Anyway though… the following morning my mom arrived to Santiago. She came for 10 days in which time we had arranged to go to Patagonia and I had a list of things to go see in Santiago. The first few days we mostly just slugged around Santiago and went to see my campus and the presidential palace and some other things and poked around in different artisan markets. We also went to Valparaíso for my real birthday since it is the best place on Earth. If ever I am in the position of being in one of those game shows like on Friends between Monica/Rachel and Joey/Chandler where they are competing to win back the apartment by answering personal questions about one another, then you the reader should now be able to answer the questions as to “where the best place on earth is”. It is valpo. I can’t explain why exactly. But somewhere between all the murals and colors and hills and secret passage ways between streets and ascensors and vegetarian food and hippies and the port with all the ships and the people I met there, it is the best place on Earth. Plus it has the biggest firework show in Latin America for New Years although unfortunately I will not be there to see that.
Valpo:
Anyhow, after a few days in the city, we set out for Patagonia. We flew into Punta Arenas first which is the southernmost city of its size and the departure point for a lot of excursions to Antarctica. From there we hopped straight on a bus to Puerto Natales where we spent the afternoon walking around and relaxing to recover from out 2:50am flight out of Santiago. The next day was the day we actually entered the Torres Del Paine National Park. From Puerto Natales it was another 2-3 hour bus ride north to enter through the southern entrance of the park. While in the park we had decided to pass on trekking due to my mom’s frail knees so we stayed at the lodge at Paine Grande and just went out for day hikes. Determined to see as much as I could see being limited to day hikes, I may have pushed my mom and little hard, chasing her to the Grey Glaciar and back the first day (22km total – approx. 15 miles), so after hiking with her a while the second morning she sent me on my own way to haul up to the top of the Valle Frances where there was an awesome view of some striking mountain tops that the call the “catedral” or the “cathedral” (27.5 km – approx. 18 miles).
The two main trails to trek through the park are the “circuit” and the “w”. The “ciurcuit” takes about 10ish days and goes all the way around the park and the torres (towers) themselves. The “w” is actually part of the “circuit” but only takes 5-6 days. I would have liked to do the full “circuit” or even the full “w” but I was pretty satisfied with what I did in the time I had. I ended up doing one “u” of the “w” twice. Plus it was kind of nice to stay in the lodge with showers and beds and hot food. We got really luck with the gorgeous weather we had. The first afternoon walking out to the glacier it seemed a little dreary as we were being beaten in the face by snow and slush but after that it was pretty perfect. The second day I barely even needed to be wearing long sleeves. Plus it was awesome because we were so far south that it was light out until about 11pm since it’s the summer so I could sleep in until noon and start hiking around 1 and still complete a 10 hour hike with light to spare. It was all in all really awesome. The third day we didn’t do too much because we had to catch the catamaran ferry around noon to get back to the bus to go back to Puerto Natales to catch the bus in time to get back to Punta Arenas that night.
We stayed in Punta Arenas for two nights at a funny hostel run by an pretty Italian Chilean man named Alejandro who woke us up each morning with Frank Sinatra and Pavarti bellowing from his stereo in the living room and fresh squeezed Pomelo juice. We only really had one day there though since we came in late the night we arrived and had to head out early the day we were leaving in order to catch our flight back to Santiago. The day that we had was well spent though as we went to the Isla de Magdalena where we saw 35,000 pairs of Magallenic Penguins. It was my mom’s special request trip.
It was so cool because there were just so many penguins and they were fairly unafraid of humans so we could get pretty close and take lots and lots of pictures as they waddled around and ducked into their little burrows and played in the water. My pictures look so fake with how many penguins that are but I swear on my life that the are real. It was pretty amazing. We also had a little time to wander around Punta Arenas which was a lot larger than I had expected but not particularly different than many other Chilean cities. And then the next morning we headed back to Santiago. Back in Santiago we didn’t have a lot more time before she had to leave so we went to the winery that I went to with my group at the very beginning, Concha y Toro, and went to see the German country club, Club Manquhue, that the family of my pololo belonged to, and took the ascensor (elevator thing) up Cerro San Cristobal to see a view of the city.
On the same day that my mom was to head back home, I actually set out for Uruguay to meet up with Meg, Maggie, and Molly in Montevideo to spend some time on the beach in the sun and aprovechar (take advantage of) the summer before I had to sadly head back home myself. We met up in Montevideo where we poked around for a whil in the morning, stopping by a large Gaucho statue (in front of which the UCSB girls had to take a picture) and stopping through a plaza where legendary tango spirits wallowed although none of us felt a particular desire to start dancing. In Montevideo we rented a car, a manual car, which I got to drive because I was the only one that knew how, and headed east along the coast towards Brazil, past Punta del Este which is a popular beach resort destination but far more developed than what we were seeking out. The roads were actually pretty good but it was kind of funny because every now and then we would pass tractors and horse drawn carriages just putting along down the highway.
