/ chile
tengo una reserva de hostelworld
I´ve written quite a bit about couchsurfing, yet have not mentioned hostel life at all. And, like almost all young travelers in South America, I have spent many a night - and quite a few days - in hostels. I´m currently in a Loki Hostel, a mini-chain of four hostels in Perú and Bolivia known for being some of the craziest party hostels.
They serve food all day and cook dinner at night (not included) and generally have hopping bars, so guests often forget to leave. Most hostels are not like this, although diversity is sort of the name of the game in hostels - especially since having four hostels makes Loki the largest hostel chain I´ve heard about in South America. Most hostels operate independently and are run by their owner. There are always dorm-style rooms with bunk beds for anywhere from four to 15 people and usually a few private rooms. Almost all have kitchens for guests, a bar, a separate common area with a television and a communal computer. Outside space, like a rooftop patio or backyard, is common.
Free WiFi is the norm, and more people than ever seem to be traveling with laptops since those cheap, light weight, little netbooks appeared this year. Every week I seem to be seeing more people with them, while only three months ago they were novel.
All hostels employ local people, but many have a few gringo employees, especially as bar workers. Of the 20 or so different hostels I´ve stayed at in South America, only one places has had only Spanish-speaking employees. English is without a doubt the language of hostel-culture in South America. The majority of guests come from Australia (a country that must be empty because all of its citizens are out traveling), Germany, the UK, Ireland, Canada, the US, Scandanavia and New Zealand; as you may have noticed, the citizens of these countries either speak English as their first language or so fluently it might as well be their first language. Most people don´t speak more than 50 words of Spanish, though many people are using part of their time in South America to take courses.
Speaking English is generally a problem for people from Italy, Spain, France and Brazil, who bank on their native language being similar enough (or the same) to Spanish to get around.
Many people are traveling alone, which adds to a culture of constantly meeting new people. The vast majority of people are friendly and social, always looking for someone to hang out with. Other people travel in pairs of friends, almost always of the same sex, and there are generally a few couples hanging around. Every once in a blue moon, a pair of siblings or a group of more than three people traveling together can be found.
Most people are traveling for three or four months in South America, though many travel for nine months or a year on ¨around the world trips.¨At any given time, you can find someone in a hostel that has been traveling for several years almost non-stop.
hmm… consider this entry a work in progress
Kiwi Friend says…
I needed to get out of Argentina to renew my visa, and as it worked out a friend I met in Buenos Aires was travelling through Peru. We decided to meet up a few days ago in Arica, Chile. The bus to Arica from Jujuy was quite a trip. The bus went through some pretty high altitudes which can make you pretty sick. Luckily for me I had conveniently emptied my intestines completely the previous night, but unfortunately the woman who sat across the isle from me was not so lucky.
Ok, put down your macaroni cheese for a moment…
For a second I thought to myself, is that parmesan I smell? No. Not Parmesan. Then we were all treated to some charming sound affects as the women threw up into a leaky plastic bag, missing a few times of course, and then falling asleep for an hour and a half still holding the dripping bag. The poor guy in front of her hadn’t realised that there was vomit all over the floor and it was seeping through his backpack. Why, why, why would you not go in the bathroom or ask the driver to stop? Or even ask if there is somewhere you could deposit the vomit bag? Ok, sorry about that. I bet you feel like you were there for that.
going back for a moment…
Some days in Chile it seemed like everything in a package is made by Nestle. And some days it really was. From ice cream to crackers to yogurt, their brand rules the grocery store. Forget General Mills, common cereal brands like Cheerios are sold here under the Nestle, not General Mills brand.
Oh, and I almost forget - yeah, right - Nescafe, the overprocessed, instant hot beverage product mascarading as coffee.
I wrote last week about pisco in Chile, and now I´ve had the opportunity to try the Peruvian pisco I heard so much about. I can´t really tell the difference, and the drink is served in pretty much the same way in both countries. Pisco sours are the most common, though they call a piscola Perú Libre here - and add some lemon. Pisco with Sprite and lemon is also common.
The main difference seems to be price, honestly. The three pisco sours in picture one cost PEN$12 (Peruvian Nuevo Soles - about US$4) combined. Almost all the bars in Arequipa have happy hour specials all the time - and use the term ´Happy Hour´ on menus in Spanish. Three drinks for PEN$12 for pisco sours, mojitos and similar well drinks is common. In Chile, one pisco sour was at least US$2 or $3 ($1000 and $1500 Chilean pesos, respectively) and could easily cost $7 or $10.
