Last Days in Chile

Whoah! Whirlwind couple of days there. Here are the tourism highlights:

Don and I accompanied Bridget and the kids into town on the micro – they were going to school, and he and I were going to the bus station, to purchase tickets and head off to Viña del Mar and Valparaíso. These are the two cities in Chile that people talk about if they aren’t talking about Santiago, and they thought (and I agreed) that I should really see them, since they’re close by and we had the time.

By the way, the day prior, I had spent an utterly pleasant and relaxed day with Don, shadowing his movements, between doing some errands, picking up the kids and taking them home, meeting some of the local folks, kicking a soccer ball back and forth with his son, preparing lunch with Bridget and him, etc. Just pleasant, no-pressure existing in the way they have come to exist in Chile. It was a wonderful day.

But on this day, we were going on a bus ride. It’s kind of amazing when you ride the bus from Los Andes, Chile, out toward the sea – at one point, I remarked to Don that the mountains of yellow earth and stone were much less sparsely covered in brush; it seemed occasionally that you couldn’t even quite see the earth between the bushes, which is saying something around here. “Yeah,” said Don, “as you get closer to the sea, you get a lot more of the mist and fog, which carries a lot of moistu—“ At almost this precise instant, we drove into a wall of mist and fog, which carried a lot of moisture. It was an amazing bit of timing. I also noticed, with the help of Don, who might have pointed it out, not sure, that there were trees planted high up the steep, steep sides of these conical mini-mountains – much too high to have been watered with the canals and acequias. Don was curious about them, too – How could they water them? Did they pump it up that high? Seems like an enormous amount of energy to have to burn. But as we thought about it and talked about it, we noticed concrete structures ascending the slopes in straight lines in some places, and then suddenly a giant pipe that just shot straight up the mountain to one side of a planted slope. So, yes: They pump it up there.

I’ve said it before, but the fertility and production of this country are just mind-boggling. Every flat piece of ground is under cultivation, it seems – and not in the desperate sort of way you see in a starving country or in a country where people have no land rights. It’s incredibly orderly. Planned structures everywhere you look – Don told me the other day that you’ll see flat, irrigated, broad pieces of agricultural land, with a “For Sale” sign on them, and when you look up the asking price online, you’ll find that owning that parcela, as they’re called here, will set you back $250,000, or $500,000, or $1,000,000, depending on the size.

Them ain’t pesos, folks.

It’s just ridiculous, the amount of production they can get out of these fields. Think about it: No deep freezes ever, and irrigation. They’ll get triple, quite literally, the amount of any given crop as you will in the US, simply because they can plant, and harvest, and plant, and harvest, and plant, all in one year.

The towns are all dependent on the work that comes from agriculture. You see gangs of workers, often in uniforms!, pruning grape vines, putting metal strips around the bases of peach trees, tying back branches on apple trees, harvesting avocados, etc. Not to mention all the tractors you see pulling implements, and implement dealers…In this region, nothing stirs the economic pot like agriculture.

Except mining. But I don’t see that, because there’s only one local mine (I still don’t know what they mine there), and it’s a busride away. Most of the workers at that mine take the company bus to and from work, and many apparently used to live in company-built housing. One of Don and Bridget’s friends, Guatón (Chileans often go more by nicknames than their regular names; “la guata is “belly” in Chilean, and Guatón’s got a good one going), lives in a house he bought in one of the old mining neighborhoods in Los Andes, the big town we were in to catch the bus. Many other houses depend on mining, as their husbands or sons are of in “el norte” doing something in the mining industry. Wenceslao and Lucy’s son Rodrigo is a surveyor at a mine in the North, and Don says that he makes as much in a year as Don does back in the US. It’s good money, even if it’s bad for Chile’s environment.

But it would be difficult to know that from what one sees on a daily basis around here. And it is easy to see the economic effects on this society. Order, order, order, everywhere you look – pristine sidewalks, road construction, low crime, thriving businesses open everywhere there’s a window to be rented out.

So we hurtled down the mountain into Viña del Mar, which comes upon you somewhat suddenly, just like in “Motorcycle Diaries” – one minute, you’re on the edges of a city, and another, you’re descending into the port, with the sea glistening at you on the horizon.

Viña, our first stop, is the playground of Chile’s wealthy. There are expensive apartment houses everywhere, towering ever higher to get a decent view of the sea. Swanky shops on every street, fashionable ladies and gents wearing expensive watches and sunglasses – Viña is one of those places that make me nervous even to be in. We de-bussed and walked to the beach, where we paid $300 (them’s pesos, folks – about 75 cents) to use the bathroom, and then walked over to a working clock, twenty feet across, set at an angle in a hillside, made of flowers. (It was difficult to resist the temptation to ask the two men working on the flower beds there if they knew what time it was.) Don nodded at the clock. “The guidebook says Viña has the beach, and this clock,” he said. “We’ve done Viña.” So we hopped a bus, and zoomed down the coast into Valparaíso.

