Near Chaiten, we visited Parque Pumalin with a guide named Nicolas, who is originally from Canada. The morning started out in a New Mexico sort of way. We showed up at Nicolas' office at 8:30, as instructed. Nicolas showed up 15 minutes later, with a van full of travelers he had just picked up from the ferry. He told us he was having a paperwork problem with one of his vans, and a mechanical problem with the other van, and there would be a little delay. He said his secretary didn't show up, and he asked me if I would run his office for a few minutes while he worked on the paperworkm problem.
So Gary and I, and Grayson from Utah sat in the office. I took a phone message and sold a couple of bus tickets, and we got to know other travelers from Germany and the U.S. who came by to wait for Nicolas and the tour. By NOON, Nicolas had resolved the van problem and we boarded the van, a total of 9 passengers. Nicolas apologized by giving us each a piece of chocolate and playing a lively tune on a traditional stringed instrument.
But the day in Parque Pumalin was well worth the delay. We hiked in an alerce forest among alerce trees, some up to 3,000 years old. We ate nalca, the giant rhubarb plant. Every square inch of space in this rain forest is covered with plant species, moss, ferns, etc. Many of the species here, like the monkey trees, are very very old and existed during the jurassic period. I can imagine the dinosaurs eating nalca and walking among these trees and ferns!
We hiked along a rushing river to several beautiful waterfalls, and we enjoyed getting to know the other travelers in our group. We did not see the pudu, or tiny deer that is a foot and a half tall, but on the way back we watched the sun set over the pacific ocean behind islands.
Parque Pumalin is a nearly 3,000 square km privately owned park in the Patagonian rainforest. It's owned by an American named Douglas Thompkins, who established the park to preserve the environment. From what I heard, Thompkins and his wife started North Face, Patagonia and Esprit companies.
The rainforest in the park is so dense that you could never hike through it without a trail. The trails are really well kept and with wooden steps in many places where it is steep, and wooden suspension bridges over the rivers. But the vast majority of the park is trail free and road free, and I am reminded of how important it is to preserve this space, not only so that people like us can hike the trails but also just so that this place, teeming with life, can exist.
We wouldn't have needed a guide to hike in the park, but the problem is getting there. It's safe and easy to hitchhike in Chile, and we have done it, but on the road to the park you could wait half a day before seeing a vehicle.
The next day we took a 12-hour bus ride to Coyhaique. The driver, Juan Carlos, is a friend of Nicolas. And since Chaiten is such a tiny town, we had already met 7 of the 10 other passengers on the bus. Five were on our tour to the park, and two men from France are the ones I sold bus tickets to.
Many of our fellow travelers are college aged, but we also meet quite a few people in their 30s. We see people in their 40s and 50s too, but often we don't meet them. I think they tend to take package tours and stay at more expensive hotels, while we always travel independently and budget-style. There is a 'bus aleman' or German Bus that is a big red vehicle for 16 people with seats and beds and cooking facilities. It rode the ferry with us to Chaiten. The German Bus makes trips through this area every two weeks, full of German travelers. We have seen few American travelers until now, when there are more US college students on winter break. Some who have been studying abroad in Chile are now on break and traveling.
Our driver stopped every now and then so that we could take pictures of a fjord or glacier or river or mountains. All but one of us are foreign travelers, mostly from Germany, the U.S. or France. One passenger is from Chile. She is going to Puyuhapi, a tiny village, to join her boyfriend who has found a job there driving a backhoe. Puyuhapi is in a gorgeous location on a fjord surrounded by mountains, but there is absolutely nothing there but the hot springs and a road construction project. As it came into view the young woman began to cry.
In our bus, we passed two bicyclists who we had met on the ferry a few days ago. We waved at them, and they waved back, recognizing us too. By bicycle, it takes about 6days to get from Chaiten to Coyhaique on this gravel Carretera Austral. Buses travel the route several times per week, and now are filled mostly with travelers. Juan Carlos said that in the past more Chileans used the route, but now that Asian cars are cheap to buy here, mostly people drive cars rather than taking the bus on this route.
Juan Carlos has to plan his bus route around the schedule of the only gas station, located mid-route in La Junta. We are on the Carretera Austral, the main and only road going south through Chilean Patagonia. This major highway is gravel and 1 1/2 lanes wide. It has washboards like the gravel road I grew up on. Passing cars have to pull to the side of the road. But Chile is in the process of paving this highway. Juan Carlos opposes the paving, as it will change the nature of tourism in this area. This 12 hour trip will become 5 1/2 hours, and people will breeze through the area without stopping. Before the Carretera Austral was built in the early 1980s, this road was a wagon track for horses and carts, and it took a four wheel drive vehicle all day to go 200 kilometers.
Photos are at flickr.com/photos/kimigary under Chaiten to Coyhaique.
Monday, December 17, 2007
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Chaiten, Chile (revised!)
Apologies to those who read this blog before I edited it! The electricity in Chaiten went off as I was drafting. They announced the shutoff on the radio, and I had just enough time to publish as is. I{ve tried to fix the photos here, although I am creating more errors since I can{t make an apostrophe on this keyboard! -- K
Our friends from Colorado returned to the U.S. a couple of days ago, and now Gary and I are on our own again, heading farther south in Chile.
We went to a cultural encuentro in the village of Dalcahue, which reminded me of a county fair. There were lots of booths of traditional food. Behind each booth, there was an outdoor "kitchen" where the food was being prepared. I think this is what is known as an asado, or barbecue, but it is much more involved than any BBQ I´ve ever seen. People were roasting all kinds of meat on homemade spits with wooden poles that men turned by hand. Others made a kind of potato pancake that was made of dough wrapped around a giant rolling pin that someone turned over a fire. Others boiled empanadas or shellfish in a pot over an open fire.
