Alturas de la Parva Hasta los Fondos de Valle del Elqui

The recent several weeks have been a chaotic slurry of activity punctuated by routine, eleven-hour breaks for work. Reaching all the way back to the end of my last post I realize that I must begin with the ski trip to la Parva.

La Parva

When my alarm went off in the morning I didn’t want to wake up, but I didn’t want to miss the bus taking us up to the slopes either, so I rolled myself off the bed and onto the cold, wooden floor to help speed the waking process a little. The floor was a little more comfortable than I expected so I kept lying on it for a while, but visions of powder spraying in my head jerked me off the floor with a start and I propelled myself head first into the shower. Unfortunately, that burst of activity proved illusory and I fell into a standing slumber underneath the soothing water of the showerhead, until I realized the hot water was running out and hurriedly applied soap and shampoo to the areas of my body I deemed most in need of that luxury, halfway rinsed it off before the water turned unbearably frigid, and then rubbed the rest off onto a towel. I jumped from the shower and into several layers of clothes, realized I didn’t own a pair of gloves or a hat, grabbed a few items from the kitchen that looked edible for breakfast and fled out the door.

The clouds crashed against the side of the mountain just like waves on a rocky shore.

Ran the block to the metro. Green line, changed to red line, followed it to the last station in the direction of the mountains. Impossible to separate the experience from any of my other times riding those subterranean rails. If you’ve ever ridden public transportation routinely for an extended period of time you will know what’s it’s like descending into the stale, drugged air that brings all passengers to a semi-comatose state where our collective memories cease to function.

My consciousness returned to me as I saw the sky emerging over the stairs coming back up to the surface. Gary and Darren were standing there on the sidewalk looking stupid. Gary and Darren were two Australians renting rooms from some old lady who apparently let her dog shit wherever it wanted inside the house. This understandably bothered Darren quite a lot and he’s now sharing an apartment with some Chilean guy who listens to heavy metal all night long. Apparently though, the rent at that house was cheap and Gary was trying to save some money so he could get out of the city so the shit didn’t bother him so much. That’s understandable too. And actually Gary did just got out of the city. He moved up to Calama, up north near the Chiquicamata mine, which is the world’s largest open pit mine. You would have seen it if you ever watched The Motorcycle Diaries because Che Guevara stopped there on his trip through South America. I’ve never seen the mine but I’ve seen Calama and it’s a completely hideous miner’ town, but at least it’s surrounded by lot’s of completely amazing countryside. Not a bad move, in my opinion. I was too come really close to making the same move myself almost a year later.

Anyway, the reason Gary and Darren were both looking stupid was because they both didn’t know where they were supposed to find the van arranged to carry us up the mountain, but I did, so together we headed over to the Unimark grocery store where we all had planned to meet, and because we were running a little late the bus took off pretty much right after we got there. Once inside I put myself to getting to know the motley group of English teachers, other various expats from English speaking countries dotting the globe and their Chileans accessories.

Me, squinting against the sun at the top of the world.

Santiago gives up its sprawling almost immediately where the climb to the mountain begins, and from there it’s a steep, windy road of hatchbacks leading past mountain landscapes vegetated by cacti right up to the snow line. It’s a strange thing to see cacti at fourteen thousand feet in the snow.  Just as the van peaked its hood over that boundary between desert and snow we came across the three ski resorts huddled together we had come to find. We drove off to the one to the leftward one, la Parva , named for the haystack peak rising up behind the slopes.

The day was beautiful, though perhaps not what everyone would consider ideal for skiing. Below us in the Central Valley of Chile where Santiago situates itself was a vast ocean of clouds, which broke against the jagged mountain like waves crashing against a rocky shore, creating conditions where the slopes oftentimes were clouded by thick, roving splotches of dense fog in truly beautiful effect. I didn’t mind skiing with the intermittent low visibility, though it really seemed to throw off the rest of the crowd. All in all the skiing was extremely enjoyable although the resort wasn’t very challenging.

The Comedown

Though in a recent post I said I was going to, I didn’t go to the costume party in the country I had planned on. That day after skiing I met up with some of the guys from the trip at a bar on Calle Manuel Montt. It seems that there is either something infectious about the Latino concept of time or something about it that attracts foreigners already predisposed to tardiness. Though I thought I was really late to the bar I arrived to find only one person, Ed, the guy who had arranged our ski trip to la Parva, sitting there looking bored and waiting alone. I sat down and we had a conversation that I retrospectively fail to remember but am certain must have been okay while the rest of the party slowly strolled in.

John, one of the several Kiwis who joined us that night, is one of the most amiable and conversive people I have ever met. He is s o well conversive that at times it becomes overwhelming and you need a to take a break, so you run off to go get a beer, take a piss, talk to a girl, or fulfill whatever physical need happens to be dominant at the time. After you’re done satisfying that need you’re ready to go and start it up with John again, who is always ready. It’s a nice thing to have that always waiting. After running into a conversational brick wall with anyone, hitting one of those awkward moments, or getting shut down by a girl, John is always there to turn to. He’ like a dog in that way.

I told John about my plans to head to the north of Chile that weekend to meet my friend Mickey and camp in the desert around San Pedro de Atacama, and have some good experiences. John thought that sounded like a great time and since he didn’t have anything better to do we decided that he should join us.

