Travel Moments

I am completely in love with Santiago Chile. I am leaving today to go to Valparaiso, which is just an hour or two away, and I have not ruled out coming back to Santiago for a few days. The city is this amazing mix of South America, Europe, and North America. There was a lot of wealth in Chile around the turn of the century, mostly from mining in the north, and the wealthy of Santiago had a fascination with Europe, especially Paris. Thus there are all of these streets and buildings that are Europeanesque. The inside of the Central Market is wrought iron and florid, very Art Noveau. At the intersection of Paris and Londres (really, those are the names of the streets) the buildings are stone and the street is cobble stoned and tree lined. On top of all of these old beauty Santiago is fresh faced and modern. I am currently sitting in the National Library, a building that would fit in in Paris, but I am in a computer area that is enclosed by a very stylish, modern glass wall that goes up about 6 feet. This mix is everywhere in Santiago. There is culture and art. There are cafes and sushi restaurants and hip bar areas. There are cute little shops. There are people juggling for cars stopped at lights. Santiago is a major metropolitan area with a serious pollution problem but it is also green. There are parks everywhere! There are tree lined streets everywhere! But you are still in South America and that is evident as well. It's just a wonderful mix of everything and I am totally in love with it.

I have been in the Santiago area for about a week. I first went to Buin and Valdivia de Paine, which are a suburb and little town outside of Santiago that you will probably never read about in a guidebook. There is nothing happening in Buin or Valdivia de Paine. I loved my time there. I went to see Carlos, the Chilean who had been staying with my CS host in Arica. My day with him was one of those beautiful travel moments where everything that happened was simple, untouristy, and delightful. Sometimes the best moments of travel can be as simple as having a hot shower, drying off with a big, soft, luxorious towel (after weeks of small, useful, but uncomfortable travel towelness) after a night bus ride, and a breakfast waiting for you after the shower. Carlos showed me around Buin and stuffed me full of food. I tried a Chileno, which is essentially two sort of crackeresque cookies filled with dulce de leche and covered with a sort of hard meringue, and sopaipillas, which is a bread kind of thing made out of pumpkin that tastes nothing like pumpkin. Then we went out to lunch with parents where I ate some sort of stew with a slab of beef on top. I cannot remember the name but it sounded like Shakakan but with an R somewhere in there. The best part of the trip was just sitting with his family, drinking coffee, eating bread and jam, and talking about the United States, earthquakes (a very common topic of conversation in Chile) and other natural disasters.

Over the weekend I went hiking with a group of CS folk from Santiago. There were 8 of us in total, 6 Chileans, one Peruvian, and me. We hiked about 40 kilometers in all. The first day was a little brutal. It was cloudy, windy, and cold. We lost the trail for a while and were scrambling through brush and mud. We eventually made it to camp, struggled to put tents in the howling wind, and eventually were all cozy inside one tent, sheltered from the wind. It was a great night, exactly like a night in a tent in the USA. We played games that were basically identical to the games one would play in the States, laughed a lot, and had a good time. The next day we hiked up to a glacier and were sorely disappointed. We had been told that it would take an hour to get there, it took closer to 3. We were at nearly 4,000 meters so every 5 steps we were out of breath and the day before we'd hiked 17 km and our legs were already tired. Then the glacier was tiny and we had been looking at it for the last 1.5 hours without even realizing it. Oh well, We had fun anyway!

Since then I've just been hanging out in Santiago, soaking up the ambience, walking around a lot, going to different sights and such. My first night here I went to a karoake bar with my CS host. It was pretty awesome, especially seeing people join in with the karoake singer to belt out these Chilean songs that I had never heard.

After Valparaiso I don't quite know where I am heading. South, that much I know, but I'm struggling to decide WHERE in the south. Southern Chile is where all of the good stuff is, all of the volcanoes and green and cool national parks. There is pretty much too much to see! Travelers (versus tourists) seek to find a delicate balance between seeing the highlights of a place and staying away from the places cluttered full of other foreigners with their backpacks and guidebooks. This is not an easy task. When you prepare for a trip usually the first thing that you do is buy a guidebook (or if you are Leah you go and check like 14 out from the library). For a traveler the guidebook serves as a reference. For the tourist it is a bible. Guidebooks are incredibly useful. They are also annoying and a pain in the ass. The guidebook takes vast enormous countries with a huge number of towns, cities, parks, hostels, restaurants, and activities and tries to narrow it down to the ones that are probably worth your time or easy for you to visit. This is great, but also means that everyone ends up at the same places. Its not that hard to stay away from the hostels and the restaurants written about in Lonely Planet (Couchsurfing makes this way easier!) but deciding what places a guidebook talks about to go to...therein lise my current issue. I suppose that ultimately it doesn't matter. After all, Buin isn't in a guidebook and I loved my time there much more than my days in Valle Elqui, which all the guidebooks rave about.

**I promise that my next post will have pictures! Really. I swear**