About Brian Horstman
Brian Horstman is a teacher of English as well as a traveler, writer, photographer and cyclist. His interest in traveling around Latin America began while he was living in New Mexico, where he began to experience the Latino culture that lives on there. From there he spent time in Oaxaca, Mexico and has since been living in Cuenca, Ecuador and will be living in Chile starting in 2011. Cal's Travels chronicles some of his more memorable experiences from Mexico and Ecuador, as well as some side trips to other parts.
Recent Posts by Brian Horstman
South of Chile: The Culture, The Food & Beer, and The Sites
April 1, 2012 by Brian Horstman
We recently took a trip that included several towns in the South of Chile, doing our best to see as much as we could in the amount of time we had for traveling. It was something of an exploratory trip, as we had never been to any of these places before. Chile is a uniquely shaped country, and its extended length means that thorough travel throughout its many regions requires a lot of time, and some careful planning. Adding to the challenge is that Chile, like many of the countries in this part of the continent, isn’t cheap, especially in the high Summer season of December through February.
Especially in the South, the high season lends itself to tourism because you’ve got the least chance of getting rained on. The names of Chile’s southern regions, such as Los Ríos and Los Lagos, highlight the abundance of water and its defining presence in the area. Our first stop was Valdivia, the capital of the region of Los Ríos. It has an extensive history of various waves of European colonization and indigenous resistance, but the biggest earthquake in the recorded history of the world, at a magnitude of 9.5, was responsible for the destruction of most of its historic buildings and economy. That means that today Valdivia itself isn’t much to look at compared to many of the other cities in the area. But it’s blessed with some gorgeous geography: three beautiful rivers, like the one you see above, as well as a varied coastline made up of multiple islands, and plenty to do.
We arrived in Valdivia at night, having taken the train from Santiago as far south as it goes and then busing it the rest of the way from Chillán. Despite making a reservation at a hotel and confirming it the night before, the receptionist told us they had no rooms for us. Some mild indignation landed us in a private cabin at a discount for our first night until they made room for us in the hotel.
The masses of travelers that flood into Chile’s southern destinations demand plenty of forward thinking, like the booking of hotels and buses several days in advance. And even then, you should be prepared to behave assertively when necessary. You’re in direct competition for space, and even the national parks and monuments have no qualms about visibly raising the prices this time of year.
One of our cost control methods was, whenever possible, to stay at accommodations with kitchen access, either in a modest apartment or carefully negotiated private cabin, or in a hostel where the kitchen is shared with the other guests. That said, we still made a point to sample some of the signature dishes in the South, where dark beer and buttery potatoes are served as accompaniments to seafood and lamb that crumbles and melts upon contact with your watering mouth.
Like at the Kunstmann brewery, the home to Chile’s famed German-style microbrew. Chile is in the midst of a craft beer revolution, putting Kunstmann on the map today in the eyes of enthusiasts. Their restaurant is something of a mix between Cracker Barrel and brewery, walls lined with memorabilia painting a clear picture of the historical German influence on the region. The theme is rounded out by the impeccable stainless steel fermenters on display behind glass, and the countless T-shirts, commemorative steins and gift boxes of beer for sale. Skipping the gift shop, we contented ourselves with a few pictures, a huge meal, and a pitcher of unfiltered lager.
The guidebook I relied on for this trip had a definite love-it-or-hate-it attitude about the South of Chile, placing each destination squarely in either the can’t-miss or not-on-your-life category. It sang the praises of Kunstmann beer, for example, while condemning the food as so German that only the nostalgic Hansel or Helmut among you would find it appealing. I thought it was pretty damned tasty, though, and a few friends who have also been there have echoed my impression as well. Can’t please everyone, I guess.
The coastal areas of southern Chile, during much of the colonial age, lay at the edge of Spanish territory and the settlements consisted mostly of heavy fortifications which have weathered the centuries and earthquakes better than the buildings in the city of Valdivia. Except for the cold and fog, some of these forts reminded me of the ones we saw in Cartagena de Indias.
This one was in a place called Niebla, aptly named for the prevailing weather conditions. While the visibility was low and confounded our attempts at taking pictures, it was fascinating for us to be at the other extreme of Spanish influence in South America. From the Caribbean forts in Colombia to these in South Pacific, one was struck as much by the similar architecture as by sheer distance between them.
The three forts we visited formed a triangle of defense with each point located on a different island or peninsula, separated by the estuary of the Valdivia River. When you look at the system of forts on a map after seeing them for yourself from the water below, it becomes clear how formidable the fortifications would have been for pirates or other attackers.
Today, however, they stand as little more than a crumbling relic of the past, punctuating a profoundly beautiful landscape where the continent meets the sea. This fort is located on the Isla Mancera, a picturesque island with a walking trail along its perimeter, ostensibly open to the real estate market as evidenced by the collection of rustic houses to be found on the path, but fortunately lacking any large scale development so far. When you find yourself at the right vantage point here and look out over the sea, you can’t help but hope that places like this will somehow manage to avoid the greedy eyes of developers forever.
The last, and the largest, of the forts we visited was in the small town of Corral, with a population larger and more concentrated than the haphazardly scattered homes on Isla Mancera. Hopping from one destination to the next on a small ferryboat as we did that day, you begin to get the feeling that you could keep at it endlessly, exploring one town after another in infinite procession.
That’s why I sometimes prefer to look at a map after the fact, or perhaps never, so as not to put limits and borders on that feeling of unlimited expanse. But even then, when your eyes are filled with wooded hills and blue water as far as you can see, that’s about as close to the infinite as you can hope to fathom. Especially when you’re on the first leg of a trip full of places you’ve never been.
Back in Valdivia, we walked the costanera, a boardwalk at the edge of town that comes to a point at the confluence of the two rivers that defined the historic borders of the city. There, a colony of stocky sea lions have made themselves at home, a few of them seen basking on a raft, in front of the tour boat in the river.
These boats will provide you with an all day river cruise, stopping off at the same forts we visited. We opted to make the same trip on our own terms, taking a city bus to Niebla and then hiring our own ferry from one stop to the next, but for those who prefer the convenience and comfort of a packaged trip, there are kiosks of tour agencies on the boardwalk ready to make you a deal.
And, while I mentioned before that Valdivia didn’t have much historic architecture left after the 1960 earthquake, that’s not to say it doesn’t boast a few remnants of its former glory. What has remained has been polished up and painted, rendering certain corners a miniature Valparaíso of sorts.
