Back up to last Saturday and I'll start the story of my first travel adventure in Chile. After days of dealing with several foot-dragging American exchange students who kept hedging over making definite travel plans for our week off from school, we finally put together a small group to head up to the city of La Serena and the surrounding areas in the Norte Chico region of Chile. To introduce our travel group: Sarah is from Knoxville but goes to Hendrix College in Arkansas. Ben is from Knoxville and goes to Maryville College in Maryville, TN. Kelsey is from South Carolina but also goes to Maryville College. (This introduction was endlessly confusing to everyone we met on the trip. We probably should have simplified it somehow).
We set off on Saturday morning, beginning our journey with a seven hour bus ride from Vina del Mar to La Serena. Our dread of hours-long misery was blessedly dispelled by the incredible, nearly perpetual view of the Pacific Ocean to our left throughout the entire ride, crashing blue-green and angry against the imposing rocks beneath a dull pewter sky. Besides, a bus trip in South America that lasts only seven hours is a mere drop in the bucket (to go from La Serena up to the Norte Grande region near the border of Peru would have taken another twenty hours by bus, for example). We arrived at the bus station and took a quick taxi ride to our hostel, the Aji Verde, in the heart of downtown La Serena. Immediately and warmly received by the young and hip Chilean staff, we were given a tour of the place and shown to our room.
After dropping off our stuff, we headed out to grab dinner, famished after the bus trip and a disappointing lunch stop at an overpriced, mediocre travel center obviously in cahoots with the bus company. A second-story balcony restaurant at the nearby Mercado Recova provided a feast of seafood (ceviche and salmon), salad (tomato and avocado), bread, and a teeny tiny pisco sour apiece before and after the meal. Feeling much better, we wandered through the local supermarket to pick up some groceries before returning to the hostel to hang out with other guests. It was cool to get to know all of the different people staying there--two British couples, an Australian man, several Germans, three Swedish girls, the Chilean staff. All were friendly and talkative, and we had some great conversations on the breezy rooftop.
Sunday morning was our introduction to the Aji Verde breakfast of unlimited bread, butter, and jam, assorted fruit, tea and...Nescafe. Not terrible. We spent the day walking around La Serena, although things were pretty quiet since it was Sunday. Sarah had been struggling with a cold for a few days already, and by the time we stopped at a small cafe for a quick lunch it was apparent to me that I would also be a victim, judging from my rapidly worsening congestion and the floaty, dazed, weak feeling taking over my body. Still, we temporarily revived ourselves with sandwiches, espresso, and ice cream, then continued to walk through a hushed La Serena, past churches and plazas, Japanese gardens, and ever-present Chilean street dogs of varying hues. Our goal was the lighthouse on the beach, which we reached in the afternoon as the sun began to melt the morning clouds. We explored the area around the lighthouse, and the little girl in me insisted on copying my friend Laurel (who visited La Serena last summer) and riding a horse on the beach. Sarah declined, having already checked this life experience off her list, but Ben and I were game, so we ponied up (ha?) the three dollars to ride horses. As it turned out, my horse was kind of a gloomy little thing, which I guess I would be too if my life consisted of carrying around cheesy tourists on my back. And both of the horses had apparently been trained to return to the corral before giving up our money's worth. But it was definitely a surreal Chile experience, and I rewarded my reluctant steed with some nice pats on the neck and a few soothing words. Even got him to trot for a few seconds. Funny, he went way faster on the return trip.
So, girlish fantasy of riding a horse on the beach satisfied, the three of us began to walk back to the hostel...then caught a taxi to save ourselves from utter exhaustion. Dinner that night was spaghetti and bread, a successful group effort. We sat around watching a weird but good movie and talking with a couple of the hostel staff until late in the evening. Since we hadn't been able to schedule a tour until Tuesday, we stayed up late on Sunday night and slept in on Monday. Once we got up and moving, we set out in a different direction to take in more of the city. Wandering onto and quickly off of a military base, eating bowls of fried potatoes sloshed with ketchup and mayonnaise, and shopping for handmade artisan earrings filled the afternoon. Then it was back to the hostel...to eat again, of course. We grilled chicken--and veggies for me--soaked in lime and garlic marinade, and had rice, corn on the cob, and caprese salad (queso fresco, tomatoes, fresh basil, and balsamic vinegar). I know--posh, right? And surprisingly affordable.
