Chile - The Final Post

I’m in my final week here in Santiago.  It’s not been a bad trip at all, really – certainly a different part of the world and a long way from home.   So time to summarize then.

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Chile is an interesting place.  It’s one of the wealthier and more developed countries in South America, if not yet on a par with Brazil or Argentina.  Geographically, it’s extraordinary, a long and narrow country sandwiched between the Andes and the Pacific, stretching from equatorial regions down to Tierra del Fuego, at the very tip of the continent – almost Antarctica, and one of the world’s most hostile environments.    Cape Horn, at the very tip, has a well-deserved reputation as one of the most difficult and unpredictable stretches of ocean in the world, a veritable ship’s graveyard.  At the other extreme, in the far north of the country, lies the Atacama desert, one of the highest and driest locations on Earth, and at a height and with such a clear atmosphere that it is becoming one of the best astronomical centres anywhere on Earth.    From end to end, the country is around 4300km long, and about 175km wide, from sea to mountain.  It has offshore territories, too, including amongst its Pacific islands Easter Island, world famous for its collection of massive, prehistoric stone head statues (I would love to have visited it, but it’s a couple of hours flying time, and quite expensive to do, needing at least a few days’ visit to do it justice).

It’s also a seismic country, with several big and still active volcanoes (including a huge dormant one within sight of Santiago).  One erupted in the south of the country earlier this year, and the resultant ash cloud caused widespread flight cancellations across South America and the entire South Pacific as far away as Australia and New Zealand……a southern hemisphere version of the Icelandic blow-out in 2010 that closed European airspace for a week and blocked my first Caribbean trip.    Earthquakes are also quite common, mostly slight tremors but now and again there’s a big one – as recently as February last year the biggest ever measured (8.8 on the Richter scale apparently) struck the country, followed by many aftershocks, including one measuring 6.9 in March 2010.  Nothing like that has happened during my visit as I write, although on Monday evening I was sitting in the hotel having a quick surf on the internet, when there was a very clear and unmistakable tremor – it only lasted a few seconds, and nobody seemed to take any notice of it, but I felt the floor of the room (I’m on the 8^th floor) tremble, heard a clear groaning sound, and saw the light fittings in the room start swinging.   All very interesting – when it stopped I went onto my balcony and looked around, and it was as if nothing untoward had happened as people went on about their normal business without a care.

The result of this seismic activity is that the hotel safety card is very different.  All the versions I’ve seen before just give information about fire escapes and actions to take in the event of a fire.  Here, the card in my room gives this information, but also carries sections covering what to do in the event of a volcanic eruption, an earthquake and a tsunami – even though Santiago is over 100km from the coast and the nearest active volcano is about 80km way.  Better safe than sorry, I guess.

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Politically, it’s a stable democracy with a popular and forward thinking president.   This is a marked change to the 70s and 80s when the country was ruled by the army generals, led by Augusto Pinochet, a brutal regime that resulted in thousands of people being tortured and killed or just plain disappearing without a trace.  Sting wrote a song about it – the haunting “They Dance Alone”.   Pinochet, after he was overthrown, was a bit of a pariah and became an exile himself in Paris, but died from natural causes before he could be extradited to face justice.  Interestingly, Maggie Thatcher always denied he was a butcher and insisted he was a true friend to British democracy after he allowed us to use Chilean naval and air bases during the Falklands war back in the 80s.  To the day he died she refused to hear a bad word about him.

But despite this relative stability, the Student Demonstration seems to be a national pastime as popular now as it ever was.   If you look on the UKFO Travel Advice website, it gives a warning that demonstrations can happen at any time, and that tear-gas, rubber bullets and water cannon are routinely used to disperse them.  I went downtown last Saturday, where the University campus and all the museums and the cathedral are situated, and I had hardly left the metro station when I heard loud chanting and klaxons going off.  There was a small demo taking place about 50m away, a couple of hundred people marshaled by  half as many riot police, and they were heading down the closed off shopping street I was standing in.  I shot off a couple of pictures and walked down a side street to avoid any potential confrontation, but there was none.  Later, on my way back, I looked across the main road close by, O’Higgins Boulevard, at the main campus building – right the way across the frontage, just below the roofline, a protest banner was stretched and small groups of students were marching to and fro shouting slogans.   They seemed to be having a fine old time….

