Chile

Back in the pre-Isaac days Jen and I went to Chile. It was chosen after the usual extensive and “random walk” due diligence process that has been the Frankling's way of choosing holidays for some time. This postcard is a celebration of that 2004 trip, and we like to hope it has been matured well for the delay, like a good Chilean red.

Chile is a rather ridiculous looking country which is 4329km long and averaging 180km wide: proportionally its the longest country in the world compared to its width. However the Andes mountain / volcano range on its eastern borders largely explain this apparent cartographic silliness, especially if you consider much of Chile was cut off from Argentina in winter during colonial times. Its the richest and arguably most democratic place in South America, although this can't be hard when you have competition like Bolivia.

It would be basically impossible to see a fair selection of the country in 3 weeks without a Lan Chile Airpass, which we duly bought. Our basic plan was to divide our alloted time into the 3 chunks of Chile that seemed to have the most highlights between them, yet because of the distances separating them were likely to be quite distinct. Chile, has, to this point, set a new record for us for sheer holiday logistical planning. In the end there were 13 flights, bus trips, 2 car hires and a couple of sections shared with travelers we met on the way. At one point we even considered chartering a helicopter into Torres del Paine National Park to try and save the better part of 2 days, until we were balked at the £2300 cost. No doubt many of you will email in comments along the lines of how we will have to replace such trips with package holidays for the next 20 years because we now have offspring. Watch this space.

First stop was Patagonia, after 6 back to back flights, an unnecessary taxi ride and a 3 hour bus trip. The taxi ride came about as we needed to get to a bus terminal in down town Punta Arenas from the airport. We didn't have much time to catch the last bus of the day so our first non airport experience of Chile consisted of the taxi driver apparently breaking local road rules to get us to the terminal on time. We got there with a few minutes to spare only to be... driven back rather slowly to the airport to offload people before heading north. While we whinge about many forms of transport in this postcard we can report back that the buses in Chile are a true delight: clean, comfortable, regular and remarkably cheap.

The primary reason we went to Patagonia was to see Torres del Paine: a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve which is famous for its natural beauty, in particular the glaciers, wildlife and the Torres (Towers). The plan was to spend 5 nights in the park doing the classic “W” walk, which basically takes in most of the sights you can see without being seriously kitted out. We kept our kit requirements down by getting full board in the backpacker lodges for the 5 day trek. This must be one of the few places in the world where you can trek in a true wilderness area on (really) full board accommodation. This might strike some of you as cheating but it turned out to be money very well spent.

As we came into the park we saw all the standard tourist things such as the vistas of the Torres, guanacos, a raging river, and the fairly obligatory boat ride over Lago Pehoe to our “base camp”: Refugio Pehoe. That first day was actually rather pleasant, starting with our afternoon walk around part of Lago Pehoe in what was to turn out to be unusually warm conditions. The evening consisted of an excellent hearty meal in the Refugio washed down with some Chilean red. The company was varied, and included a rock climbing Roman Catholic priest from New Orleans who was on holiday from his ecclesiastical duties in Bolivia. Then there was the young American woman who, upon realising that she had been walking alone for an hour in a part of Torres known for its incidence of pumas, had taken the precaution of recording her farewells and last will and testament on her camcorder.

The next day we set off for Refugio Grey, situated strategically on the north eastern end of Lago Grey very close to Grey's Glacier. The walk could be done in about 3.5 hours without taking breaks but we took considerably more. There were a lot of of scenic vistas to see on the way but some of the best involved seeing glacial “calves” on Lago Grey.

After dropping off our kit at Refugio Grey, we spent some time clambering over a large rocky promontory just to the north of camp. In the darkening light, Jen took some of her best shots of glacial calves, as well as the terminal face of the Glacier proper, which at this point was only a few hundred metres away. Evidence of the impact of the glacier on the landscape was all around us, and was the setting for a truly memorable afternoon. After we returned we organised to join a Glacier trip the following day. The training included being taught crampon tips, such as not wearing them while in the zodiac.

Now throughout the entire trip we kept on meeting people who were on trips that made our 3 weeks seem inconsequential. However that night in the Refugio we met the (grandfather) of all backpackers, who, now at the age of 72 had spent the majority of each of the last 14 years exploring around the world!

