Sunday Thunder, Monday Thunder

This is another bumper catch-up post so brace yourselves for some words. We bumped into an English / Ozzie / Dutch / Indonesian couple (Miriam accounted for the last 3 nationalities by herself) on the bus from El Bolson to Bariloche. I think we were all too disappointed with our visit to the smaller towns the region (see the El Bolson rant in the previous post) had to offer to strike up idle conversation. Hilan and Miriam had spent a couple of days in Esquel and apart from their trip on the famous Old Patagonian Express, a narrow gauge steam train of old, as far as I could figure out, everything else seemed to be closed in the town of Esquel during their visit. It was when we all ended up in the exact same seating configuration 4 or 5 hours later on another bus from Bariloche to Mendoza that we started chatting and sharing shitty (ahem) bus snacks. The conversation definitely shortened the rainy overnight bus journey. As I was having my altercation with Francie Bellew in Mendoza bus station when we arrived, Hilan discovered that a large bottle of Miriam’s moisturiser exploded inside his backpack causing chaos, confusion, much moisturising of personal effects and a large scale pan-national watery domestic. This is after he woke up on the bus to discover an unpleasant present stuck to his sleeping bag liner, some less than mintyfresh pre-chewed gum which some previous kind passenger had deposited by the window and which had attached itself to his liner overnight.

Valpo

We waited for close to an hour in the rain at the bus station in Mendoza in a taxi queue with people clutching second hand bedside lockers, spare parts for mannequins, cardboard boxes hermetically sealed with shoelaces, and all manner of other bits and pieces of baggage and shopping. When the taxi eventually did arrive, I got on the wrong side of the driver straight away by banging my door despite this very obviously placed sticker. I think it means close the door gently, or lovingly.


We checked into the Hostel Independencia and that’s where we stayed for the next few nights. We’re slowly cottoning on to the fact that private double rooms in hostels are a relatively cheap and less distressing compromise to living in full dorms with upto 6 other backpackers. They’re also the rooms which get booked quickest so you need to book ahead rather than turning up with a dishevelled head and being disappointed. When you’ve got 8 people in a room, statistically you’re guaranteed to have at least a couple of snorers, one or two who are less than hygienically disposed, and a couple of dipsos who don’t get in til 3 or 4 each morning who when they do, snore AND stink.

We had one Spanish guy who talked in his sleep but very entertainingly so. He had 2 sided conversations, in very stern and forthright voices. like a film noir dialogue. Apparently he spent the first 16 years of his life sharing a room with his brother who also talked in his sleep and his father told them that they used to have sleeptalk chats over and back. Too bad they were in Spanish cos I’m sure I would have enjoyed a sneak peek into his psyche (so to speak). It’s weird though, no matter where we stay there’s always someone who gets night terrors and calls out my name to release them from their horrors.


Mendoza is an average nice town it’s main feature being streetside gaping open drains (or canals as they’re called locally) 2 or 3 feet deep which were used for irrigation of the tree lined boulevards. They’re pretty dangerous, especially if you’re drunk on local wine or if you have your head stuck in a camera. Aspects of Mendoza would remind you of BA but there’s much more of a town feel off Mendoza – despite it’s size. It has a huge municipal park which houses a University, a sports stadium and a load of other public amenities. The houses surrounding this park are as good if not better as any of the plushest architectural anomalies we witnessed in Buenos Aries. It’s located in the heart of the most well known wine region in Argentina and it’s really its winemaking industry and its many bodegas and larger wineries which result in the influx of tourists.

M at Septima Bodega

We took our first South American city bus to the extreme outskirts of the city to a free winery tour at Septima Bodega, one of the more modern bodegas in the area. The building itself sits in the middle of a sprawling vineyard – a grape concentration camp - and was built incorporating Inca building methods. The end result is a stunning mixture of old and new and even if I hadn’t done the wine tour I’d have been happy to check out the building from the inside. We took the tour, given by a girl called Carolina Green who’s great grandmother on her father’s side was Irish and who endearingly referred to the cellar as “the celery”, in the company of 2 apparently well to do Americans. She was dressed in a gold coat with matching handbag and shoes, he was dressed like a politician on a working holiday. We were dressed in whatever was left from the pile of clothes sent to the laundry that morning. Who gets dressed up formally for a wine tour anyways? Stretchy pants a go go.