Preparations

It was during the next few days that the trip I had planned to the north severely diminished in scale and ambition. First I dropped the idea of meeting Mickey in Lima, Peru, traveling to Cuzco and hiking the Inca trail because leaving Chile would have been difficult with the visa situation I had at the time and because Mickey couldn’t commit to the Inca Trail in enough time to make reservations. Then my plan to fly to the northern extremes of Chile and meet Mickey at the border, rent a car and camp out in the desert died because I postponed buying plane tickets for work and during that time the fares quadrupled in price. In the end the trip ended up shrinking to an overnight bus trip to la Serena, much less glamorous and much closer to Santiago than I had in mind.

Nonetheless this part of Chile really is beautiful and intensely pleasant; a destination I highly recommend to anyone. Wanting to get out of town and seeing that the trip was now very economically accessible, my friend from work Tyra decided to join us. Aside from being mildly disappointed about not being able to go quite as far as I’d w anted, the only real inconvenience was the fact that Mickey had to spend the money for a bus ticket and an entire two days traveling from Lima to la Serena.

Chapel in La Serena

John Sly and I got together earlier during the week to buy bus tickets and get stuff together for camping. I met him under the clock tower inside Estación Central, and being an estadounidense (I promise to use the Spanish term for someone from the US until we realize that calling ourselves Americans is hopelessly vague as well as arrogant and that we need to come up with something just a little more specific) embarrassingly ignorant to passenger train travel, the scene never ceases to impress me. Since I was a kid there’s been something with me and trains, something surely accentuated by the fact that I’ve never actually traveled on one. Until my German friend Laura laughed at me when I told her this in Buenos Aires I didn’t even realize that this might be considered a sign of backwardness. Turning away from the trains slowly filling up with passengers from the platforms, I got a good view of the mountains, freshly covered with snow and highly visible thanks to a mostly smog free day. Even though they’re constantly right there lording over the city their presence much of the time is either blocked by buildings or overshadowed by the smog. On one of those occasion s when you are lucky enough to escape both those urban plagues, the view of the Andes truly is astounding, even more so during the Winter when their peaks are shrouded under blankets o f snow white snow.

After some waiting around, John showed up on foot, and we proceeded to walk down to the bus terminal another metro stop down. There we purchased our tickets and John was ready to go for a beer, which sounded like a good idea but unfortunately I had to go to class and had to turn the offer down with promises to take him up on it on the road.

La Serena

My last class on Friday that week finally came and went and I met up with Tyra and John at the bus station around ten that night. Tyra still hadn’t bought her ticket and had to take another bus that was leaving ten minutes after ours. So when the time came for John and I to board our bus I offered Tyra my ipod to keep herself occupied during the journey, which I think being a bit displeased about having to go alone she turned it down. But after we all got to la Serena she said she just fell asleep the moment the bus departed and slept the whole way, so it probably didn’t end up being a big deal. That’s not how it went for John and I. In the darkness of the journey we knocked back of slew of beers and talked late into the night about his trade of being a jeweler , traveling, fights, crippling spider bites to the leg, and countless other topics that I can’t even begin to remember from this distant time where I now find myself writing. At some point he politely asked me to keep my voice down in respect the other sleeping passengers, and sometime later I found myself joining them making Z’s, as far as I can tell leaving John alone in the realm of waking life.

A swan sunning itself at the Japanese Garden in La Serena.

At what seems only moments afterward John woke me up to inform me that we are almost to la Serena. I think we were really an hour out, and my weariness enforced a passive patience and I sat there with a mute exhaustion and listened while John talked at me loudly until we arrive to the bus station, everyone else on the bus fast asleep.

We get there early in the morning and still tired we go the the only recently opened station restaurant and ate a refreshing meal of scrambled eggs served straight from the pan with a cup of black coffee. (Please note that black coffee is decidedly un-Chilean and people here get kind of freaked out when you don’t pour several grams of sugar into whatever beverage you’re drinking.) So after eating we board a micro headed into downtown la Serena and get off at the central plaza. After months of being in Santiago the tranquility and cleanliness of the city came as a bit of a shock. We weren’t really sure what to do. We had no agenda. There was a plan to rent a car and head to some of the places outside the city that seemed attractive to me; a penguin reserve, some of the world’s most important astronomical observatories, various places in Valle del Elqui, but because we were all on limited budgets and because Mickey was coming down having spent nearly all his remaining money on his bus ticket from Peru, these plans were quickly discarded.

Chillin’ out in the Japanese garden.

So we relaxed and took in the atmosphere. We spent the morning and early afternoon exploring blocks surrounding the central plaza and browsed bookstores and sat at coffee shops and ice cream parlors. During my last two years in the States and under the influence of several very close friends from India, I had developed a great appreciation for spending vast amounts of time just relaxing taking in the ambiance with good conversation ranging variously from the meaningless to the profound. With Tyra and John I was finding la Serena an ideal place to do this. This seems to be a pastime foreign to most estadounidenses these days but I strongly suspect on more than circumstantial evidence that we once excelled this activity in the past, and that it’s just one more aspect of our culture lost to the apersonal bustle of modern consumer capitalism.

