Bienvenido en Chile
As many of you are aware, I don't really do early mornings. Still less likely am I to be wide awake and happy on said morning if I've had one or two drinkies the night before. So it shouldn't really be a surprise that I overslept a wee bit the day I was due to leave Bariloche on an early bus. Well, I say overslept. What I actually did was wake up, turn off the alarm clock, not get out of bed "quite yet" and then wake up half an hour or so later in a blind flap, and do my champion headless-chicken act getting out of the door. I am quite well-practiced at this, unfortunately, so at least I had packed almost everything into my bags the previous night and so was able to do a 3-minute departure. I made it down the evil little hill on which Pudu hostel sits and then stood for about 10 minutes waiting for a local bus to turn up to get me to the bus terminal. Eventually, I decided that trying to save a couple of quid by getting a bus rather than a cab and thus risking having to buy a whole new ticket to Chile was a particularly daft false economy, and flagged down the next passing taxi. So I made my bus in the end.
The journey itself was really beautiful, at least on the Argentine side, cutting alongside the lakes that give the region its name, which were lovely in the morning sunshine. See, I can't have been feeling the effects that bad, or I wouldn't have regarded sunshine as being a beautiful thing. The border crossing took a fair old while, mostly due to the wait at the Chilean side whilst all the bags were scanned for fruit, vegetable or animal matter - yes, the Chileños are about as obsessed with bio-security as my old friends the Kiwis (and yes, I am still bitter after over 3 years about the NZ$200 fine I got for accidentally bringing in an apple from Australia...). We also had the fun experience of driving for a few kilometres in quasi-No-Man's-Land, having been stamped out of Argentina at the Argentine border post but not actually stamped into Chile until we made it through the pass to the corresponding Chilean post on the other side. From there, the journey was relatively straightforward and would have been dull but for my book, although it was noticeable right away that the countryside in southern Chile looks quite a lot like northern Europe.
Possibly partly as a result of this, but also of the fact that it was relatively unsettled frontier country (having until recently been a stronghold of the Mapuche people, who stood up to both the Incas and the Spanish), there was an awful lot of immigration in the 19th century from Germany, France and Switzerland, and this is reflected in some of the architecture, as well as in names of streets and businesses and the like, and possibly also the food - the most common fast-food found in Chile is the hot-dog, usually in the form of the completo where it is drenched in mayonnaise, ketchup, onions and sometimes guacamole, sauerkraut or both, and the area around Puerto Varas and Valdivia is more blessed with sauerkraut availability in general in restaurants than anywhere I've been outside Europe.
On arrival in Puerto Varas I was slightly gutted to find that my bus company was one of those which did not stop nice and conveniently in the centre of town, but a fair way out, leaving me another one of those fun treks in the mid-afternoon fun of which I am so fond in order to get to my hostel, the Compass del Sur. In keeping with the north European theme, this is owned by a Chilean-Swedish couple, and they advertise on Hostelworld and the like that their staff speak Chileño, Svensk, Deutsch and English. I just had the luck to arrive when the lass on duty only spoke Chileño (which even some Spanish speakers think could occasionally be classed a different dialect with the amount of weird vocab they use), at the usual machine-gun pace for here - luckily, the basics of showing someone into a hostel are fairly self-explanatory, and I was able to understand about 40% of what the lass said, and infer the rest. Having gratefully dumped my bags, I popped back into town to get supplies from the supermarket (yep, pasta-and-sauce nights again, with a drop of viño to accompany) before a quiet night in, some of which was spent comparing micro-brew preferences and recommendations with Cameron, yet another exchange student doing a semester in Santiago.
The journey itself was really beautiful, at least on the Argentine side, cutting alongside the lakes that give the region its name, which were lovely in the morning sunshine. See, I can't have been feeling the effects that bad, or I wouldn't have regarded sunshine as being a beautiful thing. The border crossing took a fair old while, mostly due to the wait at the Chilean side whilst all the bags were scanned for fruit, vegetable or animal matter - yes, the Chileños are about as obsessed with bio-security as my old friends the Kiwis (and yes, I am still bitter after over 3 years about the NZ$200 fine I got for accidentally bringing in an apple from Australia...). We also had the fun experience of driving for a few kilometres in quasi-No-Man's-Land, having been stamped out of Argentina at the Argentine border post but not actually stamped into Chile until we made it through the pass to the corresponding Chilean post on the other side. From there, the journey was relatively straightforward and would have been dull but for my book, although it was noticeable right away that the countryside in southern Chile looks quite a lot like northern Europe.
Possibly partly as a result of this, but also of the fact that it was relatively unsettled frontier country (having until recently been a stronghold of the Mapuche people, who stood up to both the Incas and the Spanish), there was an awful lot of immigration in the 19th century from Germany, France and Switzerland, and this is reflected in some of the architecture, as well as in names of streets and businesses and the like, and possibly also the food - the most common fast-food found in Chile is the hot-dog, usually in the form of the completo where it is drenched in mayonnaise, ketchup, onions and sometimes guacamole, sauerkraut or both, and the area around Puerto Varas and Valdivia is more blessed with sauerkraut availability in general in restaurants than anywhere I've been outside Europe.
On arrival in Puerto Varas I was slightly gutted to find that my bus company was one of those which did not stop nice and conveniently in the centre of town, but a fair way out, leaving me another one of those fun treks in the mid-afternoon fun of which I am so fond in order to get to my hostel, the Compass del Sur. In keeping with the north European theme, this is owned by a Chilean-Swedish couple, and they advertise on Hostelworld and the like that their staff speak Chileño, Svensk, Deutsch and English. I just had the luck to arrive when the lass on duty only spoke Chileño (which even some Spanish speakers think could occasionally be classed a different dialect with the amount of weird vocab they use), at the usual machine-gun pace for here - luckily, the basics of showing someone into a hostel are fairly self-explanatory, and I was able to understand about 40% of what the lass said, and infer the rest. Having gratefully dumped my bags, I popped back into town to get supplies from the supermarket (yep, pasta-and-sauce nights again, with a drop of viño to accompany) before a quiet night in, some of which was spent comparing micro-brew preferences and recommendations with Cameron, yet another exchange student doing a semester in Santiago.
posted by Pat at 12:00 pm
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