I graduated from Geneseo this December and then headed down to Chile to spend some time with the family before starting graduate school next fall. I arrived on Christmas morning after a stressful succession of flights zigzagging me across the United States before an overnight flight to Santiago, Chile. I arrived at the Rochester airport a couple hours before my flight was to leave only to find out that the flight was already two hours delayed. My connection in Chicago would be tight. I arrived in Chicago and got to the gate just in time for them to call my row for boarding. Once on the plane we sat for a while on the tarmac waiting for people and filling empty seats with people from the standby list. My connection in St. Louis would also be tight. We touched down in St. Louis 15 minutes before my flight was scheduled to leave. Luckily it was leaving from the gate next door. I got off the plane and ran across to the other gate only to discover that that flight was delayed by two and a half hours, maybe more. I had dinner and waited. We finally left St. Louis three hours behind schedule and made it to Miami a half hour before my international flight was to leave. My departure gate was literally the farthest possible gate from my arrival gate so I crossed the terminal and waited only about 15 minutes before boarding despite the flights 30 minute delay.
Once I was on the flight from Miami the stress was over and I was able to sleep most of the night on the plane. The woman next to me gave me a cheerful "Feliz Navidad" at midnight just before the plane took off. I arrived in Santiago around 10:00am, but it was almost noon by the time I had bought a visa, gone through immigrations (the longest line I have ever seen), gotten my bags, and gone through customs. My parents met me at the airport and took me home to drop off my things, take a quick shower, and pick up the gang before heading up to the mountains for a Christmas excursion. Catherine, Steve, and Alyssa Menz, friends of ours from Binghamton, were visiting over the Christmas holiday. They arrived a day and a half before I did and left just after new years.
We drove up to one of the ski resorts above Santiago (about an hour and a half drive and 60 switchback curves up the mountainside) and after walking around the resort and taking some mountain photos, found a nice creek on the side of the road and set up the grill and picnic table and made Longeneza, a Chilean sausage, for lunch. We got to see Chilean Condors, including some young ones, that weren't too far away. Chilean Condors are endangered and so not always easy to find.
The day after Christmas we drove up into the Cajon de Maipo, a river valley just outside of Santiago, to go to Cambria's (my youngest sister) boyfriend's (Tomaz) country house. The house had a tennis court, a swimming pool, an ATV course, a coy pond, an aviary (complete with peacocks), and pens with mountain goats, deer, and rabbits. We spent the day eating some of the best food I have ever had and lounging by the pool. The house itself was designed by his mother and was absolutely gorgeous, complete with views of the high Andes.
The 27th we drove to Pomaire, a small town just outside of Santiago famous for its earthenware pots and dishes. We shopped along the main streets seeing lots of traditional pottery and crafts and had a traditional lunch of Pastel de Choclo, a sweet corn pie. On the way out of town we saw the first of many brush fires that I have seen since my arrival, a huge problem in this part of Chile this time of year.
On the 28th we drove up to Zapallar, a beach about two hours north of Santiago. We found a hotel in neighboring Papudo, a small fishing village, and then spent the afternoon lounging on the Zapallar beach, before getting dinner at a classy beachfront restaurant. Most of us had Pastel de Jaiba, a cheesy crab meat baked in an earthenware dish. The hotel contrasted sharply with the nice dinner we had had. Despite my budget travels through Asia and Africa this was possibly one of the dirtiest hotels I have ever stayed in. The bathroom had not been clean and the rag hanging from the towel bar had clearly been used as a mop multiple times. Bug carcasses littered the floor and two of the beds did not even have sheets (luckily we had sleeping bags). The next morning we visited the beach in the fishing village and got to watch the local fishermen preparing the days catch. We caught a few more rays in Zapallar and then headed back to Santiago. We had dinner at Los Buenos Muchachos, a restaurant that has all sorts of traditional foods and hosts a stage show every night from 9pm to 1am. We saw dancers from each of the different parts of Chile and from Easter Island (technically an autonomous region of Chile). As the night progressed the dancing shifted to Salsa, Merengue, and other popular dances and there was a large crowd dancing. Around midnight it shifted to Jazzersize, also producing a large crowd, though one that we were not a part of.
The 30th we went to an Inti Illimani concert. Inti Illimani is a Chilean band that plays traditional style music and uses a lot of traditional instruments. The band split up a couple years ago and there are two sections now, both of which are calling themselves Inti Illimani until the court produces a decision on the rights to the name. The band was accompanied by the national orchestra which was fabulous. They played encores twice.
