Chile, Day 22

Stay away from El Mismo...

I have to say, I’m thrilled to be leaving Santiago. Not thrilled to be leaving Chile, as I basically liked it, but Santiago…get me out of here and get me out of here fast.

I’m leaving Santiago more or less with the same kind of ridiculous encounter that I had in my first hour here when a belligerent drunk took a swing at me as I was trying to photograph a building. Tonight, the owner of a restaurant where I went to eat, El Mismo (511 Monjitas Street), which is a “local” establishment more or less next door to my hotel, asked me where I was from. I said, “Estados Unidos.” He scowled and replied that in Chile people call my country, “Putos Unidos.” I didn’t know what this meant, but by his demeanor I immediately wondered if he was insulting me. Not that I’m paranoid, but he didn’t seem very pleased that I was there. This feeling was reinforced when the man, who at 50-something should have known better, kind of dropped my food on the table and wouldn’t respond to my waves or calls of “Señor” to get the bill, even though we were twenty feet from each other and no one else was there. When I got back to the hotel I looked up the word “puto” and found that it means “homosexual,” but in a more derogatory way.

So I went downstairs and mentioned this to the hotel manager, who speaks English. He told me that in Chile the United States is often call “Estados Juntos,” and "juntos" is synonymous with "unidos." However, the restaurant owner didn’t use the word “Estados” in his response. Also, even though my Spanish is bad, I can definitely distinguish between a Spanish “j”-sound and a “p”-sound. I can also tell when there is or is not an “n” in a word. And since I’d never heard the word “puto” before, it’s an odd coincidence that this is what I remembered and then looked up. But the kicker is that he was rude. Also, not surprisingly, his food wasn’t very good.

So I’ll put up a photo of his restaurant along with the address so that anyone who happens to be in Santiago and staying in the vicinity of Mosqueto and Monjitas in the El Centro district – for example, at the Andes Hostel or Hotel Ciudad de Vitoria, which are a stone’s throw away from the restaurant – doesn’t support his business.

Like I said, I’m happy to be leaving Santiago. I’m sure Santiago has many nice people – millions, in fact – but I have had too many bad experiences with rude people in this city to leave with positive memories. Chiloe I loved. But Santiago…

Chile, Day 21

Women on the corner of Santiago's Monjitas and Mosqueto streets, celebrating their new president.

Well, as many of you probably know already, Chile elected a new president today: Sebastian Pinera, a Harvard-educated billionaire who, according to the AP News wire, helped popularize credit cards in Chile, and whose fortune includes a significant share in LAN (Chile’s main airline, which I’ve flown all the time during my trip, thus putting money unwittingly into his pocket), a national TV channel, and a professional soccer team. Pinera has promised to produce a million jobs during his time as president and double Chile’s median annual income to $24,000 -- all within four years. Good luck with that. The biggest surprise about his victory, at least to me, and I know very little about Chilean politics, is that he’s right-wing – his coalition once strongly supported Pinochet’s dictatorship. And apparently he’s quite popular in Santiago. His victory was declared at around the dinner hour, and people poured out onto the streets waving the Chilean flag, waving Pinochet-for-President banners, shouting jubilantly, and driving around waving flags from their windows and honking, honking, honking. There were plenty of other people not celebrating, but I'm not sure if they were being reserved or had been backing the other candidate, Eduardo Frei.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. This morning I left Puerto Varas at 7:30 a.m. for a flight back to Santiago. The weather had improved, though I still couldn’t see either volcano due to the low-hanging clouds. It’s a shame I didn’t have time to hike up one of them, but there’s always the future.

I didn’t have time for the free breakfast at my hotel, which is too bad because it looked fantastic. Instead, I opted for a quick bite at an airport restaurant.

The airport in Puerto Varas has one restaurant: this one.

Again, I really wish I’d taken the time to eat at the hotel. I ordered pancakes and a double espresso. The latter was good – the caffeine got me going like the nice, mild drug that it is – but the former was basically a crepe drowning in a plate of brown goop.

Nothing like a week's worth of sugar and a bazillion calories for breakfast.