In the book Between Extremes, the authors say the following about Grey's Glacier: “In the distance the shimmering topaz of the vast expanse of frozen water confronted us...this eternal wall of water had...broken open granite mountains. Evidence of epochs of glacial sculpting was everywhere around us”. This is an accurate depiction of the emotive scene we encountered, as we set out for our walk across the Glacier, led by the ebullient and androgynous guide Micki. Our time on the ice was great fun, with Andrew in particular really feeling comfortable in traversing the glacier speedily with the aid of his trusty icepick, as evidenced by this blurred action shot. The highlight was an ice cave, with its amazing blues and clear delineated layers of ice. There was also an ice climb which we passed on. This involve scaling a sheer 10m high ice wall using just your icepicks, crampons, and a climbing style demonstrated by Micki which could roughly be described as “loving the ice”. On the way back we had to again cross the “no man's land” of icy sludge & rock between the glacier and land proper, which is surprisingly treacherous.

All in all the glacier experience was great, except there was another, younger and much larger group we had to wait for, who held us up by about 2 hours. Why couldn't our group have been taken back on the zodiac first? By the time we got back and had a quick “lunch” it was already 3pm , the weather was closing in and it was starting to blow a gale. We had to retrace our path of the previous day and it probably goes without saying that the experience was not fun, what with the scenery in reverse, the wind, the rain and the failing light.

That evening back at Refugio Pehoe we were very happy that we weren't actually camping. Apart from the weight of carrying camping gear around and the unpleasantness of the weather we had became aware of another local occupational hazard of tenting: super mice. These little guys had adapted to chewing through tents each night at the camping grounds in search of sustenance. In fact there was even a rumour going around that the mice actually preferred eating tent. The net result was that the tent guys had to endure rain, cold, a Patagonian gale AND ruined tents.

We pressed on the next day from Refugio Pehoe around the tonguetwistable Lago Nordenskjold towards Refugio Los Cuernos. This was perhaps the most memorable day walking. The conditions ranged from average to poor to attrocious. A little way over half way you make it to the turn off to the Valley del Frances, the so called “middle” bit of the W with apparently panoramic views from the top. “Base station” for this mini climb is Campamento Italiano, named presumably after Italians who thought the nearby Rio and good cover under the trees was a good place for a camp. Well when we got there it was quite cold with the wind blowing strongly through the trees: we hate to think what its like out of season. Some poor souls had camped the night, braving the lack of toilet facilities and in some cases attempting to fend off the super mice by tying their kit up trees. Jen in particular was keen to see views from the top so we asked a few of the residents about their experiences. Some people had climbed an extra 2000 feet to Campamento Britanico (not sure what this says about the relative intrepidness / intelligence of the British and Italians), and one intrepid couple had gone even further only to reported the visibility was so poor that enjoying the Valley de Frances vista was out of the question.

So we struggled around the “W”. At this point I should mention that we weren't exactly carrying light backpacks, sans camping gear and food. No, because Jen had read in guidebooks that “The W” was “basically flat” we were carrying all sorts of extras in our fittingly named Karrimor backpacks, including Jen's Clinique, which actually made our loads quite heavy. The only problem was that the W turned out to be anything but flat, and our tallish backpacks were getting caught in the high wind. All this was fairly bearable until the path careered down to Nordenskjold and we had to walk for a while on a rocky beach. OK, walk is an exaggeration. Try lurching dangerously as the wind howled around us, trying desperately to avoid smashing face first onto rocks. Jen used her walking poles for stabilisation while Andrew just used his legs. All the time we were trying to judge when to inch forward again in between gusts. And then it happened. Andrew looked behind him at the Lake and saw an almost solid wall / squall of water ripped up from the Lake hurtling towards us (this photo after the event doesn't really do it justice but note the white "haze" on the lake). Andrew had just enough time to shout to Jen to “get down!” before we both got well and truly showered. Getting to the other end of that beach, which can't have been that long, was the culmination of a slightly unpleasant short adventure. The rest of the trip to our Refugio for that evening was uneventful. That night we felt truly sorry for the campers. At times it seemed the wind was wanting to demolish the Refugio – the conditions really were rough. Campers had (wisely) chosen to pay the small fee to cook their food inside, and generally lounge around with the rest of us inside, before being banished to the storm at the alloted 11pm. With conditions like this, the smells and noises of the mandatory unisex group dorms were definitely preferable. However the Dorms did provide some concern, given that one night Andrew was allocated the top part of a giant triple decker bunk bed which had a guard rail so low it would have had trouble keeping even bed bugs in. This didn't help Andrew's mild case of vertigo, and really help focused his mind about whether he needed to go to the toilet. Outside, the campers got flooded...

