Well, that was the idea, after the rigours of Peru. Arriving in Santiago from the depths of the Amazon jungle is a bit like arriving on Mars from Earth. It is hard to believe that two countries so different can be next-door neighbours. Peru – so mad, so beautiful and so ugly, but most definitely a Developing country. Santiago is like a modern European city: busy, rich, clean and cosmopolitan. It boasts colonial architecture and an efficient metro; modern, antiseptic business sections crammed with Starbucks and Radisson hotels such as Las Condes, other neighbourhoods that are funky and slightly decrepit like Barrio Brasil. The cars are Audis and Toyotas, not converted Honda motorbikes. We were lucky enough to choose La Casa Roja on Lonely Planet’s recommendation, and found a beautiful converted colonial mansion now serving as a fun, busy hostel. We revelled that first night in hearing English spoken, albeit mostly by Aussies. We groaned as we realised the cricket was on … the first Test in Adelaide … on wide screen in a lovely little courtyard opposite our high ceiling-ed rooms. Suddenly we were proud to be Welsh.
We drank wine with ‘the young folk’ and the kids ran wild. That’s the great thing about hostelling: you don’t have to worry about disturbing hotel guests, as the other occupants tend to be young, or tolerant, or both. Of course the downside is that you too have to be tolerant, even of those who think it’s socially acceptable to play the didgeredoo at 2am. Yes, they exist, and no, we didn’t ask them to be quiet. This is one of the many blessings of having children who sleep through absolutely anything.
This hostel is the brainchild and baby of Simon and Isabel, and they have converted it from an absolute wreck to a beautiful place, and are building the swimming pool area as we speak. Simon, originally from Australia, has a rather cool claim to fame. He plays cricket for Chile’s national squad, and he’s probably the best cricketer in South America (though he will modestly tell you there’s a guy who’s pretty good in Brazil). However with the thrashing England got, cricket was a pretty sore subject!
It was pure luxury to be able to get laundry done, finally washing away the smell and damp of the jungle, to shop for shampoo and to speak some English. We were, to be frank, bone idle in Santiago. We did have a quick trip to the interactive museum, and a walk around the mall, but other than that, we vegged. We had a surprising evening one night when we finally met up with Don Eduardo, one of Joe’s old work colleagues. We were supposed to be having a quick drink, but got whisked away to his wonderful, well, mansion really, in the hills outside of the city. Here we drank Pisco Sours, played with the mad dog, and the kids even got a dip in the pool. Don Eduardo and his lovely wife were perfect hosts, and we left with a truly unique gift: Don Eduardo has published two collections of his father’s poems, beautifully bound and illustrated with pictures of Don Eduardo’s own paintings, which are amazing. We got back extremely late, and that was the night of didgeredooing. Hey ho.
The kids earned their keep, and us a discount on the room, by washing the dog, a very proud young man called Dado whose mother definitely encountered a Dalmatian somewhere along the way. The kids were thrilled beyond all reason to get this opportunity. I don’t know whether the kids got dirtier or Dado got cleaner, but it was all good dirty fun. Jenna also insisted on helping the kind housekeeping staff with the hoovering, while Rowan went off in her own inimitable way making friends with twentysomething Australians. It must be said, we still can’t quite get over the smug factor. No one, it seems, from pre-University backpackers to other families we meet can believe we are either a) mad enough or b) brave enough to take three kids out of school around the world for a year. But it really doesn’t feel brave, or that mad. It’s actually much, much easier than trying to entertain kids at home and, once you relax – and you have to relax BIG time – it’s really good fun. OK, so the kids’ bedtime has slipped to about 10pm with no let up from the dawn chorus. But you have entertainment on tap, a lot of the time. Kids don’t get bored by peacocks, waterfalls, coastlines or the sheer excitement of where we might sleep tonight.
Still, we couldn’t slouch about in the city forever, so we hired the hostel minibus to take us up to Vina del Mar, for the much awaited beach time we had promised ourselves. In typical style however we arrived at the start of a long holiday weekend in Chile, and it seems all of Santiago wanted to go to Vina, billed as Chile’s premier beach resort. After several nights of arrrrgggghing on the computer as it crashed, lost connections, only to find that most places were full; Joe, ever the pragmatic one, bought us a new network card and found us a B&B. Our arrival in Vina was less than auspicious, however. 1) we lost our camera somewhere en route, which aint bad going … this is the first thing we’ve lost 2) Vina was covered in fog and nowhere near as warm as 30 degrees Santiago 3) what we could see of Vina was high rise monstrosity 4) the B&B turned out to have prices in Pesos, not Dollars, as we’d thought, so wasn’t a bargain after all 5) it was right on top of a hill, a couple of miles from the beach.
