Reflectification

Not long after completing my last post, three friends of ours, a Colombian doctor named Javier, a Chilean bus mechanic named Andrés, and a student from Texas named Robert showed up from Viña del Mar so that we would begin our trip to the Chilean Lake District. We piled into the car and took turns driving throughout the night and in the morning arrived at Los Lagos, a quiet small town in the center of the Region.

This is my roommate Cesar with our generous hosts in Los Lagos, Juan and his son, Juan.

From left to right we’ve got Juan, Andrés, Robert, and Cesar in front of the house in Los Lagos. We spent the afternoon that first day just hanging around and relaxing and getting to know each other. Of of the residents we got to know pretty well early on was their cat-dog.

So this cat-dog up there is Luna, and he climbs up these logs to sleep on the roof, which is really one of the the more ridiculous and comical things I’ve seen before. Each step climbing up it looks like the entire log pile is going to come crashing down. It the photo it looks like Juan is about the hit the dog with that stick but he’s not.

I’ve got so say here that I took a picture that was similar to this but one of the best pictures I think I’ve ever taken, which I then I deleted on accident. Really pissed about that. I wish I could have shared it here.

OK ladies, this one’s for you. This little guy kept getting his head stuck in the gate trying to get near all the action in the house. After setting him free a couple time I didn’t feel too bad about taking some pictures of it. The little bastard is kind of cute, after all.

Unfortunately, I still haven’t picked up my camping gear from Valparaíso so that first night Chechi and I stayed in Los Lagos with Juan while the rest went to that farm I was talking about in my last post to go camping. Not too worried about it though since we plan on repeating this trip several times, and that is definitely high on the list of places to visit.

Oxen are still used frequently like this in the South of Chile, but I was a little surprised to see them working in a residential neighborhood like this one, across the street from the house I was staying in. Here they are hauling gravel, either for a driveway or to mix cement. I’m not sure which since this was actually the last thing I saw before we left Los Lagos to return to Santiago.

That first night then Chechi, Juan, our friend Rita, and I headed over to Valdivia and went down to the Kuntsmann Brewery. Valdivia really is a spectacular city, and unfortunately this trip we didn’t see much of it during the day. It’s one of the places I visited last December when I was traveling in Chile and it’s absolutely one of my favorite places in the country. I won’t say too much about it here because I’m saving that for the next time I go back and photograph it.

Kuntsmann is definitely far and away my favorite beer in Chile. It has a German name because this part of Chile was originally settled by Germans and the culture is still really strong in the area. If you are lucky enough be be able to find this beer wherever you might be at I highly recommend that you try it.

That night we crashed at Juan’s place in Valdivia (the place in Los Lagos is really his parent’s and he actually works in Valdivia) and in the morning we drove back to Los Lagos to meet with the rest. We had a pretty grand plan to visit several places including a couple of towns with German styled building and some waterfalls on our way down to Puerto Montt, which is the last major city in Chile before you get to Chilean Patagonia. (Some people consider the Lake District of Chile Patagonia, but it’s not.)

We stopped at a town called Osorno to eat lunch, which pretty much nixed most of our plans for that day. I expect bad service in Chile this place was beyond ridiculous and we must have spent more than two hours in this place, which obviously cut pretty deep into our plans. Here are Robert, Javier, and I at that restaurant.

After we left the restaurant we came across this religious gathering on the main road of the city. I’m sure it probably had something to do with this holiday they celebrate here called Easter, which was going to be happening the next day.

So we decided then on a couple of places that we would still be able to visit before the night came and we got in the car and drove past Frutillar, one of the towns we had planned to stop at, and then through Puerto Varas, which was another one. They’re both two of these German settled towns I referenced earlier on the shores of Lago Llanquihue with a really stunning views of Volcán Osorno hovering over the lake.

This is a photo I took of Volcán Osorno just past Puerto Varas while we were driving to Petrohué©.

Here is the Volcano from a little closer.

