Chile: Out of this World...Well, Out of the Third World Anyway

San Pedro de Atacama:

A beat-up, single-car train takes us from Tacna, Peru to Arica, Chile, a coastal town near the border. I can already tell that Chile is far more developed than Ecuador and Peru by the suv´s on the streets and, oddly enough, the fact that the restaurant where we have a nice seafood dinner has a well-maintained bathroom with full toilet paper and soap dispensers, and (wow!) even paper towels. The toilets, however, are still low-pressure, so it´s still necessary to throw the toilet paper in the waste basket.

Immediately after dinner we take an overnight bus to San Pedro de Atacama, located near the Atacama desert, the driest in the world. Although arriving somewhere at 7am without a clue of what to do or where to stay isn´t exactly getting any easier, we manage okay, walking around the dirt streets with our big packs and finding a decent hostel with vacancy after about two hours. San Pedro is comprised mostly of tour agencies, hostels and restaurants - catering towards the throngs of tourists that come there to experience the surrounding nature during the seemingly endless desert days.

For us, experiencing the desert is a matter of renting bikes and, after the sun has cooled off a bit, riding about 20km to Valle de la Luna. The landscape´s resemblance to the surface of the moon is striking, and we climb to the top of a dune, leaving our bikes at the bottom, just in time to watch the sunset. While most of the tourists head back to town in hired buses, we are left with our bikes; there are no headlamps or street lights, so the desert is illuminated by only the moonlight. We stare up at the sky, and the stars, thanks to the thin atmosphere, are coming out in full force. It´s slightly difficult to navigate around the ruts in the road, especially while staring upwards, but the ride is magical. All of the stresses from earlier in the day have gone up through the atmosphere.


Valparaiso:

Having realized that San Pedro is expensive and that the moonlit bike ride through the desert was more than enough to satiate us, we decide to leave for Valparaiso, the coastal town just northwest of Santiago where we´ll meet our beloved friend (Ryan) Schuster. Going to ¨Valpo¨ is a matter of taking a 24-hour bus to Santiago and then another hour and a half bus from there. To prepare for the journey, I buy two dozen postcards and a bunch of snacks. I write nearly all of the postcards on the bus and kill time talking with a friendly Canadian guy and his nine year-old daughter. Other than waves of bad odors coming from the bathroom, which we´re seated next to, and an annoyingly hyper five year-old girl who is not kept in check by her mother, the bus ride is quite tolerable. So, we´re in Valpo soon enough, and it´s a funky coastal town with feniculars, massive amounts of graffiti and other street art, and youthful, alternative culture. The hills and hipsters make me a little nostalgic for San Francisco; some say the city is the next Venice.

We make our way to Yo-Yo, the hostel where Schuster has been ¨working¨for the last month and getting room and board in exchange. We makes ourselves comfortable in Schuster´s shoebox-sized room (Schuster is out of town until the following day), and then treat ourselves to a nice dinner at a moderately upscale restaurant. That´s the pattern we´ve adopted while backpacking: treat yourself to something nice after relative suffering, i.e. enduring a long bus ride with smalls amounts of crappy food.

Day two in Valparaiso is lackadaisical. We have more delicious seafood - empanadas de mariscos and paila marina - at the fish market in the city center and kill time waiting for Schuster by checking out some of the graffiti, watching ¨Family Guy¨(apparently just as funny to the Irish as it is to us), and talking to Tim, the Chicagoan who owns Yo-Yo. Finally, after two and a half years of talking about traveling together in South America (since we studied in Prague), Schuster arrives! It´s no surprise that for dinner he takes us to a street vendor to get completos - hot dogs with loads of guacamole and mayo, another Chilean specialty. Afterwards, we drink wine and meet Schuster´s friends from the hostel and then start to pack up since tomorrow we´ll be heading to Santiago to meet Joey, Stephen´s brother and camera mule, and Sam, Stephen´s friend from film school.


Santiago:

Schuster and I check into a clean and comfortable hostel in Santiago while Stephen picks up the guys from the airport. Joey, coming from New York, has transported Stephen´s new camera and accessories, guide book, journal, Burt´s Bees, etc., and will be traveling through Chile with a rental car for a week and a half. Sam, coming from Buenos Aires, is joining us for a few weeks until he has to return to BA and then to the U.S. Our motley crew of strong personalities enjoys café con piernas, where mostly old business men smoke cigarettes and drink coffee served by waitresses wearing short, tight-fitting dresses that showcase their legs and barely cover their rears. Even more scantily-clad are the transvestites we pass later in the night; they´re wearing skirts that expose their bare asses, and they try to excite our interest, saying, ¨De dónde son? Rrruuuusiaa? Austraaliaaa?¨ Somehow we resist their charms (even despite the fact that we´ve been hitting the box again, boxed wine that is), and we go to a bar for beers, greasy food, and a jolly good time, as Sam would say.


Wine Country and Pichilemu:

The next day we pack into the rented Volkswagon - all five of us and all of our stuff - and head toward the Santa Rita winery. Getting there proves to be difficult because, as it turns out, Google Maps doesn´t work as well in South America as it does in the U.S. Luckily, I have a decent GPS and a keen sense of direction, and Schuster, being the fluent Spanish speaker that he is, is always happy to stop and ask for directions. We pick up a few bottles of wine (yes, bottles, not boxes) and stop at a roadside Bavarian restaurant for weiner schnitzel and other delicacies, and then we make the four-hour drive to Pichilemu.