We got off at a fairly central-looking plaza, and walked away from the sea, looking to ascend Calle Bella Vista (“Pretty View Street”), at the top of which we would find Pablo Neruda’s house. We marched upward, and I started firing the camera in all directions.

The hills ascend so quickly form the seaside in Valparaíso that you don’t know how they stay up there. Houses are stair-stepped up the sides of them in precarious, gorgeous fashion, and the streets wind and wind along making for pleasant, if cardiac-ally challenging, walking. Partway up the hill, we passed an open workshop door, where a carpenter stood working on a chair.

I just had to stop and look in. It was like a little cave in there, with a few lightbulbs poking out of the wooden ceiling, and it was clear that decade after decade of semi-disorderly work had been going on there. The carpenter himself was probably 70 years old, scraping away at the dog-chewed leg of a chair. (Don greeted him and asked what he was working on, which is how we knew that this had been the problem.) 

I then noticed some hand-carved items on the side – portraits in relief of Salvador Allende, of idealized and general Indians, of an indigenous folk hero who had resisted the Spanish in the south of Chile. Another was a reproduction of the Chilean coat of arms – There were a number of them, all on shelves, all dusty. I asked if he’d made them, and he said he had – whenever he had a free few minutes during his day, he’d grab one and work on it. He couldn’t say, therefore, how long any of them had taken.

Don picked one up and handed it to me. It was a tiny bust, carved in pine, about 5” high, of Salvador Allende.

“Would you sell something like this?”, I asked.

“Of course,” he said.

“How much would you want”

He shrugged. “Ocho lucas”, he said. Eight thousand pesos – about $15.

“Trato hecho,” I said. Done deal. I wasn’t haggling over art.

He let me take his picture with it, and I walked away with my favorite keepsake from this trip. Once we were at the top of the hill, Don said he wanted to take a picture of me with him; I generally hate appearing in photos, but I admitted that I probably should have done that. And that I should have asked his name & written it down in my notebook. We resolved to do both on the way back down.

At the top, we quickly found the house, and it’s utterly gorgeous inside. Mostly because of the views – there are five floors, and every one of them has at least one large window that overlooks the harbor. We got some of those phone-like museum guides, which talked us through the whole place. I won’t go into too much detail – You should go. It’s worth it.

Here it is:

Down the hill again, after purchasing some lunchables, where we found the carpenter’s workshop was closed up for lunch. Dang. We walked to a park and sat and had lunch, and were so doing when a political protest marched past, with a big banner and a police escort. (The street dogs don’t like cops, I’ll tell you that much. They harassed the motorcycle carabineros from the beginning of that march to the end.) Apparently, Chile is going to grant more fishing - licenses…? Rights…? – to the large-scale fishermen, and the small operators are upset about it. Snapped some pictures, and then Don and I walked along trying to find a “fanicular” – the diagonal uphill train / elevators Valparaíso is famous for.

Found one. Rode it. Kind of neat. That’s about it.

They are an interesting artifact, I’ll give them that – a big ski-lift-style wheel that rolls one up as it rolls another one down, an ancient-looking entryway on the downhill end that sneaks in between two old buildings. Cool. But hardly earth-shattering.

We walked to the harbor, and then headed to the bus station. I’m very glad to have seen it, but as you can tell, there’s not all that much to tell. We were back in town again by about 5:30.

The more memorable stuff, for me, happened back there at Don and Bridget’s – well Wenceslao and Lucy’s. We (D and B, the kids, and I) went to their friend Flaco’s house for dinner the night before, and talked about everything around his big outdoor picnic table, and then, when it got dark, their indoor kitchen table. The supper, by the way, was fantastic – it was really “las onces”, with things to pick at as much as one wanted, and no big-ticket items. I had what they called “kuchen”, sweet fruit-covered pastries; empanadas de queso (cheese empanadas), which are what Chileans really point to as their typical finger food; and pan amasado, the local brad that comes in six-or-seven-inch disks, about three-quarters of an inch thick. It is fantastic stuff, and Flaco’s wife Miriam had made it in her wood-fired oven. They have access to electricity and gas, but prefer to keep making bread with wood. It comes out fantastic, let me say, particularly when spread over with pebre. It’s a sometimes gooey mix of tomatoes, onions, and chilis, and it is just delicious. They also love peach juice here, and there are two bottles of it on the table in the various pictures.

This is pan amasado, up close:

(Flaco, by the way, should be Rowan Atkinson's stunt double.)

Flaco's son Rodrigo shares some yuks with Don.

It was a very fun conversation that ranged all over the place, from homophobia to racism in Europe (Flaco and Miriam’s son, Gerard, and his wife, Luz, had lived in Spain, and were regularly the objects of nasty comments and looks from people in the street), and Chile vs Uruguay.

 Which will be the subject of my next post...