The walk the next day to Refugio Chileno would take us nearly all the way to the base of the famous Torres del Paines. The walk was fairly uneventful weather wise but our muscles were beginning to complain. We were most of the way through our hike by this point and it was becoming increasingly obvious that most of the famed fauna of Torres del Paine had gone north for the winter. We got left with guanaco, a bird or two, 2 caterpillars and domesticated cattle & horses.

Before dawn the next day we joined an extended group of walkers to attempt to make the lookout for the Torres. The autumn night was predictably freezing as we expended some effort trying to find the path. As we cleared the forest there was perhaps half an hour of climbing up the moraine, which could easily have been the backdrop for more than one Lord of the Rings scene. The “lookout” was a jumble of boulders on a lip between the moraine proper and a very striking alpine lake at the base of the Torres. The vista was beautifully austere, and we froze waiting for the sun to spectacularly hit the Torres in the fashion of the postcards, but that never really happened.

A few days later we were about a thousand km north and driving a hire car south from Puerto Montt airport in our way to the island of Chiloe. The short trip down the Chilean mainland to the ferry to Chiloe passed uneventfully. Chiloe, is the third largest island in South America, after Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego and Marajo respectively. It is a famed mystical green isle that has been compared to many places, including our homeland Tasmania. We should have realised that for the Brits to turn down the offer of taking sovereignty over the island in the 1820s probably should have been warning enough. It turns out the reason it is so green is because it seems to have considerably wetter weather than Britain – and Jen reckons its nothing like as good as Tasmania. Our base for Chiloe was with a crazy Canadian called Carl in the town of Chonchi. Carl had thought about running a guest house on Sark in the Channel Islands but plumped for Chiloe instead. He had a laid back attitude to life which included giving non existent directions to his guest house, telling us that “we couldn't miss it – it was obvious”. His supposedly excellent directions didn't extend to when it was raining and dark, and as we've already said it did a lot of the former. Worse was to follow – 4 different sets of locals didn't know where he was either. Things got so bad Andrew had to calm Jen down with a steak sandwich in the middle of our search. We eventually found Carl's ramshackle establishment Hospedaje La Esmeralda down an unmade road. Carl made up for all this through his telling of other tall stories, which presumably included a small measure of truth, and his truly excellent breakfasts of eggs and home made bread.

It was at Carl's that we struck up a friendship with Rod and Lee Jones, an Australian couple who were traveling the world on a shoestring. While they gave us some rather excellent tips on how to go on half price Antarctic cruises which we have filed away for future reference, it was other knowledge of theirs which would come in handy that day. They were planning to travel around Chiloe on bus, but discovered the service wasn't very convenient, like apparently so many things in Chiloe. Given some of our more interesting travel experiences have been when we've given strangers a lift, we offered them a ride for the day in our car. The plan was to head north along the eastern Chiloe coast, visiting some of the tiny coastal communities nestled in inlets along the way. It looked like a pleasant short drive . We were barely out of the provincial capital Castro when the dirt / mud incline which was an excuse for a major road starting giving us trouble. So much trouble that all of us bar Jen got out and walked to reduce the weight in the car. That didn't help. Then Jen handed the keys to Rod who had to use his considerable 4WD skills to get us up the first hill. From there things got somewhat worse. As the hours ticked by we discovered that our map didn't actually detail most of the roads we were traveling on. We went down one steep road to a bay ostensibly to look at some cute hamlet, and proceeded to all find semi-private places to micturate behind. And at one spot the incline back up was so bad we seriously considered driving across the beach to the next town. We suspect even the locals thought our actions surprising, brave or perhaps just plain stupid. But we eventually made it back to the road the map deigned to show and went to some drizzly town called Dalcahue with a boring market, UNESCO World Heritage listed 19^th century wooden church blah, blah, blah. Minutes later we were back in the car driving north again to Quemchi. This turned out to be the highlight of the day, providing a rather excellent late lunch of fresh fish at El Chejo, which included a tour of the dishes available in the kitchen, given our Spanish was so bad. We're particularly thankful for this, since it meant we avoided ordering the mussels, which were just sitting out the back door. After lunch we did the tourist sightseeing thing before eventually realising the Church we were looking at was holding a funeral. We made our way back to Chonchi via the super fast Pan American Highway which runs down the spine of the Island, not even tempted by the pastry chef who was selling his goods/wares at a stop along the way. Its no wonder Chiloe is the place where the Pan American Highway finally peters out. The place is so depressing we won't waste any of the other photos on you.

