Half a world away

Well, we’ve come to the end of our whistle-stop tour of central Chile on the Patchmamma (Earth-Mother) bus and have learned that sea lions smell very bad and do a mean impersonation of the Bud commercial - Whatssuuup!, Flamingos are not so pink; dolphins make you want to commune with nature; and Chile still has quite active volcanoes and has miles and miles and miles of very deserted desert.

We set off on Sat 21st with 11 other backpackers with whom we have talked an amazing amount of b******* over some seriously cheap and tasty wine. The hostels have varied in quality, but special mention goes to La Serena for fluffy toilet-seat covers and pelmets/curtain ties in the shower.

In Coldana we explored a deserted train yard with steam trains that were used to transport nitrates. Cue 11 grubby big kids returning to the bus after clambering over, in, through steam trains, engines and funnels.

The nitrate industry fluctuated and, when there was no longer any call for it, they moved entire towns out of the desert and towards the coast. However, they could not move the cemeteries and we visited one that remains. Unfortunately, there is a legend that there is gold buried in one of the graves (to hide it from people who looted the church) and so several of the graves have been smashed open. You can still see the bodies inside that have been preserved pretty well by the hot, arid conditions.

The Chileans are very proud of their mummies and are keen to point out that they were doing it much earlier than the Egyptians. You can also see pointy skulls in the museum at San Predro. The different tribes shaped the skulls with bindings at a young age to differentiate them from different tribes.

We saw the most amazing sunset at the Lunar Valley, but I’m sure you’ll get to hear so much more about sunsets over the next year so we’ll move on.

We’ve been resting up in Arica for a few days now after finding a hostel that is a self-proclaimed “Party House” with no ******* scheduled breakfast or curfew. Roberto (hostel owner and all-round party animal) hosted an impromptu BBQ and nightclub expedition on our arrival. Chileans certainly do love the Village People…

What’s the best thing about Chile?, I hear you ask. Is it the majestic volcanoes that fringe the vast salt flats? Is it the 10,000 year-old mummies that pre-date the Egyptians by 5,000 years? Is it the never-ending golden beaches made up of white, dust-fine sand and iron pyrite? No, no and, again, no. It is that finest of epicurean delights, the empañada.

No matter where the exhausted British traveller lays down his moist-rimmed Panama, whither he lifts a crooked little finger as he supports a cup of Earl Grey, wherever he lays his clean-shaven cheek; he shall never be further than half a furlong from the nearest empañada stall.

Empañada – basically a deep-fried pasty. Always containing cheese of the lowest calibre, but often packed with the finest floor-sweepings of porky goodness. Ginsters have missed a trick by not thinking to drop their products into the cheapest vegetable oil to give them that final, artery-damming flourish of toothsomeness. Mmm-mmm, them’s tasty, my friends.

Aside from the occasional (by which I mean “almost daily”) trip to the empanada stall, we are trying to keep a little healthy. We haven’t cooked for ourselves as much as we should, but we do get in a bit of walking, sometimes at altitude, every day. And, since we arrived in Arica, we’ve tried to play Frisbee in the surf for a while.

Our Castillian is improving by tiny amounts. Yesterday, we noted with some amusement that the Spanish word for ‘wait’, esperar, is also their word for ‘hope’. Anyone who’s ordered food in a Latin-American restaurant, will recognise the irony.

Tonight is Hallow’een. It is also our host Roberto’s birthday. An ominous amount of rum has arrived at the hostel. We have been advised to rest to save our strength for tonight’s celebrations, which bodes. We’ll let you know how our livers fare in the next installment.

More photos soon, promise.

Super Santiago Snaps

Clip clop!

(this one´s for Jessie)

Too much Merlot tonight and this is where we´ll end up.

Jules stikes a pose.

Ah! Reminds us of N21.

There´s a lady to be found hangin´around

on every hill in South America.

Kof!

It`s all downhill from here.

Chilly in Chile

It's sometime in the afernoon in the amazingly noise-polluted Barrio Bellavista in Santiago Centro. That sound a little grumpy? Probably becuase it's difficult to sleep, even though I've tried for an hour or two. That'll be the slight jetlag. Still, it hasn't stopped Jules and I from having a great couple of days so far.