It was when the three of us were having a thoroughly pleasant time doing just this at a corner cafe when I received a phone call from Mickey. He spoke to me in his typically manic manner seemingly just on the verge of panic, saying their bus had to stop at a small city in Peru because protesters involved in a nationwide teachers’ strike had thrown burning tires in front of their bus, which ceased all through traffic for hours. Finally the protesters relented and let traffic pass through again, and they had finally reached and crossed the border into Chile. Apparently there was a Peruvian woman traveling with her husband and five year old daughter who was helping him out. We had expected Mickey to get to la Serena that morning but apparently he wouldn’t arrive till sometime the next day.

John’s Cannon

It was shortly after that call from Mickey when we decided to head towards the beach. Just outside the downtown we were a little surprised to come across a pretty extensive Japanese garden. We decided to go in and found it so pleasing that we spent the early afternoon dozing on the soft carpet of grass below a pole holding several carp-shaped windsocks blowing gently with the breeze coming in from the ocean.

We awoke late into the afternoon feeling refreshed and decided to continue our trip towards the beach. The walk ended up being quite a lot further than we had expected. A lighthouse arising at the end of a long, palm-lined avenue guided us towards the shore. We reached the lighthouse and shared some beers while watching the sun bathe the Pacific with a violet and orange glow as it settled down below the edge of our vision. Across the bay we could see the Coquimbo, with el Cruz del Tercer Milenio, or the Cross of the Third Millennium, dominating the city’s most prominent hill and a mosque’s tower standing proudly atop the hill next to it. A fifteen year old kid came up to us shyly looking for company and I offered him a beer, which he declined, although he took a cigarette from John. Tyra thought he was rather strange although I just enjoyed the opportunity to practice my Spanish, while John got along well with him as usual and seemed to enjoy trying to communicate with the boy with his patchy knowledge of Spanish phrases.

While there was still some light we decided to head into Coquimbo by micro to search out a hostel there. I had heard before that Coquimbo and la Serena are very comparable to Valparaí­so and Viña del Mar, and while being neighboring cities with noticeably different atmospheres in some ways these comparisons ring true. Like Viña, la Serena is a little more serene (hence the name) and wealthier while Coquimbo is the port and more of a workers’ town like Valparaíso. However, the differences between Coquimbo and la Serena aren’t nearly so striking as the differences between the other two further south. For one thing Coquimbo is far cleaner and quieter than Valparaí­so.

We got off the micro in the downtown of Coquimbo after dark, so many of these differences didn’t really sink in at the time. We had to walk several blocks to reach the hostel, which ended up occupying a former Victorian style mansion having all the stereotypical characteristics of your typical haunted house. We were the only guests in the place and after we checked in with the Chilean girl working the desk and set ourselves to arranging our things and investigating the premises. The haunted house theme only deepened as we walked over squeaky wooden floors of the immense and nearly empty mansion. The living area showcased a giant fireplace with an ancient, even larger mirror in a gilded frame hanging above it. The mirror was blurry and scratched with age and everything it reflected had an eerily ghostly paleness to it, and seemed certain to reveal the house’s ghastly secrets if one only stared in it for long enough.

Moving our stuff on the micro from La Serena to Coquimbo.

We took off to go eat some seafood and at the recommendation of the girl working at the desk we headed to a restaurant something like four stories tall, although not exactly so large since each dining floor is relatively tiny and just comfortably cramped. We decided to eat on the top floor in a greenhouse like structure built on the roof which offered a stunningly beautiful view of the city and the harbor. The seafood choices were disappointingly few but once the food and wine arrived all complaints were put to rest. The three of us practiced my favored communal eating habit, where you each share your plates more or less equally with one and other. Besides the obvious benefit of getting to try more foods, the greater variety is also healthier. I also think eating this way builds bonds between the eaters. If you’ve tried it you’ll probably agree.

The hostel in Coquimbo

After the meal we went back to the hostel feeling very content and satisfied and set up on the porch out front and talked with the girl working at the desk, who obviously wasn’t busy since there was no one else in the house. We asked her if she thought the house was haunted and she said that she’s heard strange things before. That night when the rest of us were out in the town, Tyra said that she was scared shitless and unable to sleep because of a periodic tapping coming from a trunk next to her bed. Later I figured out that it was actually coming from the lamp sitting on the chest, which for whatever reason would mechanically click every five minutes or so. I thought it was pretty funny when we found out but Tyra didn’t.

If John, Mickey, and I were to cut an album, this would be the cover.

John and I arranged with the Chilean girl and the French girl working at the hostel to go out and visit an art gallery while Tyra decided to stay in and sleep. The gallery was nice and the art was interesting. There weren’t a lot of people but we ran into a strange looking man with interesting facial hair arrangements who mumbled, smiled, and chuckled at John and I while offering us swigs from a bottle of pisco he kept taking out from under his jacket and taking long pulls from. The hostel girls introduced us to the owner of the gallery and she promised to meet us at a bar after she closed down, and so we headed out into the plaza and into the basement of a building on a side street where a band fronted by a female with an amazing voice was playing Latino songs ranging from Violetta Parra to Soda Stereo. The night got long and the hostel girls were fun to talk to. John didn’t seem to mind at all that their English was a little too shy for them to really attempt expressing any complex ideas to him and I had to spend some time acting as an intermediary translator, though communication smoothed itself out through the night. At some point the owner of the gallery came in and joined the ruckus. Hours later the band began incorporating English pop and rock songs from Dylan to Colplay in the repertoire. At the end when the band had finished and the bar was closing and we were trying to conjure up the money to pay our bills the singer came up to me and started a conversation, which lasted a good amount of time but still was one of those th ings which would have liked to last longer.

