Forethoughts on Exploring Chile

Posted 25 January 2007

Brian and Joan in Far West of China

Why Chile? Fascination with rugged western coastlines, those of Norway, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, not to mention Alaska and New Zealand which I have yet to visit. By reputation it's the safest venue in South America, where they talk the fastest Spanish and baffle further by leaving the ends off their words. (I always did think this Latin grammar was overkill.)

Likened to a small island hemmed in by the Pacific Ocean and the Andes, and only 180km at its widest, but oh so long - ranging from magical equatorial desert to Cape Horn. A people sometimes thought of as the impeccably behaved English of South America - though I guess my Welsh friends will want to claim Welsh speaking Patagonia and they can have the climate, rain for 370 days a year. I doubt they speak much English there, so I will have to exercise my Spanish. 'About time' says Maite, my teacher.

Joan has been reading guidebooks avidly for the past month. All I really know is that we are heading south to their summer holiday resorts at peak period. She is especially intrigued by the Mapuche (indigenous) culture on the island of Chiloe, which used to be off limits even for Spanish speaking Chileans. We now have a map, a superfluous guide one thinks for a country where there are no roads. To get south from Puerto Montt there are three alternatives, fly, take to the sea, or drive by looping over to Argentina's Atlantic coast. Now I learn from the internet that the preferred option is out, the biggest of the two ferries plying this route weekly has been out of action since the end of 2006 and is obviously not expected back in service before March at the earliest. Their site is silent on the reason so the imagination is stirred, a collision with an iceberg perhaps, or the dreaded overdue El Nino storms which occur at about five yearly intervals. (That phenomenon predates global warming and is thought to have been the cause of ancient civilisations being wiped out in far away coastal Peru.)

What to take on these trips and how to do it is a perpetual dilemma. Joan is already in a blue panic about whether she will have to carry her bag because it will cease to wheel (if it ever does!) on the unmade roads of the south. I seem to remember similar thoughts by me of the sandy desert country we were to encounter in western China, which in the event was a false alarm the only problem being on newly laid tarmac pavements. At least those thoughts have made up my mind. I will again start with the same old large rucksack, (which I bought second hand for our first backpacking venture in Nepal nearly twenty years ago). Keeping it as light as possible may mean going without my SLR film camera for the first time. But it necessary to cater for extremes of weather, cold and wet in the far south, hot and wet in the middle holiday area - the so called Lake District, and hopefully just hot in the wine growing and coastal resorts nearer to Santiago. The biggest regret is that we have waited too long - for this must be superb trekking country - but we are sadly too old of joints to contemplate that now.

Undoubtedly Chile will be a huge contrast to China, where we were simply amazed by the speed of development, particularly the opening up of the vast deserts of the 'wild west'. We went to China expecting it to be expensive whereas in reality it was very easy and extremely cheap to live at good European standards. By contrast we expect Chile to be the most expensive country we have yet in South or Central America, with little developed industry except mining, wine and tourism. It has an especial link with Swansea, which was once the most important copper producer in the world, in the day's of the clipper ships and the epic roundings of Cape Horn.