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.

Border Expulsion

When I got to the station I found that the buses were all sold out so I hopped on a van (not too much more expensive than the buses) and began the trek up through a pass in the Andes that leads to Argentina. These mountains are truly beautiful, and the main route from Santiago to Mendoza, el Paso de los Libertadores, passes by several of the highest peaks in the Americas, the highest of those being Cerro Aconcagua, at 6,962 meters (22,841 feet). The beauty of these mountains is staggering, and the landscape displays a surprising variety of colors, so much that parts are reminiscent of the Painted Desert in the United States, only uplifted to dramatic new heights. Here is a photo from the customs house on the Argentine side of the border that shows some of these colors

When the bus arrived to customs I closely examined my passport to realize that earlier I had made the innocent (stupid?) mistake of misreading the expiration date on my tourist visa of May 13 as May 18, and consequently realized that my it had expired a week prior. For that reason, I was not allowed to leave Chile (although I was really already a few miles beyond the border) and was left stranded, stuck at the pass. Luckily, I managed to wave down a bus which was headed to Viña del Mar. I had contemplated going to Viña anyway that weekend before I belatedly realized I needed to leave the country for a visa run, so I figured that since I had my things all packed and ready I would just go ahead and spend the weekend there.

The Road to Viña

So we passed through the tunnel in which the border is hidden and stopped at the Chilean customs house a little ways beyond that, where I talked to some authorities about nothing very important, except for the fact that I would have to go to the Department of Foreign Affairs and pay a fine, and then would be free to leave Chile. I didn’t tell them I didn’t plan on leaving, but that doesn’t matter much now.

Here is a photo of one particular peak near the Chilean customs I took that weekend next to an almost identical photo that I had taken about three months (and a week) prior.

Coming up the pass is an endless array of switchbacks, typically and dangerously overrun by countless semi trucks and buses. The photo you see below was actually taken about halfway down the particular set of switchbacks which you see. This scene also happens to be near one of the more renowned ski resorts in the Andes, el Portillo. In some parts of the road are covered so that ski runs can pass over it. Definitely a place I’ll be spending some time at this Winter.

The next few hours of the day were spend on the bus descending the mountains, crossing the central valley and then passing through the equally beautiful coastal mountains until we finally reached the coast and descended once more into Viña del Mar just as the sun was going down.

Return to Valpo & Viña

There I called up a friend of mine, Mauricio, and spent the remainder of the day catching up on things and talking with him and his family. The next day passed pretty casually just walking around the Northern end of Valparaí­so and hanging out on the beach. Here’s a photo of Mauricio and I we took that day.

And a photo of central Valparaí­so across the bay.

All these pictures here are taken from Playa Portales, a small but pleasant beach in Valparaí­so towards Viña del Mar. This is the famous site of “liter on the beach” from way back in the ISA days, for those of you who participated in that.

During this trip I never made it to the heart of Valparaí­so, but I felt the tranquility and well being that has accompanied each of my trips to this city since returning to Chile earlier this year. Already the months I spent living, studying, learning, and growing here seem farther away than they really are.

Sitting on that beach that evening it dawned on me in the clearest possible manner that this is a place I will always love and that I hope to return to all my life, no matter how far away I may find myself in the future. More immediately, I recognized that I need to be spending more of my time here, having thus far spent almost all of my time since returning to Chile in Santiago. Valparaíso and Santiago are only little more than an hour and three dollars apart, after all.

Here’s a great photo of my head being eaten by a giant great white shark hanging next to a restaurant on Playa Portales.

That night we headed for the the bar Journal where I passed the night with a group of Chileans, Germans, and Irish. At one point we headed to El Huevo in Valparaí­so where a pretty decent rock band was playing. After that died down it was back to Journal for the rest of the night.

