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British Mensa Travel Special Interest Group |
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Chile
for Beginners by Sally Branston Hi! My name is Sally Branston and I'm a new member, currently resident in Santiago de Chile. I've been here for eight months with my husband, who is an officer in the Royal Air Force spending this year studying with the Chilean Air Force. I teach English as a foreign language. Unfortunately, because of the demands of my husband's course of study, we haven't done as much travelling and sightseeing as we would have liked, but I thought I'd get in touch to share what information I have. I know that a lot of people have started to consider Chile as a holiday destination, particularly if they are interested in walking, mountaineering or other forms of adventure holiday. Chile is divided into twelve regions from north to south, plus the metropolitan region and the Chilean Antarctic Territory. So far, I've been to Regions I, II, IV, V and VI and hope to go south later this year, so I'll write then and let you know what I find. In the meantime, if anybody is thinking of including Chile in their South American Tour, this is what it's like. Santiago is a very pleasant, modern city to live in, but for the tourist, it's probably a little disappointing. I wouldn't recommend staying here for more than two or three days. We've had six minor earthquakes since I've lived here, and the country has experienced a hundred major ones in its history, so very few interesting or historic buildings have survived. As you walk along the city's spacious avenues and pedestrian precincts, through modern shopping malls and past steel and glass skyscrapers, you won't feel you're having a "Latin American experience." It's clean; there are lots of shops, statues and green parks; but city centre cuisine owes more to MacDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken than to Andean tradition. The national dish seems to be chicken and chips, with lashings of tomato ketchup. The only llama is in the city zoo. You need a guidebook to seek out the good restaurants, many of which are to be found in the outer suburbs, a twenty minute taxi ride or forty-five minute bus journey from the centre. Taxis are metred and relatively inexpensive, but you need to know where you're going, because the driver almost certainly won't. Buses are clearly labelled and have a standard fare, whatever the length of the journey, so you don't need to speak Spanish to use them, but a recent visitor from the United States thought "Chilean Bus Ride" would make a good, scary attraction for a theme park! I use the buses all the time and find it an easy way to get around, but don't expect the driver to come completely to a halt when you're getting on or off, or even to pull into the kerb. Quite often, they expect you to jump off in the middle of two or three lanes of fast moving traffic and you should always try to have both hands free, in order to cling on when he sets off when you've only got one foot on the bottom step, or opens the door opposite as you hurtle round a corner. City buses were involved in 3,000 accidents last year, quite often because the drivers were under the influence of either alcohol or marijuana, or because they don't get proper rest periods. There is a modern underground, but its scope is limited. Gifts and handicrafts are available in the arcades round the central square, the Plaza de Armas, and in the artisans' markets of Vitacura and Los Dominicos, in the suburbs. The sort of thing you can buy here is silver and lapis lazuli jewellery; llama / alpaca / vicuna sweaters or rugs; wooden puppets; copper wall hangings and pottery. Apart from the jewellery, the quality of the handicrafts is not great and nothing is cheap. The problem for tourists is that the Chileans love big, modern malls and want to fill their houses with imported European goods, such as Swarovski crystal or Capo di Monte porcelain, and they can't understand why you would want to buy indigenous craft work. Food in the better restaurants is very palatable to the British stomach. You eat two or three courses, as we do at home, and while you're studying the menu, the waiter will usually ask you if you would like an aperitif. The most common thing to have here is a Pisco Sour, made from pisco (grape spirit), lemon juice, sugar and egg white. It's a little like a margarita. Main courses are usually based on either chicken, beef, fish or seafood. Side dishes are usually only rice or potatoes (chipped, sautéed or mashed) and it's rare to be offered fresh vegetables. A side salad would probably consist of cold potatoes, carrots, beetroot and runner beans, and vegetarians would probably experience some difficulty in eating well. Chilean wines are excellent - anything from the Concha y Toro, Undurraga or Errazuriz vineyards is usually good. Coffee is almost universally awful. The Coastal Resorts The big disadvantage of Santiago, though, is the smog. From June to August, a brown pall hangs over the city and the nightly television news is filled with pictures of children receiving oxygen in hospital emergency departments. Don't come here if you have respiratory problems, or come in January or February, when most Santiaguinos are away on holiday and the traffic fumes are greatly reduced. The first question a Chilean asks you is, "Do you like Chile?" The second is, "Have you been to Vina del Mar yet?" In January and February, the inhabitants of Santiago routinely desert the city in their thousands to go to Vina, their favourite seaside resort - probably not a good time for overseas tourists to visit! Vina itself is nothing special for Britons - it's rather like many of our own south coast resorts with its floral clock, casino and pier. The beaches are clean, but the Pacific Ocean is strong and cold here, and only the best swimmers should attempt to go in the water. The great thrill for us, however, is the wildlife. I can guarantee that, all along the coast of this central region of Chile, you will see seals, sea lions, pelicans and even penguins. Apart from the northern deserts, the whole country is a bird watcher's paradise, but be sure to bring a