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| Chile |
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Santiago, 4 July 2004 Hola Amigos, Arrived safely in Santiago a couple of days ago. We crossed the international dateline on the way and somehow managed to arrive 4 hours before we set off on the same day! Had a couple of days to recover from the journey and find our bearings and work out which way to go next. Too cold for Patagonia this time of year unfortunately but will likely go south first by train and take advantage of the winter offers which are stupidly cheap for a 600kms journey. The hostel we're staying in is very laid-back and it has to be said very dirty after the spotless kiwi places we've been spoilt with. Thankfully no bed bugs to report! None of the rooms have numbers and hilariously our room is the Bob Marley suite!!!! So-called because the glass door and partition are covered in huge rasta coloured striped stickers (to give us some privacy)! Our new hostel-mates are more like new flat-mates. They never wash up after themselves, never leave the bathroom clean and always use the last bit of loo roll! Soap-dodgers and they never seem to leave the TV room all hoping to score the promised free internet access or even a breakfast. After a roof over our heads finding somewhere to eat is the next priority when we arrrive in a new place. The food here is great but very very meaty. Hotdogs called 'Completos' seem to be the national dish, garnished with tomatoes, onions, mayonaise and wait for it....mashed advocado!!! Suprisingly it is a winning combination. People here eat the local fast food and there are loads of 'Sandwicherias' which serve enormous toasted sandwiches full of melted cheese, ham, mayo and any kind of meat. Pasties called 'empenadas' are popular too. The real shocker is that they don't do coffee! except for Nescafe! I know this is latin america but they just don't, apparently locals prefer tea instead. Cafe con leche (with milk) is a sachet or a few spoonfulls of Nescafe dissolved in hot milk rather than hot water. It's actually ok. We joked about tea with milk being served the same way and we weren't disappointed. Santiago feels strangely familiar and is like bits of Barcelona and other european cities even London. The Andes in the background are massive and capped with snow at this time of year. We took the cable car ride to the top of a hill called Cerro Cristobal to get a a panoramic view of the city and a better view of the mountains. Apart from the practical stuff we've been sightseeing and exploring the streets. So far the waiters/bus drivers/hotel receptionists have been very patient and polite with the two gringos talking crap spanish to them! Temuco, 8 July 2004 Arrived in Temuco after a really enjoyable 9 hr train journey. The train followed the Andes which in places are actually a chain of extinct(ish) volcanoes. Apparently, the most violent eartquake ever recorded was in Chile. Outside Santiago the landscape changes very quickly and the farmland makes way for forests, villages, horses and after 8 hours the lake distict. If it wasn't for the little clusters of pointy tin-roofed two storey houses it could all be easily mistaken for New Zealand. Temuco is a nowhere kind of a place and usualy a gateway to the surrounding volcanoes and lakes. We were thinking of going further south but we read about flooded resorts nearby and the freezing cold weather in Temuco convinced us to head north to the deserts instead. In spite of this really enjoyed the few days we spent in Temuco - a real town without the tourist frills a great market and lots of shops selling horse meat. Found a couple of 'greasy spoon' cafes and met someone in the local museum who spoke to us for a whole hour in rapido spanish and was convinced we were understanding him! Stayed a really cosy little guest house. Valparaiso, 11th July 2004 We've been back to Santiago and made our way to the famous city port of Valparaiso. The city's been destroyed by earthquakes twice and once by a tidal-wave not to mention pirate attacks so we'll let you know..... staying a couple of days. Antofagasta, 17 July 2004 Hola Muchachos, Stranded for an extra day in Antofagasta before we can catch the next bus out of here. We've been in Chile two weeks already but it's only the second time our hotel/residencial has clean sheets and hot water! Since Valparaiso we've traveled 1300km north along the coast and crossed about half of the Atacama desert via the seaside resort of La Serena and a forgetable but necessary pit-stop oasis town called Copiapo. There are no passenger rail services north of Santiago (in the centre of the country) so we have to rely on buses to get around which is a shame cos the train south of santiago was great. The buses here are very modern and well organised but never a first choice for the longer journeys and unlike in OZ or New Zealand they don't really do proper meal/loo breaks. Drivers stop along the way even in the middle of the desert for hawkers selling drinks and weird pastries. No hardship really but it means we've got to be organised/bothered to sort out a picnic the night before... If we're lucky we get to watch a couple of films dubbed in spanish too. Stayed a couple of nights in La Serena to break the journey, stretch our legs and get some fresh air by the sea. Met a bloke at the bus station when we arrived who spoke excellent french offering accomodation in his 'residencial'. He had references and his place was in a couple of old guides so we decided to take the chance. People often meet the long distance buses here to offer places to stay and it's a good way of getting to see how the locals really live and have a nose around their houses! La Serena is a sizable fairly wealthy spanish colonial style town where the Chileans and Argentinians go for a seaside break. The beach is a whopping 14km long not very developed and totally empty at this time of year, except for about 20 men in goggles disappearing in and out of the surf, about a 100 metres or so out, looking (we think) for shellfish... Seemed to be work of some sort not recreation. Walked the rest of the beach to a small fishing town Coquimbo