It was a bad choice. I’m not sure I’ve eaten anything so sweet in my life, and half my effort at downing the “pancakes" was expended on scraping the brown goop off of them. And if that wasn’t enough sweet stuff for me, the flight, as before, served three small packs of cookies in a decorative box. I passed on mine and just had water.

When I arrived in Santiago, the whole place was shut down. It was like a ghost city; no one was on the streets or sidewalks, and every business had its doors shuttered. That’s when I remembered that Chile would have a new president by the end of the day. However, I arrived at around lunchtime, and the ghost town-feel of the city was obviously going to pose problems for me. A few small, independent restaurants were open, and of course Burger King and Dunkin Donuts were doing business, but otherwise the city was on holiday.

At one o’clock I walked eight blocks toward downtown, sure that I’d find something near the Plaza de Armas, but nothing was open – just two hot dog stands, which were totally packed, and which I wasn’t interested in anyway. (No more completos! Ack!) Another eight blocks later, and very close to where I was staying – I should have gone there first – I found a small café called Antay and took a seat inside.

I had plenty of time to take photos here. As usual in Santiago, I'm apparently invisible to restaurant workers.

Despite the fact that I was sitting right in front of the counter where three workers were, I had to wait ten minutes for a menu. (I would have gotten one myself but it wasn’t obvious where they kept them.) I ended up ordering a frutilla drink (mixed fruit juice) and an “Italian No. 1,” which is a sandwich made with cheese, tomato, lettuce, arugula, and avocado.

It took at least twenty minutes to get either item, and when my sandwich came it had no avocado. It wasn’t a great loss. However, the sandwich had no flavor to speak of. For 1900 pesos ($3.89), maybe I should have expected as much. At least the frutilla (1800 pesos) was nice.

Since absolutely nothing was open today, I hung out in my room and finished a book I’d started in 2007. I’m glad I finished it. I’m not sure what took me so long to get through 200 pages.

For dinner tonight, I headed to Sicosis, one of the closest places to my hotel that was open. When I tried to order beer, my waiter, who had no patience for my Spanish, told me that no restaurants are allowed to serve alcohol on election night. Why it has to apply to foreign tourists, I have no idea…nah, just kidding. That was fine. I’ll just double my alcohol intake tomorrow.

The streets were empty when I arrived here, but by the time I left they were full of people again.

I ordered a smoked salmon pizza, which included hearts of palm, tomato, and cheese, and a crust that was very thick and hard – more hockey puck than anything else.

How to make salmon pizza: make regular pizza; dump a pound of lox on top of it; sprinkle with oregano; serve.

The smoked salmon made the pizza. Without it, I doubt it would have been very good. But for only 3500 pesos (~$7.15), I guess I can’t complain too much. In Santiago, at a sit-down restaurant, that’s cheap.

Things were starting to open again by the time I'd finished. I headed to the grocery store to buy water and fruit -- a nice option, since earlier the grocery store had been closed down, too.

Cars were honking constantly, which naturally made the neighborhood dogs bark like crazy and chase after them.

I hate it when parents recruit their kids to help them play politics. This guy in the photo isn't that young, but there were lots of grade school-age kids hanging from the windows of cars, blowing whistles and waving flags in support of Pinera's right-wing party.

Chile, Day 20

Sleep. I need more sleep.

Last night some kind of disco near the hostel where I was staying started blasting dance music at midnight and didn’t stop until 5 a.m. Then the drunks came out, singing loudly, followed by a chorus of dogs barking at them. I think I slept an hour. So, at 8:00 I went walking into Puerto Varas to look for a new place to stay, found one that said I could check in immediately, then returned to my hostel, gathered my things, and canceled the tour I’d arranged the night before. With one hour of sleep, I didn’t think I’d do very well on the long hiking trails of Osono Volcano. It was a good choice, despite the lack of anything to do today. Why? Because my new hotel is awesome, and because it’s been raining all day long – I can’t even see the volcanoes across Lake Llanquihue today.

Where are the volcanoes? And why isn't the weather cooperating?

Since I left my hostel before breakfast – they were half an hour late putting it together – I had to go into town for some morning grub. There were only three places that served breakfast at around 9 a.m., so I picked the one that looked most promising: Dane’s Café.