                                                    Chile's national pastime...the Student Demo

It seems the president is more popular outside Santiago than within it, and even more so outside of
Chile.  Like leaders worldwide he is fighting an economic crisis, with unemployment rising and productivity falling, and like leaders worldwide he is relying on the new buzzword and tactic of “austerity measures” to solve the crisis – and like everywhere else it’s not exactly a popular course of action (nor particularly effective since it slows economic growth to a standstill even as it attempts to reduce costs through tax increases and job cuts).  The cuts to the education budget here are particularly harsh, and so the students at universities across Chile are vocal in their opposition. 

                                   

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Downtown – Old Santiago – was a bit of a disappointment really.  I didn’t see much as my dodgy hip started playing up and I had to cut the expedition short and go back to the hotel to rest, but what I did see was frankly not that impressive.  There were some fine old buildings in the area, big and clearly Spanish influenced, but the whole area, like that around Estacio Central (see my last post) was very grubby looking and not well managed.  The roads were narrow and clustered closely together so it was easy to get off-track as many of them weren’t labeled on my hotel tourist map, and the key buildings were poorly signed – I walked past the cathedral about three times from different directions before stumbling on to the front entrance: there was no precinct around it as with St.Paul’s or Westminster in London (or indeed any cathedral I’ve ever seen), the front door opened straight onto a busy shopping street and only the sounds of the Mass drifting out of the doors gave the game away.

Close by was small and pleasant square, perhaps the size of a football pitch, surrounded by more grand old buildings (I think one was an art gallery), and preparations were going on for some kind of show that evening: a stage was being erected, there were small stands around the edge selling all kinds of ornaments and crafts and snacks, and in the middle of it all strode a dark suited evangelist preacher, Bible in hand, haranguing everyone in sight.  Everyone ignored him completely.

                                                      Oy!  Is anyone listening to this?

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Last week there was a bank holiday here.  Whilst the project shut down for the day, the main shopping malls and tourist attractions remained open, so I took a hike to the biggest and most popular mall in town, looking for the usual gifts to take home.  The mall was perhaps a three kilometre walk away, within the same Las Condes suburb as the hotel and office.   I stopped off at my local Starbucks for some breakfast, then strolled through what is in effect New Santiago, past high rise office blocks and apartment complexes, some of them quite spectacular (one such had a helicopter landing pad on the roof, a platform that stretched out over the road), in lovely tree lined avenues.  Santiago is quite a green city: all of the main boulevards and many other roads both large and small, in both the Old and New city, are tree lined, and there are many parks.  I walked through one small park that was actually sited between the opposing carriageways of one busy road: it contained attractive flower beds and well-tended lawns, play areas with swings and slides for the kids, benches and picnic tables to relax at, and a jogging/cycling track down the centre.  A similar park I saw on the way out of Santiago on my coastal trip stretched for perhaps three kilometres, again between carriageways, but instead of flower beds and cycle tracks it held a succession of football pitches and basketball courts, some of them floodlit.  There is an almost identical area on the road out to the airport, and I’ve seen it also in Mexico City, again en-route to the airport.

                                                   Nice place to live.....

Most of the apartment blocks were lovely, fifteen and twenty floors high, all apartments with big balconies and underground parking, surrounded by landscaped gardens containing tennis courts and swimming pools, and of course 24 hour security guards at the complex gate.  Las Condes is clearly one of the more select areas in Santiago, both for work and living: it even has its own golf course (I walked past it on the way to the mall).  I haven’t checked, but my guess is it would be very expensive to live in the area – but worth every penny.

The mall was huge, without doubt the biggest I’ve been to anywhere.  We have some big and impressive malls in Warsaw, but this one was the equivalent of perhaps three of them combined – for UK readers, imagine perhaps 3 Bluewater’s in one building.  I got lost.  There were at least three floors of shops in each wing of the mall – the local department stores (equivalent to BHS or Marks & Spencer), plus the usual suspect international brands like Benetton, adidas, Zara and so on, plus local brand stores, many food courts, cinema complexes and, as we’re in December, no less than three Santa’s Grottoes.   There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to the layout – there were little arcades of shops shooting off the main avenues, sometimes looping round to rejoin it further along, at others merging with another massive department store, and I saw no store maps to help you navigate.    I found a local gift store within a couple of minutes of arriving, but decided to see if there were any alternatives – and when I couldn’t, spent another hour trying to find the place again.