and had a look around. Took a bus we thought was going back to La Serena and ended up in a sprawling housing estate and definitely the wrong part of town (bit like 'the city of god'). The bus driver realised our mistake when we didn't get off at the last stop. The driver found a Collectivos-taxi, which is one of the shared taxis people use to get around, and very genorously paid the fare for us to be taken back to town! The journey through the Atacama between the sea and the mountains is spectacular and not like any desert I've seen before. Between Valparaiso and La Serana there's agriculture, vinyards and some greenery but just north of La Serena the Atacama Desert starts for real. There is some vegetation for a while and then it gets gradually thinner and then it's just nothing, no weeds or shrubs or grass, not one visible living thing, like a moonscape. There's a lot of colour but no life. There's always something suprising to see, occasionally there's a fishing village or maybe a mining town but even where the desert meets the sea there's barely anything living at all. Antofagasta is a large-ish port town with 500km of desert to the North, South and East between here and anywhere else. The town used to belong to Bolivia until the late 1800's when large deposits of saltpetre were discovered nearby. Chile then fought and won the Pacific War against Peru and Bolivia over what was at the time a valuable commodity used in fertilizer. 200,000 people live here now in what really is the middle of nowhere except for Bolivia which still uses the town as its main port which explains its prosperity. Otherwise it's a town with a copper mine, couple of shopping malls, some industry, not many trees, lots of stray dogs. Went down to the fishing quay yesterday and saw half a dozen huge sealions feed on the fishermans scraps in the harbour, a massive turtle and a some pelicans... Took a local bus out to see a sandstone-arch in the sea and the only tourist attraction called La Portada. The fare is only about 10p and buys a 2Okm trip out of town into the desert. The bus dropped us off at nearest turnoff the main road and we walked the last couple of kilometres down to the beach. Took a few photos and set off back to the main road. Halfway back to the main road an off duty tour bus driver took pity on us and gave us a free ride into town. People here in Chile have been very nice to us so far even if we can't 'hablar' back to them too well in spanish. Next stop Iquique in the far north..... Over and out, more soon Caldera, 28 July 2004 Breaking the journey back to Santiago to make the marathon of bus journeys less exhausting and stopping off in a seaside resort called Caldera. They do the siesta thing here between 2pm and 5pm everyday which is getting annoying when we get off the bus and want something to eat. I suppose it kind of makes sense in the blistering heat of the summer but it winter (now) it's just silly. Made it as far north as Iquique. A very photogenic city with lots of brightly painted wooden colonial buildings. What makes Iquique a bit special is that it's dwarfed by a sand dune the size of a mountain! Took a trip inland to see some excellent ancient drawings (Geoglifos) on some nearby hills in the desert (as seen in National Geographic) and visited an abandoned mine and a deserted mine town called Humberstone. After Iquique we headed inland and South towards an oasis town called San Pedro de Atacama. It's the first time we've seen lots of other tourists since we arrived in Chile. Not just gringos like us but Argentinians, Bolivians, Brazilians, Americans and Chilean tourists. San Pedro is said to be the most cosmopolitan town in Chile, not sure about that but it's defintitely the most visited. The town itself is horrible and totally overun by us pesky tourists, but there's so much stuff to see nearby like - geysers, moutains, volcanoes, vast plains, salt lakes with pink flamingos and the famous 'Valley of the Moon' - which is great. Every tour ends with a sunset and we had to climb and then walk over a massive sand dune bridge between two high ridges to see the sunset. Apart from the sightseeing in San Pedro there's being 2250m above sea level to consider. We had to spend a couple of nights in a place called Calama to get used to the altitude. Found a great place to stay with its name 'Hotel Atenas' stenciled in jumbo letters on all the bed sheets and pillow cases. The Breakfast lady took one look at me and said 'oooh blanchito' ! The climate in San Pedro is bizarre and a bit scarey - not a cloud in the sky, the air is pretty thin, it's incredibly dry, very dusty and the UV rays are seriously fierce. For me just going for breakfast around 9am means covering up, wearing sunblock, sunglasses, a hat and long sleeves. By night it gets very cold and there was ice in the fountain one morning. It hasn't rained in some parts of the Atacama for 800 years! A freak combination of geography and prevailing winds mean that rain bearing clouds just never make it here. Oasis towns like San Pedro can only exist because they have an underground water supply. Apparently the water gets topped up by rains in the higher Andes and by thick mists that fill the valleys most nights. Have to hang around to take the bus this evening so we took a collectivo (shared) taxi 6km down the road to see a what the guide reckons is the finest beach in Chile - Bahai Inglesa. And yes we can confirm it's beautiful, feels very remote, and not very developed. Spent a couple of hours admiring the beach and had something to eat before heading back to Caldera to kill some more time. Mayonnaise is very big in Chile. In supermarkets they sell it by the litre in huge plastic sachets and it's the essential ingredient in all of the typical Chilean sandwiches and hotdogs sold everywhere. Films we've seen at least 3 times on the buses so far: La Mente Brilliante (A Beautiful Mind), Los Todos... blahdy blah (The Sum of All Fears), Shrek, 'Pedro' Flintstone in Viva Rock Vegas (Barney is called Pablo!) and only once : LA Law the Movie! Anyway off to catch a bus to Santiago and then it's next stop Peru and Machu Pichu. |
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