Pulling Teeth in the Belly of the Beast

The next week in Santiago was spent largely in the catacombs of Chilean bureaucracy and not working. For those in the States who have spend lots of time in the DMV, you can understand to some extent what this is like, although my experiences renewing my license fall far short of this. Arrive early in the morning and wait in line for a number, then you wait. And wait. After your number is called, you are sent to a different office, where you have go through the same process only to be sent back to your original location.

To make matters worse, daytime television in Chile manages to top even the worst that I’ve ever seen in other places. I’m not exaggerating at all when I say this, that the televisions in the waiting area were tuned to a several hour long reality TV program involving dentists or something which almost solely depicted hour after hour of pulling teeth from the various mouths of one unfortunate patient after another. Somehow, I couldn’t really think of anything else more appropriate for the situation.

All in all though it wasn’t quite all that horrible since I came equipped with my ipod and met several really really cool people, while waiting. A few include a soccer player from Brazil, and displaced Indian, and a tour guide from Colombia. And among my encounters with the inevitable inept bureaucrats who sent me pointlessly from one place to the next I came across one very kind woman who actually reprimanded those who had sent me to the wrong places, helped me through much of the ordeal, and even gave me the phone number of her office in case I encountered more problems. Most generously of all she waved my fine.

I finally got through all the bureaucracy and regained my legal status on Friday of that week just ten minutes before I was to start my first class and the new Institute I was working for, and managed to get there just in time.

Snippets From a Life in Transition

Let me briefly sketch a few of the various happenings since then.

The weekend after escaping the Chilean bureaucracy my cell phone was stolen by somebody who grabbed it off a restaurant table and managed to jump onto the back of a motorcycle just before I could catch him. As a result I lost a lot of numbers, including those of the people I met that week while trying to renew my visa. I can think of at least half a dozen people now that I probably will never see again unless either luck or fate happen to intervene. So that’s been a serious source of irritation but I’ve got a new phone now.

The week after that I completed my final week of work at the clinic with the old institute I had been working for. I’m going to miss my students there, but I’m definitely glad I left when I did. Apparently the institute is in pretty major debt right now and is having serious trouble paying its teachers. Being that I’m not working for them anymore, I don’t think I’m top priority on the payroll, so to speak. I’m still fighting with the management there so that I can get paid. I will, but it might take some more time and hassle and a bit of a fight.

My classes at my new institute on the other hand are going really well. I have classes twice a week at the airport near the hangers, which is really awesome. I’ll definitely put up some pictures of that soon. I’m really glad that I’ve moved to this new institute and didn’t get stuck where I was before. For one, I’ll have a contract which means that I’ll have a working visa and won’t have to worry about trips to Argentina every three months to renew my visa. They also have a really good reputation for paying their teachers well (and on time).

I’ve moved into a new apartment in a really great part of town, Bellas Artes, which I ‘m really, really happy with. It’s really nice, with wooden floors and is pretty spacious for one person. Everything I need is within walking distance and I can walk to almost all of my classes as well.

Last weekend I went with a friend from work to a blues festival in a small town outside Santiago called Talagante. I’m pretty sure it was the first time I’ve ever heard the blues in Spanish, which was interesting, although there were a good number of songs in English too. I have to say that I was really impressed with some of the musicians, and now I’m pretty inspired to invest in a guitar here and start playing again.

Blog in Transition

For various reasons, I’ll be writing my future posts in a different style, which I hope will be of a higher quality and I expect should be a little more interesting for the reader. Unfortunately, the frequency of my posts may not improve much, although I will certainly try to avoid large periods of time without an update. In any case, thanks for reading and I hope you’ll continue to visit my site!

So towards the end of last week my friend Randall showed up in Santiago and hung around throughout the weekend. We met at the hostel in Buenos Aires and I mentioned him in a previous post here. He’s been traveling around Latin America taking for several months and is now nearing the end of his trip. A really interesting guy and a great artist. Here’s a photo of him sitting on the roof of my apartment.