Tuesday we woke up early and got ready to leave for our 8:30 tour. Wait, it did leave at 8:30, right? Wait, we were scheduled for a tour...right?? After going back and forth with Gustavo, the increasingly sheepish hostel employee who had supposedly made our reservations a couple of days before, it was determined that Michaela, another employee, had failed to confirm our tour. A likely story, Gustavo. He began calling other companies and came down to the kitchen a few minutes later (looking like he was a little afraid I might hit him) to let us know that he had in fact been able to get us booked with another tour company for later in the morning. Ahh, relief. If not for this tour, there would be little reason to visit La Serena. A while later the bus pulled up and we piled in with 10 or 12 other tourists. Our first stop was a local park, where we all got out and introduced ourselves--the three American college students, a dating couple, a newlywed couple on their honeymoon, one older Chilean woman currently living in London and another from Germany, a group of middle-aged sisters and friends, and our intrepid tour guide, Jorge, a teacher. After introductions, Jorge gave us a brief lesson in Chilean geography. Then we were off to the Elqui Valley, following the Elqui River through a microclimate where the principal products are papayas and grapes.
(((Cue magical realism))
As I mentioned earlier, during this trip I had fallen victim to an insidious and disorienting Chilean cold-and-flu-type illness. The nasal congestion, headache, slight fever, light-headedness, and weakness brought on by the Chilean cold--combined with the suspicious effects of the Chilean decongestants I had picked up at a local pharmacy and the climactic conditions of a semi-desert region--lent everything about the day a strange, dreamlike quality. I swear, this one day alone could be the basis for my Nobel Prize-winning short story.
Odd details and experiences didn't do much to help my state. For example, when we stopped at a local orchard where papayas and chirimoyas (another fruit) were cultivated, we learned that the latter grew on bisexual trees. Their flowers produce pollen in the morning and then open up to receive said pollen in the afternoon. However, the flowers are green and blend in too well with the rest of the tree to be pollinated naturally by birds or insects, so the trees must be artificially pollinated by groups of female workers (they're gentler and more methodical than men, of course) who walk around and pollinate them by hand, with a tiny stylus, out of a tiny bag that they filled with pollen earlier in the day. Weird, right? We also saw signs of the parasitic carmine beetle, which is collected and crushed to release a red dye used in cosmetics and food products (yes, Caitlin, your beloved carmine beetle is a parasite, terrorizing Chilean fruit trees).
At the next stop we got out and walked up a hill to the enormous Puclaro dam, where the wind whipped through a giant acoustic resonator installed by an artist, creating strange music. On one side of the dam, the sun glinted off the shimmering surface of a lake containing millions of liters of water. On the other, the Elqui Valley wound its tranquil verdant way, tracing the route we had just taken. Windblown and feeling the ferocity of the Chilean sun, we wandered back down past booths of artisan objects and tasted a weird spiky fruit with flesh akin to that of a kiwi, but full of sour juice. A teaspoon or so of sugar improved things considerably. Then it was time to put in our orders for lunch; we would be eating at a restaurant where everything is cooked outside in solar-powered ovens, so it was necessary to place our orders several hours in advance. Most of our group requested roasted goat, while others ordered corn pudding and I asked for vegetable pie. A little farther down the road we stopped at a roadside stand to sample gigantic raisins dried in the valley and some fresh grapes of the variety used for pisco, the national liquor of Chile.