The tour itself was interesting enough – we learned that the grape had most likely been introduced to South America by missionaries in the 15th century who needed wine for the sacraments. We also found out about the different varieties of handmade barrels imported from France and the states, some made from French Oak and others from North American Oak - French Oak is superior and is kept for only the reserve wines as it gives it a superior taste and richness over time. Rosé has such a light taste because it doesn’t get barrelled at all. Other wines achieve a medium oakiness or woodiness from the fact that they’re stored only in barrels on their 5th usage. It’s all very scientific and controlled (except for the 30 fruit flies I swallowed as I inhaled going into the mixing room – I kept coughing for half an hour as if I’d been eating peanuts) and entering the realms of the wine bore but we learned something, saw the inside of a functioning winery and got to glug some free wine at the tasting afterwards. We bought a couple of bottles of Malbec to keep us warm on our bus journey to Santiago. We had to keep asking the driver to adjust the air conditioning so we could sip our wine out of our Nalgenes at the just the right temperature.

The most remote off license on the planet

We met Hilan and Miriam later for dinner and we hit a Vegetarian Buffet which was a refreshing change from the usual bowel locking fare. Vegetarian food is like the Labour Court when your unionised bowels go in strike. Deadlocked bowels are bound by the intervention of the Falafel treaty, the Empanada amendment and the Pakora dictat. The following day we went on a bus tour up the mountains which wasn’t nearly as interesting as our wine tour. We bumped into a very old dog in a tiny village high up in the Andes who had the misfortune of being very blind. He comically stood facing a wall and barked at the rain. All the time we were there.



We left Mendoza on the Saturday morning and took a swish bus across the Andes into Chile, towards Santiago to our eventual destination of Valparaiso. We needed the swish bus (leather seats that reclined 75 degrees – the 90 degree recliners were sold out) to calm our travel frayed nerves after the border crossing took 3 and a half hours on its own. The Chilean Department of Agriculture is on constant lockdown (think of ports and airports in Ireland during the foot and mouth crisis) and refuses to allow any animal or plant derived food products from entering its borders. Chile is pretty hardcore on drugs aswell so every vehicle including the hundreds of commuter buses which pass through this extremely busy but remote border crossing, are rigorously searched by dogs, customs officials, department of agriculture officials and police drugs squad. So you have the usual painful queuing for immigration and the multiple forms to be filled out with exactly the same information. Then you queue to get your carry on luggage xrayed, very slowly and methodically with suspicious bags being systematically searched as you are called to witness the search while the rest of the bus looks on. Then all the main luggage from the bus is slowly and methodically unloaded and passed through the xray machine. It’s all unbelievably tedious and when you consider you’ve waited at least a couple of hours already for your turn (it’s done on a bus by bus basis) AND that the luggage handler guy goes around with a paper cup looking for propinas (tips) just as you’re about to board the bus and just as you think you’re finally done with the craziness, you can understand how it might take 3-4 hours and make you crazy in the coconut.

The Argentina Chile border high up in the Andes

I’m currently reading The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux where he outlines his travels by rail from Boston to Patagonia. It’s a highly recommended read more for the fact that a lot of his experiences aswell as their locations mirror ours – here’s an example of his take on border crossings : “The Panamerican express crosses a national frontier and railway travel is never more interesting than when it involves a border crossing. The frontier is always a no man’s land in which fascinating pieces of fraudulent theatre are enacted – the passport stamping ceremony, the suspicious looks, the bullying at customs, the foolishly patriotic pique and the unexplained delays.”


The public toilets in Chile are all turnstile affairs where you need to pay your Domestos contribution before you can relieve yourself. They say it’s in the name of “hygienic and secure toilets for everyone”. Not having any Chilean currency at the border and needing to visit a bathroom that’s not in a chrome wardrobe (like on the bus) becomes problematic when you discover they don’t take credit cards. It’s funny though, the local government, whose idea it presumably is to charge people for such a basic public convenience, are wholly inconvenienced themselves by the public health problems caused by the fact that many Chileans decide to opt out of the toilet toll and just do it in the street.