It was in one of these buildings where we had our second taste of southern cuisine on our way out of town. With our backpacks piled up in the corner, we hunkered down to a full-on seafood feast of fried fish and a hearty stew loaded with all kinds of shellfish I don’t know the name for in English or in Spanish. Accompanied, of course, with deliciously buttered potatoes. And washed down, naturally, with a nice, dark beer. It was going to be another long bus ride, and we’d need our spirits high.
A fitting end to our first stop. Stay tuned for another fun-filled installment.
Oktoberfest in Chile!
January 30, 2012 by Brian Horstman
In the U.S., when we think of Oktoberfest, we think, naturally, of Germany. German sausage, sauerkraut, maybe some German music, and everything written in a nice, German-looking font. But let’s face it, we mostly think of beer. So when I heard of an Oktoberfest happening in the small community of Malloco, a short drive from Santiago, I was happy to find out that here, too, Oktoberfest means beer.
Apparently, la Fiesta de la Cerveza, in Malloco (read: Beerfest) started years ago with the restaurant pictured here, Der Münchner. Indeed, the first thing we saw as we climbed off the bus from Santiago was the colorful front of this German restaurant, with the beer festival happening essentially in its back yard.
When I say “we,” I mean a group of English teachers like myself and other friends, all understandably curious about the very promising, long list of Chilean breweries that would be present and serving many varieties of their hand-crafted beers. Upon arriving at the bus terminal, we discovered many, many buses with the words “Malloco: Fiesta de la Cerveza” scribbled on the sides. Presumably, these buses would be making round trips all day long, shuttling partygoers to and from the capital and the party. Just how many people would be there?
Once we had paid the 5000 peso admission (about $10 US. Chile, defying the long held reputation that Latin America is a cheap place to travel, can be pricey), we wandered past several rows of stands selling commemorative steins, hats, and various things to eat. After a few minutes of this, we began to wonder, where was all the beer?
But then the path opened up into a wide, dusty field encircled completely by beer vendors. Literally, dozens of breweries. And at that hour, right around lunchtime, there weren’t so many people at all. So we went straight up to one of the first breweries that caught our attention and made a purchase. Dark, delicious and cold beer. Not your typical commercial pilsener; that day, there would be none of that. No. Nothing less than microbrew, at its flavorful finest. We split up, some of us dedicated to enjoying our first pints in the shade, and the others striking out at once, intrepidly in search of the next cupful.
You see, we were not limited to one successful formula for enjoying an extended afternoon of sampling so many uncommon beers. With the next several hours as full of promise as they were, the temptation was certainly there to enthusiastically take down a few pints in rapid succession.
Clearly, there were many festival goers who were doing just that. But after an education at Ohio State University, my personal rate of consumption had been tempered by years of experience, and most of those in our party had clearly learned similarly.
Rather than make the mistake of indulging with wanton abandon, then, only to be met with a physiological compulsion to sleep in the later afternoon, we chose to make our second beer purchase only after a shrewd sampling of as many different beers as possible. Because of the relaxed atmosphere brought on by the low turnout at this early stage in the day, most of the sellers were happy to talk at length about their beer, their philosophy, and to give out free samples of an ounce or two of each beer they had on offer.
We spent a good couple of hours in this regimen of socializing and sampling, staying out of the relentless midday sunshine as much as possible under the cool shade of the canopies hanging over each stand. It was in this way that we learned that the overwhelming majority of the many breweries in participation that day hailed from central Chile. I didn’t hear of any coming from further north than La Serena, and not many came from much further south than Santa Cruz. With the reputation of southern Chile as being the major beer producer that it is, that bodes well for future sampling as we begin to explore places like Valdivia and Puerto Varas. Tasty!
Time passed, and a second pint was finally purchased, with the benefit of a well-informed knowledge of what was available. Moving in reverse, having started with a stout, my second beer of the day was an amber ale from a brewery I had never heard of before, and may well not hear of again until Fiesta de la Cerveza 2012. But it was the one that stood out in my mind as having the nicest hop profile so far, and that was what I was going for that afternoon.
Meanwhile, the festival was filling up, and the beer stands were heaving with spirited clientele. Thankfully, that didn’t mean that the vendors stopped giving out free samples, but the time for idle chit-chat was over. Interactions with the bartenders became terse and to-the-point:
Bartender:¿Cuál?
Me: La negra.
B: ¿Grande o pequeña?
M: Una muestra, nomás.
B: Vale.
Deciding it was time to take a break from the crowds, we opted to have some food and some time to relax in the shade. In the search for a place to sit down, we walked past the obligatory carnival section of the fairgrounds.
Incidentally, the little wheel behind the red tower is one of those contraptions that is designed to send you spinning along multiple axes at the same time. The weekend before at the same event, a young man who had likely had too much to drink, decided he would stick his legs through the bars of the cage he was locked in for his safety while the ride was in motion, and his feet caught on the center axle, snapping his legs at the shin. He died in the hospital a couple of days later. Not surprisingly, that ride was not in operation the day we went. Alcohol and carny rides are never a good combination.
After a nice break, we launched back into our methodical sampling of virtually every beer on offer at the beer festival. More stands were visited. More beers were tasted. Another pint was purchased, by me. This time, it was an IPA, the only one I had found the whole day. It was from this brewery, if I remember correctly.
A well-crafted IPA is one of my favorite beers, but in the US amongst microbreweries today, there seems to be a tendency to load the beer up with a quantity of hops far in excess of what an IPA traditionally called for. The one I tried that day was well hopped, but not to the extreme like some of the “double IPAs” you can find. I wanted to bring a bottle home with me, but at the end of the day this brewery became somehow elusive, and I couldn’t track it down.
When all was said and done, we had tried beer from just about every brewery available that day, over the course of five or six hours. Drinking at a moderate pace for that much time doesn’t get you drunk if you do it right, but it was like a shift at work, and left us physically exhausted at the end. The bus ride home was a rowdy one, us standing in the aisle with crowds of Chileans chanting hymns that all of them knew and none of us did. Were they singing about politics, or football? Instead I focused on the number of beer stains noticeably visible on the white shirts of many of the people seated around me. Perhaps the people were on this bus and not behind the wheel for their own safety, and for the safety of others.
My personal bill for the day was 5000 pesos for the entry fee, and about 1500 pesos for each pint, 3 in total. Plus food, and another 700 pesos or so for the bus ride each way. Let’s put the grand total at around 15,000 pesos, that being about $30 US. I’d do it again next year. Who’s with me?
Chile’s Cordillera De Los Andes: Copper, Mountains, Ore, Mining…
December 30, 2011 by Brian Horstman
Way up a winding road heading into the cordillera de los Andes from the town of Rancagua, south of Chile’s Santiago, lies the town of Sewell. Its setting on a steep mountain valley, the sheer and snowy slopes flanking it, the colorfully painted buildings that comprise it, its rich history as a copper mining town, all of this make it an attractive destination for tourists.