I also learned, during the pisco tasting in picture two, that pisco comes from the first fermentation of the grapes; it´s literally fermented grape juice (as opposed to a grape-based alcohol like grappa, which is made from the remnants of wine grapes). A few grapes, like muscat, are common in Peruvian pisco, and most bottles actually contain a mix.
rules of the road
I couldn´t find one plant growing in the desert between Arica and the Chilean border. Just sand, flat sand and mountains of sand - oh, and some trash people have chucked out their windows over the years.
In the past week, I have been told at least 10 different stories about the drama of crossing the Chile-Peru border. Everyone claimed that everyone else´s advice on how to cross was wrong.
¨Just buy a bus ticket from Iquique to Arequipa.¨ (They don´t sell them.)
¨Just go to Arica and buy a bus ticket to Arequipa.¨
¨Go to Arica and take a taxi across the border to Tacna. It´s only $1000 Chilean pesos.¨ ¨It´s only $2000 Chilean pesos.¨ (US$2 or US$4 respectively, but it´s actually $3000 Chilean / US$6.)
¨There´s a train, but it´s not running today.¨
¨The border check personnel are on strike. Don´t go today; stay another day in Arica, and you won´t have any problems. Today´s you´ll have to take a taxi to the Chilean side, walk two kilometers with you bags (through the desert) and get another taxi on the Peruvian side. If there are any. Oh, and I talked to people who had to wait five hours to cross today.
What actually happened: Kiwi Friend, who I met in BsAs and reunited with in Arica, got up early in the morning and walked to the international bus ´station´ in Arica - actually a parking lot with a few stands selling passages in five-passanger cars to Tacna. There was some border issue, so they were only willing to take us as far as the Chile check point for $1500 Chilean. When we got to the check point and had our passports processed, which took less than five minutes, there were cars waiting to take us to Tacna for $2000 Chilean. The two kilometer walk turned out to be about 50 meters.
The most interesting part of the border crossing turned out to be the surpisingly new, modern building at the Peruvian checkpoint. Oh, Chile, how you always lie.
cuidate con el agua. estamos en una zona desierta.
After nearly three months in South America, I have finally gotten to a place where you can´t drink the water. As an avid anti-bottled water, Nalgene user, I find this to be very problematic.
This is not intended to be advice to others on where to drink the water, but I have been told that it is fine - and not gotten sick from it - everywhere I went in Argentina, Uruguay and central Chile. Having arrived in northern Chile, in one of the driest parts of the world, however, the water starts to have a really terrible taste and can often make travelers - and even locals - sick.
You can drink a little of it from the tap, and it´s not so problematic as to cause problems when brushing your teeth. I even tried boiling it before drinking it, but the flavor remained so strongly that I had to force it down my throat.
The flavor comes from the piping, I´ve been told, that is needed to bring the water from the mountains, from Argentina or from the center of Chile to this desert zone. What´s most befundling about these northern Chilean cities and towns near the Atacama Desert, the driest in the world, is not the quality of the water but that they have enough to survive at all. Today, there´s water piped to houses, and bottled water can easily be purchased. An older local man recently told me that only 20 or 30 years ago, however, water was brought to the most northern city of Arica only twice a week in trucks. Let me reiterate that there is no water here naturally; Arica is the driest city (population almost 200,000) in the world. How people survived here 200 years ago is even more surprising.
And a sidenote about Nalgenes, those unbreakable, thick plastic bottles that can be used for carrying hot or cold drinks. Almost every person from the US, and most of those from Canada, I´ve met traveling carries one. They´re certainly popular in the US, especially among a population likely to backpack around South America. For me, carrying a non-disposable water bottle is as important as sunblock.
And yet, I have met ONE person not from the US or Canada carrying one - and he found his on the ground while hiking. Most non-north Americans don´t seem to know what it is, and I´ve gotten many questions about what it´s for and why I bother carrying it. ¨Isn´t it heavy?¨ is one of the most common. And, yes, it is, when it has a liter of water in it. But that´s just more encouragement to drink water!
In the center and north of Chile, there´s tons of fresh fruit juice. Some places add water and sugar, but it´s also easy to find 100% juice - mango, strawberry - a mix of these two shown in picture one along with straight pineapple - orange, cherimoya and others.
Cherimoya (picture two), by the way, is a soft Chilean fruit with giant black seeds - seriously, I can´t think of another fruit with similarly sized seeds; they look like black almonds - that tastes kind of like a mushier, sweetened pear.
Juice is served at regular restaurants, of course, and can be found waiting for you in smoothie-like juice dispensers at juice bars (picture three), kiosks and street food stands.