Actually, the interior of Dane’s is nothing special: a dark interior full of gray-brown wood (mostly gray) and cafeteria-style tables. But there’s something vaguely old and homey about it – perhaps it’s the bow-tied wait staff who seem like a throwback to an earlier time. Speaking of waiters, I didn’t have to sit for long before a menu was brought to me. The menu was hard to read, but one of the few breakfast items I found that wasn’t sweet was an omelette con verduras surtido, so I went with that.

I just noticed in this photo that my omelet looks like someone stuck their finger in it.

I wasn’t thrilled with what I was served: the omelet was bigger than I had hoped – it looked like they’d used four eggs to make it – and was filled with green beans, white asparagus, diced onions, and chopped tomatoes. Maybe I’m just not used to having so many green beans in an omelet, but they certainly dominated. The omelet was also very dry on the outside and runny on the inside. I ordered an expresso grande, which came with two small cookies, and polished it off rather quickly. I managed to get through most of the omelet, but I couldn’t finish the entire thing. Dane’s café is probably a better place than I’m giving it credit for, especially as other people’s meals looked just fine. One plus to this café is that it has an English menu available, and the people working there are nice and patient when dealing with gringos. In the entrance to the café there are numerous cakes for sale, along with wine and cigarettes. Because what goes better with cake than alcohol and tobacco?


Dane’s Café is at Del Salvador 441. Tel: 232-371.

From Dane’s I returned in the rain to my new hotel and tried unsuccessfully to nap. Then at some point I realized that I didn’t have my sunglasses with me (again), not that I needed them today, so I went back to my former hostel and picked them up. The friendly homeless dog that sits in the grass in front of the hostel door jumped all over me on my way out, probably thinking I had food, and he was drenched from the rain. I played with him a bit, but when his dirt began transferring to my hands too much I decided to go back to my hotel and take care of some travel arrangements and class prep.

When lunchtime rolled around, I hit a Japanese restaurant called Kaori that wasn’t terribly far, and was in a direction that allowed me to stroll at my leisure past Iglesia del Sagrado Corazón…in the rain.


Kaori is a charming little restaurant, with a large stone fireplace along the back wall.



I made sure there were Asian people working there, as I’ve had “Japanese” food in entirely South American-run Japanese restaurants that weren’t good at all. (Same-same with a "Vietnamese" restaurant in Quito, Ecuador.) Well, there was an Argentine of Japanese descent who ran Kaori, but the food wasn’t particularly Japanese to me. I ordered miso soup, a wakame (seaweed) and bamboo shoot salad, and two small handrolls (maki): one with salmon, and the other with crab, red pepper, and cream cheese. Well, they didn’t have any tofu, so I couldn’t have miso soup, but the owner asked me what other kind of soup I’d like and it would be on the house. At a loss, I asked for vegetable soup. The sushi came first, and indeed look very nice.


Unfortunately the pickled ginger tasted spoiled, and red bell pepper really doesn’t go very well in sushi. The salmon maki was excellent, however. After that my wakame-bamboo shoot salad arrived…without any kind of dressing. Also, instead of bamboo shoots there were bean sprouts, which, when I thought about it, made more sense anyway.

It was absolutely flavorless. A waitress eventually came by with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, but that wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. It was healthy, however, so I shoveled it down. The soup came last, and it wasn’t Japanese at all as far as I could tell, but it tasted fine.


With a glass of wine, the meal came to 10,800 pesos, or just over $22. It really wasn’t worth it, but the place is definitely nice and the owner quite attentive to his customers. He also speaks English very well.

Kaori is at 695 San Ignacio. Tel: 237-222. Email: kaori@telsur.cl. Web: http://www.interpatagonia.com/kaori/index_i.html

The rain continued all day, and by the time dinner rolled around it was coming down hard and with gusty winds. I took a seat at the hotel restaurant and watched people – tourists, I guess – walk up the hill to the hotel, bent against the wind and rain, without umbrellas or raingear.

I don't usually stay in hotels with dining rooms this nice.

