Isla Chiloé

Isla Chiloé is amazingly beautiful. We spent two nights in a very rustic cabin directly above the Pacific coast. We had big windows overlooking the water, and at night the moon. The second night there was a big wind storm and we watched the moon and clouds over the wild water while listening to the wind. This place, Puñihuil, is very remote but easy to get to by bus. I´m amazed at how nice and helpful the bus drivers are in Chile. They stop the bus and help us load our big backpacks and they don´t seem to mind that we and all our bags are delaying their route. Since I don´t usually know our stop, I just tell the driver where we want to get off and he lets us know when we get there.

Our friends are returning to Colorado in a few days, and we travel farther south, by boat because we are almost at the end of the highway.

In Puerto Varas we almost met up with my aunt and uncle Pati and Peter, who are taking a cruise around Chile and Argetina, but we just missed them by two hours! We at least got to email with them about the places we are seeing.

As I hear from my mom in Minnesota that it´s been below zero and getting dark early, we´re enjoying that it´s early spring here and stays light until almost 9 p.m.!

We´ve been traveling faster since we are traveling with friends, and I haven´t kept up well with the blog, but I´m posting pictures o Flickr. Check out the sets called Puerto Varas and Isla Chiloé if you would like to see them.

Southern Chile at last!

This is the part of Chile we have been waiting to see! We met with our three friends in Temuco, then took a bus to Pucón. In the mountains near Pucón, we rented a beautiful cabin for five overlooking a green valley with a snowcapped peak in the background, at Los Pozones hot springs. We hiked during the day and soaked in the natural pools at night. We went into the cold river when we got too hot from soaking. Who could ask for anything more?!

Now we are in Puerto Varas, where we have another cabin, and in a few days we´ll take a ferry to Isla Chiloé. It´s amazingly beautiful here. The pictures are at flickr.com/photos/kimigary under the sets called Temuco, Pucón and Rafting.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all. Tonight we´ll have a nice dinner of fresh mussels in our cabin with friends Jeannine, Deanna and Lori.

Valparaíso, Santiago and El Quisco

Hi from the Santiago bus depot! We are preparing to head into southern Chile. Tonight we´ll take an all night bus and arrive in Temuco around 6 a.m. tomorrow. In Temuco, we´ll meet friends Jeannine, Deanna and Lori who are flying down from Colorado. For those of you who heard about the earthquake in northern Chile, it didn´t affect us since we´re in the south already.

After leaving La Serena, we spent a night at a youth hostel in Valparaíso. I always wanted to visit Valparaíso after reading an Isabel Allende novel that took place there. It´s a very unique city built on more than 40 hills or cerros. Each neighborhood is known by the name of its cerro. There are many asencores or cable cars to help you get up the steep cerros. And it´s a major port.



In Santiago, we visited my high school friend Olga, from the United World College, and her husband Rodrigo! Olga and Rodrigo took us all around Santiago, served us delicious food and showed us a great time. They are expecting a baby boy, Juan Ignacio, next month! We went to a scrumptious barbecue at Olga´s parents´ house. Olga´s parents have met many UWCers through the years, and we had fun remembering our high school friends.

Rodrigo is going to be an excellent and attentive dad! He is already practicing by making Olga breakfast in bed.



Santiago is a very modern city, with a few historic buildings scattered here and there. It has everything that is available in the U.S. Olga bought a sewing machine while we were visiting, in a huge department store that way outsizes Bed Bath and Beyond, and is located in one of the largest malls in Latin America.

The Latin American Summit was happening while we were in Santiago. Presidents from all over Latin America were here. We heard lots of news of the inflammatory remarks made by Venezuela´s Hugo Chavez, and how the king of Spain told him to shut up. Other than that, I´m afraid I can´t report on much of what the summit was actually about, but I still like hearing people mention "La Presidenta", Chile´s female president.

We also met Rodrigo´s mom, who VERY generously invited us to stay in her beach cabin in El Quisco, straight west of Santiago on the coast! What a wonderful gift! We spent three beautiful days there, sleeping, reading and just sitting on the beach. We got up now and then to eat a delicious empanada or seafood dish. It was absolutely wonderful. The town was quiet, as the tourist season has not yet started, and the cabin was beautiful complete with a kitchen and hot shower, etc. Thank you to Rodrigo´s family! And we wish Rodrigo´s dad a speedy recovery after his accident. It was really nice to spend some time with Olga, who was my classmate 16 years ago!