The next day Rod & Lee packed up and left on the bus, and Jen and I departed in our car. For both couples this was earlier than originally planned.

So we crossed the strait on the ferry again and headed north. This trip was memorable for how much it looked liked parts of Australia. We stopped the night at Frutillar, a lakeside holiday resort popular with Chileans. Much of the architecture pointed to the original German settlers. In general there was meticulously preservation in a manner faintly reminiscent of The Truman Show, so its perhaps appropriate that different things in the town have been sponsored by Nestle, which also is in the business of sweet things. The whole place was made more memorable by being very out of season, so we had just about everything to ourselves, including the home stay where their english was as bad as our spanish. We wiled away our evening in a Frutillar restaurant, knocking back the Pisco Sour and eating the recommended Mix Grill, which to our horror had so much meat it reminded us of a gluttonous 50th birthday party we attended in Andorra in 2001. Frutillar would be the ideal place for an espanol Saga holiday.

After all this veneer, we headed somewhere with a much greater purpose in life: Pucon. Described by Lonely Planet as a “hot spot for vacationing Santiaguinos, a must stop on the gringo trail... the most touristy place in southern Chile”. As good fun loving adventure types, how could we resist this most authentic of Chilean experiences? We checked into La Tetera, famed for its breakfasts, only to discover that just down the corridor were...Rod & Lee Jones. This was definitely a case of keeping up with the Joneses.

Upon checking out our various adventure options we discovered that:

• the water was way too low for white water rafting in the Rio Trancura

• the water was too low to try a variation on river boogie boarding

• the weather was too poor to climb the active Volcan Villarica

So we ended up doing no adventure sports at all in what must be the disputed adventure capital of Chile.

So we hooked up with the Jones's for another day out.

Our first noteworthy sojourn was at an amazing set of river waterfalls fed from an underground outlet of the large lake Ojos de Caburga. Some of the waterfalls are shown here.

The next memorable stop was Parque Nacional Huerquehue, a 12,500 hectare reserve of alpine lakes and monkey puzzle trees. The road got more difficult until it completely fizzled out near a Refugio. The walk was... very pretty and atmospheric but also mainly uphill, cold, drizzly and the mud...lets just say the our few hours hiking involved some slippery moments. We eventually admitted defeat and passed up the opportunity to do the most scenic “Northern Loop” of the Parque, and retreated to the Refugio. There we found various tourists, including Rod & Lee, relaxing near a log fire, sipping hot chocolate etc.

For our final stop, what better way to cap off all our exertion than a sunset dip in a hot spring? So we parked ourselves at Termas Los Pozones, which came complete with a car park, concrete lined hot springs & unisex non-illuminated changing cubicles.

On our last day in central Chile we had a fairly forgettable experience driving to a small town with a museum dedicated to the Mapuche, an indigenous people. It was near here in 1960 the strongest ever recorded earthquake occurred (9.5 on the Richter Scale). Unfortunately the tiny museum, complete with its spanish only explanations, barely moved us. One market did however draw our attention for its colours. We eventually drew our time in central Chile to a close by flying out of Temuco and on to Calama, in the Norte Grande of Chile.

Calama is the mining town supporting the world's biggest copper mine, and a useful launch point into the Atacama, the world's second driest desert, a place so inhospitable it has been used as a testing place for Mars missions.