But if you come, don’t plan on spending the night. Sewell is a ghost town. Today, no one lives in any of its buildings, and the road that leads you here is closed to all traffic, save that going to and from the nearby El Teniente, the world’s largest subterranean copper mine.
Save also tour vehicles like the one parked in the bottom left of the photo, full of tourists like us, seeking a day trip different than your typical wine tour or run for the beach.
The road to Sewell led directly through the facilities of the mining operation. I, probably like most people in the world, had never been on a tour that featured a copper mine before, so I took a lot of pictures along the way. Some areas, with the blue, yellow and red theme, and unusual architecture, imparted a whimsical sort of Willy Wonka’s copper factory impression.
Then you round the bend and see something like this. Toxic pools, grey concrete buildings under ominous cloud cover, with barren land all around. That’s what you expect massive mineral extraction to look like. Our guide delivered an endless set of statistics and explanations surrounding Chile’s copper industry, and told us that it would be impossible for a mining operation on this scale to not have an impact on the surrounding environment.
At the same time, while Chile has worked hard in recent years to diversify its economy, the exportation of copper remains its single largest source of revenue, and without it, the country would not enjoy its current level of development and prosperity. So don’t expect El Teniente to close any time soon.
In addition to selling copper, Codelco – the government-run mining company responsible for El Teniente’s operations – also runs tours. In fact, not only did our tour lead us around the facilities.
After passing for several kilometers through this kind of industrial landscape, we donned the hardhats and orange reflective gear required by law, and drove straight into the mine itself.
As I mentioned before, this is the biggest copper mine in the world, barring open pit mining. Chuquicamata, an open pit mine in the north of Chile, is the 2nd largest such mine in the world, matched only by Bingham Canyon Mine, located in Utah. To give some perspective, since Chuquicamata was opened over a century ago it has cranked out some 29 million tons of copper ore. In its own right, El Teniente produced more than 418,000 tons of copper ore in 2006 alone.
I’ve been within the man-made bowels of the earth once before, when I walked with my family a hundred meters or so into an old gold mine in Zaruma. This particular winter’s day in Chile, we drove more than 6 kilometers into one of this mine’s many tunnels. We were merely scratching the surface, so to speak, of the vastness carved out beneath the ground. Not a tour for the claustrophobic. This particular leg of the tour can be bypassed for those who’d rather not go into the belly of a mountain.
As this hand-drawn diagram indicates, there are some 7 horizontal levels of tunnels dug into this mountain, each at a different depth, each counting on gravity to bring materials down first from their respective mines. From there they are carted to the white apparatus indicated on the right, where they are ground up and dropped down to the level where they can be loaded and driven out from the valley below.
It turned out that the white apparatus in question, known as a chancado, was part of the tour. In layman’s English, we might call it a crushing machine. The room that houses it reminded me of the place where they filmed the final scenes of Terminator 2. The crushing device itself looked like a big electric orange juicer, with ground up rocks rather than orange juice pouring down from the spinning blades into a long vertical shaft leading below.
You’ll have to be satisfied with my description to conjure up an image in your mind, but I will include a photo of the cavernous and seemingly endless hole in the ground, leading down to the lowest depths of the mine.
In addition to demonstrating the many levels of the underground complex, this photo also reveals the horrid air quality to be found beneath the surface. It took me a couple of takes to realize that the odd interference in each photo in this room was the result of infinite particulate matter reflecting the light from the flash.
Otherwise unseen, but definitely noticeable from the chalky taste in your mouth, this is the stuff that ultimately ends up clogging the lungs of many career miners, leaving them with a case of silicosis after years and years underground.
That mining is hard on your respiratory system is well known, but seeing and smelling it for myself gave me a more visceral appreciation for the hardship that miners must go through to make their living. Unlike them, I could go home, rinse off the dust from my body and breathe easy the next day.
Besides the chancado, there is also an underground casino. But before you start thinking that these miners can gamble away all their hard-earned income before they even see the light of day, I should mention that this term has a far different sense in Chilean Spanish than it does in English. Gambling casinos are known in Chile, but the majority of the places you’ll find bearing this name fall under the category of what we’d call a cafeteria.
After this picture was taken we saw the casino for ourselves, and had lunch there. Besides the lack of windows, it was your typical working class mess hall. Soup, rice, meat, sauce, salad, drink. At least, that’s what we saw people eating. The lunch for tourists ran about $10 more than the regular cost of the tour, which seemed a little steep for what you get. We brown bagged it.
After lunch we took off our dusty helmets and orange jackets and made our way up to the highlight of the tour, which was the abandoned mining town of Sewell. The first stop on the guided tour was a museum housed in one of the most well-maintained buildings in town. The top floor was certainly the best – if most unlikely – exhibit, housing a collection of copper items from around the world.
Copper sextants, copper helmets, copper weights and measures, all beautifully preserved. And, this copper Ganesh. It’s interesting to note that while Chile is one of the world’s major exporters of copper ore, little of it is refined here into pure copper, or manufactured goods.
So it is that the copper used here in Chile may have come from Chile, but chances are it then got shipped as ore and then sent to Asia. From there it was refined, shaped, included into any number of electronics or other such product, and then shipped out around the world, including back here, to Chile.
This irony is not lost on those in the copper industry of Chile, but when the established infrastructure and cost of labor is such in Asia that finished products can be churned out for far cheaper than here in Chile, there is no economic incentive to do otherwise.
In that light this exhibit, with its collection of artistically crafted copper sculptures, antiquities and other bemusing curios, stands as a microcosm for the curious situation that many countries like Chile find themselves in.
Rich in resources but lacking a tradition of manufacture, we find an economy chugging along nicely on the export of raw materials, but all of the added value that comes later from the finished product earns profits abroad.
I don’t know if it was Codelco, with profits from its copper business, or some other entity which bought the fine pieces we pored over that day. And for a fine price I’m sure, judging from the condition of the pieces.
But whoever the owner may be, they’re making some added profit from the trickle of tourism coming to Sewell and this museum, so we’ve got some locally added value after all.
The rest of our tour took us around the snowy, wind-blown streets of Sewell. Our guide mentioned one story after another to reveal the curious lives of miners and their families, stranded so far from civilization up here in the middle of nowhere.
Founded in 1904, everything was brought in on a train, including the miners, and once here they couldn’t expect to see anything else for months on end.