On the morning of the 31st we drove out to Pirque to see our Chilean friend, Diego's, winery. We got to see where and how they made the wine, tasted the wine, and the rooms where they hosted parties for the distributors from all over the world. The winery, Santa Alicia, is a relatively small winery that produces for export only. My parents favorite wine there is Carmenere, a grape originally from France but which died out there and was thought to be lost. Years later some French sommelier found the grape in Chile being mixed in with the similar Merlot grape and the grape was reintroduced in France.
That night we had Tomaz's (Cambria's boyfriend) family over for dinner and then went with them to Cerro San Cristobal, a large hill in Santiago, to watch fireworks. The lights of the city from up on the hill were impressive and though the fireworks were a bit far away, it was interesting to get to see them at eye level. We went back to the house for Champagne and to watch the ball drop in New York (on TV) at our 2 am because of the time difference. The Menz family left the next morning.
After a couple days of relaxing and catching up on sleep from the fast-paced adventures while the Menz family was visiting, we visited the zoo. Our municipality, Providencia, has a bike program where you can pay two dollars a month to rent bikes for an hour at a time any day before 8pm. If you sign up for a year (16 bucks) you get a free helmet. I signed up, got my helmet and the whole family biked to the edge of the municipality closest to the zoo, turned in our bikes, and crossed the canal to the zoo. The zoo definitely beat the guidebooks description of " the dinky Zoologico Nacional, which houses an aging bunch of neglected animals," but it wasn't anything spectacular. There was a baby flamingo which was very cute. We spent a while watching as the other flamingos fought over who knows what and the mother cautiously protected her baby. On the way home we stopped for lemon meringue pie ice cream, my favorite.
The next week I spent helping my father build a structure to hang a curtain to separate off the part of the dining room where I sleep on an air mattress from the main part of the room, corresponding with graduate schools, and filling out an application for funding and a traineeship at the Carolina Population Center, should I go to the University of North Carolina for grad school. That weekend we had numerous people over for various meals including two past Chilean exchange students and their families and one of my mother's colleagues and his family.
On Saturday we drove up to the Embalse de Yeso, the reservoir that houses all of the drinking water for Santiago, to test out our four wheel drive before heading north. The roads were narrow with a drop on one side and a cliff rising up on the other, but nothing too extreme. We probably could have done it without four wheel drive, but it served as a nice little excursion.
Monday and Tuesday we spent packing and finally left for the north trip on Wednesday around 6pm. We stopped just before dark at a campsite on the beach about two and a half hours north of Santiago outside of the town of El Molle. On Thursday morning we checked out the beach and hiked to the local blowhole "El Pequen" to see the spurts of water from the waves filling a partially underwater cave. We had lunch further up the beach at Pichidangui. That night we camped at the hotsprings, Termas de Socos. Friday morning we got up and swam in the pool filled with the hot springs water. It wasn't particularly warm, but it wasn't cold. We then headed up the coast and into the Elqui Valley inland of La Serena and camped in El Almendral. We celebrated Sterling's (my brother) birthday a night early because the Pie de Limon, the Chilean version of a lemon meringue pie, wouldn't keep overnight and it didn't fit in the cooler.
On Saturday we stopped for lunch, Empanadas, turnovers filled with ground beef and onions, a quarter of a hard boiled egg, one olive, and three raisins, in the village of Vicuna. We then drove up into the hills to reach Cerro Tololo, a scientific observatory that offers free tours every Saturday afternoon. The observatory was fascinating; there was both a 1.5 meter telescope and a 4 meter telescope. The telescopes are attached to the hill and hang completely separately from the buildings so as not to be damaged by the frequent earthquakes here. Scientists sign up months in advance for one or two nights on the big telescope and have to home that it isn't one of their 60 cloudy nights a year. The telescope is in the desert to avoid as much cloud cover as possible. Its three hundred clear days a year and two hundred perfect nights a year (a perfect night is one in which the stars don't twinkle) is remarkable.
