Smoggy Santiago

There were all kinds of dodgy dealings going on as our luggage disgorged from the bus, people in the know flashing notes at the man scrabbling about in the hold to get their bags out first.

“Put that away NOW” hissed the burly Ukrainian we’d crossed the Andes with, as Clive tried to catch the driver’s attention by airily waving his passport about.

Up until then the journey had been blissful. I’d kept my inner toddler at bay with Netflix/Audible/podcasts/Kindle/fact and fiction real books/Spotify/Prime/editing photos/Freeform (an ipad drawing ap)/jotting in a notepad/ writing postcards to my mum/reading The Times/ The Guardian/Al-Jazeera/CNN/BBC news/playing with Garage band (when there’s wifi). Clive, meanwhile, lasted the entire 9 hour trip reading The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene.

 

 Santiago bus station seemed like a menacing moshpit in contrast to the gleaming, quiet, smooth running one in Mendoza. After retrieving our luggage from the bowels of the bus we fought our way to the taxi rank. Santiago lies in a river valley between The Andes in the east and Chilean coastal range in the west, and for the time we were there, lay steeped in smog. The taxi pulled up outside a derelict looking building with peeling paint covered in graffiti and we realised with dismay that we’d arrived at our hotel. A locked front door suggested it may well be abandoned, but as we bickered over why we’d felt the need to book somewhere miles out of the centre in such a state of disrepair, someone opened the door. 

Our hotel at night.

and in daylight. I think it looks worse actually.

 It turned out, although the bathroom lay across the hall and our room in the rafters, to be quite charming in a creaky floored, brass bedstead kind of way. We were hungry, as we’d assumed the bus would stop for food but it hadn’t. The girl on reception smiled beautifically when Clive asked:

“Is it is safe to go out?”

She assured us it was. But then added:

“But after dark, it becomes..” she cast around for the right word, “peligroso’”.  (That’s dangerous in Spanish.)

  Although Clive tried to clarify this – “early dark? late dark? In an hour’s time dark?” she doesn’t understand, and just looks gnomically at us.  Empanadas having lost their appeal after eating them daily for three weeks, we’ve earmarked an Indian restaurant for dinner, because I would kill for a Peshwari naan and chicken tandoori.  But it lies down a quiet, possibly murderous street, so we stick to the main road, eventually finding a roaring, rollicking student bar in the throes of happy hour. It’s 30 quid for two drinks and Fajitas, so while more expensive than Argentina, we can pay with cards, and don’t have to wield a wheelbarrow load of notes everywhere we go. We try around three different cards before one of them works mind you, a relief as we have no back-up Chilean cash yet. Wing and a prayer baby, wing and a prayer. 

  

Arty bollocks

We’re in Santiago for 2 days, so spend day one walking for 10 hours, visiting galleries, museums and Londres 38, the address of one of many places people opposing the Pinochet regime were taken, interrogated and tortured, often never to be heard of again.

You could touch the edge of the terror witnessed by these walls as we walked through a dark narrow corridor and up some winding wooden steps, but once upstairs the mundanity of the rooms belied its tragic, horrific history. 

  

Londres 38.

 Day two finds us in Valparaiso, where grafiti has been elevated to an artform (perhaps it is everywhere, it’s just not my cup of tea). It’s a seaside city an hour’s drive away, like our Brighton to London. We’ve already been in to see La Chascona, the poet, politican and writer Pablo Neruda’s house in Santiago, and on the tour we’ve booked they take us to his place in Valparaiso. Colourful, light filled, with curiosities he’d picked up from second hand shops and on his travels as ambassador for Chile in various parts of the world, all three of his houses in Chile were trashed and in Santiago’s case, flooded by Pinochet’s regime, then lovingly restored by his third and final wife after his death.

Neruda is a Chilean hero to many though not all; his reputation having become tarnished by his autobiographical account of raping a maid in the Far East in his youth, and for abandoning his only child, who had severe learning difficulties, who died probably prematurely aged 8 at the hands of the Nazis in Holland. He came to a sticky end himself, probably on the end of a botulinum toxin-infected needle, more than likely at the hands of the same people who shot the then president Allende in the military coup that ocurred a few days before Neruda’s death. I first heard of him when the Lyndhurst film club ( a hotly contested title, aka Minstead Film club) watched Il Postino – a very old, very lovely Italian movie. I think his poetry loses a lot in translation, as however well it’s done, it can’t have the timbre and lyrical beauty it probably has in it’s original language. I wouldn’t know, obviously.

 

Valparaiso.

Things I have lost:

1. Knickers, that blew off a window sill down to the breakfast patio below, hopefully not onto some’s medialunar (croissant) y marmalada. 
2. A pair of trousers. Now I only have two left and one of these are white, not practical now we’re heading South into the cold. It’s all upside down here – the sun travels east to west in the sky but shines from the North, they hanker for a North facing garden as South facing ones are mossy and damp. The sun also moves from right to left. I have only just realised this last fact. Mind-blowing.
3. My jewelled ebay-find designer sunglasses that exactly matched my wedding handbag. I know, gutted. A victim of Mendoza’s three room changes in 24 hours.  

  Next stop is further North to La Serena and a trip up to see the night sky.