That set up the typical situation of the company town, where the mining company owned and operated everything. Once the road to the mine was built, the mining company began phasing out life in Sewell in 1977, which means that there are plenty of people with memories of life in Sewell.
Indeed, since the tour, I’ve happened to mention to a few Santiaguinos that I was there. Santiago is not so far from Sewell and El Teniente, and the mining industry is such a big part of the economy that a couple of the people I’ve told have mentioned that they remember their early childhoods in Sewell.
As you can see from the photos, the weather conditions at this altitude are extreme, and in the few decades since its abandonment and substantial dismantling, the elements have taken a major toll on the remaining buildings.
Now an UNESCO World Heritage site, efforts have begun to restore what’s left of the town. However, many of the structures which have been at least partially restored have already suffered a new round of damage from the long winters and the subsequent effects of significant snow accumulation.
Apparently, plans are in the works to bring some full time employees to the town in order to run an on-site hotel in one of the finer buildings, allowing tourists to spend the night in the ghost town of an old mining encampment. Does that sound like fun to you? There’s even an old bowling alley…
Built on such a steep hill, Sewell was composed of many levels, both geographically and socially. Here, on the concrete plateau between flights of concrete stairs, we can see an abandoned schoolyard where dozens of children of miners must have once played. Further up the hill, and now mostly dismantled, were the well-appointed homes of the English-speaking managers and executives of the mining operation back when it was a foreign holding.
While these wealthy expats would have enjoyed as many amenities and comforts of home as money and the limitations of the time would have allowed, the miners themselves were housed with their families in small rooms stacked up in big apartment buildings like the ones seen here. The difference in the quality of life of these distinct socioeconomic strata would have been very clear, according to our guide.
Nonetheless, the local miners were afforded a quality of life far greater than at other mines, with enviable salaries and benefits.
Today, the miners can still apparently expect a fair salary for the hard work they do, and most of them live with the modern comfort and nicer weather of the city of Rancagua in the open valley far below.
That leaves Sewell behind as a nearly lost relic of Chile’s past, rescued from ruin and now enjoying what could be the beginnings of a nostalgic renaissance.
Standing in the icy air of a ghost town like this one, a colorful oddity amidst the grim machinery of a huge industrial project, puts you in the middle of several levels of contrast. If you ever go, you could even try and count them, like counting the stairs on the way up the hill.
In Search Of Snow In Chile’s Beautiful Country
November 30, 2011 by Brian Horstman
This year was the first time I had experienced a real winter since 2007. I gave winter a miss during my years in Ecuador, which has what is colloquially referred to as a winter, describing the part of the year you might call the rainy season. I suppose people from different parts of the world have different concepts of what winter looks like. For me, coming from Ohio, I could never think of it as being anything less than icily cold, cloudy, and often snowy. But admittedly, after a few years in the eternally springlike climate of the Sierra in Ecuador, my personal tolerance level for cold weather had shifted. A night in the 50s started to feel downright cold to me, and I had taken to the Ecuadorian custom of wearing a jacket when I left the house on many mornings that in Ohio, around April, would feel practically balmy.
So, once we came to Chile, and the days began getting shorter, I started to wonder just how cold the winter in Santiago would be. Come July and August, winter had fully set in, and one morning in particular, we awoke to the above scene from our living room window. Every Chilean I spoke to said that this was highly abnormal, and the TV news that day was full of people marveling over the novelty of snow on the ground. The snow never made it to our neighborhood, but in the parts of town lying near the mountains, the snow accumulated, much as it had on the hills you can see from our apartment.
Soon after, we opted to take a walk in a neighborhood closer to the mountains, and while no snow remained on the ground beneath our feet that day, the Cordillera de los Andes loomed nearby, replete with a nice dose of white powder laid down by successive snowfalls.
Santiago is one of few cities its size to lie so close to a mountain range that receives such a quantity of snow, and we were fully charmed by them each time we saw them this winter. Whenever some rain would come down in the city, we would remark that more snow had fallen on the mountains, and made a point to get a look at them to see just how far the snow had reached down the mountainsides.
Having bought a bike for commuting to the various places around town that I need to go for work, I started to wonder if there was a decent place to go riding, to get into the snow in the foothills beyond the city. Fortunately I wasn’t the only one thinking like that, and so I had the opportunity to go with my friends Ruth and Stuart into a conservation area known as El Santuario de la Naturaleza, or Nature Sanctuary, as we might say in English.
In order to get there, we rode through several of Santiago’s comunas. The metropolitan area of Chile’s capital is divided politically into many such areas, each with its own mayor, and distinct look and feel. Starting in Santiago Centro, and then riding along a contiguous corridor of green space and parks through neighboring Providencia, we soon made our way into Las Condes and rode among the many new skyscrapers of Santiago’s modern economic heart. Being Saturday, its wide sidewalks were nearly vacant, and we were able to cruise peacefully along streets that during the week are nearly unnavigable by bike for the number of people on foot and in cars or buses.
We then moved into Vitacura, an upscale residential area I hadn’t spent more than a few minutes in until that day, and I was struck by the resemblance it bore to countless upper-class neighborhoods you might find in central California, with its mix of modern apartment buildings, two story homes with grassy lawns, and smattering of high-end stores and restaurants, local or international.
After nearly a full hour of gradual climb towards the mountains, we had reached Lo Barnechea, the most rural and perhaps most expensive neighborhood yet. The picture above reveals a glimpse of it. Its rolling hills dotted with bushes, the river valley below, and the occasional rustic estate transported me instantly to the Upper Canyon Rd. neighborhood of Santa Fe, where million dollar homes were not a rarity. I don’t know how much homes in Lo Barnechea will set you back exactly, but considering that the only students I’ve had who live there are both vice presidents in their respective companies, I have a general idea.
The nice thing about places like Canyon Road and Lo Barnechea is that while the real estate might be priced out of the reach of a lowly teacher like myself, there was nothing stopping us from enjoying it in passing from atop our modest means of personal transportation. We wound along some dirt roads that took us ever higher into the hills, passing hobby ranches and wooden farmhouses wafting aromatic smoke from tin chimneys.
It was here too that we finally made it to our first sighting of nearby snow for the day, visible at the top of the hillside to the right. The brisk air full of the pleasant smell of nearby fireplaces made the climb a lot easier, and I realized how necessary it is to get out of the city from time to time, into fresh air and natural surroundings.
I couldn’t tell you now what roads we took to get there, but eventually we left the increasingly sparse scattering of rural mansions below us and reached the entrance to the nature preserve. We had to sign in at a wooden gate with a river to one side and a stone guard station to the other. Above us, the dirt road was muddier and the hills steeper than those we had already passed, and the snow lying atop them was lying thicker, too.