We got to the waterfall, Salto Petrohué, just before the trail heading to it closed. It’s waters are characterized by the bright turquoise that is in all the water here in the South, which you can see running down the channel in the photo on the left. It’s really stunning and I still need to figure out exactly why all the water down here has this color, but it must have something to do with dissolved elements in it.

These falls were definitely impressive but really weren’t nearly as cool as some of the ones I visited nearby last year, specifically Salto Huilo Huilo and Salto Chino. But those are for another trip and I’ll have to show you later.

Me at el Salto Petrohué. After checking out the waterfall we drove over to Lago Todos los Santos just in time for the sunset.

I believe that this peak here is Cerro Nevado, which is in Argentina.

Here is the sun setting over the lake. You can take a ferry across this lake into Argentina where San Carlos de Barriloche is, which is a really popular tourist spot and ski resort. It’s one of the most popular places for both Argentinians and Chileans to vacation, plus lots of other foreigners. Still haven’t been over there yet.

After that we drove down to Puerto Montt and had dinner. The city seems kind of cool and I’ll definitely have to come back to see it during the day. This is also the city where you take most of the ferries that go further south to Patagonia or la Isla de Chiloé, all places I have yet to visit.

So despite the fact that I had a ton of fun and met some great people on this trip it was a bit rushed and left me with a desire to come back and really spend some time in all these places we saw. But this is definitely a trip that my friends and I intend on repeating several times (hopefully with a little more planning) and a place I´ll be dragging any of you who are lucky enough to come visit me while I´m here in Chile.

As always I took a lot more photos on this trip than I’ve shown here, the set of which is available here .

The next major trip we have planned is a weekend in Mendoza, Argentina, another great place I’ve visited before and somewhere anyone who comes down here will be obliged to go to with me when you visit.

Let me go ahead and briefly go over the issue of Chilean soldiers fighting in Iraq that I talked about in the last post. Before I get into it let me state that this is not an issue that is confined to Chile and is more foreboding for my own country, the United States, if one makes exceptions for Iraq and any other countries that are unfortunate enough to be direct victims of our foreign policy.

This involves a particularly alarming issue that has emerged in the United States within the last decade, which is the increasing privatization of the military. The company that is at the forefront of this is Blackwater USA. It is notable about this company that two of its employees were the American contractors killed in Fallujah, Iraq in 2004 and drug through the streets, which led to our forces leveling the city and possibly committing international war crimes in the process. (A short Italian documentary in English describing these crimes can be downloaded for free here.) Blackwater USA was also the first to respond after Hurricane Katrina, reportedly using excessive force in many cases.

I hope I don’t have to spell out the potential consequences of this for anyone reading this post, but two of the most obvious involve the lack of accountability of these companies to American and international law and also the lack of accountability to the American people. I feel like I’m pointing out the obvious here again but anytime you have a situation where war is profitable you’re probably going to see a lot more of it.

The news program Democracy Now! dedicated the large part of two episode to this which can be either read of listened to here(part1 part2) and there is a book I haven’t had the opportunity to read yet but has been highly recommended to me about this by Jeremy Scahill called Blackwater: Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. The website for that book is here.

Regarding Chile, this country has been one of the major recruiting grounds for these companies, particularly by the aforementioned Blackwater USA. Most of these soldiers go over to Iraq and provide security and perform other tasks, often leaving the Chilean military for these higher paying jobs. This is particularly disturbing when one notes that the 90% of the Chilean people are against the war in Iraq and the government is officially opposed to it. A very good article about the recruitment of Chilean soldiers by US private security firms is here.

I hope to look into this more myself and see to what extent recruitment is still taking place within Chile, and will certainly include anything I find here. I think I’ve met one person in the entire time I’ve been here who supports the war in Iraq, and many, many people have brought it up with me. I think that this is not very well known in this country and I think most people here would be really upset if they found out.

If I get a good response to this (it is possible to leave comments here) I’ll try to include a lot more about Chilean current events and their relationships to global events and happenings.