Don't do it in the street

We’ve seen so many guys, from the very young to the very old, urinating freely in alleyways, behind trees, just off shopping streets, in stairwells, over sea walls, in doorways and on street corners. Valparaiso in particular, which already has a plague of vicious or unhinged street dogs with wonky ears who use the streets as their toilet, was a pretty odorous streetwalking experience. And still they charge people to do their numbers in public bathrooms. Most of the time if you stop and try and unconfuse yourself about a lot of how South America works you’ll get pickpocketed or sold some chintz by a 50 year old “medical student” with a 5 o’clock shadow. So it’s not worth the effort. Bite your tongue, mentally staple the reasoning part of your brain closed and carry on.

Valparaiso

Our first night in Valparaiso was pure horror show. It was a bank holiday weekend and there was no room at the inn at the first 2 hostels we tried. So we scanned further down the list of accommodations in the guide book, almost to the bottom of the list and came across Hotel Puerto Valparaiso. It seemed cheap enough and mentioned “claw footed cast iron baths”. We later cross referenced the entry with another guidebook and found it was located in an area frequented by truckers, transvestites and rent boys. Always a lethal combination. Anyways, completely ignorant of this fact we checked into our windowless room, happy to have a bed for the night. We initially complained about the 20W bulb in our room and we were grudgingly upgraded to a room with 40W bulbs. We were still left with a windowless room so dimly lit that you needed a tripod to take a photo This place was a complete nightmare, the most low rent place we’ve had the pleasure of so far. I’d say the building itself was well over fifty years old with the original fit out done with second hand fixtures and fittings with things being only mended or ignored - never replaced, since then. Its bathroom had the oldest toilet I’ve ever seen and it had a fetching gingham jam lid cover over the opening. The bathroom relied heavily on “plumb and pray” plumbing - you only got a true appreciation for the plumbing innovation from the perspective of the toilet seat; a shoe lace had been drafted in to seal one of the joins.

.....sometimes

The bathroom door itself wouldn’t close as the wood had warped so much over time that it no longer cleared the broken tiled floor – even if you could get it shut there was a panel missing leaving a hole big enough to accommodate a llamas head….should you be mad enough to try and accommodate your llama in the en suite of your accommodation.

Valparaiso

So picture it, you’re trapped in this dimly lit, musty hell hole of a hotel at least until morning, you decide to take a look around, wandering the halls for distraction and the whole interior of the hotel is covered in homemade Word Art ads …..for the very hotel you’re trapped in. Helvetica Wavy Spooky. We had to borrow chairs from the restaurant to sit on in the room because there were none in the room and I caught the bed winking at me several times and refused to make contact with it until I fell out of my standing with tiredness. The interior lighting was very economically configured so that when you entered a hallway, a spotlight would turn on as you passed and have dimmed itself before you had even made it around the corner.

Notice in the hotel - your guess is as good as mine

We fled the claustrophobic confines of the hotel to go in search of food and maybe even some alcoholic anaesthetic but the streets of old Valparaiso at night were to prove even less hospitable than our mental breakdown of a hotel. Valparaiso is an old port town and still runs a functioning port from its waters. Our hotel was in the older part of this old port town but despite of, or maybe even because of its long history of visiting sailors from distant shores, the neighbourhood had a very unwelcoming ghostly feel. Our first stop was an ATM machine enslosed in one of those glass boxes where you need to swipe your card to gain entry. There was a bloodstained fist sized hole in the glass and notices over the machine to always check behind you when using the machine. Rattled, we stuffed the notes in our pockets and ran towards the light of what looked like a main street, passing a man walking on his cushion covered knees because….he seemed to be missing all his toes. The smell of deep fried meat and rotten fruit aswell as the aforementioned health and safety shortfalls filled the evening air. The purveyors of all things deep fried all seemed to have bushy moustaches. I’m not sure what the link is. We walked and walked, partly looking for some wholesome food and partly just to keep moving so not to provide an easy target for whatever malevolence we had convinced ourselves was abroad in this strange town. We eventually settled for bread and cheese purchased from a supermarket rather than risk trying any of the deep fried fare from the smoke filled holes in the wall packed to choking point with noisy locals. We returned to the hotel resolving to eat and get to sleep as quickly as possible to await the brighter perspective which morning generally provides. We bought new earplugs and dad has always called TV chewing gum for the eyes – well these things are chewing gum for the ears. They have the texture and consistency of well chewed Hubba Bubba but they work a treat for keeping the disco in the ballroom up the hotel from your room out of your dreams.