The climb never got too grueling, but a persistent pain above my knees started intensifying as we made the climb and eventually I grudgingly had to hop off my bike. It took awhile for me to admit defeat, having ridden up hills far steeper with no problem in the past. Was it the flu I was getting over? The copious wine I had drunk the night before? The lack of physical preparation in the weeks prior? All those things and more, most likely. Once I was down, it felt like my legs were going to buckle underneath me, and a few squats didn’t seem to help. But after a few minutes the pain subsided, and fortunately I was able to walk my bike without it coming back.
The same place I finally decided to dismount, a snowdrift. I was like a kid at Christmas. Albeit a 34-year-old one, with a pair of aching knees. Not so bad that I couldn’t bend down and scoop up a handful of it for the picture.
We had made it to the snow. If I was going to have to walk my bike from here, at least I had made it this far on two wheels, into the snow. Five years prior, I had ridden my bike through the pink-brown mix of snow and caliche in Santa Fe, when it had dumped a foot on the city in the course of a few hours. I was forced to walk my bike then too, not for my own physical limitations, but for the simple fact that the snow was too deep to ride through.
That was the last snow I had been in, until now. When things come around full circle like that, how can you help but reflect on who you are now compared to who you were then, and all the things that have happened in between? That’s what I did, as I shook my legs out and pushed my bike up the hill.
From our perspective, moving as we were along the snow-speckled foothills of the Andes, we were afforded ever more spectacular views of the Andes proper. We were separated from them by a valley, and however high we went along our path, the mountains on the other side would always be higher still, and snowier, and further out of reach. That is the how the mountains dare us, revealing with their sheer presence the next and greater challenge. That day, we were happy enough to enjoy looking at them from where we were as we shared a lunch of sandwiches, tangerines and chocolate chip cookies.
That was not to say that we were done for the day. That first snow drift gave way to more, until the road itself began to be overtaken by ice and slush. We found this shack, ostensibly abandoned, and decided to take a break. In the distance, the Andes unfolded above us in their snow-swept glory. And from an overlook nearby, we were afforded a panoramic view of the city below.
It was truly impressive. Partly because it revealed just how far we had come to be where we were. In the foreground, the open hills and occasional homes of Lo Barnechea. Beyond, the greater and greater density of both the city itself, and the thick layer of smog that obscured our view from the vantage point in the clean air we were enjoying at the moment. None of the photos I took show much more than this murky, yellowish-gray cloud that appears thicker the further towards the horizon you look.
The naked eye could see lots of landmarks of the city in the distance, which we spent several minutes discovering. We could also see how the smog spilled out past the limits of the city itself, laying like a blanket on the entire flat basin beneath the mountains, locked in by them. Which reveals yet another reason why it’s important to get out of the city on a regular basis. Especially in the winter.
From there we continued our climb on foot, along a road now fully buried in snow. Judging from the muddy tracks, we obviously were not the first to be up it since the most recent snowfall. Later, we met a pair of Australians, each atop their own personal four-wheelers, taking a break and having a chat in the middle of the road.
Several minutes after we passed them by, the deep silence afforded by the insulating power of a thick layer of snow was broken by the high-pitched roar of their engines in the distance as they motored their way back down the mountain. There are lots of ways to get up a mountain road, and from my personal bias, I have to say that the ones that you can do quietly are best.
At some point on any day trip, the decision must be made as to where to stop and turn back. The road we had chosen kept going up, the snow kept getting deeper, and the wind kept blowing harder. We played for awhile at saying that we would go just one more bend in the road. I for one was waiting for some kind of other milestone, like the initial snowdrift, to mark the stopping point. I didn’t know what that might be, admittedly, and in the end, there wasn’t one that day. We finally found a place to stop, to sit for a few minutes, to eat and drink. When we got up, it was back down and not up the road that we went.
Along the way we found this black dog, and he followed us on our walk back to the bikes. Once we got on our bikes and began the high-speed, rattling downhill, he kept on following us, joyously matching our speed. He would run ahead, get to a bend, slow down and look back, and then run aside, fall behind, and then back up front again.
Never did he run the risk of getting too close to our bikes and causing an unexpected turn and subsequent crash, and I felt comfortable letting go of the brakes and pushing at the limits of the downhill. Only once did I find myself in the gravel of the shoulder as I underestimated the angle of a curve, forced to come to stop and reorient myself before starting up again.
Looking back, thinking of the various rides I’ve taken in the Andes of Chile and Ecuador, this one might have been my favorite downhill ride. The visibility, the grade of the hill, the severity of the curves and the conditions of the road all added up to a nicely technical ride that could still be taken safely at high velocity. Other roads might let you cruise with your hands off the brakes all the way, resulting in a fun downhill, but lacking in any great challenge. Others are so steep and curvy that you’re riding the brakes the whole time, or the dirt and gravel is so thick and loose that one wrong move can leave your wheels out from under you. This one was a nice balance of all of the above, and thankfully my legs let me do it without any resurgence of my earlier cramping in the knees.
Once the thrill of the downhill tapered off into a gentler finish close to the guard station, our black dog stayed behind, and we all regrouped and recounted our respective experiences of the ride. Then we continued the trip, down from the Santuario, down from Lo Barnechea, Vitacura, Las Condes. The foregone conclusion of food and beer at a restaurant in Providencia, and then our goodbyes as we went our separate ways home for the day. All in all, a fine day on a bike.
Exploring Chile’s Pomaire
October 10, 2011 by Brian Horstman
Since we arrived in Chile, we’ve been living in Santiago, its big, modern capital city. In many ways, it’s even more modern than many comparably-sized cities in the US, when you take into account the kinds of apartment and office buildings that are going up in Las Condes, or the constantly expanding subway system, for example.
Living in a city like Santiago has been a great experience so far, revealing yet another angle in the multifaceted gem that is Latin America. I’ve remarked before, surely, on the simultaneous unity and diversity of Latin America. With a common language, history, and certain aspects of both traditional and popular culture, you can visit many places around the region and find common threads. And yet the culture is so varied that you can go from one country to the next and discover the countless details that make each place unique.
Santiago, for its part, represents Latin America perhaps at its most modern, its most globalized. Here, you haven’t lost the charm inherent in any given latin culture, but you also find yourself surrounded by all sorts of conveniences, and big business. Fascinating, and overwhelming at the same time. A topic I will certainly explore further in later musings. It will have to come later, for today’s story starts here in the capital, but ends up elsewhere.