I tsk-ed them from my warm, dry, comfortable seat, and laughed loudly and slapped my thigh when I thought they saw me through the window, though I probably only made the waitresses think I’m crazy. Still, I had food to order, so I beat my chest with my fists and shouted, “Menu!” Thankfully, a waitress hurried one over to me. I ordered a salad with lettuce, tomatoes, goat cheese, bell peppers, eggplant, and zucchini, and a plate of panzotti pasta with a rich cream sauce that included crab and walnuts.



I had absolutely no complaints with this meal, though it was about five or six bites more than I should have eaten. That’s the problem with being a tourist and not wanting to waste food – I feel like I have to eat everything, and I usually do…which is exactly why I’m afraid to step on the bathroom scale that the hotel provided me.

Chile, Day 19

Osorno Volcano looking out over Lake Llanquihue.

Today I left Castro, in Isla Grande de Chiloe (it’s South America’s second-largest island), rather reluctantly. I really liked Chiloe, but I felt like I’d seen much of what there was to see, and in any case I wanted to spend a couple days in Chile’s Lakes District, and specifically Puerto Varas. With this latter idea in mind, I grabbed a 10:10 a.m. bus to Puerto Montt. (In the bus station, I watched, off and on for ten minutes, a custodian in his office watching television through a bottle of yellow liquid soap. I have no idea why he was so intent on watching TV this way, but it was funny. I also got shat on by a bird.) My reluctance to leave was all the greater as we passed northern Chiloe’s rolling pastureland and numerous lakes under sunny skies. Three hours later, I stepped off the bus, grabbed my bag out of cargo, and got a taxi to Puerto Varas. By two o’clock I was checked in to a new hostel, and a few minutes later I found myself wandering along the lakeshore, staring in disbelief at two beautiful snow-capped volcanoes, Osorno and Calbuco, rising up majestically from the other side of Lake Llanquihue.


The lake's beach, or what little there was of it, was packed with sunbathers and swimmers, though I was told that the water was extremely cold.


Since it was already late in the day, I didn’t dawdle at the lake, though it was tempting. Rather, I took the hostel-owner’s recommendation to have lunch at a restaurant only a block and a half away called Donde El Gordito.


It's a small restaurant, and I was lucky to find a table at 2:30 p.m. I ordered fried congrio (conger eel) in a creamy shellfish sauce (6800 pesos, ~$13.80; the menu had it listed cheaper – oh well).

Admittedly, this photo makes the dish look a little gross. But it tasted very nice. That shellfish sauce was amazing.

And when they say shellfish sauce, they mean lots and lots of shellfish, as well as small shrimp and scallops. It was a huge amount of food, and there seemed to be as much shellfish as congrio on my plate. It was an excellent meal, though my side of two whole boiled potatoes was more than I could deal with. The family that runs this restaurant is very friendly, and they seem to have many regulars coming here. They often exchange kisses on the cheek with customers, and then invariably wish them “Suerte!” with a wave when they leave. There’s also a photo of the owner with Anthony Bourdain, who apparently came here when filming his No Reservations – Chile episode.

Donde El Gordito is located at San Bernardo 560, Interior Mercado Municipal. Tel: 233-425.

After lunch I decided to walk off that rich shellfish sauce, and started by climbing up San Francisco Avenue to see the Iglesia del Sagrado Corazón, a giant of a church built in 1915 that towers over the rest of Puerto Varas. I passed through a small, pretty park with a fountain in the middle of it and a shrine to the Virgin Mary being attended to by a young woman and her little boy.


I climbed up a small hill behind the shrine, where my view was almost assaulted by the site of the enormous church and the bright blue sky all around it. When I went inside, I was the only person there, and it was a very serene place to be alone.




Puerto Varas is known for its German influences, which are found most readily in the local architecture, food, and the people themselves. Sagrado Corazón Church, for example, is meant to resemble the Marienkirche of southwestern Germany’s Black Forest, or Schwarzwald. Since I’ve never been to Germany, I have no idea if the resemblance is strong. But it does feel somewhat European here, as much of Chile does, and the architecture is certainly different than what one finds in Santiago or Valparaiso.

I continued walking through Puerto Varas for another hour or more, and at one point, as I was turning around on Pasaje Ricko, I decided to sit down for a cortado at a tiny, uber-charming café called Emporio Almacen Haritz.