Here is the link to his flickr site which houses his photography .
I highly recommend checking it out. He’s an excellent photographer and in addition to photographing countless genuinely powerful snapshots of normal life here in Latin America he has been lucky enough to stumble across some truly momentous events. The one that stands out the to most to me is the Oaxaca student protest in Mexico. On the lighter side he’s managed to infiltrate the press box of a lucha libre (Mexican WWF wrestling, basically) and has crashed some really fascinating (and fun) carnivals. Also on his site he has a few sets that contain scans of his paintings and sculptures which are absolutely worth a look as well. So go check it out.

I spent a good part of the weekend showing him around Santiago and exploring areas that I’d never seen myself either. Also the charger for my camera finally showed up (thanks Mom) and he gave me a lot of advise on composition and how to take better photos. I soaked up his advice and it really does seem to me that the photos I’m taking now are a lot more interesting. I still don’t like to spend all my time behind a lens but now I’m more confident I can do a better job when I am back there and enjoy it more as well.

That Saturday night I went out with everybody from the TEFL course to celebrate our last day. It was a lot of fun of course and I ended up meeting some really cool Chileans. The next day Randall and I took the Metro to Santa Lucia, which is one of my favorite spots in Santiago. It’s a park built onto a small sort of mountain that was designed something over a century ago by some renowned French designer. Is filled with nooks and crannies, has castles and churches perched on the most awkward spots, and all sorts of surprises waiting around each corner. A really fun place to explore and the kind of place you would want to take your girlfriend. If you’ve ever read Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle he talks about climbing Cerro Santa Lucia. There is a garden named in his honor and this photo you are seeing of me to your left is just above that garden and just below the summit. Randall took this shot. I don’t have any of my own pictures from there because I only received my battery charger right after we returned to the apartment that day. I can promise you that I’ll be returning and taking some though.

Sunday was pretty interesting. In the morning Randall and I decided to head towards a market called Bio Bio, which I’d heard a lot about, including that you could buy anything there from used toilet paper to a new car. So obviously I’d been dying to check it out for some time. My roommate gave us completely awful directions to get there and told us it was in a different part of Santiago than it really is, so we ended up riding the metro quite a ways until it came out above ground. After a while we spied an abandoned complex of buildings that looked really interesting and we decided to get off and go check it out.

After investigating pretty thoroughly we are both still pretty uncertain what the whole thing was. The buildings seemed pretty diverse and they were definitely part of some kind of industry or public works. The building in which most of these pictures were taken in must have been the office for whatever the whole business was. There was some really cool graffiti there, as you can see through the window to the left. Here is that work close up.

And even closer to the eyes. I really enjoy this photo. I am really digging the piece of wood nailed into the right eye. Really alludes to that proverb about removing the log from your eye before you remove the splinter from mine. Doubt that the artist actually meant to say that though, and my guess is that it was there before since there is white paint on it. One of the really great things about these particular abandoned buildings was that the eroded out windows provided a lot of framing opportunities for taking pictures.

Here’s another piece of graffiti that I really like which was on a wall standing off completely by itself.

Definitely the cooler aspects of this graffiti are in the details, especially in the hands. All the other significant graffiti nearby was done so that it could be seen from the highway, but this piece really needs to be searched out. Regarding the photo, I like the complimentary angle of the billboard above the graffiti. And also the contrast between the two types of images. At least to me, what was done illegally on this wall is much more welcome than what was was put on that billboard legally.

Here’s Randall in a whole in a wall. Look at how happy he looks.

I’m really not sure what any of the stuff going on in this picture is but the textures are interesting. You’ve got the rubble, the tile, the wet-looking stone and the cement around the frame where the tile has come off. Seems that it was a bathroom at some point in the past… Probably still is. Actually, the whole place really smelled like shit. Attribute it to my good taste that I didn’t actually photograph the piles that were about (yes, I somehow managed to resist) and that I’m not posting any of the other photos I took where it is one of the present decorative objects. (you can always go to my flickr and look though. It’ll be like Where’s Waldo, or more like Where’s Mister Hankey.) We found a room there that was set up with some beds and stuff so there were some bums living in there, which was no surprise.