After a month or so of staying in Santiago, once work was lined up and a regular schedule began looming ahead, we thought we ought to get out of town for awhile. As pleasant as it’s been to be in a modern city, both of us come from smaller towns and after awhile, a city this size can start to feel oppressive. Fortunately, once you leave town you go from urban to rural landscapes very quickly, and there are a number of interesting destinations within an hour or two from the city limits by bus.
One such place is Pomaire. It has a very small town feel, with no buildings seemingly more than two stories, and most homes with a small but fertile garden. Many of the houses look to be made with adobe, and either have flat roofs, or sloped and topped off with corrugated metal. Or better yet, with the red ceramic shingles you can find all around Europe and Latin America.
Further contributing to the small town atmosphere is the fact that the people are much more likely to say hello to you as you pass by in the street, and on the day we went, there was hardly a car to be seen on the roads.
There aren’t many destinations in central Chile lacking the ubiquitous grapevine, whether it is laid out in countless rows in a commercial vineyard, or spreading along a trellis in someone’s backyard. Nearly all the homes in Pomaire seemed to be graced with vines of this latter ilk, and since we found ourselves there in the late summer of mid-February, the grapes were getting plump and ripe, and looking mighty tasty.
Grapevines of this sort add an elegance to even the simplest home. Really, if you’re going to grow a garden, why not make it an edible one?
Before going any further, I should mention the main draw of Pomaire, which is its pottery. Here, you can buy simple, functional and beautiful clay pots for use in the garden or kitchen, plus all kinds of utensils. Oven-proof and purportedly even stove top-proof, we’ve been baking pizzas and casseroles in the ones we bought for the past several months. We haven’t risked filling one with soup and throwing it on the stove yet, but every vendor we asked boasted that it could be done.
While some of the shops had attractively designed showrooms, the majority were like this one, little more than an open warehouse. Walking around a store like this, you had to assume that in the next room over the next round of pottery was being molded and fired by members of the same family who was sitting casually in the storeroom with you.
Pomaire is so close to Santiago that it’s a popular weekend destination, a place to shop in some rustic stores and get out of the city, much as we had chosen to do. So much so that its unmistakable style of pottery can be found in Santiago homes, up and down the socioeconomic ladder.
When you consider the sheer size of our new big city home and the popularity of Pomaire’s products, you have to imagine that this town has potentially churned out millions of earthenware goods over the years. There are dozens of vendors around town, and ostensibly just as many potters turning out the clay merchandise before throwing it in the kiln. Each of them most likely has their own personal touch or specific technique that makes certain products better than others or unique to the eye of the trained beholder. But from my layman’s perspective, what we saw from store to store conformed to a signature style that is less individual overall, and more demonstrative of a sort of “Pomaire brand.”
If my casual assumption is to be believed, we could go on to observe that the collective selling power of Pomaire’s goods must be a well-recognized economic engine within the community, and the local potters may well have collaborated in designing such a recognizable style and functional quality. This would help to guarantee that Santiaguinos keep coming back for more, and rather than one family cornering the market, the entire community benefits from the constant influx of visitors. In other words, grassroots branding. Who needs a corporate logo when you define your product with your own bare hands?
Best of all, it’s cheap. We bought an armload of various clay pots and what have you, plus one of the lamps from the shop here, and a liter of local honey. Each item ranged from only $3-$10 more or less. But this also meant that as we made our rounds through the town we ended up spending a decent chunk of money before we were done. We didn’t mind; we were in the market for something to bake a pizza in, and a reading lamp. Everything else was more of an impulse, truth be told. But we haven’t had any buyer’s remorse so far.
The other attraction of Pomaire is the rustic food, baked in rustic clay ovens, and served up in equally rustic-looking restaurants.
We got there too early for lunch, which meant that the bread was just going into the hearth, and the stores were just starting to open. The lady shown here was in the middle of turning her pan amasado around for an even bake just as we walked by, and was nice enough to pose with her modest yet enviable oven for us.
Unfortunately, the bread still had some more cooking to do before it would be ready, and we never got back around her way to try it. Pomaire is also famous for its over-sized empanadas, which can be described roughly as a meat pie. Imagine a potpie, but wrapped up like a calzone, and you’ve got the basic idea.
I’ve developed an unbridled appetite for the empanadas they sell in our neighborhood, which are big enough to fit nicely in your hand. The empanadas here were about twice that size. Or at least, that’s what we saw as we walked by the restaurants.
We didn’t know there were going to be empanadas in Pomaire until we got there, so we had packed our own lunch before we left home, and contented ourselves with a picnic lunch in the park. We didn’t feel like we were missing out; it’s an easy and pleasant trip out of the city, and we’ll be making it again. The next time, we’ll try the food. For the time being, we had some nice sandwiches and corn on the cob, and shared our mealtime with a pack of hungry puppies who wouldn’t leave us alone. Hence lunch on a bench instead of in the grass, safely out of their limited reach.
Otherwise, we were in Pomaire for the day, so we had time to wander the streets for awhile.
We’ve been told that Pomaire fills up on weekends, especially on holiday weekends when everyone is looking to get out of Santiago. But the day we went was a sleepy weekday in the summer, so we got to enjoy the town during one of its quieter moments. There were a few tourists wandering around besides us, especially after lunch when the weather warmed up, but as close as we were to the big city, I can imagine how different it could be on other days.
Shopping and eating is what tourists do in a place like this, but for us, having been confined in the big city for more than a month straight, it was nice to simply waste some time in a small town. That kept us entertained for at least an hour or so.
But eventually we made up our minds to call it a day. We had scoped out the things we wanted to buy in the morning, and then systematically bought them up on the way out of town. Once thoroughly loaded down with our weighty earthenware purchases, we found one of Chile’s peculiar colectivos, a taxi with a fixed route and a fixed price per destination. It took us to a dusty bus stop, where a bus quickly came along and whisked us along the highway back to Santiago, through some extensive stretches of agricultural land.
If you grew up in Ohio like I did, and if it weren’t for the picturesque mountains in the background, you might be fooled into thinking that you weren’t in South America at all when you look at a picture like this. But that cornfield and barn are as Chilean as wine grapes, and a visit to the vegetable market in summer here will present you with plenty of sweet corn that’s *almost* as good as what you can get where I come from.
While I’m on the topic, I’ll also mention that on the four different roads that I’ve taken out of Santiago so far, each has a revealed a vastly different landscape. The one to Baños Morales took us up a mountain pass that got drier and more deserted the further we went. This one led through the cornfields you see here, and other crops you could find throughout the Midwest. The road to Valparaíso runs past vineyards spread out amongst gently rolling hills. Another, which I’ll write about eventually, went along rows upon rows of the fruit trees that comprise central Chile’s many orchards. Maybe I saw the trees that will bear the apples you’ll be eating next summer?