The woman running the café was very nice, but she got to talking to other people for about fifteen minutes before she finally decided to make my drink. And when it came, it was lukewarm and tasted like water.


Still, the setting itself was probably worth the 1100 pesos she charged me (~$2.20).

When I got back to my hostel I decided to arrange for an individual tour of Osorno Volcano, which is costing me 35,000 pesos (~$71). It seems a bit much since we’ll be traveling by local bus, but…I’ll just have to wait until tomorrow comes before I can determine if the tour is worth it.

Once I had this done, and had rested for a bit, I went out to get dinner. I was waylaid by a very friendly homeless dog that the hostel has sort of adopted, and by the time I’d gotten away from it I was covered in dog hair and my hands were filthy. I figured I’d wash them at whatever restaurant I went to, but where I ended up the bathrooms had no soap. So, I decided to eat with the hand I managed not to pet the dog with.

I went to a place just down the street from my hostel called El Reloj.



It was a friendly little restaurant, and not being super-hungry I opted for a chicken sandwich with tomato and avocado. I also thought a pisco sour was in order – not for any particular reason, but just, well, because. It was good. A pisco sour might be in order tomorrow, too.


The chicken sandwich arrived and was not very good. It was like hot chicken salad, and the meat was so soft I didn’t really have to chew it. But it was only 2500 pesos (~$5), and it was maybe the cheapest thing on the menu. What more could I expect?

This makes me feel ill just looking at it. Not that it was awful. I just wasn't in the mood for what I got.

True to my deteriorating eating habits, and probably my health, I had to go with a piece of raspberry pie for dessert.


It was pretty decadent, though not as sweet as I’d thought it would be. Just as well, as I really don’t need the extra sugar.

El Reloj is at San Francisco 310. Tel: 312-475.

Chile, Day 18

The dogs were fairly quiet last night. Just a couple of “soft bursts” of barking at around 1:30 and 4 a.m., but nothing too irritating. Since I’d arranged to take another tour today, I had to wake up at 7:30, shower, eat, and prep what few things I’d need for eight hours away from the hostel. My guide, Juan Pablo, arrived at around 9, and an American tourist joined us since he wasn’t able to make his way to Mechuque today. All through the morning Juan Pablo regaled us with various stories from Chiloe's rich mythology, which is one of the most fascinating things about this region.

We started off driving south from Castro to Chonchi, a small town most famous for its old pirating history, former cypress forests, and a 19th-century church called Iglesia San Carlos de Borroneo – yet another of Chiloe’s UNESCO World Heritage Sites.


The church stands at one of the highest points in Chonchi, and right across the Plaza de Armas, so you can see it from virtually the entire town as you walk through it. The church was typical of others that I’ve seen in Chiloe, though I really liked the long blue roof here, which was like an inverted boat hull, painted with stars and moons.


The church had been damaged during the 1960 Valdivia earthquake – registering at 9.5 on the Richter scale, it was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded – and on one side of the building one found beams supporting the church in the event that another earthquake should strike. And major earthquakes, I was told, hit Chile approximately every 20 years.


From here we walked a few blocks down the main avenue of town to see some of its unique wooden houses. Some of them are not merely weathered, but seem on the verge of collapse, and I felt like I needed to walk very quietly past them so that they wouldn’t topple over from the minute reverberations of my steps.







At the end of the road we came to an algae-covered beach with a few boats stranded in low tide. There were no people outside here, and all we could hear was the lapping of water and the cries of seabirds overhead.


Juan Pablo picked us up beside the beach and we proceeded inland a bit to a small, mist-enshrouded town called Huilinco. There’s almost nothing here, yet I could have stayed much longer than we did. Lake Huilinco is here, and several houses dotted the snaking shore.



We walked to the end of a dilapidated wooden pier and looked out over the black water of the completely undisturbed lake. Juan Pablo told us that he always saw a kingfisher here whenever he visited the town, but as we walked out we only saw a young hawk on top of a house. However, coming back from the pier the hawk was gone and two kingfishers had taken its place.


We walked through the town another two hundred meters to an old church, across from which spread a cemetery that Juan Pablo guessed was nearly four hundred years old.