I ate in one of the outside food plazas on the roof as it was (as usual) hot and sunny.  It’s one of the few places I’ve found with an English menu, so I selected something called “Meal for the Poor”.  It turned out to be a big plate of chips and fried onions, with 4 nicely fried slices of beefsteak topped with two fried eggs.  It was delicious, and I’m still wondering what is the “Meal for the Averagely Well Off” if this monster was for “the Poor”.   But washed down with a pint of the local brew, cold and from the tap rather than bottled, it certainly hit the spot.

                                                  A Meal for the Poor, apparently.....

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Close to my hotel is the Parque Metropolitan.   This is a big area containing a large hill (or small mountain if you prefer) that rises about 400m above metropolitan Santiago (itself around 500m above sea-level), at the top of which are a number of radio and tv masts and a 22m statue to the Virgin Mary on a pedestal surrounded by a crafts market and picnic area.  Next to this a funicular railway takes you down to the city, close to the zoo.   The web says the view from the top of Cerro San Cristobal (as it’s called, San Cristobal’s Hill) is spectacular, across the city and mountains, and a “must see” for any visitor to the city.  Fair enough: I’d better go there then.

The main entrance to the park is actually downtown and needs a metro ride to get there, so I decided to find a more local entrance.  Again the map was not too clear on this: although the park itself is clearly shown entrances and exits aren’t, except for the funicular.   Anyway, working on the basis that any park, no matter what the size, must have more than one way in, I decided to look for something closer to the hotel.  I wandered around a bit before I found the right road, and eventually got to where the park appeared to start, at least at this end of the city.  It didn’t…..instead, there was the entrance to the San Cristobal tunnel, that leads evidently under the hill and on towards the airport, avoiding a run through the city centre.  I walked along the road that parallels the 10ft fence separating the park (or at least that section of Cerro San Cristobal) from the surrounding houses – the neighbourhood, despite its proximity to a network of main roads and dual carriageways ringing the northern edge of Santiago, is very nice: no apartment blocks but quiet roads of mainly detached houses and bungalows – but could find no entrance.  Once I reached a concrete traffic island separating lanes of traffic at an intersection I figured I had gone far enough, and doubled back.   At the tunnel entrance, I noticed some mountain-bikers coming out of a side street and decided to look there.

Sure enough, it led to the park entrance.  There was a decent looking bar/restaurant there which I ignored (I had a bottle of water and a banana in my back pack) and a playground for the kids, and a number of paths leading into the woods that cover the side of the hill.  I selected the easiest looking one (it had a shallow flight of wooden steps within a few yards of the start) and headed off.  It was a hard climb in the event, not easy at all – that flight of steps was the least strenuous part of the entire walk – but well worth it.  The path zig-zagged its way up the side of the hill, through woodland.  It was usually quite steep and narrow, with plenty of tree roots exposed to trip you up if you weren’t careful, and now and again a flight of wooden or rock-hewn steps with rickety wooden railings would help you navigate a more difficult stretch (usually a sharp bend where the track doubled back on itself, but on a higher elevation).  It was hot and dusty despite the shade from the trees, and invariably steep and a hard walk.  Every so often the path would level out and form a little viewpoint, and the guide books and websites are right – the view out across Santiago is superb, and better the higher you go.  The whole climb took probably an hour, with a couple of stops on the way for a quick drink, and in that time I saw perhaps another dozen people on the track, including one lunatic riding a mountain bike at speed DOWN the track.

                                              Now where the hell has that path gone?

The top of the track brought me out onto a road that wound its way up to the park at the end of the massif, where the funicular, the statue and the market are situated, so I strolled along there.  At the top is a small garden with seats and a picnic area, and a kiosk selling drinks and ice-cream (but no beer), and next to it a further small elevated park that leads to the base of the radio masts at the very summit of the hill.   The masts rise another 100 metres or so, and I felt giddy just looking up at their tips – I admire anyone who works at maintaining those things, climbing up a narrow ladder to the tiny platforms at the top as required.  I hope their life insurance is generous and they’re provided with parachutes….