Here is one of the other buildings in the complex. If any of you have any idea what this is I would really appreciate you letting me know.

After leaving the abandoned buildings we went to where my roommate told me Bio Bio was. I asked somebody which direction we needed to walk to get there and it turned out to be like six metro stops away. But that would never stop any determined and mildly competent fellows so we managed to get ourselves there, to some disappointment. It seemed that you really could buy anything there at Bio Bio and probably for a good price too, but if you weren’t going with buying something in mind there’s not much else worth seeing. It’s not like the much more interesting fairs I saw both in Valparaiso or Buenos Aires and mostly consisted of several large warehouses with endless rows of vendor’s stalls. I still would imagine that Santiago has several more genuine fairs to offer, but Bio Bio isn’t one of them.

After that we hopped back on the metro and went up to la Plaza de Armas. This is the plaza that conquistador Pedro de Valdivia established as the center of Chile way back in the day. When we arrived we were lucky enough to find them setting up for a free concert by Plácido Domingo. If you’re like me and only have a rudimentary knowledge of opera you will probably have to be reminded that Domingo is one of the Three Tenors, so he’s pretty big stuff.

La Plaza de Armas is typically one of the more lively spots in the city, and was definitely much more so with preparations going on for the show.

The statue in the foreground is a tribute to the indigenous peoples of Chile and the Cathedral to the left is la Catedral Metropolitana. You can see the stage set up there and the crowd which has been there for almost the entire day waiting to see Plácido Domingo sing.

Here is the same thing from a different angle. There were still several hours before the concert was to start so we went in to check out the cathedral.

Here is a view of the central corridor.

Here’s a statue of Jesus. You can see that somebody has laid a bag of raisins at his feet. I Could think of worse shows of faith. Over to the right there is a statue of an angel slaying a demon. ‘Tis definitely something cool. I like to think that the angel in the statue has made a mistake though and has got the wrong demon. Makes you feel sorry for him a little to think of him like that, doesn’t it?

Here’s something kind of cool below here. Please let me know if you know the technical name of that alter thing.

After we left the cathedral and came across the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art, and since it is free on Sundays we decided to spend the hour we had before it closed looking around. The place is really amazing and it’s definitely a place that I would like to return to and spend more time at in the future. It contains artwork not just from the indigenous peoples from Chile but all over Latin America. We weren’t allowed to take any photos but if you are curious the museum’s website has photographs of all the pieces here.

After leaving the museum we ambled back to the plaza. Here’s another cool church that I saw only about a block from la Catedral Metropolitana.

We hung out in Plaza de Armas for quite a while while he took pictures. At this point it was getting too dark for me to get much worthwhile out of my camera but since his camera is much more powerful he was still going. We actually ended up walking out of the plaza right before Plácido Domingo began performing and weren’t able to get back in because there were too many people. We listened to a couple of songs but since we weren’t able to see anything we ended up leaving.

I’ve got more photos of all this business on my flicker . Check ‘em out.
Randall left the next day to go visit the South of Chile but probably will be stopping by again for about a day or so before heading back to the US next week.

Oddly enough I ‘stumbled upon’ another ‘free’ concert tonight, so to speak. It was actually a concert that I had intended on going to but had forgotten the date. It was Roger Waters of Pink Floyd performing The Dark Side of the Moon, and surprisingly enough I was able to hear it fairly well from my bedroom window. I listened to the whole concert then and enjoyed it but am glad I didn’t go. The cheapest tickets were more than forty-five dollars and escalated from there. Also I really love going to concerts but when it is a really huge one and I’m far away it always seems kind of lame to me, like I could have had the same experience just watching a DVD of the performance. The other thing was that he just played the Dark Side of the Moon, which is great but only 45 minutes long, and that’s a really short show for the money people were putting out to see it. But I’ve got to say it was pretty awesome hearing from my apartment and my luck for free shows has been at its pinnacle this week. Hope it keeps up.