Iberia Airlines are proud of thir Spanish heritatage and incorporate tradition into their services. The food is pretty limp, they’re never on time and they love piped musak. Ever heard a Spanish version of Angels? Happy you.

Still, everyone was cheery enough. There was an unintentionally hilarious crowd of Welsh-speaking pensioners on the flight - through their babble of throat-clearing and mumbling, would come words such as "Intercity 125" and varicous veins". Bless.

We crawled through Clilean passport control. I obviously had grown an extra eye as well as a nine ay em stubble, judging from the time it took for the officer to compare my fizzog and photo. We flung our backpacks over our sholders and entered the melee of competing taxi and minibus company reps. Pausing only to leave my debit card in the cash machine (thank you honest-chap-in-the-queue-behind-me), we paid about four quid apiece to take a minibus jouney into town. The outskirts of Santiago, as seen from our sixty mile-an-hour ride along the motorway are low-level concrete almost-slums. But people seem to take a pride in them.The streets are bereft of litter and dust, which is impressive, since the streets were mud. Perhaps they're too poor to have dirt. By which I mean, if you don't have much but your pride, you take a pride in what you do have.

We pulled off the motorway into the centre of town, where we continued to drive at sixty miles and hour. There seems to be a fair amount of Machismo in Chilean driving. All pedestians cross the roads at a run. Our hostel, Hostal Forestal, is cheerfully battered, but scrupulously clean. We flung the backpacks in the room, stuffed our valuables into a safebox and hit the streets. It was about 11 am, local time, 3pm BST, and we needed feeding. We ordered some random foodstuffs from the menu of a little bar/grill and set off to see the lady on top of the mountain. It seems that South Americans like to place large religious statues on the highest points of their cities. Santiagans can take a funicular railway to the feet of the crowned virgin and take in a panoramic vista of the smog that shrouds their city. Still, peaking out above the smog were the pinnacles of snow-capped jagged mountains. I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of those at a later date.

We shuddered and squeaked back down the funicular and stumbled into a café where we realised that our tiredness was going to win and that surrender to siesta was inevitable. After two hours of the deepest sleep I can remember, we upped and scrubbed and set out for dinner in Barrio Bellavista, a funky little area on our doorstep, full of bars and eateries, winos and students, theatres and bordellos, street stalls and boutiques.

We decided that we needed a slap up feed to celebrate our newly arrived status and fell into a corner restaurant. Being only seven-thirty, the place was deserted – people generally don’t go out and about until much later in the evening. We ordered fillet steak and salad with a bottle of local merlot. A small charcoal grill appeared at the side of or table with two haunches of Argentinian cow gently sizzling in their own juices. We deduced that the procedure is that the kitchen flames the steak to your specification and then lets you slice off piece after succulent piece to gently seal at your leisure. The taste was incredible (I have only lately returned to eating red meat) and so was the bill. Six pounds each for the largest, juiciest, tastiest bits of meat I’ve ever been lucky enough to chew.

We stopped on our way home for a beer and a game of cards at a pavement bar (nobody in this town is sissy enough to drink indoors) and weaved our way back to the hostel. There we invited a couple of lads from Plymouth to a game of pool. After soundly being whooped by, of all people, me, the lads, Johnny and Ian, suggested that we head out for "a beer". Note, if you please, the use of the singular. On our way back into Bellavista, we met some local folk who were off to a Karaoke bar. We ageed to join them – after all, we were here to meet local people, right? If the Karaoke became too much, we could always make our excuses and retire to a less repulsive hostelry.

Thankfully, the bar was closed. After a firm rejecion, by me, of a bar playing live freeform jazz, we stopped at a random street bar and started to drink beer. And talk. And meet new people. And order more beer. And chat. And tell jokes. And order more beer. And discuss the changes in Rapa Nui brought on by the advent of tourism. And meet new people. And argue for the right to buy the next round of beers. And be kind to a professor of English at the local University by not acually telling him that, no his English accent was appalling. And tell stories. And hug ferociously. And, eventually, weave our way back to the hostel at about four in the morning.