But hey, we walked down into town to find Vina … well, a bit like Paignton really. No offence Paignton – that’s probably an unfair slur. We did find some cruddy fast food and a river that was so polluted it crunched rather than flowed. After food we felt somewhat warmer towards the place, especially as the waiter was so nice to us. We determined to make the best of it, but we were disappointed to say the least. So what do you do? Well, just dive into the whole spirit of the thing. Stroll along the prom looking at the tacky goods on sale, get the kids henna tattoos, let them go on the bouncy castles / bungee jump-come-trampoline thing, and find decent Italian restaurants. Hey, the fog even lifted once or twice though the sea is apparently too full of riptides to swim. We did enjoy Vina in a masochistic kiss-me-quick kind of way, but we were keen to move on. Plus, yet again we were getting sick of not being totally free agents – we needed our own transport. So, stuffing the planet for the umpteenth time, we hired a car. He is Wallace the Yaris, and Gromit at night. After a couple of nights we were to escape further up the coast to what Lonely Planet billed as Chile’s most exclusive beach resort, Zapallar. I had booked this one: 4 days of luxury right by the beach, with pool, at Hotel Isla Seca. Not only Lonely Planet recommended this one – my trusty source of reviews from rich Americans known as www.tripadvisor.com was positively falling over itself with superlatives about the place. They’d had no availability earlier, hence the unscheduled and last minute stopover in Vina, but now we were looking forward to some 5 star stuff. But, we were a little trepiditious (is THAT a word??). After all, if Vina was Chile’s premier beach destination, hmmm, what would the most prestigious be like?
OK so picture this. Lovely hotel, all marble and poshness, and we got a suite. Lovely clifftop walk to the beach, a nice but nothing special cove, on which was a restaurant. The clientele? Women in pashminas sweeping immaculately dyed hair back with perfectly manicured nails and kissing each other loudly. Men in Ralph Lauren shirts glued to their mobile phones whilst on the beach or over Sunday lunch. This, hard on the heels of Peru … it was all a bit much. It was all a bit up its own bottom. The service was unfriendly to the point of rudeness and the food mediocre. The black pigeon of gloom landed on Joe’s shoulder.
I think it was simply because it was all too familiar, like home, or work, or any overpriced and overrated middle class holiday destination. Men who think they are far too important to switch their mobile phones off for a meal or to build a sandcastle. Women clashing jaws. There was nothing WRONG with the place, but there was nothing spectacular. Nice coast, but nothing you don’t find in Cornwall. Infact, not as nice as you find in Cornwall. Not as wild.
We have become so used to being blown away by new sights, sounds and feelings. But Chile felt a bit like, well, Belgium. Yup, there are some really nice bits, and its pretty in parts. But it’s all so darn European, something we think the Chileans would take as a real compliment. Which is fine … but not straight after Peru, Galapagos, and Costa Rica. What should have been a welcome respite, felt more like a waiting room. Because of course the next big thing is Christmas and New Zealand.
We also learnt that, despite any mockery of me to the contrary, we are better when we have things planned. OK, so not “this is exactly where we’re going to stay each day” type planning, but a vague idea of where we are headed and what we want to see.
Chile DOES have the Atacama Desert, and more importantly perhaps it does have Patagonia. We looked into both very vaguely before we left, but Atacama is high … and we thought I for one might need a rest from altitude. Patagonia was far more tempting, but it is also prohibitively expensive. The allure of heading down to the Antartic after swimming above the Arctic watershed was enormous however, and could we have arranged it, we may well have done (after all, what are credit cards FOR?!) We did try, in Santiago. However, Navimag, the main ferry company taking people from Puerto Montt in the south way down to Punto Arenas only leaves on a Saturday, and our lounging around in Santiago and consequent coastal plans meant we had blown the timetable. Puerto Montt by bus is 60 hours from Santiago. It took less than a millisecond to dismiss that idea after the Cusco bus experience. There simply are no roads to Punto Arenas, unless you go through Argentina, and the hire car company would not insure us for that. So, Antartica will have to wait for another trip.
So here we were instead in Zapallar, but at least we had a car. Well, we drove around all the local coastal villages but come Monday morning the holiday crowds had left and everything was a bit reminiscent of Broadstairs in November. Shut, foggy, dreary. One bonus good day was spent at a local beach in Cachagua. Here, we wound through the back streets until we found one that ended in sand. Right on cue, the sun came out, and we took our hastily bought food onto the beach, which was deserted except for a few pelicans. Gorgeous seaside homes faced the dunes, looking for all the world like Porthcawl (we thought of you fondly, Jude and Dave!) Of course we weren’t THAT prepared, but I improvised with seashells for knives and sat making tuna and mayo sandwiches in the wind. The kids were enchanted by eating jelly with seashells for spoons … hey, Robinson Crusoe eat your heart out. Better still, we wandered up the beach and found an island, just offshore, which had thousands of birds on it. On closer inspection, we saw that many along the edge were waddling. Penguins! Hundreds of the buggers! Far more than we had seen in one place in Galapagos. For the first time, we wished for a pair of binoculars. However with a bit of squinting we could watch them fine. These are Humboldt penguins, and we were enraptured. We even found a beach bar (gasp!! In this part of Chile!) and it is amazing how much coffee and ice cream lifts the spirits.