I’m now living in Santiago, Chile in the middle of the second week of my TEFL course (teach English as a foreign language). This is all going really well and keeping me pretty busy. I’m living in a nice spot with two really cool Colombian guys, so nothing to complain about. I went to Valparaíso this past weekend to pick up my laptop and some other stuff I’d left there and had a really great time doing it. But I’m going to talk about all of this later. This post will only talk about the last two weeks or so I spent in Argentina. I should be doing a catch-up post in a few days and then proceed as normal from there.

IguazúFalls were absolutely amazing of course. Looking back though I’m not really sure that it was the best idea to go, considering that it took me two days to get to Santiago on bus from there (although there was something totally hilarious on the way, I’ll tell you later…). I would have liked to stay that extra day in Buenos Aires as well. I spent almost a month there, but the dynamics of any place, especially a place like Buenos Aires, are always changing and compelling reasons not to leave sometimes emerge. Add to that the fact that I have every intention of going back to Iguaz’u sometime and it seems pretty clear that it was a long way to travel to see something I intend to visit in the future anyway. But what can I do now and what can I say? It was still awesome.

Coming up on it, it looks like this:

And then you see this. This panorama was taken from the top of La Garganta del Diablo, or the throat of the devil, which is the largest fall of the whole complex.

Here’s a video of it:

A little closer up:

And here is the heart of the garganta, or at least the top part of it, with a nice rainbow.

Here is the same fall from a distance:

You can see a viewpoint on that second tier waterfall on the Brazilian side (left), which I didn’t visit. I took the video and those previous photos from a platform on top of the falls and to the right. The land mass that you see on the right side of this photo is actually an island that separates the garganta from the other side of the fall complex, which is pictured below.

You can see that there are some boats going in there, which I didn’t go on. Come down here to visit and we can go together…

By the way, I didn’t go into the Brazilian side because us Americans have to pay $100 dollars and jump through some hoops in order to get a tourist visa. Sucks being so loved around the world, doesn’t it? There was one agency that I heard could take Americans without visas through but they were closed when I wanted to go. When I return I’ll be spending a lot of time in Brazil so it should make the whole business of getting the visa worthwhile.

The Biggest fall that you see in this photo is called Salto San Martín, though there are several others. And yeah, it rocks.

There are a bunch of names for all of these falls and it probably wouldn’t make the slightest difference to you if I told you.

These are the same falls from a different angle, p’oh.

There was quite a lot of wildlife running around the park, much of which I’d never seen in the wild before.

So there on the right is a caiman, which is somewhat different from a crocodile or an alligator. That¡s a tucan on the right of course. They’re both pretty bitchin’.

These are coatis. There were tons of them running around the park. They actually range all the way up to the Southwest United States and I saw quite a few when I was in Costa Rica, though these looked a little distinct.

There were a ton of butterflies around, which was pretty neat. These are my favorites among the several photos I took of them.

This pitiful looking creature wasn’t in the park but in the city Puerto Iguazú. It’s actually only the second most pitiful dog that I saw in that city and you should be thankful I didn’t photograph the first. I guess they don’t take care of the strays in Argentina like they do in Chile.

These three murals were in a plaza in Puerto Iguazú and were cut out of wood and painted. There were a few more, but these were my favorites.

They really did come to bring Jesus, silly indians.

We are the land and the land is us. And the plants and the animals they are land and the plants and the animals ate each other…

Split open that eyeball brother, yeah! Raise a fist!

I came out here with an Australian friend of mine and one of the locals was kind enough to give us a ride in his car. In the foreground is Argentina, across the river to the left is Paraguay, and across to the right is Brazil . If you follow the river that goes to the right you will end up at the falls, and if you follow the river that goes over the horizon you will find one of the largest dams in the world, or so I was told.

This is the obelisk marking the Argentinian side. There are similar ones on the Paraguayan and Brazilian sides, each with their proper colors of course.

The set of the many other photos I took up in Iguazú can be found <here>.