On the way up to the observatory the car overheated a little, but nothing crazy. On the way down, however, the car overheated too much and we blew both of the head gaskets on the engine. We were stranded about five kilometers outside of town and so called the police to ask them to send someone out. An hour after they promised to send someone we called again and waited another hour before they came. By then my mother and Cambria had taken a bus back to the campground to tell them that we would be staying another night. The police arrived, three of them in a SUV with gravel protectors around the car like chicken wire. They only had room to take one of us into town so my father sent me to go with the police to find the town mechanic. I rode into town and we stopped at the mechanics shop, his house, and were headed to his mother's house in search for him when the police saw his car and pulled him over. We then followed him to his shop before going to our car, which my father had nursed into town after putting the rest of the kids on the bus back to the campground. We nursed the car into the shop and the mechanic agreed to fix it Monday morning. He had been on a date and his girlfriend was waiting in the car. Some people my mother had befriended at the campground came into town with Kalindi (another of my little sisters) to pick us and all of our stuff up from the mechanics.
On Sunday we took the bus into town and had lunch and picked up some groceries. It was national election day so by rule of law, every establishment that had a liquor license was closed, so the choices were limited. On Monday we took the bus farther up the Elqui valley to the town of Pisco Elqui. Pisco is the national liquor of Chile; it is a brandy made from grapes. Peru also claims Pisco as their national drink and so in order to protect against Peru laying claims on the name, this town was renamed for the liquor. For example if Peru named a region Pisco, nothing outside of the region could be called pisco (think Bordeaux from that region of France), but as this town now has the name, Peru couldn't do that.
In Pisco Elqui we visited a distillery and learned how pisco is made. The tour even included tastings of both straight pisco (very few people drink pisco straight) and a pisco sour (the much more common version of the drink) and a souvenir pisco glass. We then grabbed lunch and looked at the local artisan shops before taking the bus to the town of Montegrande, the birth place of Gabriela Mistral, a Chilean Nobel Prize winning poet. There we saw her grave, an elaborate memorial to her and her poetry.
Tuesday the car was still not fixed so we took the bus into Coquimbo, the port town at the base of the valley. There we visited the fish market for lunch and checked out a one room archaeological museum built around the discovery of some early humans buried with their llamas. We took a boat tour of the harbor in the evening, seeing sea lions and many marine birds, before heading back to the campground by bus.
Wednesday morning we climbed up to an abandoned mine on the hillside above the campground. The mine led deep into the hill. With a flashlight we ventured back. My father (a geologist) determined that it was probably a copper and gold mine. We took the bus into town for lunch, checked email at an internet cafe and then waited in a park for the car to be ready.
Thursday we got an early start (early for us is before noon) and drove to Tierra Amarillo where we filled the car with gas and filled three gas cans that ride on top of the car too to be sure to make it to Argentina. From there, we began on the international road to Argentina. About 300 kilometers up the road is the Tres Cruses national park from which you can see five of the tallest volcanoes in the world at one time. There are also salt lakes with flamingos and lots of wildlife. We camped about 100 kilometers up the road in Puquios, an abandoned mining camp. We pitched the tents using the collapsing walls of the ruins as windbreaks. The stars were brilliant because of the lack of light pollution.
Friday morning we headed up toward Tres Cruses, but once again the car was overheating and taking hours to cool before overheating again. The underlying problem had not been fixed. Out of fear of blowing more gaskets even more in the middle of nowhere, we turned back and headed south back down to La Serena. We spent the next two days taking our time heading south. On Saturday we went to Tongoy on the beach for fresh seafood and lots of local artisans shops. On Sunday we stopped at Fray Jorge National Park, a fog forest near the coast. Though not total desert, the area was very dry and we hadn't seen trees in over a week. The fog forest was a place up on a hill where the plants were able to get enough moisture out of the fog for trees to grow. Going up the hill we realized that removing the thermostat has not solved the over heating problem; coming down off the hill the engine shut off. We discovered that on the last bump (it was a dirt road) we had broken a shock absorber, but that couldn't have stopped the engine. We looked under the hood and sure enough a wire had broken, only about a millimeter from the base. Too short to tie the wires together, my dad used his hand lense to lay the wires together and put a drop of gorilla glue on them, before covering the whole thing in duct tape and supporting the wire. Sure enough, the car started. We drove back to Santiago (quite an uncomfortable ride with the shock banging around under the car until we reached the paved road) and arrived home around one in the morning.
We spent the last couple days unpacking, washing everything, and repacking while the car was at the mechanic. Tomorrow morning we are headed up to the mountains for the night to test out the car and be sure that it is fixed. Sunday we will leave to head south for the month of February.