That was the highlight, amongst cloudy days trying to find anything to see or do. Not a moment too soon, it was time to leave Zapallar and decide – North, or South?? North towards the Atacama, though the distances prohibited us from getting all the way to San Pedro de Atacama, or south towards the lake district? We really were undecided. We had a kind offer from Don Eduardo to meet him at his beach house near La Serena, north, but we also didn’t want to impose ourselves. Then, over dinner on the last night, we took the advice of our waiter. He basically said, as we understood it: the north is brown. The south is beautiful. Pretty much decided, we set out the next morning but didn’t finally make it firm until we sat at the junction with the Panamerican. South won the toss. And so we started the 700km drive down, back past Santiago.
Santiago has a fantastic climate and it lifted our spirits to come back into the warmth. The motorways are excellent, and we were happy to pay £1.60 every 100kms or so for the privelege of driving deserted, straight roads (it felt a bit like France). It is rather disconcerting that people drive the wrong way up the hard shoulder, ride horses on or haul bikes over the central reservation, take their kids cycling along the motorway and cross it in a hazardously leisurely manner, but that just keeps you awake. We also highly recommend Copec service stations, if you’re ever inclined to drive through!
More than anything else, it just felt good to be moving, to be under our own steam. We found a good budget hotel in Chillan, and then plumped for Pucon, in amongst the volcanoes and lakes. I picked a place with cabins just outside of the town, billed somewhat double-edgedly (again, is THIS a word??) as the most touristy place in southern Chile. One of the benefits, we had read, was that it had a choice of good food, and after Vina and Zapallar we seriously craved some choice. There is only so much pollo con papas fritas and hamburguesas con nada, not even a bun, you can stomach.
Not knowing what on earth you’re going to find, whether it will be Valhalla or the ‘Other Place’ is one of the great joys of this travelling lark. This time, we came up trumps. A beautiful cabin with a KITCHEN and a KETTLE and joy of joys, a bath! Immaculately clean, with a fab playroom for the kids, and views across the lake and mountains. It was just what we needed. The weather alas was a bit like the English Lake District: enormously changeable with lots of rain, but we settled into a routine of late starts, long lunches and brief explores with late nights and homecooked dinners. Pucon is lovely, and very reminiscent of Canmore in the Canadian Rockies. You could spend a fortune on all your North Face gear, or you could lose yourself in terribly Alpine restaurants serving raclette and fondue. We did neither, choosing instead to indulge in our family favourite Italian cuisine and riding the little train around the town and lake, stopping for internet cafes and browsing the shops (Rowan was back in retail heaven). It was bliss to be out of a hotel and in a house you could call home, if only for three nights. They flew by, and we soon started our journey back up to Santiago and the long-awaited flight to Auckland. En route, we’ve stopped at Salto del Laja, which has a nice waterfall, for a night in a not-so-posh-or-pricey-or-indeed-clean-but-hey-it-had-peacocks lodge costing the princely sum of £40 for all of us including dinner with copious drinks, and tonight we are in a glorious hotel in a little unspoilt town called Santa Cruz, about 160kms south of Santiago, in the wine valley. It really is a case of from the ridiculous to the sublime. Last night, I was trying to spray anything smelly in the kids’ room to remove the stench of damp and wee, and tonight we were dining on rack of lamb in sumptuous surroundings, with 5 star luxury.
We are not totally dismissive of Chile. I have absolutely no doubt that you could have the most amazing holiday here, with all the comforts of home. If we had got down to Patagonia it would almost certainly been breathtaking. It is all very civilised, with decent lodgings, no great shocks but not great surprises either. The mountains are pretty, but nothing as stunning as Peru. The lakes are nice, but nothing on Ontario. Its all very … European. It would have been a great place to start the trip.
However while we have been here, we have had several firsts:
1) Rhys’ first baby tooth came out (awww! He’s growing up!)
2) We had our first major political bit of unrest, with Pinochet’s death
3) We felt our first, and second, earthquakes
But more than this, it was the first time we weren’t goggling in amazement at everything we saw. We needed a rest, and we got it. And now we’re chomping at the bit again, and have learnt that we must plan ahead, and we like to keep moving. So – let’s go to the other side of the world, and country number seven!
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