Yup

So Before I bussed myself on up to Iguazú I was living the life down in Buenos Aires. Still so much to say about that place…

The last night I spent there in Buenos Aires a few of us went out for Thai food, which was amazing. We sat on the floor too, just to be cool.

This is me looking sad because my bud Pete has killed an entire cow for his dinner. I only let them kill a fish for me.

“For relaxing times, make it Suntory time.”

This is Evalina, from Sweden. Ya.

I’m heartbroken that I can’t remember the name of this Israeli girl. She was really sweet though.

At the bar afterward I think Pete and I really irritated her with our ¨We’re Americans, f’ yeah!¨type talking.

Evalina was cool with it though. She’ll laugh at just about anything. (just kiddin’… Errr, now laugh…)

This is Pete and I. I know you’re probably thinking that it’s about the gayest photo ever. I don’t even know why I posted it.

At the end of the night we went home in this cab because we thought it would be funny, and somehow managed to live. Hilarious! I didn’t take any of these last photos by the way. They’re Pete’s, and his flickr is <here>. (if you click on this link you’ll notice that Pete doesn’t have that flickr account any longer, which also is why the preceding photos don’t work.  These issues may be corrected in the future.)

A couple of days prior to that I went ice skating with some friends of mine.

Several more went than are pictured here, but these are the cool ones. (Don’t really mean that… Respect.) But here we have two Israelis, Two Argentians, a German, and a gringo. See if you can tell who is from where! I don’t want to give any hints, but Laura and Andrea are in there, and they were two of the better friends I made in Buenos Aires.

You might notice that the quality of this photo is substantially better than the rest. That is because Randall is behind the lens with his badass camera that is bigger than your head. (Unless you are reading this Vik, your head is a bit over-sized for being such a short fellow). Randall traveled all the way to Argentina from the States and should be coming to visit in Chile, where I will be helping him find a boat to New Zealand (or so we plan). His photos are really amazing, and he has photographed some really interesting events such as one of the uprisings in Oaxaca, Mexico. I highly recommend that you check them out. His flickr is <here>.

The story moves on…

Here we have Gorge from Chile and some Swiss guy whose name I have forgotten. Lost his email too on accident. Both are really cool guys. Gorge and I should be hanging out some here in Chile. Andrea was with us at this time, and we later went up to here apartment and had matte with her parents. The Swiss dude couldn’t come because he was just starting work in the restaurant we’re sitting in here. He’s actually been traveling all over South America and working whatever jobs he manages to get.

We passed this house on the way that’s supposed to be haunted and that’s supposed to be me being scared by that face on the wall. The truth is though that I don’t get scared at anything at all, so it’s totally a set-up.

Andrea and her family live on the top floor of an apartment complex and this is the view from the top. This was really one of the more genuine experiences that I had in Argentina. We stayed for a couple of hours just talking and passing around the guitar playing and singing songs while taking matte. Nobody from outside the Southern Cone of South America but me.

So you look at all these pictures and you think that it’s all good times and babes and kicks and that it’s easy to be in a place like this. Maybe you could do it too? No! You can’t. This is what they do to unwary tourists who don’t watch themselves in Buenos Aires. Not kiddin’.

Really though, these signs are all over the city. Didn’t they know that someone would do this?

All the other photos I took in Buenos Aires that weren’t of buildings are <here>.

This is right by the capitol, on the opposite side of the park.

A Lamppost and the steeple of a really cool building near the capitol.

And finally here is the capitol itself .

In your face!

\

From the rear!

Reflection of the dome from a neighboring building.

In a city with so much amazing architecture that buildings that would stand out anywhere else become lost to the background, this is one of my favorites. It’s called El Palacio de Agua, or the Water Palace . It is so called, because it is actually the water utility building for the city. An odd use for such an amazing building. Unfortunately none of these pictures does it any justice; really just needs to be seen in person.

Sportin’ the flag.

The front.

Here is a statue with a pigeon sitting on its head. Respect.

