Chilean teenyboppers and tea with Pinochet

Thursday night I went to Santiago with Ashley and our friend Kendra to catch a concert in the Estadio Victor Jarra. We went to see Alex Ubago who, for those of you not up on your Spanish music, is like the equivalent of Clay Aiken from Spain, and a couple years older. He’s young, dorky-cute, and appeals to teenage girls and their mothers. He has an adorably nerdy way of dancing and performed in jeans and a blazer which may not have the appeal of a shoeless Ryan Miller (reference to my last concert in the States), but that can be a hard act to beat.

We spent the night in a hostel close to the center of town and headed to the ritzy outskirts the next morning for some American indulgence. In the expensive Las Condes neighborhood there is both a New York Bagels and a Starbucks, providing us with the big American chain versions of two things we had missed terribly: bagels and real coffee.

Kendra stayed on in Starbucks to work for a bit and then return to Valpo while Ashley and I took off for the Chilean countryside. So we didn’t have tea with Pinochet, but we did plan a relaxing weekend in the same place he had a vacation house, the Cajón de Maipo, or the Maipo (River) Canyon. And the title is a reference to the movie, Tea with Mussolini, but probably didn’t make that much sense as few people that I know have seen it.

Getting to the country was a bit more of a chore than we had planned. It turns out someone decided to change the bus route since the last time LP or Let’s Go checked, and so we found ourselves at the wrong place, receiving advice from a toothless older gentleman. He told us he was going that way and also had been tricked by the change of bus lines (at least it wasn’t just the silly foreigners), and had us follow him on multiple busses through most of Santiago. Before he got off a few stops before us, he gave me his number and insisted that we call him or he would get worried and come looking for us in the country. Ah, relying on the kindness of strangers.

After initial difficulties, we made it into the small town of San José in the Cajón de Maipo. Since the office of tourism had closed for what could only have been a siesta at that time of day, we decided to ask a woman selling jam in the square for hostel recommendations, and she pointed us in the way of the Hostel Tío Valentín. Keeping with our tradition of slightly decrepit but character rich dwellings, the Hostel was owned by a sweet woman who was trying to convert her deceased parents house into a countryside stop for Chilean tourists. For less than 10 USD a night, breakfast included, it was fine by us.

Friday afternoon we hopped a bus and took it to the end of the Cajón line to see what there was to see. It’s an interesting place in that all of the surrounding Chilean area seems to vacation there at some point or another, be they wicked rich or scrape-by poor. Okay, perhaps not quite the latter, but it does yield a wide variety of visitors. We decided to walk a good 9 km of the way back to enjoy the views, take some pictures, and stop for dinner at a cabin resort. Afterwards, we hopped a bus the rest of the way back (about another 11 km), and took turns listening for each other in the shower since the bathroom was the “old-fashioned” type in Chile – a calefont, a gas powered mechanism for heating water that pretty much every house in Chile has somewhere, in the bathroom instead of the safer/better ventilated kitchen or porch. Because who really wants to die of gas inhalation while on vacation?

The next day we hired a van and took the hour and a half ride to the very end of the Cajón, close to the Argentinean border. To start this story, one must be reminded of the facts that 1. I burn easily, and 2. I’m stupid. That being said, it should come as no surprise that I sit here with one of the worst sunburns I’ve ever had. It turns out people aren’t lying when they talk about the whole in the ozone layer being above Chile.

To backtrack a bit, Ashley and I, apparently not having learned much from our previous mountain climbing experiment, decided to climb an Andean hill: the National Monument (which seams to mean just a small national park) Morado. It’s a 16 km hike, 75% of which is rather gradual. We saw a lagoon and a glacier, we didn’t get lost, and I came back with a really bad burn despite my sunscreening efforts. Well, two out of three isn’t bad.

To relax a bit and perhaps soothe my burn, we headed to the “thermal springs”. When the guidebooks say “rustic”, they aren’t kidding. It turns out that these thermal springs were, as the owner described them, “tibia, not hot”. And orange. Well, for 3 USD, Ashley and I will try anything once. How many people can say they bathed in 22 degree Celsius orange waters under both the Andes and the vigilant watch of not one, not two, but three Virgins!? That’s what I thought. The owner insisted that the waters were orange, not because they were dirty, but because of the abundant minerals that were present. And that we shouldn’t shower afterward but let the minerals work their “medicinal effects”. Needless to say, we did not heed his advice.

We slept a good 11 hours that night, sleep that was much needed by this work-hard play-hard study abroader. Unfortunately, it’s not a luxury I will have tonight, so it’s back to work for me. Currently reading (due Wednesday): Mapocho, a book about an incestuous and dead brother and sister, wandering the streets of Santiago. Ah, Chilean postmodernism! Weeks left of such craziness (in other words, classes): 3. Weeks left in Chile: 5. Next up: the Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth, on Thursday!