Sarah and I had just woken up from a groggy, cold-influenced nap on the tour bus. I felt like I was turning into a human raisin from the dry heat. So when we heard someone mention goat cheese, we asked no questions. We both liked goat cheese--we had to buy it! Perhaps if we had both been our healthy selves we would have seen a few of the obvious problems with this scenario: 1) we were on the side of the road in the Chilean desert, 2) we did not know when or how this cheese had been manufactured, 3) it was being stored in a deli case dating from approximately the 1930s. In the desert. In Chile. But groggy and ailing as we were, we handed over the pesos and turned over The Cheese to a bewildered Jorge, who popped it into a cooler in the back of the bus. Don't worry--this isn't the last time you'll hear from The Cheese.
Ill-advised roadside purchase completed, we continued on our journey to one of the highlights of the tour, at least for me: the village of Monte Grande, childhood home of Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin American woman to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, for her work Desolaci
Lunch was next, and together we gathered at a long table at the Solar Villaseca restaurant to share our sun-cooked specialties. I didn't tell anyone, but mine was cold in the middle. Haha. We spent lunch getting to know/entertaining our tour group, especially when Sarah and I ordered mote de huesillos for dessert. It's a typical Chilean food, a sort of dessert-y drink with tiny spiced peaches and grains of wheat floating in it. Very confusing, but mostly tasty and refreshing. The group got quite a laugh as we tried to figure out whether to eat it or drink it--you have to do a little of each. Our next stop was the Fuegos distillery, which produces artisan quality pisco. The liquor is aged for four years in Chilean, French, and American oak barrels, and then each bottle is individually filled and labeled by hand. Our final stop was the small town of Vicuna, where the rest of the group would depart, leaving us three hours to explore before embarking on the second phase of our tour-packed day, a visit to a local astronomical observatory. We said our goodbyes to Jorge (who left me with a list of authors to investigate) and the rest of the group.
Ok. Three hours in a sleepy little town. Well, at least we had some delicious homemade goat cheese to eat with fresh-baked bread from the panaderia! Wait--was that a long reddish hair that I saw on the goat cheese? And was it inside the plastic wrapper? No matter, we decided. We just won't look at that side. We found a park bench, broke off chunks of Cheese, and passed them around. A Chilean street dog of the Husky variety plopped down expectantly in front of us, pale blue eyes fixed on our food. As expected, The Cheese was strong. Not a bad flavor, necessarily, but the more cautious nibbles we took, the more we thought about the dubious circumstances of its manufacture and purchase. And there was the undeniable presence of that disturbing hair. In the end, Sarah and I got grossed out and couldn't eat any more. Our rational minds returned--if briefly--and we decided to ditch The Cheese, despite the protests of Ben and the dog.
Another street dog had anticipated our plans, though. As we tried to walk nonchalantly away from the trashcan where we had stashed our rank error in judgment, we observed a yellow lab (yes, family, a yellow lab) mosey over in a beeline to the trashcan, stick his head in, and emerge with the offending disk of Cheese clenched tightly in his jaws. Triumphantly, he trotted away with his treasured find, with several canine friends in tow. He was definitely a long lost Chilean cousin of my own dear yellow lab brother back in South Carolina, I just knew it. We could only hope that the terrible digestive problems undoubtedly faced later by the dogs did not result in too much misery for the population of Vicuna...
Our first dinner plan thwarted, we wandered around in search of another option. And decided that there was a slightly creepy air about the city, something strange lurking just beneath the surface that we couldn't quite identify. Now, this could have just been our worn-out, sun-addled condition or the Chilean decongestants talking again...but I feel that now is a good time to mention that the Elqui Valley is also considered by New Agers to be the center of the universe, a strong focus point of spiritual energies. According to the highly reputable website EN Chile (heh), "Spiritual seekers began to arrive in the Elqui Valley in the sixties, guided by a prophecy that said that this geographic point would be like a magnetic center, that it would be a natural sanctuary where the new spiritual civilization of Aquarius would develop in The Magnetic Valley." That's right, Aquarius. As in, "Age of." Signs of those lingering hippies were everywhere, from a puzzling roadside sign reading "Free and Life" to the rune necklaces abounding in gift shops to the artisan market of doom run by a group of very spaced-out individuals, one of whom commented to Sarah in English, "I am your uncle. I have silver rings," right before we high-tailed it out of there. If our friend Gino had been with us, he would have sworn that we had wandered onto the set of the awful slasher flick Hostel.