This is a memorial plaza built beside the Israeli embassy, which was targeted in a suicide bomb attack in 1992. The sign says, “In this place 29 people died, please respect their memories.”

This is the Bauen Hotel . It is being run by the workers and there are no bosses. There’s a whole movement of worker collectives running businesses that failed after the economic collapse in 2001. There is a really great documentary in English about the movement called The Take that I highly recommend watching (notice that the name links to the film’s web site). I went inside to check it out and things were pretty lively and it had a really nice atmosphere.

I took a ton of photos of buildings and stuff like that in Buenos Aires. They are all <here>.

Alright, I’ll update youz folks on coming back to Santiago, my class, my trip to Valparaí­so and everything else in a few days.

This is how we spend a lot of our evenings in the hostel when there’s not a lot else going on. From left to right, we have David, Javier, Jonatan, Lara, and myself.
This is Jonatan’s vacation beard. It’s coming off when he gets back to Israel, and he’s going to photograph the four-step process.

This is a group of us out at a club called Opera Bay. It’s the one that looks like the Sydney Opera House that I have a picture of in an older post. Our group was composed of people from Isreal, Germany, French Canada, and myself.
This is what I look like from above.

Last night David, Lara, Jonatan, and I went out for some incredible sushi, and it came out on this:
Too bad David wasn’t fast enough to get the last piece.
Sucker.

This is Juanito, who works at the hostel and speaks several languages fluently but I’m sure is unintelligible in any of them, and Kathia, who is from Brazil and speaks three languages very well. They are both super sweet.

So those are the photo highlights. Here is the link to the set of the rest of these photos

I’m planning on going to go to the Bauen Hotel tomorrow, which is very special and I’ll write about it later. Chau.

After getting there we arrived at the Martin’s brother’s house and had some drinks and then went to bed early so we could get up for skiing in the morning.**

We skied Mount Hood Meadows that day on almost perfect powder right after a pretty good snowstorm.  This was my first time skiing for about three years or so and it took me some time to regain my confidence, but I did pretty well.  I had almost forgotten how much I enjoy skiing.

Afterwards we went to this bar called Charlie’s up on the mountain in a town called Government Camp.  Marvin told me that his dad used to come to this bar when he was young and that it still is exactly the same as it was back then.

(So my camera died at the start of this trip and I had forgotten both my extra battery and my charger, so none of these photos are mine).

Â

This is us at Charlie’s

This is Adam after his teachers Paul and Marvin threw him in a snowbank and took pictures.

The next day we opted to go to Ski Bowl instead, which I liked better because there were fewer people and the runs were funner and more challenging.  Marvin’s dad used to be  ski instructer here and this is where he grew up, and possibly concieved, as he told me.

Apparently that day at Mount Hood Meadows some old guy got hit by a snowboarder and died and the dude that hit him just took off.  What a bastard.

Â

We only came off the hill to drink beer and eat nachos.  Actually, I didn´t have any of the nachos becuase I´m a vegetarian now.  Adam did though, even though he is also recently a vegetarian.  If you look closely at his sleave you can see the tears off shame he wiped off there.Â

Â

A band of merrymakers.

So after rockin’ Skibowl we dropped off Marvin at his brother’s place and had these killer coffee drinks and checked out his impressive vintage stereo collection and drove back to Yakima.

All the rest of the pictures from this trip are here.

I chilled out there for a couple hours until my driver Vik picked me up again and took me to Pullman.  We arrived there a little after midnight but still had time to hit up Valhallas for about an hour before it closed and then went to our buddy Mohamed’s place and hung out. My sister Laura took me to Spokane in the morning.

So it all started when my bud Vikrimjit picked me up from Spokane to take me to Seattle, and we ended up turning around at Vantage and heading to Pullman because being true to his character he had forgotten his passport.  For those of you that aren’t so familiar with Washington State we drove for a little over five hours to go the distance of about 70 miles or so.  Just a warning.  If you’re ever going anywhere important or far away and then look to your left to see this:

Â

quiz him and be sure that he is fully prepared to flee the country.  He probably wants to but isn’t.  This docile looking Punjabi would be at best the partial cause of lots more unnecissary driving during this trip.  The cool thing was that we went to Rico’s Pub, which is a bar in Pullman something over a hundred years old that we used to hang out at a lot.  Hadn’t changed much.