We’ve been talking about going back to Pomaire again soon, now that it’s Spring. We’re all out of the delicious honey we bought, and there’s a few more things we could use for the kitchen. We won’t see the grapes this time of year, but I imagine there will still be some giant empanadas. We’ll be sure to stay for lunch.
An Adventurous Trip To Buenos Morales
August 29, 2011 by Brian Horstman
Eventually, the bus turned off of the main road and up into a smaller valley. We came around a turn, and the otherwise barren landscape was interrupted by a veritable oasis in the desert. This was Baños Morales, a tiny resort town sprouted up from the trickle of tourism coaxed from the city by a couple of little hot pools in the desert.
We got off the bus and began to explore this haven of wooden cabins and trees resembling the aspens of Northern New Mexico. Upon closer investigation, the slender trees had thick, rubbery leaves adapted to retain moisture despite the high desert heat, wind, and lack of humidity. Most of the cabins, predictably, were given over to tourism, each one advertising food, beer, lodging, tourist transport, or all of the above. As we explored, however, we noticed a few houses which were nothing more than homes, probably the weekend or vacation homes of Santiaguinos seeking respite from their urban surroundings.
As we walked around, we soon discovered the source of the local verdure. In addition to the town’s eponymous hot springs, a source of fresh water graces the hillside Baños Morales is perched upon. It drives the whimsical waterwheel you can see over Nancy’s shoulder in the previous photo, and intrigues my daughter, who didn’t want to leave once she discovered it. It also makes the town possible, gracing it with trees, green space, drinking water and gardens. I found it incredible that from the desert could come such a gush of water, albeit a relatively small one. Seeing the stark and nearly barren mountains standing over the valley, it seemed impossible for a stream to exist at all.
In the middle of the summer heat lies this beautiful glacier, atop an active volcano. In a sort of environmental symbiosis, we find the glacier giving life to valley below it, and the volcano its mineral wealth. Without either of them the hot springs of Baños Morales wouldn’t be possible. Residents told us that fumaroles have been visible above its peak in recent years, and also that some pristine hot springs lie on the slopes of the volcano, existing in a much more natural state than the man-made pools and surrounding facilities to be found in the village.
After so much talk about hot springs, I should probably show you the real Baños Morales. Here they are, three multicolored pools in the morning sun. We glimpsed them from above, shortly after our arrival in the village. We decided, based on the lack of shade, that we would try back later in the day. Later in the day, we didn’t get around to going back. You might wonder why we would go all the way to a town famous for its hot springs and never get in the water. Maybe it was the hot weather, or the less than crystal clear water. My first hot spring experiences were in New Mexico, which has very nice, translucent pools to be found amongst the most beautiful of wilderness settings. This type of wild setting, I’ve come to realize, is not always easy to come by.
A Chilean goat, with her cabra chica. These were two of the many goats to be found wandering around the upper reaches of Baños Morales.
Didn’t I tell you? That’s a lot of goats. Goats belong in the mountains. These aren’t really mountain goats, but they must feel a little closer to the essence of their nature with a glacial peak within sight of their foraging. The dirt road that led us to them continued up the hill, and the name of the road, Calle Volcán San José, would suggest that it leads at least part of the way up to the mountain itself. But we chose the goat sighting to be the limit of our wanderings for that day, as the hour of departure was starting to get closer. We didn’t want to miss the bus, so we thought we’d hang around a little closer to where it would pick us up, for the rest of our stay.
This also provided the perfect opportunity to relax in the shade on the patio of a nearby restaurant, and sample the cheap beer options of our new country of residence. Escudo comes by the liter, and is, therefore, for sharing. Chile has other cheap beer options, and even quite a few microbreweries, which was an exciting discovery for me. On other occasions, I will doubtlessly explore such topics, for your consideration. For now, I will go so far as to say that while Crystal is the ubiquitous draught beer to be found at any bar, Escudo is my personal favorite for an unassuming drink at home. And when you’re on a patio of a restaurant far from the city and regular delivery of kegs, Escudo is what you drink to cool off after a long day of exploring a high desert town.
Baños de Ambato, Chilean Goats & Cajon de Maipo
July 27, 2011 by Brian Horstman
During our first months here in Chile, we had the opportunity to do some exploring outside the city of Santiago. Rather than take long trips into the far-flung northern or southern regions of the country, we opted to stay close to home, venturing no further than two hour bus rides beyond the city limits. One of the first destinations we chose was a set of hot springs to the southeast of Santiago through mountain pass known as Cajón de Maipo. If my map is a good indicator, we were closer to Argentina than we were to Santiago by the time we reached our destination, heading up and up into terrain that to me began resembling the dry landscape of Nevada’s deserts, the further we went. After more than an hour on a dirt road through a desert valley, I began to wonder if we were headed for a couple of pools in the sand with nothing else around.We got off the bus and began to explore this haven of wooden cabins and trees resembling the aspens of Northern New Mexico. Upon closer investigation, the slender trees had thick, rubbery leaves adapted to retain moisture despite the high desert heat, wind, and lack of humidity. Most of the cabins, predictably, were given over to tourism, each one advertising food, beer, lodging, tourist transport, or all of the above. As we explored, however, we noticed a few houses which were nothing more than homes, probably the weekend or vacation homes of Santiaguinos seeking respite from their urban surroundings.As we walked around, we soon discovered the source of the local verdure. In addition to the town’s eponymous hot springs, a source of fresh water graces the hillside Baños Morales is perched upon.
It drives the whimsical waterwheel you can see over Nancy’s shoulder in the previous photo, and intrigues my daughter, who didn’t want to leave once she discovered it. It also makes the town possible, gracing it with trees, green space, drinking water and gardens. I found it incredible that from the desert could come such a gush of water, albeit a relatively small one. Seeing the stark and nearly barren mountains standing over the valley, it seemed impossible for a stream to exist at all.