The statue of the Madonna is beautiful, in white marble, and is very similar to the statue of Christ the Redeemer above Rio de Janeiro – gazing out across the city below, arms outstretched, but a lot smaller.  At the foot of the statue’s plinth is the craft market and another picnic area that was quite crowded on this sunny Sunday afternoon.   Below, Santiago stretches away south, east and west, right up to the Andean foothills, and on this day some of the higher mountains beyond, snow-capped and magnificent, were clearly visible.   I spent an hour or so wandering around here, trying and failing to take the perfect picture to do the view justice, browsing the trinkets, leather bracelets (I treated myself to one, aging hippy that I am), post cards, traditional Indian knitwear and so on, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

                                                     The Blessed Virgin.....

                                                    ....and the view......

The funicular ride down was fun.  It’s an old railway, and although well maintained probably hasn’t been significantly upgraded for years.  Each “train” comprises 4 linked carts, each about 7feet square and covered by a stretched tarpaulin roof.  They are all open to the elements with no windows at all and only waist high wooden walls with gates that are secured merely by bolts as you would see on an old farmhouse door.   One goes up and as it does so one goes down to keep the line balanced.  Half way down the steep slope of the track is a passing space.  But it was fine: the ride down took perhaps 10 minutes, half of which was spent just above the passing place waiting for the other car to fill and climb up to meet us.   The line passes through Santiago Zoo, but I didn’t  get off there (and nor did anyone else) – the only creatures I saw were a few monkeys lolling in a tree in their enclosure beside the track, dispassionately watching us trundle past.

                                                         The passing place on the funicular

At the bottom the street from the station back into the city passes perhaps 60 bars and restaurants, small places with outside tables selling identikit burgers and beers at similar prices, all of them playing competing flamenco or hip-hop music.  I gave it a miss.  There is a metro station  at the far end of the street, next to yet another university campus (there seem to be more options in this one city than in Oxford and Cambridge combined), and the train from there took me back to the hotel in 15 minutes.  I was tired but happy, it had been a lovely afternoon’s exercise.

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So what else can I say about the place?

Well, it’s certainly worth the long journey, at least in the summer months, when the weather is hot and sunny.  I imagine winters are good too, with Andean ski resorts a mere half an hour’s drive away.  The surrounding scenery is stunning – the only place I’ve been to remotely like it was Almaty, with its Himalayan offshoot on its northern border.   But Santiago, in particular the Las Condes district in which I’ve been based, is much much nicer than anything I saw in Almaty. 

There are other similarities to Almaty as well – the traffic is heavy  but the drivers more polite than the average Kazakh (at lease traffic signals are obeyed), and some of the old bungalows in the poorer quarter around Estacio Central, and on the edge of Las Condes viewed from Cerro San Cristobal, reminded me of the northern suburbs of Almaty.   Like Almaty too there is a surprising lack of spoken English – both cities are flourishing business and international banking centres for their respective countries, and I would have expected English to be more readily spoken than it actually is.  Santiago and Almaty are still the only two places in all my business travels where I have had no option but to use the services of an interpreter to do my daily work.   That is perhaps something the Chilean tourist authorities need to get a grip on and improve, because I can quite easily envisage the place becoming a more popular destination, and the lack of English (or for that matter, French, German etc….) in even the main Tourist Information Offices can only be harmful for its development.

I would certainly love to see more of the country.  My trip to Horcon and its beautiful beaches whetted my appetite, and I can think of many worse places to spend a couple of weeks lounging in the sun.   Having flown over them on the way in, a trip or two into the Andes would be wonderful.  I would love to travel north to the Atacama desert and lie on my back one dark night and watch the stars wheel overhead through crystal clear skies with no light pollution, and in patterns very different to those I’ve lived with in northern Europe these last sixty-odd years.  A trip to Easter Island to see those strange statues would be great as well – I remember in my youth reading a book by (I think) Erich von Daniken that cited them as proof that Earth was at some time in the past visited by alien powers who helped the primitive civilizations develop tools and techniques that should have been way beyond them.  Not sure I believe that (although I am totally convinced that we are not alone in the universe – there are other sentient beings out there, we just haven’t met them yet) but I’d love to see the place and make my own mind up, thank you very much.  Tierra del Fuego would be great too, with its colonies of seals and sea-birds and in season the odd passing whales, and dramatic almost Antarctic climate: granite coastlines and rough seas pounding them incessantly.

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Yes, it’s been a good trip.