In the morning we drove from Pullman to Bellingham, which is near the border and met with Shammi & Rie, afterwich we proceeded to the greener pastures of Canada.  Here’s a cool photo of a peak on Snoqualmie Pass that I took from the car on the way.

We picked up this other wack Punjab named Gurri and then went to our Buddy Jay´s house to Prefunk.

I forgot that I was the only white guy there until just now when I put up this pic.  Then we went to a ghetto club on Granville Avenue which I got into for free and checked my coat for free because I tried paying in pesos.

This was a good start to the night.  As you can see from these photos everything was great.

Until Guree & Rie had some glowing, green mixed drink that turned them into flesh-eating zombies.

Â
I think Shammi gave it to them and made them to terrible things, but I´m not really sure what.  I don´t trust that guy.  Thank god Guree and Rie slept it off and couldn´t remember what they had done in the morning.Â

There was one girl with us who was a total floozy and was hooking up with all the guys.  Her name is Rie.

 
Rie hookin´up with Guree         Rie hookin´up with Shammi

Â
Rie hookin´up with Vik

As you can see from these pictures she just couldn´t make up here mind.  (Actually, she´s a really sweet girl and would never actually consider getting involved with any bad, bad types like us.)

  The next day is a blur (no, I wasn´t hung over) of sitting in Indian restuarants and eating and talking.  We got caught up in this and did it for so long that we forgot that our Punjabi driver and navigator had no idea what they were doing and left way too late to get into the Cambie, a really rad bar that was also the only one that didn´t cost like fifty dollars or more to get into that night.  So we spent the New Year in line outside the bar, which isn´t really so bad all in all but we still began to torment Vik the driver because of it.

 The prospects for the night were looking pretty dull since we weren´t willing to fork out exhorbitant amounts of money to get into a club and for some reason it´s illegal to sell alcohol in British Columbia after 10pm, even on New Year´s Eve.

We did manage to infiltrate a private Japanese party and had tea and scones.Â

  Â

   So we were a little put out about the way New Year´s Eve had gone…

But then Guree got his hands on one of those New Year kazoo flapper thingies, which he vetted his frustration at towards everything in the street for about two hours, which was a rather entertaining spectacle.Â

Â

Â

You can see here that Vik has finally cracked from all the ridicule we gave him for making us miss the New Year.  Don´t worry about him though.  Shammie took him into his lap and rocked him and sang him lullabies and he´s all better now.

So the first morning of the New Year before we headed out we stopped at Jay´s Little Caesars to have pizza.

 Â

We made Vik beg for his pizza.

And it was back to Seattle after that.  Vik, Rie, and I spent the day at the Seattle aquiarium, which was pretty cool.  They had reversed the order that you go through it since I had last been there and the lobby was closed, I´m not sure if temporarily or not.

  Â
This sequence of photos showing Vik sneaking up behind Rie shows without a doubt that he is a creep.

Â
Vik creeped up on this octopus too and it attacked him, hopefully teaching him a good lesson.  When I saw what was going on I had to rescue him.  He was my driver, after all.

 

Later that night we met up with Heather and went to a bar in West Seattle.

Â

Vancouver is still one of my favorite cities in the world and I always love going there.  Even though things didn´t really go as planned it was really great spending the New Year with some good friends hanging out and eating delicious food.Â

 PS You can see the complete photo set for this trip by clicking here.  I finally put up all the pics, so yo

My sister Hannah & I at lunch

My sister Hannah, her boyfriend Phil, and myself being very white and blonde.

Hannah drinking from an amazing straw that we made together

Mickey and Shad, chillin’ like villians at Shammi’s place