Getting Mickey

The next morning I was awoken far too early by a call from Mickey, who had just arrived at the bus station in la Serena. “I’m calling from a McDonald’s at the mall. That’s just the place I should meet you in Chile after coming from the United Sates,” he said. I didn’t really process that and said back to him, “Yeah.  Just sit tight and I’ll be there as soon as I can get there. See you in a Bit.” My phone battery died instantaneously after hanging up on Mickey. “That was close,” I thought as I fell back asleep.

I honestly can’t say if it was twenty minutes later or an hour later when I groggily awoke from my slumber and pulled my body off the mattress. Tyra and John -I swear that man never sleeps- were already up and out. I plugged my phone in so that I’d be able to receive his call if Mickey was trying to reach me and walked through the gigantic hallway to the entryway, then the living room, then the reception, and finally the dining room -all empty. I heard noise down the hall towards the opposite end of the house and walked down to find the Chilean girl working in the kitchen. “Good morning,” she said pleasantly, and I replied the same and asked her if she’d seen Tyra and John. “I don’t know where they are but they asked me to cook lunch for you guys.”  “Great. Is it going to be ready soon, cause I have to go get my friend.”  “No, it’ll be awhile. I haven’t really started it yet.” “Can you make a plate for him too then?” “Sure,” she replied happily. -This is all in Spanish by the way. She knew some English but didn’t seem comfortable using it. Speaking of language, this trip was really a breakthrough for my Spanish. It was the first time I really felt comfortable doing everything in the language without fear of some fatal misunderstanding. I asked the Chilean girl what she was cooking. “Steak,” she said. “Oh, I guess they didn’t tell you that I’m a vegetarian.” (I’m accustomed to saying this although I do occasionally eat seafood.) “Oh no! I can make something else for you then.” “Would that be a problem,” I asked, to which she replied, “No.”

Piggin’ out on fresh seafood.

So I paced back over to my side of the house and looked at my charging phone and decided it would get me through the next hour or so and put some shoes on. I ran into the girl again while heading out the door and asked her where I could pick up a micro or colectivo to the bus station in la Serena, and she told me the number of a colectivo I could pick up at the bottom of the hill that would take me straight there. Luckily enough, that number was passing just as I reached the bottom of the hill so I didn’t even have to wait, and I hopped on and we crossed the length of Coquimbo and circumvented the bay until we arrived in the outskirts of la Serena, where Mickey’s mall, entirely modern and North American in every aspect except for the names of the department stores, came into view.

Pelican Attack!

I paid the driver, jumped out and began my search for Mickey. Unfortunately, finding a misplaced gringo who speaks absolutely no Spanish in a nearly empty, Sunday morning mall didn’t prove as easy as I expected it would. “Have you seen a half gringo, half Chinese guy running around?” I asked somebody walking around sweeping the floors. She grinned and put her fingertips to the corners of her eyes and pulled them to make them look narrow and slanted. “Like this?” she said laughing. “Well, that’s the idea, at least,” I managed to respond. “No.” I asked innumerable other people working there, each of them either perplexed, in disbelief, or in tears with laughter that such a thing as a half gringo, half Chinese species could be walking this Earth, nonetheless this very mall.

The Mosque from Coquimbo’s harbor.

After circling that monument to modern consumerism several times and bringing most of its staff to tears laughing, Mickey finally gives me a call me and tells me that he’s been at the gas station next to the mall rather than at the mall, which despite my semi-lucid state during our previous conversation I’m certain is a detail he didn’t bother telling me. So I walk over there and sure enough there’s my gringo-chino waiting.

We head up to a cafe in the mall and catch up over coffee, and the first thing Mickey does is reiterate what he said on the phone earlier about how suitable it was to leave the United States and meet me in a mall. He does have a point. This is a side of Chile that I usually try to avoid as much as I can. This Americanization and homogenization of the world with malls that all look that same and sell the same shit from the same stores is not part of my nation’s heritage that I’m particularly proud of and am a little ashamed at it being one of our top nation exports, just behind war and terror.

Water & Oil mixing in the Harbor

Mickey is a man who lives by his belly. Some men can be pussywhipped and wholly subservient to the whims of a woman and this is how it is with Mickey and his own belly. I recall back in Pullman when he would almost daily rush panic stricken into my home, the cloth of his shirt under and surrounding the armpits saturated in a growing pool of sweat to demand ingredients for a sandwich or some other concoction he was preparing back at his apartment. He’d grab some basil or an onion or whatever and then rush out the door popping into three other friends’ kitchens to accumulate whatever ingredients he was craving at that moment. We all tolerated this because, well, he was Mickey but also in the end he usually reciprocated our generosity by bringing us the leftovers. And they were pretty damned good. For someone who gives so much of himself t o what he puts down the gulliver how could they not be?