One of the most delicious things you can find to eat in Chile is the avocados. There are avocados galore. The little black ones (hass), slightly larger and more watery green ones with longer necks, and giant green ones 6-8 inches long that look and taste like the smaller green ones. In picture one, the black and smaller green onesare displayed by a street vendor.
They appear on every salad and in tons of menu items, including on completos (picture three), a Chilean hot dog with lots of toppings - in addition to avocado, there are usually tomatoes, mayonnaise, cheese, whatever you want… They are commonly found on menus and can be bought from completo stands (more like an ice cream case than a hot dog stand) inside kiosks and other small stores.
On the other hand you have the not-so-delicious Chilean hot dogs and sausages, which usually have quite a similar consistency. Salchipapas, basically french fries covered in small hot dogs and/or sausages, are a common menu item (the remnants of a dish of salchipapas are in picture four).
Like many things - including land - Chile and Perú both claim pisco as their own. Named for pisqu, a little bird in Quechua, the liquor is distilled from grapes.
In Chile it´s most commonly drank in pisco sours, a mix of pisco, raw egg white, simple syrup and lemon juice with a shake-like consistency, or in a piscola, a simple mix of pisco and CocaCola, but it goes with ginger ale and Sprite as well. Or you can just knock it back with a little lime, sugar and ice water.
Shown above: a bottle of Chilean pisco next to pisco on the rocks; pisco sours at a bar in Valparaiso; a for rent sign with a Chilean pisco brand sponsor
driving a lingual line
Being near other tourists a lot has turned out to mean that I spend a lot of time translating between English and Spanish for other people. I´ve done it during a multi-person conversation in Spanish, where I had to recap every few minutes for a beginning Spanish sppeaker in Cordoba, Argentina; one day a taxi driver I exchanged pleasantries with asked me to ask two non-Spanish-speaking passangers where they needed to go in Bariloche, Argentina; I helped someone send money via Western Union at the bus station in Valparaiso, Chile; I regularly translate in stores, cabs and restaurants for friends.
And it´s not just for non-Spanish speakers. I´ve had shop keepers ask me how to say things like returnable and empty bottles, and a tour guide at a winery in Salta, Argentina asked me to write down and sound out instructions for tastings so she could memorize them in English.
All this experience came in handy this week when I went with a Danish friend to get a tattoo. She speaks almost no spanish so I spent about two horus translating back and forth at two different tattoo parlors about the design she wanted, where she wanted it, how much it cost, how to take care of it, etc. And I also learned that it´s difficult to convince Chilean tattoo artists to draw tattoos they don´t like - a bus in this case.
In addition to the usual public buses (the Spanish word for bus in Chile is bus) and private taxis in Chile, there are group taxis called colectivos - which is, unfortunately, the word for bus in Argentina. They’re more expensive than the bus but much less than private taxis and usually follow a semi-specific route.
planes, trains and automobiles - or not
I was thinking about writing about the buses - the long ones that make up the main form of non-personal transportation around South America. Not trains, not planes. Buses. 10-hour buses from Buenos Aires to Cordoba, 18-hour buses from Salta to Mendoza, 24-hour buses from Santiago to the north of Chile.
Even the cheapest long-distance buses in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay are nicer than any bus I’ve seen in the US - but I’ve also never been on a bus for longer than seven hours in the US. Here there’s moreleg room, the chairs lean back farther and there’s food (and sometimes even free alcohol). At stations passengers get off to buy drinks and food or use the bathroom while vendors get on to hawk packaged or homemade foods. Sometimes the vendors actually just hop on from the side of the road, sell while the bus is moving, and get off when they’re done.
I wrote the start to this post in my notebook during what was supposed to be a 28-hour busride from Valparaiso to Arica, the most northern (small) city in Chile on the border with Peru. After 26 1/2 hours, we pulled into a small bus station in a mountains-meet-desert-meets-ocean town (these are bountiful in Chile), and everyone stood up to get off. This was the first total exodus from the bus I had seen, so I asked my Chilean seatmate where we were. I thought he said Inica, which sounded like Arica to me (I attributed the discrepancy to the name being Quechua, an indigenous tongue, not Spanish).
Cue to me 15 minutes later, wandering down the street, wondering why the hostel was not where it claimed to be. I looked around a bit, still carrying my giant green backpack and an ever heavier shoulder bag, and began to realize that this town appeared to be called Iquique. That actually sounded more like what my seatmate had said, once I thought about it.
But what can you do? A quick trip to a kiosk with internet access, and I found out Arica was five more hours north - a busride I had aboslutely no interest in getting on at 11 a.m. on a sunny, warm day. I had even already spotted the long, sandy beach…
Fuck plans.
