured us it was safe. Following Muriel´s advice about compressor reliability, we skipped it all the same.



While we were on Isla Chiloe we did some hiking hoping to see a pudu. Now a pudu, for you table quizzers everywhere, is the world´s smallest deer standing 30cm at shoulder height. We didn´t see any, but it wasn´t from lack of effort. We also sampled the local fare, for the first time in Chile I might add, we couldn´t afford it anywhere else! The food was great, oysters and mussels the size of your forearm! I wanted to take a picture to prove it to my Dad, but... grrrrr...

Isla Chiloe is a beautiful island that seems to get a lot less tourists than other parts of Patagonia or Chile. Its like most people forget that its a good place to visit. The coastal views are really specatular. For me, I just thought I could have been walking down to Sandy Cove or up Toe Head. It was strange being so far from home and yet it felt like I was right there. Its odd how two places can be so far away and so alike!












When we left Chiloe, we took a ferry to the real Northern Patagonia, a town called Chaiten. Now our guidebook is a few years out of date and when we decided to go there, we had no idea what had happened. About two years ago a volcano behind the town errupted and filled the river with ash. The river of ash then burst its banks and buried most of the town in silt, sand and ash. We had no idea when we walked up to the hostel that there was no running water or electricity. When we walked through the town we had a sense of it being something of a ghost town. Firstly, the usual congregation of village owned dogs were nowhere to be seen. It wasn´t until we went for a walk down the beach and discovered the roofs of buildings sticking out from under the sand that we started putting together what happened. There were dozens of houses completely buried with just the tip of the roof and the chimney sticking out of the top. The strangest thing to see was the school´s gym hall which was a huge indoor basketball court, mostly filled in with silt and sand. Even I could have gotten a slam dunk!  It was a sad place, but we were glad we stayed and went indoor camping. Whats left of the old town definately needed the money.



Getting the ferry back to Puerto Montt we´ve hit the 33hour bus to Punto Arenas. In the next few days we´ll be trekking through Torres Del Paine National Park and roaming through Patagonia and Tierra Del Fuego. You have much to look forward to loyal readers. Will check in soon, but other than that I hope you´ve learned a few traveller tips.