Beyond Mickey’s wry remark about leaving the mall riddled US only to end up in another at the bottom of the world, many of the details of that now distant conversation are lost, buried within heaps of other memories. I’m sure there was a lot of catching up and reminiscing of the sort which only bores people who don’t happen to share those experiences anyway, and some talk about the varieties of life here in South America. In any case I was happy to see the guy and I knew I would be eating while he was visiting.

Coquimbo

After finishing our mall bought coffees and feeling sufficiently caught up, Mickey and I boarded a micro that was headed to Coquimbo and as we watched the changing scenery out the window I gave him the downlow on Chile. I taught him about the classicism that exists in the country and fed him his first two Chilean words, which he never had the chance to forget afterward: cuico and flaite. The whole case really gets considerably more complicated, but respectively the word for the white, educated, managerial class and the uneducated lower class elements predisposed to crime.

Back at the hostel introductions were made and we had arrived just in time for lunch, which was very tasty event even without the main course of steak (Mickey ate what would have been my portion). A Canadian girl had just arrived and she was eating alone so we invited her over to our table to eat with us. She was traveling throughout South America after studying in Asunción, Paraguay. It struck me as an extremely odd place for a young girl to decide to study and it was interesting hearing her talk about it. Among other things, Asunción is supposedly the cheapest city in the world. Paraguay is a little forgotten by the world, even within South America, and is the only Latin American country that even to these days has never managed to buckle it’s dictatorship and remains something of a haven for outlaws and terrorists. Several of the Israeli’s I met in Buenos Aires told me that Hamas and Al Qaeda have extensive operations within the country and that Mossad (the Israeli equivalent to the CIA or MI5) operations are commonplace there. Oddly enough, Paraguay’s name has been absent from all of Bush’s ceaseless blabbing that I have heard about “getting the Evildoers where they’re at,” possibly because the US maintains military bases in the country to watch over the region, particularly neighboring Bolivia which seems to be threatening to go the way of archenemy (of how many official archenemies?) Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela.

Two faiths

After finishing our lunch we headed out to the Coquimbo. By the shore there were a lot of market stalls selling local fruits, liquor, and crafts. I was in need of something warm so bought an attractive, zip-up sweater at a good price. We ran into the same old Chilean man who was sporting such strange facial hair arrangements at the gallery the night before and he was still tugging on a bottle of pisco just as before. We talked to him for a bit and he gaggled and cackled at us and offered us swigs of his pisco but even John wasn’t up for a drink. Our goal for that day was the mosque at the top of the hill, since we had been told that you had to pay to enter the Cruz del Tercer Milenio. Though not being particularly religious we each thought that it went against everything Christianity seemed to say it was supposed to be about so we opted for the mosque, which was free to enter. Unfortunately, we didn’t know that we would get there after it had been closed for the day. Nonetheless, the hike up the hill and the view at the top were great.

That night we decided to stay in the living area of the hostel under the giant, ghostly mirror and stayed up late talking, during which time I kept an eye out for movement in the mirror, but disappointingly saw nothing out of the ordinary. The following morning I finally made it to the hostel’s garden, which was surprisingly large and picturesque. Apparently, some travelers have paid for parts of their stays by doing work there, which sounded like a very attractive proposition and one more reason to come back in the future. The four of us spent around an hour or so messing around in the garden playing with the dogs before we decided that it was time to head out of the city for Valle del Elqui.

Valle del Elqui

Valle del Elqui is a series of interconnected valleys surrounded by rugged terrain and covered by some of the clearest skies in the world. For this reason and its high altitude some of the world’s most important observatories are situated here. It’s been a really popular place for Chileans to visit for years and years but is only recently starting to attract the attention of tourists. I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy our trip there but it definitely left a lot to be desired. We got on the bus leaving la Serena late in the afternoon. It was then that Tyra told me that she had to be back in Santiago by nine the next night because she had class the day after, and I told her that would mean that as soon as we woke up in the morning we would have to turn around and start back for Santiago. I also had class that same morning, but my idea was to spend the day in Valle del Elqui and take the overnight bus to Santiago, getting there with just a few hours to spare before class. After some argument it was clear that she was going to be stubborn and wasn’t going to be happy about following my plan so I decided that it would be better just to let her have her way rather than spend the rest of the day with her unhappy. Unhappy travel companions don’t make for happy travels is something I’ve learned several times through experience.

The mythical beauty of the place was obvious just from o ur dusk-time bus trip. Our curiosity overcame our skepticism and our plan was to reach Cochiguaz, a very small town know for UFO sightings and believed by new age gurus to have some very unusual mystical presence. Unfortunately, by the time we arrived to Monteverde where we would have had to change buses, the last bus to Cochiguaz had already left hours ago. So we tried to make the best of the situation. Monteverde is a very small town which as far as we could tell consisted of little more than a chapel, a restaurant and an assortment of houses. Although there were no customers, the restaurant was open and over pizza and pisco we talked with the owner about places we might be able to stay at for the night.