After so much talk about hot springs, I should probably show you the real Baños Morales. Here they are, three multicolored pools in the morning sun. We glimpsed them from above, shortly after our arrival in the village. We decided, based on the lack of shade, that we would try back later in the day. Later in the day, we didn’t get around to going back. You might wonder why we would go all the way to a town famous for its hot springs and never get in the water. Maybe it was the hot weather, or the less than crystal clear water. My first hot spring experiences were in New Mexico, which has very nice, translucent pools to be found amongst the most beautiful of wilderness settings. This type of wild setting, I’ve come to realize, is not always easy to come by.A Chilean goat, with her cabra chica. These were two of the many goats to be found wandering around the upper reaches of Baños Morales.Didn’t I tell you? That’s a lot of goats. Goats belong in the mountains. These aren’t really mountain goats, but they must feel a little closer to the essence of their nature with a glacial peak within sight of their foraging. The dirt road that led us to them continued up the hill, and the name of the road, Calle Volcán San José, would suggest that it leads at least part of the way up to the mountain itself. But we chose the goat sighting to be the limit of our wanderings for that day, as the hour of departure was starting to get closer. We didn’t want to miss the bus, so we thought we’d hang around a little closer to where it would pick us up, for the rest of our stay.This also provided the perfect opportunity to relax in the shade on the patio of a nearby restaurant, and sample the cheap beer options of our new country of residence. Escudo comes by the liter, and is, therefore, for sharing. Chile has other cheap beer options, and even quite a few microbreweries, which was an exciting discovery for me. On other occasions, I will doubtlessly explore such topics, for your consideration. For now, I will go so far as to say that while Crystal is the ubiquitous draught beer to be found at any bar, Escudo is my personal favorite for an unassuming drink at home. And when you’re on a patio of a restaurant far from the city and regular delivery of kegs, Escudo is what you drink to cool off after a long day of exploring a high desert town.Initial Reactions to Chile’s Valparaíso
July 7, 2011 by Brian Horstman
The first half of our walk was through El Plan, this decidedly non-hilly business district near the waterfront. This is where you’ll find the concentration of Valparaíso’s tallest buildings, and on any day but Sunday (which is when I happened to take this photo), its highest concentration of people, as well. Valparaíso is said to have once been of more importance than the capital city of Santiago, in the days before the opening of the Panama Canal. At that time its port was thriving, contributing to the city’s economic growth. Many Europeans also wound up here as new residents, during those times when other cities like New York, Buenos Aires and San Francisco were also booming with immigration. This has led to some interesting effects today in Chile, where many people have English or German last names, for example. Because of the Latin American habit of naming streets after people, lots of streets have English names too, which then get run through the filter of Spanish pronunciation. That’s confusing at best, especially when you’re trying to ask for directions. As for some Teutonic cultural references, you can find sauerkraut at many restaurants and markets in Chile, for example. And draught beer abounds, bearing the decidedly German-sounding name of schop. Loan words in Spanish are quickly assimilated into the language’s abundant list of suffixes, and so you can get a frothy schop at your local schopería, for example.
The next leg of our little tour took us up into Valparaíso’s famous hills. By popular count, the city has no fewer than 42 hills, all spilling over with buildings in various states of repair. Valparaíso is defined by its port, and its prosperity as a city has hinged upon it. But its hills define it every bit as much, governing its shape and design and giving rise to modes of personal transportation unseen in most other towns, as we will see.
Some of the hills, most notably Cerro Alegre and Cerro Concepción, have become dominated by the tourist industry and the predictable changes that come with it. Beautifully and tastefully restored buildings help draw in tourism, which then brings more money to these neighborhoods for even further restoration to take place. A positive feedback loop that brings about a positive change for a neighborhood. On the other hand, prices go up, to be sure. And some level of authenticity is somehow compromised in the bargain, as a neighborhood transforms from something real into something more of a dream to be sold.
Unless you’re downtown, every street you take winds unpredictably through the hills, and to complicate things further, many of the streets are sewn together by staircases and alleyways spiraling up and around, so much so that you have to wander up or down in order to figure out where they’ll end up taking you. A cartographer’s nightmare and a photographer’s dream. Many houses, like the hostel we stayed in, have their only entrance in an alleyway like this one, making most of them thoroughfares unto themselves with names and addresses.
The indisputably most unique and iconic way to get around Valparaíso, however, is the ascensor. So iconic are they, so synonymous with the city in the mind of the tourist, that I won’t show you a picture of them. The fact is, none of the pictures I took of them were very representative. Instead, I give you an image of the antique wheel that pulled the one we took. We paid a small fee, we boarded the little metal box with windows with a view over the harbor, and up the hill we went. At the top was a beautifully restored lobby where people must have once waited to go down to work from their home up above. Today, the ascensores are mostly for tourism, but they are as practical a form of transportation as ever, and the cost isn’t so bad. If you’re interested in seeing what they’re really like, wait until I write about Valparaíso again someday. Or check them out online, as there is no shortage of photos and videos of them.
No mention of Valparaíso would be complete without talking about the street art that exists there. At the same time, no single mention of Valparaíso’s street art is capable of capturing it all. The city is overflowing with graffiti, in every neighborhood and every alleyway. Commissioned or clandestine, and from fine art to random black-paint tributes of adolescent love. I won’t even try to explore the the street art of Valparaíso any further than to say that as much as the port, as much as the hills, the art on the walls around the city help make the city what it is. Like the other aspects of the city, the many murals are supremely photogenic. Reviewing the couple hundred pictures I took during our three days in Valparaíso, I now find myself comparing them with my memory of the many things we saw. I can’t help but feel like I did a lousy job of documenting our trip. I guess we’ll have to go back.Which leads us to the ultimate question of today’s missive. What happened to living in Valparaíso, after so many months of talking about moving there? Rather than going into an even lengthier explanation, I’ll say that this has been a fine example of the delicate balance between lofty dreaming and basic pragmatism.
Many of these posts descend at certain moments (as this one is now doing) into indulgence. Imagining a life high up in a green tropical valley, in a cabin on some lost beach, or in a city more romantic than practical. Deep down, the habit of traveling and living in new places rather than just visiting them for a week might satisfy in some way this latent urge I seem to have. Anywhere I visit, my mind begins to turn, entertaining the notion of what it would be like to live in this place for longer.
Then the other side begins to emerge, as these imaginings begin to reveal certain real complications. The mundane concerns of every day life cannot be ignored. And so we have found our home in Santiago after all, where it’s simply easier for travelers to settle down and get started. Here, we have discovered pleasant parks and a level of organization I’ve never seen elsewhere in Latin America. After years of living in less regulated places, I have to admit there’s something satisfying about the added structure to be found here. We also have friends here who we met in Ecuador and who have since established themselves in Chile long before our own arrival, which has been a boon to our little family in so many ways.
In the end, I don’t feel as though we’ve settled for Santiago over Valparaíso. Since the day we came, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much I like it here, in this city I had essentially ignored as a place to live. One of the greatest things about traveling is discovery, finding the places you like, and learning from yourself about what places you end up finding yourself at home in. Future musings will no doubt explore such notions in time.