Now, on to Temuco and southern Chile, which is said to be absolutely beautiful!

We will miss Pedro

My good friend Pedro Medina passed away this week. Pedro has been a good friend to me for 17 years. I will treasure the memories of the good visits that I had with him last summer and in recent years. I posted a couple of pictures of Pedro in my September 7 blog entry. Pedro worked at the United World College, where I went to high school. He touched my life, and the lives of so many other students, and was a good friend to me ever since. Pedro was an inspiration to us all, always cheerful and full of energy and fun. My thoughts are with his family.

Politics, etc.

My good friend Orlando asked me to write a bit about politics, and the opinions I´m hearing down here. So I took some pictures of the political graffiti and art that I´ve seen here in La Serena.



Click on this picture to see more. I´m glad that I have not seen, in La Serena, any of the Nazi graffiti that I saw in Iquique. We did see a flier for an anti-fascism event in La Serena, and we decided to go.



Flyer for the Antifascist festival, against repression, domination, machismo, racism and sexism, held at El Chirimoyo.

El Chirimoyo, www.elchirimoyo.cl.nu, is a group of people who occupied an abandoned house in La Serena three years ago. Now, nine people live there, comunally. They have a garden, they cook together, they have a weight room and music room, and a pre-university. (In Chile, the schools don´t sufficiently prepare students for the college entrance exam. Rich students can go to an expensive pre-university where they will be prepared for this exam, but poor students don´t have this option and therefore sometimes can´t pass the exam and can´t go to college. El Chirimoyo´s pre-university is free for the people).

El Chirimoyo is very clean and open. They have a people´s library, a very clen yard with a garden and an outdoor oven, a stage, benches and chirimoyo trees. They let us walk around and take some pictures. Click for more.



They have been in the house for three years, and they have running water, gas and electricity. This is the second house that the group has occupied.

The anti-fascist event started with a discussion about human rights. There were about 12 to 15 people sitting in a circle. Most, but not all, younger than I am. They talked about human rights issues that they have identified, such as police profiling and brutality, religious freedm in schols, the low minimum wage, the insufficient social welfare system, inequality in schools (large class sizes and poor instruction in poorer schools, assigning students to tracks so that they can´t go to college, uncomfortable school uniforms for girls, college entrance based on a standardized test that students are not prepared to pass). Someone commented that when we talk about human rights we often think about the horrible things that happened in Chile in the 1970s, under Pinochet, and we think that torture is the only human rights abuse, but that there are many other human rights abuses that continue to happen, such as the above-mentioned problems and also what the U.S. is doing in Iraq.

What impressed me most was that this group of young Chileans was talking about all of the same issues that we struggle with in the United States. The conversation probably could have taken place in any country in the world. We all want the same basic human rights.

After the discussion, a lawyer came and spoke about people´s rights in terms of police, during an arrest, the requirement to show your ID, and rights related to search. The next speaker spoke about anarchism.

Later we went to the tocata, where a punk band played. We had a chance to talk to some of the people we had seen during the day, and to look at fliers and zines. A few of the things we learned:

Mapuche political prisoners are on a hunger strike since Oct. 10. They are fighting for the release of the Mapuche (indigenous from the Temuco area) political prisoners and for the demilitarization of conflict zones. From what I understand, the Mapuche political prisoners are in jail because they tried to reclaim their land, which has been taken from them. They protest because the state protects the interests of the rich businesses such as mining and forestry and hydroelectric plants, while a 17-yr-old Mapuche boy was killed by police while helping to reclaim his community´s land. The Mapuche political prisoners are on a liquid hunger strike.

Abortion is illegal in Chile, and there are more than 200,000 illegal abortions every year, many under horrible conditions. You can be put in jail for having an abortion. We wonder whether it will be possible to get a safe abortion in the U.S. by the time we return.

You can make the Spanish language less sexist by using @ or x or = in place of the o or a in order to remove gender from words like compañeros or compañeras (which become compañer@s or companerxs or companer=s).