Apparently, there was nowhere to set up camp except the stone floor of the town plaza, which aft er a few piscolitas and having been assured by the owner of the restaurant that we wouldn’t be bothered by the cops it was starting to seem like a decent option. We were enjoying our meal when the owner came out an d informed us that he had found someone with a big backyard who would let us set up camp there. So afterward he led us down the block to his house connected to the town clinic his mother runs, and started a fire for us while we set up camp beside it. We stayed up late that night and went to bed even later and still woke up early. When I got out of the tent there were two Mexican girls hanging out who wanted to camp there the next night, one of them looking typically Mexican while the other wa s completely Aryan white, with natural blond hair and blue eyes. I had always been told about these white Mexicans and after living for four years in South Texas about a kilometer from the border I still had to come all the way to Chile to finally see one. We all wanted to stick around, but sadly we had to leave right after waking if we were to make it back to Santiago on time.

La Cruz del Tercer Milenio

Monteverde’s claim to fame is that it’s the birthplace of Nobel Prize winning writer Gabriela Mistral. As we waited for the bus back to la Serena we had plenty of time to contemplate that under the stern, angry schoolteacher gaze of her statue dominating the town plaza. She is certainly the less known of Chile’s two Nobel laureates, and even after over a year in the country I still know little of her work. I have friends who think very highly of her. I do know that she died in the United States, supposedly living with a lesbian lover.

I spent the bus ride to la Serena fixed to the window. Valle del Elqui can be loosely compared to central Washington st ate with the significant distinction th at it’s far more beautiful. Both regions share similar climates with abundant sunshine and are major agricultural regions with a lot of crops in common. The most striking difference is that Valle del Elqui is savage and young, whereas central Washington is placid and worn. It’s understandable why this place attracts so much attention from New Agers, UFO enthusiasts, and Santiaguinos looking for an escape from the city. Oddly enough, despite supposedly boasting sun nearly every day of the year, the less than 24 hours we spent in the valley the skies were completely overcast. Such was our luck. In the end, this is definitely a place I am looking forward to returning to.

Return to Santiago

So then we were stuck on a twelve hour bus ride back to Santiago during the day with nothing better to do but catch up on old times and drink. When we got to Coquimbo we had about fifteen minutes before the bus was going to leave for Santiago, so Mickey and I hauled ass down to the fish market to buy a few cups of assorted seafood. Absolutely delicious. John had run out of money so I lent him some cash to go pick up some beers for the trip. I thought he would bring back change but instead came back having spent everything on several packs of Crystal, sort of the Busch Lite of Chilean beers. So it was. I sat next to Mickey and we caught kept on catching up on things and I gave him a few lessons in basic Spanish. John sat in the aisle seat next to Tyra, which she was going to come to regret more and more as the bus closed in on Santiago.

After settling into our seats John handed out beers and lectured us about being subtle with our drinking. Keep you cans down, keep ‘em hidden if the bus assistant comes back, try not to spill or anything. I think Mickey and I might have nursed about two beers each all the way back to Santiago but John kept knocking ‘em back one after the other. As we moved further and further we heard John’s ceaseless rambling to Tyra get louder and louder. It was about halfway to Santiago that the shouting started. We didn’t know what to do except try to explain to the other passengers that he was from New Zealand and not the US. Our country’s reputation is bad enough anyway. But the Chilean passengers just did their bests to ignore the whole thing, as they can be so good at doing.

On Cerro San Cristobol in Santiago

I think that it was at the same instant that Mickey and I both noticed that John was holding his beer can right in the aisle, painfully in plain sight. It was one thing to be drunk and a little rowdy on the bus but this was going too far. The last thing I wanted was to be stranded three hours north of Santiago in the middle of nowhere on a Sunday night. “John, your beer,” I said to him. “No, I’ve already got one mate, thanks.” “No John, the one in your hand.” “Oh, you want one,” he said as he pulled out an unopened can and held it out towards me, hovering in the aisle just above the one he was drinking. “No, John I already have one. I mean your beer, the one in the aisle, the one you’re holding in the aisle for everyone to see.” “No mate, I’ve got my beer.” “No John, you said we shouldn’t hold our beers in the aisle.” “Oh ya ya ya ya ya,” he interrupted. “Don’t do that, mate.” I swear this went on longer than the most perseverant comedic routine, and finally I had to physically manipulate his arm and maneuver the beer in front of his eyeballs. He let out a knowing ahhhh at the discovery, and gave Mickey and I a sly look and told us to be careful.

The shouting continued when the bus stopped at a post and picked up a man in uniform, obviously an authority of some sort, who walked slowly down the aisle and sat down in an empty seat directly behind John. I swear the man gave John a good looking over when he walked by, and I saw ourselves abandoned and shivering on the side of the road at midnight in the middle of the Chilean desert. Mickey, Tyra and I were all feeling chills at this thought and I think it must have gotten through to John too ’cause he quieted down for the while. After twenty minutes that lasted an eternity the bus stopped again and the man got out at another post.

Cats by the central fish market in Santiago. Try and count ‘em.

The shouting didn’t take long to recommence and I was almost starting to feel sorry for Tyra having to sit next to John, in spite of her making us come back early. The ruckus had attracted the attention of a kid sitting in front of John who was starting to turn around and stand up in his seat and look back at him.

