So besides hiking in about 20 national parks and ski touring some cool places we did a lot of duller stuff associated with such a long trip. While this was often a bit dull it also sometimes led to micro-adventures of its own!
Chile has so few laundrettes, it is harder to find a place to wash clothes than it is to find a sober travelling Australian. We always ended up wearing the same stuff for several weeks after giving up walking around towns and getting directions to places that were non-existent, closed or took 3 days to wash my socks! Osorno was a “favourite” place; we had 6 hours to kill here, and kill is an appropriate word as after 5 hours here you were about ready to! (One exception it had a fantastic cake shop). We had a similar long wait in Chillan, which has a fascinating market but nothing else. After 2 hours of hanging about in Chillan we drove until we got bored and then cooked up pancakes in a public park with an audience of local, slightly feral village kids! The place we ended up at had a super cool huge wooden bridge – see below:
During our trip we drove miles and miles and we saw some amazing stuff from the side of the road. Rarely anything uber spectacular just lots of cool scenes; rainbows over forests, sheep being herded; flocks of ibis in cow fields. We particularly liked this traffic island near the Argentine border before Volcan Lanin:
Before my trip to Chile I had never seen oxen pulling carts before, these beasts are huge – taller than the locals (OK so Chileans are quite short!). Often the carts were attached directly to the horns which must be a little uncomfortable for them. The island of Chiloe was a particular oxen hotspot, which went with the slow way of life there. Below is a picture of horse and cart, fairly common in remote rural areas of South America; I guess it’s cheaper to run than an old tractor. After our earlier trip to Eastern Europe and Albania in particular it seemed to have become a fairly normal sight this summer.
After celebrating our escape from Osorno a few weeks earlier, we found ourselves once again stuck in the town. This time we were en route to Argentina and Bariloche, however Chilean national day was on and the connecting buses from Osorno to Bariloche were full so we had to overnight in Osorno. Worse still everything was closed as it was a national holiday. We knocked on guesthouse doors trying to find a place to stay, and of those that answered the prices seemed sky high; finally we used our old Lonely Planet book to find a budget B&B. The lady who answered was in her late 60s wearing her dressing gown at midday. We entered her house, which was full of… lets call it “old lady chic”. Porcelain, white lace everywhere, jars of jam in glass cabinets in the hall and a pervading smell of the 1970s. It was cheap and had cable TV to pass the time in Osorno though so we weren’t complaining!
We coincided with both Bolivia’s and Chile’s national holidays celebrating their foundation as countries: cue much band playing, marching and partying. We did see a great parade in Orsorno including canons mounted on donkeys, men with truncheons dressed in hats and the ski regiment of the army. We ate some bitter oversized rhubarb which came with a free bag of MSG(?!) from a street vendor and watched kids throwing confetti in random people’s faces. See the ski army in picture below;
With all this driving we got to know the roads well. Generally the highways are in great condition; better than Belgium’s anyway. The Pan American Highway is like the backbone: a fast dual carriageway, the major artery, loaded with executive coaches, lorries and 1000s of cars around the Santiago area. However given how busy this road is it was surprising how many people used it as a footpath and cycle lane regardless of the direction of traffic. Some stretches were so busy with people that it was like a computer game where you had to swerve to avoid hitting people – it was sketchy, super sketchy. Now walking along the highway during the day is bad enough, but at night with no reflectors or lights it is crazy. Hitting a stray dog was even more inevitable, amazingly we avoided hitting the hordes of pure breeds roaming the streets. The “road” in picture below was particularly fun, it was up Shangri La valley near Nevados de Chillan resort. You can just make out the snow starting to fall:
This is what the same area above looked like the next morning……powder day! We skied the volcano you can see above the resort.
There is little more disturbing than being suddenly awoken by a loud “thump, thump, thump” of the police banging on a window, with the blue lights flashing as you open you sleepy eyes. It happened last to me in Banff, Canada, my nemesis city (it really is just a tourist-filled Disneyland outdoor town), where I was fined for illegal camping in a fairly non-illegal looking place. In Chile we knew it is legal to camp/sleep in our vehicle if we were just off public highways, but this parking up in random places sometimes led to a bit of suspicion from the police hence the early morning wake up calls, however they just wanted to know what we were up to. They were always friendly after seeing our passport and wished us a good holiday. A lack of Spanish always sped things up too – the police quickly lost interest in trying to communicate using our pidgin Spanish!
The weather frequently got the better of us on this trip. This is the approach to Volcan Lanin; we never summited as the cloud was always too thick. It also started snowing soon after we took this picture.
To live up to the Chilli title we found the food fairly wanting in Chile, although the fresh fruit and veg could be superb. The empanadas were also a saving grace, especially with sweet onion and dash of chilli. Otherwise the food just seemed to lack imagination, and there seemed to be an obsession with western fair like pizzas. It appears to me that the economic and cultural development that has rapidly overtaken the country has not yet been applied to the cuisine. It is very much subsistence food: basic but filling with limited spice or flavour. Of course I am generalising – there are spectacular restaurants like in Putre in northern Chile where we found a real gem. Also some dishes that use great fresh simple ingredients can be spectacular, the traditional fish dishes on Chiloe follow this logic. However generally in random towns in middle and southern Chile the food sucked. The wine though is a different story!!
Marion is vegetarian, and wasn’t too sure in advance what kind of veggie options she might find in Chile. In general we cooked fresh stuff to save money and to save ourselves from the large amount of artificial additives that frequently make an appearance in S American processed food. Generally we found that good fresh fruit and veg was available almost everywhere and it was much cheaper in the local green grocer shops than in the supermarkets. In particular Avocadoes were crazy cheap and we had them with almost every meal. The supermarkets were full of processed junk, a lot of which contained non veggie animal fat and gelatine, not to mention a lot of weird random stuff that’s mostly banned in Europe. As for eating out, the veggie options were generally pretty limited / boring, although at the above-mentioned favourite restaurant in Putre we did find some interesting vegetarian options on offer using local delicacies like pond weed (tasted better than it sounds!). All in it is probably is a better place to be a meat lover, and we haven’t even started on Argentine steak….