My good friend Orlando asked me to ask people in Chile what they think of George Bush. Well the truth is that I am happy to be on a whole separate continent from George at the moment, but I did ask one person, a young man who was staying at our boarding house. He told me that he thinks that Bush is not very intelligent. In fact, he is stupid. And he has a lot of power, and that is a dangerous thing. The truth, he said, is that George is like a monkey. I guess the caricature artist who drew the below picture would agree:



In other news, I rented a bike and went for a beautiful bike ride down the coast to the town of Coquimbo. We took a tour to the Humbolt Penguin Reserve, on a nearby island where we saw penguins, sea lions, cormoran, a tiny sea otter (nutria), pelicans and other species of birds. We saw wild guanaco, the ancestors of the domesticated llama and alpaca, on the way. And we had a wonderful guide named Felipe, who we have run into by accident twice during the past two days! We went to a play, The Misunderstanding, by Camus. The play was free! We went to a cultural festival in La Serena, and we took a day trip to the sunny Elqui Valley. I´ll post pictures of these activities on Flickr.

We said goodbye to the French family who shared our boarding house with us for over a week. We became fast friends with their children, and I miss the giggling in the morning!

We will stay in La Serena for a couple more days, when we will go to Santiago to visit my United World College friend Olga, who lives there and is about to have a baby! Then we will head south to meet several friends in Temuco, to start our tour of the Lake District. We miss all our friends and family at home, and hope you are well!

La Serena, Chile, and you can call us tonight or tomorrow

I love the place where we´re staying in La Serena. It´s a private house belonging to a woman named Iris. She lives here, and also rents out three or four rooms. We have full access to the kitchen and the clothes washing machine. And we can receive calls on the telephone! It is expensive for us to call you (and we can´t do it from Iris´house) but it´s very cheap for you to call us from the U.S. So if you want to catch up with us by phone, tonight or tomorrow night (Halloween) is the time. The cheapest way by far is to buy an international phone card for $5 or $10. You can call us from the US at 011-56-51-225175.

We are one time zone east of the U.S. Eastern time. And it´s best to call us after 8 our time. So that means between 6 and 8 p.m. Central time, or 5 and 7 p.m. Mountain time.

We´re really happy to hear from you by email, or by blog comments, too.

So about the place we´re staying: It´s really nice to be able to cook our own meals after so many restaurants. I have really missed Gary´s delicious cooking! Yesterday he made spaghetti with Chilean vegetables like sapayo, which is a type of squash. The kitchen is clean and Iris showed us how to clean the vegetables with a beach disinfectant. You have to do that when traveling because many vegetables are irrigated with contaminated water (probably contaminated with sewage) so it´s important to cook them or peel them, and to be extra safe you can disinfect them. The disinfectant contains bleach and so is probably not healthy in the long term, either. Clean water is really not to be taken for granted. Water pollution is one of the biggest problems worldwide.

The house is just a regular house with no sign or advertising. Iris fills her rooms by going to the bus depot every day and approaching tourists as they get off buses. That´s how we met her.

We share a bathroom with a French family. Two parents and two kids, ages 5 and 2 1/2. They are traveling for 3 1/2 months, on a route similar to ours. They have been to Peru and Bolivia too. It would be nice to be fluent in multiple languages like my mom is! The little 2 1/2 year old and I just say "hola" to each other. Yesterday we played a game involving pointing at pictures of animals. I say the name of the animal in Spanish, then she repeats it perfectly. She says the name in French and I try to repeat it. She corrects me and I try again. I´ll never be able to say horse in French. Then I point at the tiger and roar. She laughs, then points at the horse and says hee-haw, exactly like a donkey! I guess she must have seen some burros in her travels.

There is wonderfully hot water here, any time we want it. When we want hot water, we light the pilot light on the gas water heater. The water becomes instantly hot. We turn off the gas when we´re done, and the water is instantly cold again. I don´t understand how it heats the water so quickly. It doesn´t store a tank of hot water, as our hot water heaters do in the U.S. Some hotels have an electric water heater in the shower. It´s a device attached to the shower head. In my experience it didn´t actually work. But the gas one is great.

I uploaded our latest pictures, on Flickr. Just go to flickr.com/photos/kimigary and look at the photos for Antofagasta, Chañaral, Pan de Azucar and La Serena.

Hasta luego!

Chañaral, Chile

Hi from Chañaral! In Chile, we´ve been traveling on the Pullman bus line, which has very nice service complete with a sandwich and soft drink at lunch time. From Iquique to Antofagasta, we rode on the top level of a double decker bus, in the very front! That was a nice view. I´m reading an Isabel Allende novel, La Ciudad de las Bestias. It´s easy to read while riding through the Atacama desert, because there are no curves in the road, and very little to look at!