It didn’t take long for John to start yelling friendlily at the kid with the few Spanish words he knew and then blatantly in English, which just made the kid laugh. The kid’s mother just sat there in the seat next to him I kept expecting her to tern around and smash her purse against the face of what to her must have been a drunken pederast jealously eying her son, but to my amazement she just did her best to ignore the situation.

Mickey and Paulina above the Port of Valparaíso.

By this time we were on the outskirts of Santiago and John’s shouting kept on crescendoing as we got closer and the moisture from his breath condensed on the windows near him. He and the kid got into a battle drawing pictures of each other being decapitated by axes and dismembered in every way that they could dream up. The kid drew a man in a dress with pom-pons and pointed at John and laughed. John erased it with his hand and the alcohol from his breath quickly re-condensed on the window freshly creating a clean slate to draw on . John drew a circle near the base of the window and then started drawing a very large and very phallic arc above it. “No!,” I shouted at John. He turned around to me and with a sly grin said, “Relax mate, it’s a cactus,” and began drawing the spines on the plant and then drew a body spiked upon it and pointed at the kid as his grin went from one ear to the other.

As we pulled into the bus station the crescendo reached its climax and things started happening so quickly that they become difficult to recount. John’s shouting turned into a shrill chirping, sort of like a flamingo loaded up on speed that had just been hit by a dart, if that can be imagined. John rose from his seat and started directing himself at everyone near him on the bus and shouting at them in English about how they were great people. “John, they can’t understand you,” I shouted at him but he was beyond the point of catching on. T o no avail I tried to get him to calm down when thankfully the bus finally stopped at the station. When we got off he turned around to started shouting at the driver, “Gato frio, gato frio, gato frio,” over and over, which didn’t translate to “cool cat” as he though it did. I tried to tell him that but he only dismissed me and insisted that the driver gets it.

The Chilean Mr. Rogers of South America, Pinpón.

So then there wasn’t much else to do but go home. We got John to his stop and we got ourselves home and crashed. The next morning it was work.

Santiago

It’s hard to recount everything that Mickey and I did while he was here in Santiago. I worked a lot, he cooked a lot and we both ate a lot. There was a lot more besides. I showed him all the obligatory tourist spots in town like Cerro San Cristobal and Cerro Santa Lucia. of course. Of course, we went out on the town some.

Of all the times we went out one stands apart as being particularly epic. I calculated the day afterward we were going for about 15 to 16 hours straight. Mickey had met some girls who were studying English one day while I was working and when he was out with John Sly and Javier. Mickey arranged to get together with the girls one Friday afternoon. He was so proud that he had had the guts to ask for their numbers when I got home from work that day and when I asked what they were like he said one of them was really into Guns n’ Roses. That Friday I left my last English class and headed straight for the bar where they were already waiting. Mickey had been talking to these three Chilean girls for about half an hour, and they were looking gigglingly perplexed by Mickey’s English, confusing enough even to your typical native speaker, and they all looked extremely relieved when they found I had a reasonable command of their language. We stayed at that bar for quite some time until one of the them had to take off, leaving us two on two when somebody decided that we needed to go somewhere else so we got onto the metro and took it some distance, got off, and for reasons that I found impossible to understand we turned around and rode the metro back to the same stop we started at, got out again and went up to the surface, and then walked to another bar right next to yet another metro station. We stayed there until about three in the morning and I was having a really nice conversation with one of the girls when suddenly the Guns and Roses girl Mickey was talking with leaned over and whispered something into my girl’s ear and suddenly they both had to leave. I didn’t notice it happen at the time but Mickey later told me that things were going nicely with him and Gn’R girl when all of a sudden her face went frigid and she informed him that she was getting sick with a cold. That was when she leaned over to the other girl and whispered something that must have been to the effect of, “I’m sorry, I know you’re having a good time but I can’t stand this loser anymore. Let’s get out of here.” So Mickey was left feeling a little dejected and us both left wondering what to do smack in the middle of Barrio Brazil. We walked around fairly aimlessly looking for Plaza Brazil where I knew there would be some action, when we finally stumbled across the plaza and out of nowhere a Red Hot Chili Pepper tribute band finishes playing at a club and the audience spills out onto the sidewalk where we happened to be standing. I spotted a group of girls that looked interesting and asked them what’s up and they talked amongst themselves for a bit and then we all headed to a bar on the other side of the plaza. There was a girl from Bolivia and one from Arica and one from Valparaíso who now lives in here Santiago and another who is just from Santiago. My Spanish was starting to get pretty decent at that point, but after we sat down the girl from Santiago turned to me and then there I was standing helplessly against a brick wall getting pummeled by an oratory barrage about US politics. Like an overheating machine gun that reloads every third sentence or so with a ¿cachai,? she drilled into me the dire results that US interventionism has had on the world as if I hadn’t any idea about what offenses my country had committed over its history. Somehow I managed to follow the idea and interjected that I disapproved of US foreign policy that I actually participated in movements against it, but this didn’t seem to satisfy her and her machine gun volley at me continued saying that “it’s much more than that, it’s the attitude!” (This girl was at a later date to apologize for her attitude and conciliate.) Feeling a little overwhelmed, I looked up from my firing squad execution in progress to see Mickey dancing intimately with the blond girl from Valparaí­so.

