Author: Joel

For years I have had no problem dropping into remote parts of the world without knowing a word of the local language, finding enough people I could communicate with, and either travelling by public means on my own or scheduling some tours with small, local, preferably environmentally friendly and active tour groups to see and do what I want to in the country. I do a lot of research before I go and make sure the countries I visit are interesting, safe, and reasonably priced and I’m able to visit them when the weather is good.

South America has proved to be a bit of a challenge, on the other hand. While many parts are safe, others are not. Far fewer people speak English that I was expecting, and local tours seem harder to find and less developed. I have managed to find some great groups to travel with in Ecuador (especially mountain biking) and Chile (hiking and cycling), but they are few and far between and don’t have excursions for as long as I would have liked.

So I found myself longing to check out the coastal Chilean city of Valparaiso, which was supposed to be quite beautiful, historical, and regarded as Chile’s cultural capital. With many colorful homes built up on hills over looking the ocean, the city seemed reminiscent of San Francisco or Wellington, New Zealand. Many of my English speaking guides recommended it, but they all warned about crime up in the photogenic hills. Between the language barrier I had with the locals and the safety concerns, I decided to skip trying to get there on my own and just signed up for a big bus tour from Santiago.

Sounds good, right? How horrific! I think this was the first time I ever found myself on a big tour bus type tour. It was a bit of the antitheses of my idea of travel. All looking and no interaction. The bus was full of mostly South American travellers (mainly Brazilian?) who seemed to be content with being confined to their seats all day.

The drive was two hours there and two hours back. We had only one guide between 20-30 people. While the hiking and biking tours I did that had 2-3 guides for 5-8 people, were active, and encouraged constant questions and dialog, the sole big bus guide would stand or sit in the front of the bus and recite her spiel in Spanish, Portuguese, and then English as we cruised around for the day. She did not seem receptive to questions from anyone and just seemed to get progressively more and more exacerbated as the day wore on.

The bus was big and modern but had terrible leg room – so it was not comfortable to sit in for long periods of time. After we arrived in Valparaiso, we just kept driving and our tour guide would point out things you could see out of the windows to photograph. We finally managed to get to an overlook where we were allowed to get out for 10 minutes, but then it was back on the bus again.

Then we finally got the chance to walk! Except, before we did, our tour guide seemed nervous about even suggesting we do so out of fear their might be a rebellion on board. Walk? We’re just here to sleep in our seats after partying all night (most on the bus were younger than me). The walk was brief and raced through a beautiful neighborhood for about 6-7 blocks before arriving at a diagonal elevator that would drop you down to the main street along the waterfront. I snapped all I could with my camera (we were warned not to use iPhones because they were an easy target for thieves, so no pictures to show you here yet) but had to keep running to keep up with the group.

After we got down to the waterfront, it was back on the bus for a quick exit from the city down the main street (“look for the markets on your left”) as we headed back out of town for a neighboring city famous for its beaches. What? That’s it? The place was so interesting I could have easily spent the day there, and here we were arriving in sterile, boring, modern Vina del Mar. “Look at the big casino on your right!” And beaches? Well, we Australians are pretty snobby about beaches, so what can I say… But this is where the bus stopped to allow people to roam freely for lots of time. BORing! We ended up making two long stops: one for a (horrible) lunch break at the casino’s restaurant (of course), and the second for a less than stellar beach – for an excessive amount of time (An hour? It was supposed to be 20 minutes but some of my fellow travellers went astray).

Needless to say, not my idea of travelling. You might as well stay home and watch travel shows on TV if the idea is to just gaze out your big bus window. At least I can say that I have officially had my big bus tour and have learned my lesson!

At least we did finish on one interesting note: They gave us a final 5 minute stop in front of one of only three Easter Island heads that have been transported to the mainland. This one is only a baby at 2.1 meters tall, parked in front of a museum in Vina del Mar.

Signed up for a day of cycle touring around the city of Santiago today. There was a morning tour and an afternoon tour – and an expensive lunch in-between (seafood lasagne, which was nice, but a bit pricey). The morning tour focused on markets, immigrants, and culture. The afternoon tour focused on parks, history, and politics.

Here are a few cool murals we checked out along the way (the first pertaining to a Nobel Prize winning poet, Pablo Neruda, who had lived across the street and whose portrait/profile is on the right). The second being about politics. Click to enlarge…

I peddled with different people during each session, but I had the same guide. He was a guy from Washington DC who went to Georgetown University, and later The American University, where he studies languages and international relations. He spent a year here as an exchange student and then returned years later to keep his Spanish up to speed while the job market remains soft in the U.S.

Talk about putting me to shame: he spoke English, Spanish, Russian, and Czechoslovakian (his first language) fluently. He also knew a enough of French and German to get by, he said. Nevertheless, it was refreshing to spend the day talking with someone who knew Santiago and Chile well, as well as Washington DC (which he could use to draw parallels), and spoke perfect English – giving me the inside scoop of what life in Chile is really like.