Valparaiso

Breakfast was an experience even by Argentine/ Chilean standards. We were greeted by more faded Word Art place settings – they had obviously gone so mad printing word art posters and place settings that the printer had ran out of toner. We were presented with Inedible Vittles – eating them was like trying to eat concentrated Liga or ten cream crackers at once. The cutting corners to save costs mentality of this hostelry continued – strictly 1 sachet of instant coffee and one portion of halflife-less butter per guest. The shallow bowl of pathetic sticky substance placed at the centre of the table looked like it had been paged 10 minutes previous to make an appearance at breakfast and pretend it was jam. We ended up eating our own cheese for breakfast..

We ended up hightailing it to an Internet kiosk first thing on Sunday morning and looking for a better class of accommodation. We had already decided to hole up in a nicer hotel for a few days prior to our Easter Island trip. Travelling can be pretty stressful, especially if you’re doing long journeys constantly without much of a break in between. I know you’re all sitting at home working hard going WHAT is he talking about?


But honestly, with holidays as long as these – as hilarious as it sounds, sometimes you need a break :) So we hit Vina del Mar and stayed at the brand new Sheraton hotel. This place is very nice indeed. It’s built right on the rocks just over the ocean – a brave investment as the area is renowned for its earthquakes and ensuing tsunamis. There’s even roadsigns depicting little matchstick men fleeing large waves in terror showing you escape routes in the event of the big one.


There was a full on gym, pool, sauna, outdoor jacuzzi overlooking the crashing waves and a very tasty and healthy buffet breakfast every morning – exactly what we needed to get ourselves relaxed and back in travelling mood and a world and a half away from the Valparaiso Puerto Hotel up the road. We kept bumping into other guests who would have a look of stunned silence on their faces when we told them we were in South America for 6 months. They were dying to ask how rogues like us could afford such high class accommodation for 6 months. We’d never mention our tent.

Valparaiso's speciality

Our first outing was to Pablo Neruda’s beachfront home in Isla Negra about an hour up the road. Pablo Neruda was, in 1971 the second Chilean poet to receive the Nobel prize for literature – the first being Gabriela Mistral. He’s a beloved figure in Chile as a lot of his history is tied up closely with the history of the country and a lot of his poetry refers constantly and very romantically to the beauty of the Chilean landscape. For example, Neruda was not a friend or supporter of several of the right wing Governments in Chile during his lifetime – indeed he had to escape from Chile over the Andes on a donkey carrying his unpublished manuscripts at one stage after a warrant for his arrest was issued. Then, when he died in 1973, the Chilean people ignored a curfew imposed by the military dictatorship (specifically to deny the outspoken poet a large funeral) and hundreds of thousands took to the streets to show their respects for their country’s poet laureate. This show of power by the people was the first demonstration to the dictatorship, indeed to themselves that they were a power to be reckoned with and it was from here that the seeds were sown for the eventual overthrow of the dictatorship. I have to admit to knowing very little about the man prior to visiting Chile but its amazing the interest which grows from visiting a man's home – especially when its as interesting as this one.

Neruda's Steel Wallpaper

He was a man who had a lot of obsessions outside of poetry. One was the sea – he apparently held a lifelong fantasy of becoming a ship's captain but was apparently happier on land than on water. So, he collected ship heads from old whale and coal ships all over the world. So there’s several of these things hanging all over the house, his favourite being one from the 18th century which had its original porcelain eyes. When he lit the fire in the room the condensation behind the ship head’s eyes would result in what looked like tears rolling down her cheeks. The house itself was built piece by piece over decades under Neruda’s instruction by his personal carpenter and a lot of local stonemasons and craftsmen who he employed to put flesh on the bones of his collected artefact’s dreams. It’s a haven of random eccentric esoterica and the rambling nature of the house’s structure is testament to Neruda’s genius and eccentricity. He always wrote in green ink, which he believed symbolised hope and life. Leather footstools, tables, walls and crockery were displayed all splashed haphazardly with the green ink of a poet at work. The place was hobbled together using rescued stained glass from about to be demolished buildings and rescued or uncovered ornate doors and windows. True to the nautical theme, the dining table was displayed laid out like he was the captain, and the hallways were all narrow and wooden with rope banisters.