Our first stop and base for the next few days was San Pedro de Atacama, well and truly on turista trail and anything but dry in the bars. Other essentials included internet bars, mobile cash machines etc. This place, while now existing seemingly only for the tourists, has a certain dusty, mud wall kind of charm, and got to be so popular due to its close proximity to so many attractions. In no particular order we saw:

• 3 different species of flamingos (the Chilean, Andean & James) in the middle of bizarre salt formations on the Salar de Atacama. Some years ago their numbers had dropped off dramatically as they were disrupted by the tourist influx. But these salmon shaded concordesque birds were now seemingly oblivious to this fact, focussing more on this particularly great water source in one of the driest spots on earth. The glare was really intense and when we weren't rapidly desiccating and dusting up our gastronasal systems we rested under the shade of a building which incongruously looked like it was built out of grey nougat.

• Valle de Luna, home to fantastically eroded salt mountains. Its was OK, but we've been somewhat jaded by having seen the fantastically eroded stone of Wadi Rum. As we wiled away the time waiting for the sunset the Brits near us talked about their Ipods.

• The geysers of El Tatio. Even getting there involved an obscenely early start followed by a long rough, dark ride in one of the many tourist buses in a chaotic convoy. The geysers are great to look at and photograph as the sun comes up, which rather clashed with the guides serving us breakfast and the rest of their timetable. The lung busting 4321m altitude certainly added to the surreal landscape, as did the the hot breakfast in -6 to -8C conditions. Afterwards many of our group enjoyed a dip(!), while we chatted with an Israeli ex-Reservist. The trip was capped off with a stroll through a picturesque, remote and quiet hamlet that was mercifully low on the tourist vendors who typically hawk “authentic” merchandise from Bolivia.

• Laguna Miniques and Laguna Miscanti. These were 2 scenic but barren high altitude lakes where we had glare laden and lung stretching walks. The highlight of the return trip was Andrew spotting a particular nonchalant fox, and spotting the place markers every 20m along the road.

Next stop on our Norte Grande tour was Iquique, an intriguingly named and situated desert city. This city of about 200,000 people is compressed into a cramped strip of land between 600m sand escarpments and the Oceano Pacifico. Actually the dunes serve many purposes, including being useful for paragliding, evening advertising light shows and Roman Catholic Easter pilgrimages. Iquique made its money from the exploitation of nitrates inland and the best part of the downtown area were the resulting 19^th century buildings. But by and large there is not much here that would interest a tourist, perhaps evidenced by the real scarcity of them.

As we were wandering the downtown streets we noticed a woman walking purposefully towards us. She had such a purpose in her step that our first reaction was that she must be a restaurant tout. Actually she was nothing of the sort and this chance encounter lead to a remarkable coalition. Meet Queenie and Jerome, 2 Dutch backpackers who were trying to find people to make the numbers up for a tour the next day. Once we got talking over some excellent ice cream it became clear that we wanted to see many of the same things, and that the most flexible / cost effective solution would be for them to share our car over the next 4 days, a whole new spin on “going dutch”.

The next day we kicked off our own little Anglo-Dutch-Australian road movie, driving back up the sand escarpments. First stop Humberstone, an abandoned nitrate company town which has been lovingly semi-restored by some of its ex residents. This place truly rocked, and was probably Andrew's favourite sight in Chile. In its time it was apparently a great place to live. Industrial landscape photographers could easily retire in a place like this.

We pressed on in the heat south through the unusual Salar de Pintados salt plains to the 355 geoglyphs of Pintados. We were to see a lot of these remarkable stone arrangements over the next few days and will show you a variety of pictures of the. However it was the derelict station hamlet of Pintados which really sticks in our minds: population 1 man, 1 dog & innumerable postcards of topless ladies. Misplaced loneliness is obviously a major civic issue in Pintados.

From there the drive was north to Arica past various sites including:

• perhaps the most famous geoglyph in Chile, Gigante del Atacama, supposedly 86m high. 50% of the car's occupants thought he was a (smaller) giant of probably no more than 20m high, which generated a pointless and occasionally entertaining debate.