The rest of the morning group and most of the afternoon group were Brazilians. Unfortunately, the tour guides didn’t have Portuguese in their repertoire so the Brazilians had to follow along in either English (as some were more comfortable with) or Spanish (as most were more comfortable with). On the afternoon tour I was the only English speaker, so I had my own guide. The rides weren’t huge or taxing, and the ground was mainly flat, but it was fun to peddle around town and see a few new things, anyway.

One of the interesting aspects of the ride were the dogs that would run along with us. Like many countries, Chile seems to be full of stray dogs – but unlike other countries I have been to, these dogs are all well cared for. They all get veterinary attention by volunteers and have had their rabies shots (I’m told), they look well fed, and strangers will yell at them as though they are their own dogs if they misbehave. Some dogs even have had dog houses installed for them by volunteers in city parks. Evidentially, the affection for the strays dates back to Chile’s agrarian history.

So yes, we had different dogs run along with us for the morning and afternoon tours. One dog in particular is said to join the tour from the same street corner every day (and can obviously tell time). The dogs would get quite competitive and snarl at other dogs that tried to join us, but passersby would simply yell at them to cut out the snarling.

Made my first excursion out of Santiago to do a hike up in the mountains, just 20kms shy of the Argentine border. The hike was at El Morado Natural Monument and followed a valley up to the San Francisco Glacier. The hiking trail was in quite a spectacular area that began in a mining village that was surrounded by bright yellow autumnal aspen trees and led up a steep track to a treeless plateau of low colorful scrub, glacier-melt rivers and a scenic pond, the Morales Glacier Pond, at the foot of the mountains.

The elevation started at about 1900 meters and climbed up to 2500 meters above sea level. Overall, about a 15km hike. For me, I felt quite good throughout the hike thanks to my acclimatization hangover from Ecuador. For my fellow hikers, I think most of them were finding it a bit of a challenge. In all, we had three Brazilians, two Americans, and a New Zealander of Vietnamese descent living in Sydney – besides myself. The three guides had to juggle Spanish, Portuguese, and English to keep everyone satisfied. Two of the guides were from Chile and the third from Peru.

Along the way there were underground mineral waters bubbling up that you could taste – and yes, they tasted carbonated. There was a bit active volcano nearby and volcano eruption evacuation route signs the whole way back to the highway.

The glacier itself wasn’t huge, but you could see it descending down the side of the mountain. Our guides were quite thrilled that there was so much snow around, which was somewhat unusual for this time of year. At the tongue of the glacier, there was an ice cave where a small stream was born than ran back down the valley to where we started.

The area was very beautiful and the return hike became even more scenic as the sun started to go down. The mountainsides were rich in a wide spectrum of colors due to their mineral wealth. I can’t say I’ve seen anything like it before.

Everyone of the tour got along great – even though a few of the Brazilians didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak Portuguese. We ended up getting back to our homes about three hours late, which made me feel like we had a good long satisfying day.

Over the past few days I have been trying to get a few tours nailed down as well as see a few museums around town. One cycling-the-vineyards tour I was interested in disclosed that they wanted $200 for a six hour tour. Yikes! Between the cost and them wanting to focus more on wine tasting that cycling, I decided to give that one a miss.

The museums here are not huge, collection-wise, but they are in beautiful big old buildings and either free or dirt cheap. So far I have visited the Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of Contemporary Art (which are actually physically connected, but not for visitors), and the National Historical Mueum. While in the Fine Arts Museum, I dropped into the cafe, only to find the guy behind the counter speaking fluent English and telling me he spent a year in Australia on a work exchange as a dishwasher – partly in Fremantle. He said Chile was the only Latin American country to have a work exchange program with the British Empire because “Margaret Thatcher and Augusto Pinochet were buddies.” I said “that’s disturbing” and he said they were because Chile was an ally of the U.K. During the Falklands War.

After visiting the Museum of Fine Arts, I worked my way down to the famous Central Market, which predominantly selling fresh fish, to find a restaurant for lunch. We were all given a card by our walking-tour guide a few days ago that was supposed to be good for some sort of discount at a specific restaurant there, but I couldn’t remember exactly what the deal was for. When I eventually found the restaurant (there are lots of them), I went inside and got a table and asked for a menu. While most of the other restaurants were busy hustling in the corridors of the market for business, most of the staff in this restaurant were inside, glued to watching a Chilean comedy channel on the TV. The discount I received, as it turned out, was for a free Pisco Sour drink – Chile’s national drink. I had a sip of one the other day and could immediately recognise the high alcohol content while appreciating the refreshing flavour. It was very tasty, but certainly challenging to get finish off with with my lunch.