Coloured Glass At Isla Negra

His other collections included an amazing shell collection which has to be seen to be believed, a lot of stained glass and old coloured bottles (he believed that wine tasted better drank from coloured glass), ornamental art from around the world - kitschy tack done with a kind of learned style. There were stetsons, hobnails, Tuxedoes, costume hats, guitars and other random srtinged instruments from all over the world bought because he liked their shape, and a series of wallplates depicting ornately painted air balloons. Telescopes, bronze hands, portraits, glass buoys also featured as well as paintings with moving parts – windmills, clock towers, goat’s heads and drinking peasants. He also had an impressive collection of ceremonial masks from Japan, China, Easter Island, Mexico, and Mongolia. His real job was (depending on which Government was in power) a foreign diplomat and throughout his life he had diplomatic postings to Singapore, Spain, Malaysia which facilitated his bizarre magpie like behaviour. An example of his madness – he bought a huge whale husk from Denmark with his Nobel prize money (88,000 dollars in 1971), he also purchased the life size horse outside a saddlery from his youth which he would pass every day on his way to school. This was displayed proudly in one of the already cluttered halls. Other random artefacts displayed around the house were reverse painted astral charts, stuffed hummingbirds , and an impressive purchased butterfly collection.

A fetching fish sculpture in Neruda's backyard

It was funny to see the stalls of touristy kitsch outside the house doing a roaring trade with tourists inspired by Pablo’s impressive collection wading in to whip up dream catchers, shell mobiles, brightly painted Neruda clay caricatures, mugs and wall plates, miniature replica ship heads, seashells (branded), cloth shopping bags, posters, postcards, baseball caps, ships in bottles, ashtrays, button badges, key rings, wall tiles, bins, buckets and spades, whatever wasn’t nailed down basically.


Neruda’s old writing desk now overlooks his final resting place. So that was his beach front home on the weekend….. He also had another crazy house in crazy Valparaiso, “La Sebastiana”, which we visited the following day. I would liken this one to Willy Wonka’s house – candy striped wallpaper, portholes in dividing walls, strange shaped rooms with odd views, some impressive steel wallpaper. There’s also another wooden horse – this time one rescued from a merry go round in Paris. The most endearing thing we saw here though was a black and white photo of him reading to a crowd of over 100,000 at a football stadium after his return from receiving the Nobel prize and he’s all alone on this vast expansive stage seated behind a very elegant writing desk and a fancy upholstered chair.

The view of Valpo from Neruda's study

Here’s an excerpt from the poem he wrote for his Valparaiso home ……..

To La Sebastiana :

I gave myself over to the cheapest doors,
Doors which had died
And had been pitched out of their homes
Doors without walls, broken
Piled up on scrap heaps,
Doors with no memory by now,
No trace of a key,
And I said “Come
To me, abandoned doors
I’ll give you a house and a wall
And a fist to knock on you
You will swing again, as the soul opens
You will guard the sleep of Matilde
With your wings that worked so much

..Now we can stop thinking. This is the house.

The common theme in both homes was the amazing views, particularly from the bedroom. Apparently every New Year’s Eve he would invite friends to a party at his Valparaiso home to watch the fireworks display over the bay, which continues even today and is considered one of the finest annual fireworks displays anywhere in the world.

Old Valparaiso

So other than all that madness, we’re still moving. We’re currently in Santiago, Chile’s capital. It’s Good Friday and the place is like a ghost town. Very religious are the Chileans. We’re hoping to get to mass in one of the large cathedrals in the city for 6 o’clock mass.

At Isla Negra

We fly to Easter Island very early in the morning. We had a quick look at the weather forecast for the next few days – we’re camping – and “Sunday Thunder, Monday Thunder” were writ large all over the forecast. Anyways, we’ll figure all that out. Happy Easter to all.

May the sun always set in your wineglass