good bird book with you if you want to identify them, because you won't be able to get one here. Further north are the resorts of Zapallar and Cachagua, which are more upmarket and where the members of the government have their holiday homes. We stayed in a lovely hotel called the Isla Seca at Zapallar, with a photograph of Mrs Thatcher in the bar, so we felt right at home! There were, however, two earth tremors while we were there and we're told this area is very unstable. South of Vina is Valparaiso, the colourful but dilapidated old port that we probably all studied at one time or another in school geography, without really knowing why. It's situated on the side of a steep hill and you can travel up and down using ramshackle old wooden passenger lifts. Many of the buildings in Valparaiso are clad in corrugated metal sheeting which is either rusty beyond belief or painted in bright yellows, crimsons or turquoises. Further south at Isla Negra (not an island), you can visit the seaside home of Chile's famous poet, Pablo Neruda. Furnished to reflect his love of the sea, you can see his collection of ships' figureheads; nautical instruments; seashells; a life-size papier mache horse; his bar, furnished like an English pub; and the poet's grave. Part of the house is made of wood and is literally ship-shaped. On my first visit, there were hummingbirds in the garden. One of our best trips so far has been to San Pedro de Atacama in the Second Region. You fly to Antofagasta and then to Calama, a copper mining centre whose tiny airport doesn't even have a baggage conveyor belt - an airport employee just hands your suitcases to you. We were met by a company called "Desert Adventure" and their driver then took us the 100 km across the rocky desert to San Pedro, a tourist mecca for students and backpackers, 2,450 metres above sea level and not far from the border with Bolivia. It's a real culture shock when you arrive. We knew that the town (permanent population about 1,000) was constructed from adobe, or mud and straw bricks. But nothing can prepare the European traveller for the single-storey, flat-roofed, squalid looking buildings, which have once been painted white but, as the roofs have been patched up over the years, the brown mud has trickled down over the outside leaving them streaked and dirty looking. The road across the desert is tarmaced but, as soon as you arrive at the town, the streets are of hardened mud. Fortunately for travellers past the age when they care to rough it too much, the town has several proper hotels. There is no electricity after midnight, however, and only the main street has a little lighting, so you need to carry a torch when out after dark. The ideal thing for the visitor is that you don't need your own transport when you get there, as you can easily walk round the whole town on foot and a proliferation of travel agencies offers all the tours you could want. Our first excursion was to the Salar (salt flat) de Atacama, where the earth is barren and encrusted with mineral salts, such as lithium, and nothing grows, even though there is water just below the surface. (You can't drink the water in San Pedro, because it contains the world's highest concentration of arsenic.) In the middle of the Salar is the Laguna Chaxa, a flamingo reserve, where we stayed watching the birds until the sun went down, leaving the landscape bathed in spectacular pinks and purples. The following morning, we visited the world's highest geyser field, El Tatio, at an altitude of 4,300 metres, despite being told by some Americans we met that it wasn't worth the bother. (I think it depends on what you've seen before - they probably have more spectacular ones in the United States.) They had warned us in the travel agency about being careful what we ate the night before, on account of altitude sickness, suggesting no meat and no alcohol, and I took them at their word. My husband interpreted the instructions a little more liberally to include chicken and beer, but in the event, neither of us suffered any ill effects, although some people can feel very sick and headachy at these heights. You depart for the geysers at 4 am because their visual impact is most striking as the sun comes up at dawn and they're 95 km outside San Pedro, up steep, winding tracks, so the minibus can't go very fast. We'd been warned to wrap up well and it was bitterly cold when we got there, with ice on the ground. The ground around the geysers steams, and in some places, pure boiling water gushes up. The guides serve you rolls and coffee for breakfast, heating the milk in its carton in a geyser. After the sun had come up, we went to a different part of the geyser field, where a small swimming hole had been created and some of our party swam. They said the water was okay, but it was very cold getting out and changing in the open air. The following morning, we walked 3 kms along a country lane, following the dry bed of a stream, to the Pukara (fortress) of Quitor, a fortified hillside structure, built in the 12th century, where the Indians held out against the Spanish conquistadors. In the afternoon, we went to the "Valley of the Moon", part of the desert where the landscape is lunar and the wind whips up the grit into your face. The culmination of the afternoon was a hike up a very large, steep sand dune and a walk along the ridge at the top, to sit and watch the sun going down over the distant volcanoes of Lasca and Licancabur. It was more fun running down the sand dune afterwards than it had been trudging up and some people chose to roll down or try to "ski". Everything we wore got filthy and, at the end of that afternoon, my dark green walking boots were yellow ochre. On the final
morning, we visited the remains of an Inca fortress (not much to see)
and the foundations of a stone age village which had recently been uncovered
when the winds had blown away the desert sand. Then it was off to the
airport at teatime and back to Santiago. All in all, it was a very interesting
five days. Although it was difficult to exert yourself at that altitude,
the air was a lot cleaner and breathing easier than it is here in Santiago
with all the smog. First published in VISA issue 31 (winter 1998). |