We are eating lots of soup here, especially seafood soup! We´ve eaten tons of seafood that we can´t name, in Spanish or in English.

Chañaral is a tiny little village on the coast. When we arrived, we walked down to the beach where we met our new friends Ricardo and Sylvia, from Santiago. Ricardo is an engineer for Codelco, the local copper mine that´s owned by the Chilean government. He showed us an expanse of greenish sand on the beach, and told us that it´s caused by pollution from the mine.

Since the 1910s, the mine was owned by an American company, first Anaconda and later Andes. They had a canal that brought the tailings down to the beach in front of Chañaral. The tailings contained that greenish contaminant, which settled all over the beach and in the ocean. The tailings were mixed with sand. Eventually, so much sand and tailings were deposited that they raised the beach, causing the shoreline to move away from the town of Chañaral. Now, you have to walk across the greenish expanse of sand to get from Chañaral to the beach. The contaminants killed off all of the marine life. This contamination went on until 1970, when Salvador Allende nationalized the mine and it became Codelco, owned by the Chilean government. Codelco continued to dump contaminants in the same way until 1990, when they changed to a new and supposedly better system. Now, the marine life has come back but the beach is still heavily contaminated.

Another local told us that a lot of people die of cancer aroud here, and that Codelco built the decorative lighthouse that is above Chañaral in order to appease the local people. The lighthouse is nowhere close to the shore and is supposed to draw tourists, but I don´t think it draws very many.

Sylvia is from the southern tip of Chile, Punta Arenas, and is descended from Croatian immigrants. Sylvia and Ricardo offered to give us a ride back to town, and ended up giving us a tour of the area. We drove toward Pan de Azucar park until we could see the island from the distance. We saw cactus (so there actually are a few plants in the Atacama desert!) and a dried plant that´s like a wooden coil. Then Sylvia and Ricardo invited us to their house for a delicious meal of toast with fish, avocado, scrambled eggs and fruit! They live in Barquito, an area of housing built by the mine. They are only here part of the year, and their main residence is in Santiago. Sylvia sometimes stays in Santiago, and sometimes comes to Chañaral and paints beautiful ocean scenes.

After dinner, Ricardo and Sylvia gave us a tour of Barquito. Barquito is mining housing built when the mine was American-owned. It was segregated. The American workers lived in one section which consists of individual houses. The Chilean workers lived in another section, more barracks style. All of the housing is built of Oregon Pine, brought from the US and unusual here where there are no trees and people build of stone, cement or adobe. Termites are devouring the Oregon Pine. Now, the mine has few employees because it subcontracts everything to other companies. So the mine sold the housing, and the houses are mostly owned by individuals now.

Ricardo and Sylvia drove us back to our hotel (and the downtown area where a street dance happened to be in progress -- and the band was staying at our hotel) but not before loading us up with good food including canned fish and herbal tea. After spending all of our time with each other lately, it was nice to spend the evening with another couple, and to make new friends.

Today we went to Pan de Azucar National Park, in hopes of seeing penguins. We weren{t able to see the penguins, but we did see jellyfish! I´ll post pictures of our day at the park later, but the connection here is too slow. Tomorrow we leave for La Serena, where we plan to spend a couple of days before heading south to Valparaíso and Santiago! In Santiago, we´ll visit my friend Olga from the World College!

Meanwhile, my mom did a bit of research on the Uros islands, the reed islands that we visited in Peru. Here is what she found: Wikipedia says: The Uros Islands were built for defensive purposes. If there was danger (probably from invasion?), the islands could (with difficulty) be moved to a safer place. There are 42 islands in the group. Each island lasts about 30 years before it rots away, and they keep adding new reeds to the tops constantly as the undersides rot away. There are about 3000 members of the Uros tribe, but most live on the mainland, and only a few hundred live on the islets now. The Uros were a pre-Incan tribe. They traded with the Aymara tribe on the mainland, and then interbred with them, and finally abandoned their language (about 500 years ago) and spoke Aymara. Then they were conquered by the Incas. Of the 42 islands, 10 are tourist showcases. About 10 families can live on each of the larger islands, with only 2 or 3 on each smaller one. They do not reject technology (hence the sheet metal buildings you saw!). They have elementary school on the islands, but must go to the mainland for higher learning.

Imagine moving your island!