We saw strangely beautiful moments, too. When a tiny, malnourished tabby kitten wandered down the sidewalk, obviously abandoned by its mother, Sarah and I considered rescuing it--until a woman with her boyfriend bicycled by out of nowhere, stopped abruptly, and gathered it into her arms. "What's wrong? Are you hungry?"she crooned lovingly to the tiny creature. But the odd feeling remained, nagging and inexplicable. Every restaurant we passed was open, but completely empty of customers. Uniformed schoolgirls skipped normally by with their bookbags and violins in hand, but there remained an uneasy sense of being very conspicuous, of being watched but in a bad way. Maybe we were just having trouble adjusting to a small town after a month of urban living. Or maybe the spiritual forces of the Elqui Valley really were at work...
Around 8:00, we headed over to the corner where Jorge had told us to wait for our second guide, praying that he would show up on time and rescue us from our strange surroundings. Eventually, to our relief, other people showed up who were waiting for the same tour. We no longer felt so trapped in the Twilight Zone as we made friends with Cristiana the chain-smoking German and a young woman from Brooklyn. The first bus pulled up and out piled a group of familiar faces from our hostel--Ingrid from New Zealand, the Colombian guy, a couple of girls from Holland. Unsure if this was our tour, I tried to ask the guide a few questions, to no avail. He simply confused me more. Luckily, Jorge had left us the guide's name, Beltran. The first guide turned out not to be him. Unfortunately, when Beltran finally arrived, he was not much of an improvement. When I tried to help Cristiana establish that she was on his list of customers, he silenced me with a brusque hand in my face. Hmpf. This rudeness was quickly forgotten, however, as we jolted up the bumpy, winding road to the observatory, perched in the mountains outside of town. The northern region of Chile has the clearest sky in the entire world, making it a prime spot for astronomers to do their work. Probably billions of dollars have been invested in observatories here (this wasn't one of the fanciest, but still). You didn't need a telescope of any kind to note the immediate, awe-inspiring difference in visibility.
We arrived at the Mamalluca Observatory, a spot where the Milky Way leapt out at us from above, creamy clouds of nebulae and shooting stars swirling in the blackness. Our astronomer guide, Luis, introduced us to his unearthly world. What looked like one star to the naked eye was really two stars--or a million. The words of one of my favorite singers, Regina Spektor, echoed in my head. "They're just old light, they're just old light." My sky is not your sky. Before Galileo ever had his telescope, the Incas watched the Fox follow the Baby Llama follow the Mother Llama on their way to do battle with the Snake, all constellations made of dark star gas. I saw Gemini, Virgo, Leo, Orion--all upside down in their Southern Hemisphere recline. The flames of dying Beetle Juice, the gleams of Sirius and Polaris. I saw the rings and moons of Saturn, a clearly recognizable burning spot in the telescope. I learned that in 2.5 billion years our Milky Way will likely collide with the Andromeda galaxy. And I felt like a speck, living on a slightly bigger speck in an obscure corner of a living breathing growing dying fading universe. And I wondered what the heck I would go to grad school for, and why we even bother with anything, for that matter. "This isn't helping my existential anxiety at all," I whispered uneasily, my religion-student sensibilities kicking in. "It's the worst feeling. And the best," posited the girl from Brooklyn, a theology student herself. Under that punched tin of the universe, which felt like the sky from The Truman Show as well as the inspiration for The X-Files (here's to you, Three's Company...), I didn't know whether to sob or laugh or pray.
And I guess that's how it goes.
Oooh...write a book!!!!!!!
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