Pichilemu is a surf town with a circus, a beachfront half pipe, canopy tours (a.k.a ziplines into the ocean) and plenty of other tourist attractions. We decide, however, to stay the night away from the crowds, and we find an area of beach where we can camp for free and where there´s no one else in sight, unless you count a few cows and a rabbit or two. We return to town briefly for empanadas and burritos and then we head back to camp to make a fire under the full moon. Sam tells us stories of juvenile delinquency in Phoenix; Schuster talks about the latest and greatest car models and kickboxing techniques; and Joey makes us gourmet snacks. We drink the wine from Santa Rita and fall asleep to the sounds of the ocean.


Pucón:

It´s a long drive from Pichilemu to Pucón, a sort of resort town in the Lakes Region of Chile, and tensions in the car are escalating. It´s high season, and it seems after much trial and error that all of the accomodations in Pucón and the neighboring town of Villarica are occupied. Hostels, campsites, cabañas - you name it; everything is packed, and it doesn´t help that it´s around midnight. We debate sleeping in a field of cows but then finally come across a campsite that has space for us. It´s a damn good thing because it seems like we could have killed one another by now. We set up the tents and pass out.

In the morning we couldn´t help but notice the smoking, snow-capped volcano that looks down on Pucón and that you can clearly see from our campsite. In town I eat some delicious shawarma, and Schuster and I find for the five of us a sort of house within a house that will serve as our abode for the next couple of nights. Pucon is starting to look really good, despite the troubles it gave us at the start.

In the afternoon we make ourselves comfortable on the black sand in a somewhat secluded area of the beach on the picturesque lake, which also has views of the volcano. I say ´somewhat´secluded because one of those inflatable speed boats passes nearby a few times, carrying a wild bunch of what I presume to be Argentine guys. One of them moves his arms up and down, almost as if doing the wave at a baseball game, and he shouts ¨Wooooo,¨ with each lethargic wave. Sam joins in at one point from the shore, and I find it hilarious. We all wait for one of them to fall out of the boat, but it doesn´t happen.

Back at our little apartment, with its own kitchen and a large grill for us to use, we make dinner with fresh Chilean fish and a lot of other tasty fixings from the supermarket. Joey, being the chef that he is, takes charge while we just help with the preparations. It turns out to be a feast and maybe the best meal I´ve had on the trip thus far. We revel in our excess, eating way too much, drinking a lot of boxed wine, and, I must confess, smoking post-dinner cigarettes. Then, to top it all of, we go to a nearby bar with a rooftop patio to have some drinks. It´s the perfect sending off for Joey, who will be leaving the next morning to make his way back to Santiago and do so in a fashion that´s more suited toward his budget, not toward that of backpackers.

So Joey is gone and the three of us spend another night in Pucón, and on our last day there we take a rowboat out on the lake for about two dollars per hour. I guess the price is what made us choose the rowboat over the small sailboats, the jet skis, and the kayaks, and though we struggle with it a bit, we make our way out to a good spot for cliff jumping. The sun is shining, the volcano is still smoking, and the water feels great. It´s not a bad way to spend Valentine´s Day.


Puerto Montt, Castro and Chiloé:

Our bus breaks down, and so we have the misfortune of staying the night in Puerto Montt before being able to get to Isla de Chiloé. From what I can tell, Puerto Montt is only good for its function as a major transportation hub, as the gateway to Chilean Patagonia. We decide after much deliberation to go with a solicitor from the bus station to a residence where we will sleep and do nothing else. In the a.m. we get a bus to Chiloé, which reaches the island by way of a ferry, and pretty soon we´re in Castro, the main town on the island. It´s a peculiar town that sees a lot of rain and, on the day that we´re there, a couple of brilliant rainbows. Our hosts for the night, at a hostel painted pastel purple, are as peculiar as the town. There´s a hippie-chic woman who owns the hostel and a frisky black cat and a Argentine hippie named Hernan, who has a rat tail (very typical of the hairdos of Argentine men) and, more importantly, a lot of homemade puppets. We share máte with Hernan, and later on we make pizzas from scratch with another hostel guest who´s a bit neurotic. The pizzas are followed by a wine-infused puppet show by Hernan, which is uninhibited and eccentric, just like him.

I wake up and almost wonder if the delectable pizza and fanciful puppet show were elements of a dream. The boys and I make the short trip to the town just outside of Chiloe National Park, get off the bus in the pouring rain, and run to the nearest hostel. Hostel Darwin is owned by a German ex-pat who is very well put together, who likes to blast Manu Chao and classic American rock, and who serves up too-good-to-be-true homemade bread and seafood dishes. We become so full and comfortable in the hostel that it's difficult to head back out in the rain. Nonetheless, we do a hike to, through and back from the national park. The park has about a million shades of green thanks to the varieties of moss, ferns, and trees, and there´s hardly anyone else in sight. The rain, which has turned into more of a mist, adds to the chimerical ambiance.

After a couple more savory meals and a good night´s rest at Darwin, we hit the road again. We return to Puerto Montt with the intention of connecting from there to destinations further south in Patagonia, but, upon realizing that travel to southern Patagonia is infrequent and difficult in Chile, we decide to try it from Argentina instead. Unfortunately, our bus to Bariloche doesn´t leave until the next morning, so we´re stuck in Puerto Montt for yet another night.