The cemetery contained a number of old wooden gravestones, and also miniature wooden houses build exactly like those found in much of Chiloe. There was quite a bit of space inside them, and they were typically filled with flowers and various family photos.

After that it was time to go to the Parque Nacional Chiloe, which covers well over 400 square miles along the Pacific coast. There are a number of indigenous Mapuche communities living in and around the park, and wildlife – birdlife especially – is abundant here. We spent our time in the southern part of the park called Chanquín, which boasts a number of excellent hiking trails as well as easy access – minus the mud – to a long, clam shell-strewn beach.



The hike followed a trail consisting of smooth boards and level logs, and went from marshy fields to thick tepú forests, which were filled with birds and birdsong as well as a wide variety of ferns. (Amazingly, the park contains 80% of the world’s total number of fern varieties.)





The forest was incredibly thick in places, and because the tepú tree grows horizontally as well as vertically, one often finds faux forest floors; if you were to step off the trail onto what appeared to be forest floor, chances are you’d fall through it five or six feet to the real forest floor below (and climb back up with leeches attached to your body).


There were all kinds of interesting plants: calafate berries (which we picked and ate), tons of fiddlehead ferns, something called cow-rib ferns that looked very much like cow ribs, and small plants growing alongside a stream that attract, catch, and then eat mosquitoes.

The bottom part of a nalca plant.

There was even a tree that was very cold to the touch; if you stood touching a different tree with one hand, then reached out and touched this cold tree with another hand, the difference was immediately noticeable. It was as cold as the inside of a refrigerator.

At the end of the hike, which actually looped around to the beginning of the trail, we marched through a wetland area and then climbed over dunes to get to the beach.



There wasn’t anything terribly special about the beach, though we did find several interesting fishing apparatuses. These were wooden posts pushed deep into the sand where the waves hit the shore. Lines with fishing nets at the end were tied to each one, and the nets secured in the water with anchors. At some later point the fishermen would pull the anchor up and draw in their nets, which, if they were lucky, would be full of sea bass.


We stayed here for about half an hour, until around 2:30 p.m., and then decided to go have lunch. (On the way back to Juan Pablo's truck, we picked wild strawberries and ate them to tide us over. They were incredible.) Juan Pablo took us to a place called Parador Darwin – a hostel as well as a restaurant – owned by a Mapuche man and his German wife.


The setting here is absolutely perfect, which is why we chose to eat at picnic tables on the lawn.


Across the road is a river, and then a spit of deep green pastureland on which sheep and horses graze, and then the sea beyond that.



I ordered chili con carne, which came sprinkled with Parmesan cheese and set on a bed of rice, which was pretty decent.


As we waited for our food, we were served homemade bread and eight different kinds of spreads for us to try – bread is often given with meals in Chiloe, and salsa-like spreads are commonly eaten with it. Each spread came in its own individual seashell, and included mayonnaise and garlic; pureed garlic; pesto; pickled onion slivers; yoghurt, dill, and cucumbers; red chili sauce; and two types of seaweed.


To me, this was the best part of the meal – and the meal was pretty good. We piled through all of this, and since Parador Darwin is famous for its kuchen conchoyoyu (I might have misspelled that) – it’s made with chocolate and algae – of course I had to order a piece. It was quite good, though the chocolate was very mild, and the only thing missing was a heaping cup of coffee, which I haven’t had in two days.


We came back to Castro after that. I asked Juan Pablo for a recommendation of an author from Chiloe who might have been translated into English, and he gave me the name Francisco Coloane. When we came back to town he dropped me off at a bookstore, but this place, and another bookstore up the street, only carried his works in Spanish. There was a free museum next door to the first bookstore I tried (Museo Regional de Castro), and I went inside and had a look around. The most interesting thing to me were a series of black-and-white photographs of Castro after the Valdivia earthquake hit, though there were other things of interest as well. However, everything was in Spanish and it was hard for me to follow.

And when it came time for dinner, I decided to go light and do it on my own. I went to four fruterias and mini-mercados and bought a dinner of bread, yoghurt, a banana, a peach, and a bag of black cherries. I think this will be more than enough until tomorrow.