But the most exciting part of the festival was the house moving. They attached cattle to yokes, and the cattle pulled a cross across a field and through a swamp as a couple hundred spectators ran along side it! This is an important tradition here, although I don{t exactly understand why!
We spent a night in Quellón, on the southern end of Isla Chiloé. Quellón also happens to be at the south end of the Pan American Highway, which stretches up through South America, through Mexico City and through Fairbanks, Alaska. We stayed in a hotel, a bit upscale compared to our usual hospedaje digs, with big windows overlooking the ocean. From our room, we watched the sun set over the water. This town is very pretty, but it´s ALWAYS RAINING! This is a lot like the trip we took a few years ago, up coastal British Columbia and Alaska.
Yesterday we took an all-day ferry ride back to the mainland of Chile, to the village of Chaitén. The only way to get to Chaitén from the north is by boat, but there is a highway heading south, which we will take. This highway is relatively new and has helped connect southern Chile to the rest of the country, although I´ve heard that the highway is unpaved for the most part, and we´ve noticed that bus tickets are more expensive down here. There is one ATM in town, which doesn´t accept my card, but luckily I got some extra cash before coming here.
Finding lodging can be interesting in Chile. What often happens is that we get off a ferry or bus and a woman approaches us offering a room. These are small time business people who rent out a few rooms in their house. They are often the cheapest places to stay, and nice because we get access to the kitchen and sometimes the clothes washing machine.
In Chaitén, we were approached by a woman offering a room for 5,000 pesos per person (US $10), with free breakfast and internet access. A second woman ran up shouting that she had a room for 4,000 pesos per person (US $8). We chose the first place, based on gut instinct I think. As our new hosts drove us to the hospedaje, the woman we didn´t choose gave our new hosts the bird.
Like most hospedajes, our room is very basic, just a room with a bed, and a shared bathroom. Downstairs, there is a wood burning kitchen stove where if you´re lucky, the señora bakes bread. (Here, she makes toast on a Chilean toaster over a wood stove).
I was curious about the cheaper hospedaje, and so we checked it out today. Photo below. All I can say is that it looks like a farm labor camp to me. But this place is the exception, and most everywhere we have stayed has been decent, if very basic.
The rest of our pictures are on flickr, flickr.com/photos/kimigary. Look under Isla Chiloe and Chaiten for pictures corresponding to this blog entry.
Our friends from Colorado returned to the U.S. a couple of days ago, and now Gary and I are on our own again, heading farther south in Chile.
We went to a cultural encuentro in the village of Dalcahue, which reminded me of a county fair. There were lots of booths of traditional food. Behind each booth, there was an outdoor "kitchen" where the food was being prepared. I think this is what is known as an asado, or barbecue, but it is much more involved than any BBQ I´ve ever seen. People were roasting all kinds of meat on homemade spits with wooden poles that men turned by hand. Others made a kind of potato pancake that was made of dough wrapped around a giant rolling pin that someone turned over a fire. Others boiled empanadas or shellfish in a pot over an open fire.
But the most exciting part of the festival was the house moving. They attached cattle to yokes, and the cattle pulled a cross across a field and through a swamp as a couple hundred spectators ran along side it! This is an important tradition here, although I don{t exactly understand why!
We spent a night in Quellón, on the southern end of Isla Chiloé. Quellón also happens to be at the south end of the Pan American Highway, which stretches up through South America, through Mexico City and through Fairbanks, Alaska. We stayed in a hotel, a bit upscale compared to our usual hospedaje digs, with big windows overlooking the ocean. From our room, we watched the sun set over the water. This town is very pretty, but it´s ALWAYS RAINING! This is a lot like the trip we took a few years ago, up coastal British Columbia and Alaska.
Yesterday we took an all-day ferry ride back to the mainland of Chile, to the village of Chaitén. The only way to get to Chaitén from the north is by boat, but there is a highway heading south, which we will take. This highway is relatively new and has helped connect southern Chile to the rest of the country, although I´ve heard that the highway is unpaved for the most part, and we´ve noticed that bus tickets are more expensive down here. There is one ATM in town, which doesn´t accept my card, but luckily I got some extra cash before coming here.
Finding lodging can be interesting in Chile. What often happens is that we get off a ferry or bus and a woman approaches us offering a room. These are small time business people who rent out a few rooms in their house. They are often the cheapest places to stay, and nice because we get access to the kitchen and sometimes the clothes washing machine.
In Chaitén, we were approached by a woman offering a room for 5,000 pesos per person (US $10), with free breakfast and internet access. A second woman ran up shouting that she had a room for 4,000 pesos per person (US $8). We chose the first place, based on gut instinct I think. As our new hosts drove us to the hospedaje, the woman we didn´t choose gave our new hosts the bird.
Like most hospedajes, our room is very basic, just a room with a bed, and a shared bathroom. Downstairs, there is a wood burning kitchen stove where if you´re lucky, the señora bakes bread. (Here, she makes toast on a Chilean toaster over a wood stove).
I was curious about the cheaper hospedaje, and so we checked it out today. Photo below. All I can say is that it looks like a farm labor camp to me. But this place is the exception, and most everywhere we have stayed has been decent, if very basic.
The rest of our pictures are on flickr, flickr.com/photos/kimigary. Look under Isla Chiloe and Chaiten for pictures corresponding to this blog entry.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
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.
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.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
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.
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.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
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!
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!
Thursday, November 8, 2007
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.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
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!
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!
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