• the incredibly well hidden British Cemetery (we kid you not)

• a huge valley the road was forced to descend into and then back out of. It must cause a detour of at least 25km.

• a giant Coca Cola Petroglyph on the outskirts of Arica, (but will the indigenous people ever get the trademark back?)

From Arica we headed nearly all the way up to the Peruvian border, before hanging a right going eastwards on Highway 11. We gained altitude very rapidly, our trip punctuated only by the occasional sight. Our eventual destination was Putre, part gringo acclimatisation stop over before tackling Parque Nacional Lauca, part small bustling town part military base.

The following morning we headed off into Lauca, an altiplano national park. The wildlife was truly amazing, including the viscacha, a relative of the chincilla who act like they wouldn't be out of place in a cartoon. But the real zoological highlight was that 3 of the 6 camelid species on the planet (vicunas, llamas and alpacas), could be seen in most places. Then there was the scenery, for which we'll let the pictures do the talking. The only other noteworthy event was a hill somewhere we decide to climb for the view. It must have been at least 4600m high. Suffice to say that never before has gentle exercise uphill seemed so excruciatingly hard, and every breath a struggle.

Overall our exploration of the outstanding park and somewhat boring surrounding areas took 2 days. To rest our weary limbs each evening we relaxed in a radioactive mud bath, before wearily heading back to Putre. By bedtime we felt knackered, when the real fun began. Jen couldn't sleep because she was worried our faulty alarm clock not going off. But it was Andrew who really drew the short straw. Suffice to say that Andrew's personal signs of altitude sickness would be a light fever like condition with a side serving of nightmares.

We enjoyable (and cost saving) time with Queenie and Jerome. Queenie put us to shame with her Spanish skills and further shamed our monolingualism by reading Jane Austen in English for pleasure. Our time with Jerome and Queenie came to an end after we retraced our path back down off the altiplano and deposited them in Arica.

Retracing our steps from Arica to Iquique was our last proper day, notable only for a large detour to the remote pacific coast town of Pisagua. It has to be one of the most unusually situated towns we have seen on Earth. Pisagua is infamous for being the site of a Pinochet era concentration camp. While largely deserted , the town is also well known for a 19^th century municipal theatre (being steadily reclaimed by the sea ), bell tower and a pre-Columbian cemetery. We sat at a restaurant and enjoyed an Easter Sunday lunch of locally caught fish in the brilliant light.

Our return trip to Jersey was really only notable for Iberia's bad service and questionable taste in movies, and a 12 hour wait in Madrid Airport which gave us a small taste of The Terminal).

Would we suggest others go to Chile? Well that depends, and our opinion is coloured by all those money poor but time rich backpackers we encountered who told us about the joys of Argentina, Bolivia and Peru. Large parts of central Chile are perhaps the richest / most westernised parts of South America, which doesn't add to the “X factor”. But then Chile incorporates so much, including that wild west feel, nature and land mines. If you have seen the likes of Tasmania and New Zealand than you could probably think twice about the need to see that much of the bottom 2/3 of the country. With so much good countryside the cities don't appear to even try and attract travelers, what with their standard issue grid layouts and endless repeating of street names town to town. Santiago is a huge metropolis served by battalions of buses, and is perhaps one of the few capitals that tourists seem to largely ignore. Our week in the north was genuinely a new experience for us, although similar cheaper experiences are available Bolivia and Peru. So the short answer is perhaps don't go if you are planning to spend a number of months in South America, but for those who are time pushed perhaps Chile could be seen as a “South American Sampler”.

Regards,

Andrew & Jen (Isaac will be contributing to holiday stories soon enough)

PS: I half expect to get reams of responses to this postcard along the lines: “Now that you are parents you won't be going on holidays etc etc.” Lets see what happens...

PPS: Notes on Some of the Tech Used to Write This Postcard:

• The writing was done on OpenOffice, the free, open source, pretty well compatible alternative to Microsoft Office. We don't use the former now for anything on our new PC.

• Wikipedia, the source of many of the links here, is a free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It is a truly amazing resource which is growing by more than a 1000 articles a day.

• We are progressively migrating our web photo hosting over to Smugmug. These guys really know how to display photos well and the customer service is outstanding.