Eating in Chile has proven to be somewhat of a challenge for me. There are a few problems: One is that there are rarely English translations on the menus, which make it very difficult to decipher what you are ordering. Fast food places seem to be easier to deal with because you can point at pictures, but fast food is something I try to steer clear of as much as possible.

The other problem is that most meals seem to be very heavy on meat and encompass hardly any vegetables. Just last night I went to a local Chinese restaurant thinking I was going to get something healthier. After finally deciphering Peking Chicken from the menu, I was brought out a tray of enough chicken meat to fill two chickens, and maybe a few spring onions thrown in for garnish. It was just pure meat that I could not finish.

Curiously around town, there are quite a few hot dog restaurants. Very odd. Not sure I would trust South American hotdogs, let along North American hot dogs. They are obviously popular enough to support the endless stores selling them!

Also in the past few days I’ve managed to move down the street a few blocks from my old featureless guesthouse to my own swish private apartment – with only a $4 difference in price! What a difference $4 makes. I went from a small room in a noisy backpackers with shared bathroom down the hall, no wifi (except for two floors down in the lobby), with a TV of Spanish only stations missing a remote – to a full furnished quiet apartment with full bath, full kitchen, queen sized bed, hundreds of cable TV stations including some in English, and security swipe card access to get in and out of the building. There are also laundry facilities downstairs. And supposedly there is a pool, but I have not been able to find it yet. Might be too cold to go swimming, anyway.

Being in Santiago, Chile, I couldn’t help but gravitate to their Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos to brush up on everything I should have been paying closer attention to in the 1970’s and 1980’s down here. The museum was excellent, very modern, and well designed, full of all kinds of documentation of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet reign. It was chilling to see how the coup unfolded and how students my own age in the early 1980’s were tortured and killed for protesting the dictatorship. After admiring many of the old government buildings around town, you could see in video footage how they played a roll in the coup – with a central government palace being bombed, which I walked right past on my way to see the museum. The entire city was full of secret graves of those who were killed for their beliefs. Really not that long ago and they still seem to be discovering other graveyards around the country.

Getting there was interesting. I was using maps from my Lonely Planet guide only to find they were wrong. Without knowing too many Spanish words, I managed to find a tourist office to try and help me locate where the museum was supposed to be. This was more of a corporate office, but they managed to find someone who knew a little bit of English and they took me back to their office to help me find the place on Google maps and plot a route to get there – which included the subway. Numerous people in the office got involved and they were all very nice in trying to help me out even though none of us could speak each others language very well.

Santiago does have a nice subway network, although it’s not quite as new and flashy as Singapore’s, Bangkok’s, or Seoul’s.

If this is my birthday, I must be in Santiago! I arrived in Santiago, Chile at 3am, after a brief stop in Lima, Peru – which seemed to have a much larger, modern airport than Quito, Ecuador. Upon arrival, I knew I was going to have to pony up the infamous “reprocity fee” charged to Americans, Canadians, and Australians. Fortunately, Australia charges Chileans less than Americans do, so it was handy to have a second, cheaper passport I could use.

So sure enough, I see the sign instructing me to pay my reprosity fee which pointed to a long bank of about 20 tellers booths before coming to the usual immigration booths. The reprocity fee desks were all dark, and all quiet. I slowly walked back and forth looking in each one to see if there was anyone there and finally found a woman sleeping at her desk. Startled when I said “hello”, she quickly jumped into action and processed my transaction.

Getting to my guesthouse was pretty seamless in an airport shuttle. Fortunately my guesthouse was open 24 hours – but they left a big watchdog in the vestibule to greet me when I poked my head in the front door. The dog’s barking quickly woke up the night watchman and he checked me in, even though I was about 12 hours early.

On the whole, I’m not super impressed with the guesthouse. It is a bit pricey for what you get and there is no wifi available in the rooms. I’m forced to sit in the lobby to use it. I managed to find another place a block away with wifi in room plus private bath and kitchen for $4 extra, so I will be moving down there in a few days.

I only managed to do a little bit of exploration after waking up at 10am. I think it was the latest I’ve ever slept in, to be honest. Almost missed their free breakfast! I did join a free walking tour of the city conducted by a volunteer who begged for tips at the beginning and the end of his tour. Another struggling actor playing a tourism role to fill his otherwise empty coffers, just like you find in L.A. The tour was fun and he acted out his passion and enthusiasm for the place quite well. The other five tourists were all very nice, with three from the U.K., one from France, and two from Perth, Australia (!) including me. Small world…

It is nice to be back in a safe city again! Safe, but expensive. Santiago looks like a very interesting and well developed city full of museums, fine restaurants, cafes, and beautiful old buildings. It very much has a European feel to it. Or so I’m told (having not been to Europe yet).