We decided to drive all the way pretty much to the Brazil border and then work our way back to Montevideo. The first night we set up camp semi-illegally (although nobody really cared) on the bluff right over the beach in Punta del Diablo and slept under the stars. On our first day laying out at the beach we pretty much all got fried and I accidentally slipped into the campfire that night, covering my foot in second degree burns, so that put a little but of a damper on the rest of the trip but it was still awesome. We stayed a second night in Punta del Diablo although we rented a tiny, cute little cabin after being swarmed by bugs when we woke up that morning on the beach which was kind of nice to shower and nurse our burns with the aloe plants that we found abundantly on the side of the road. The next day we set off for Cabo Polonio. To get there we had to drive about an hour west and then hop on what they refer to as the “bus” but which I really a giant 4x4 army-ish truck that drives you over the sand dunes into the town.
The bus:
The town there is so cool. In the entire place there were apparently about 200 people although I can’t say we saw more than 20 of them. The town is spread out among some small dunes with tiny, quaint, colorful houses sprouting out like daisies sporadically with no reason as to their location and no mark of borders to property.
The beach was awesome too. It felt like we just had it all to ourselves to swim or walk along the sand or sunbath in the nude as we pleased. There we had to stay in a hostel, one of the two hostels that there are there, because camping was strictly prohibited.
The hostel:
The dunes:
The guy that ran the hostel was this super hippie, funny, kind of washed out German guy named Uve that was pretty cool and helpful. He was the one that told us that pretty much anywhere in Uruguay its cool to camp and strangers will wake you up with a welcome and a glass of mate, except in Cabo Polonio where they will come take your tent down at 5 in the morning. He pretty much just confirmed what we suspected but it was nice to hear to reassure us that we didn’t need to pay for some shitty campground. There were a bunch (by a bunch I mean like 5) of French and Swiss people at the hostel too that were cool although not super social. There were also 2 Chileans which was cool for us and pretty rare since not many Chileans are able to travel. That night we just stayed out and watched the stars for hours. They were probably the coolest starts I have ever seen since the town didn’t even have electricity and we were hours away from the nearest city. It was awesome. The next day it was a little colder and we had all soaked in a pretty sufficient amount of sun for such a short time period, plus we ran out of sunscreen, so we spent the day checking out the lighthouse and wandering around town before heading on to La Paloma to camp that evening. We were driving around on random dirt paths that split off the highway when we stumbled on this crazy crater land that looked like we had landed on mars. Im not sure how it formed but just before the dunes started there was this weird valley with islands of land sticking up our of nowhere. We decided to camp there and set up tents just in time for the rain to start. It rained pretty much all night until morning when we got a slight break to pack stuff into the car. From there we headed back to Montevideo so that I could get my plane back to Santiago and they could find a bus. They had left Santiago about 3 weeks earlier to travel through Patagonia and Argentina a bit before I met up with them. They had been planning to go back through Mendoza but ended up scratching that plan I think, in favor of just getting back home to Santiago.
Santiago really is home to me now. Which makes it all the weirder to leave. I only had a few days left in Santiago when I finally got back so I did my best to see everyone I wanted to see and do everything I wanted to do. I hung out with Ivan and Gonzolo and went to lunch with my roommates and bought gifts for people and such. I finally went to Pablo Neruda’s house in Bellavista in Santiago because he is a famous Chilean poet who actually has three houses in Chile and I had yet to go to any of them. I saw Meg and Molly and Maggie briefly when they finally got back although all of my other gringo friends has already left for home. I packed up all my stuff which made my room feel unbearably naked but was of course necessary and hung out with Ivan, Gonzolo, and Fanny in my apartment right up until the taxi came and I had to say goodbye. I hate to say goodbye. And although I now have done the deed, I hate that it still doesn’t feel real. Santiago is home. To think I could feasibly never go back is out of the question. I have to. Chile, te amo. Nunca te olvidaré.
Things to remember about Chile:
-Musicians on the buses
-Choripan
-Mote con Huesillos
-Completos, Italians, Chorillana
-Pisco
-Terremotos
-Castellano
-Chile-time, aka always a few bendable minutes
-The Andes
-Alberto Magno
-Manuel Montt
-508 Echaurren
-Chileans: Gonzolo, Ivan, los amigos de Ivan (Franco, Pancho, Nicolás, Felipe, Marco, etc.), Egon (host hermano), Miguel de Chiloe (ruka owner, savior from rain), Marta de Castro (hostel owner)
- Extranjeros: Geoff, Pat, Meg, Molly, Maggie, Matt
- Compañeras de departamento: Fanny, Miriam
-La Cueca
-Trips: Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Patagonia, Chiloe, La Serena
-Valparaíso
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