This girl was Paulina and she was to become a very important figure to Mickey, his little Chilean lady, his polola . Let us avoid a long description by saying that Paulina is attractive and cool and likes Radiohead a lot and I think all in all a good thing for Mickey. She knew no English which complimented perfectly Mickey’s lack of Spanish, but despite this they seemed to have little difficulty communicating. It’s true that sometimes I had to stick close like a babel fish bloated so big it had to slither out of the ear to translate sweet nothings between them, but their relationship was a powerful testament that language is completely unnecessary to have profoundly meaningful communication.

They can cut all the flowers, but they won’t prevent the Spring!

Mickey’s cooking became epically famous among the English speaking community of Santiago. To this day Mickey is the only attendant thus far at our writer’s group meetings who has been allowed not to submit writing each time since we appreciated how well he expressed himself through his food. Shortly after our fifteen hour bender, Mickey spent the entire day cooking for a party which completely filled up my small apartment. It was a great time and everybody left happy and full. His cooking went a long way to making his month-long presence in my tiny apartment far more easy to tolerate. There really is nothing better to spoil you than your own in-house chef.

Valparaí­so

As usual, it was wonderful to be back in Valparaíso and Mickey seemed to love it just as I had expected. I write a lot in this blog about my love for this city and I will no doubt write much more in the future. I’ll save myself some effort doing that this time.

Mickey playing the ugly American.

That night we headed to a 6 story club called El Huevo for a Kitsh, childhood-themed party. Things were going really nicely and everyone involved was having loads of fun when Pimpón suddenly showed up on stage and began performing. Some people actually became so overcome with emotion that they started to cry.

For those who aren’t familiar with Pimpón it would probably be helpful to tell you about how I was introduced to him. It was while I was still studying in Valparaíso and at a bar with some Chilean friends and a few estadounidenses also on interchange programs. At the end of the night when we were getting on the micro to go home one of these estadounidenses, incidentally also named Will, was complaining about how some Chileans outside the bar were calling him Pimpón, and how he didn’t understand what that meant. My Chilean friends giggled at hearing this and told him that he’s a sort of Chilean Mr Rogers figure, a doll who sings songs for children and according to them very effeminately gay. I don’t know if Will was very pleased about it but for the rest of the time he spent in Chile he was dubbed Pimpón by everyone, foreigners and Chileans alike, but I was without question pleased by it since I returned to being the only Will in the country, at least as far as I knew.

Anyway, for about a day or two I had been calling Mickey Pinpón and had convinced him that it really meant “pimp,” since it does sound a little like that. I only got more amusement out of Mickey’s reaction when he realized the true meaning of Pimpón.

Pest Control: Getting Rid of Mice

Our friend Paula had arranged a combination going away party for Mickey and housewarming party for her new apartment. Since the day after the party was going to be a holiday and none of us had to work, we arranged it so that a bus would pick Mickey up from her apartment in the morning so that we could all stay over for the night.

Paulina had come by my apartment earlier to spend some time with Mickey on his last day here. I was out running errands and doing some things for work, and I showed up right before a friend came in her car to pick us up to take us to las Condes for the party. The roads around Santiago can be a little confusing and it took us about thirty minutes of running around my block and yapping on the phone to actually find her in her car, and unfortunately Tyra had been waiting for us a metro stop away in Plaza Italia, freaking out all the while. As soon as I got in the car I felt a soreness in the back of my throat and a sudden stuffiness in my sinuses. The last thing I needed then was to get sick. After driving around in circles a little more we finally made it to Plaza Italia where we were supposed to pick up Tyra, who had been standing there freaking out because she was thinking that we weren’t coming to get here. I got out of the car to retrieve her since we couldn’t park near to where she was waiting and when I finally saw her she shoved some bags into my hands but somewhere in the exchange the handles of one didn’t reach my fingers and the bag dropped to the sidewalk shattering an expensive bottle of rum she had just bought. Despite all this, once we got to the party we forgot about everything and everyone was having a great time. Then the van came by to take Mickey to the airport quite a bit earlier than we had all expected, so we gave our farewells he took off on the bus, and the rest of us kept going on enjoying ourselves.

I Had a Really High Temperature

The morning after the party we hopped into the car and went back to Plaza Italia. My cold was starting to kick in full force and I wasn’t feeling happy about having to spend my holiday ill. It ended up that I got quite a bit sicker than I can really remember being before, and had to take the rest of the week off of work. That Friday I found a letter from the government saying that my visa had been approved, which at least was a bit of good news. The following Monday after spending the entire weekend in bed, armed with a full battery on my ipod and all my podcasts updated, I went to immigration so they could paste my visa into my passport. Despite having to wait five hours I left in good spirits since I was fully legal and beginning to feel much better. After leaving immigrations I ran back to my apartment, prepared a quick lunch and curled up on the couch in the sun coming through the window and entered a deep sleep. I woke up feeling worse than ever. The sickness returned full force, and I was forced to take another three days off of work. Fortunately though, I returned to health that week just in time to see some real action. The next day was going to be a massive, nation wide strike in Chile.