A happy-go-lucky English rambler dude goes to New Zealand for a year. Here he interfaces with some of those he left behind and details his nefarious activities. Or summat.
Recently clicked on MP3s - 7th June 2005 The Lucksmiths - Warmer Corners
Jens Lekman - When i said i wanted to be your dog
The Trashcan Sinatras - Weightlifting
Teenage Fanclub - Man Made
Laura Veirs - Carbon Glacier
The Decemberists - Picaresque
The Eels - Blinking Lights
Monday, December 20, 2004
Hola! from sunny Santiago... Hope everyone's ok? And looking forward to Chrstmas, with the presents all purchased and full of hot toddies and mince pies?
Can't say i'm feeling too Christmassy myself, despite the Santiago town council going to all the effort of creating a massive fake christmas tree in the Plaza de Armas. Sun burn and insane, need to buy a coke every 30 minutes type heat just doesn't seem to put me in the right mood for it.
I've been meaning to let everyone know more about what i've been up to, but without wanting to bore the arse off you all with the sort of email that contains details about what food the airline served, and bragging about how nauseatingly great a time i'm having (even tho i am i spose).
I'm just about finished in Chile now, and fly out to Easter Island tomorrow. My last day has been filled with irritating jobs such as getting clothes washed, trying to explain to the busiest camera store in Santiago in my shite Spanish what i want them to do with my camera's memory stick (Es muy caro! No breako por favor!), and working out how many zillion pesos it costs to send eleven post cards to the UK.
In a nutshell, my time in Chile has been divided into 4 sections:
(1) Hanging around in Santiago, getting my head around being in South America, not having my own bedroom anymore and waiting for my luggage to turn up (Never fly with Iberian Airways - They make Ryanair seem like having your own personal Lear Jet).
Highlights include going to a properly bonkers football match involving much needed riot police referee escorts, dodgy penalties galore, a last minute meltdown from my team Universidad de Chile (Very Leicester city) and even a one man assault on the entire opposition team from an irate fan, temporarily assisted by some U de C players.
Also, meeting more new people in a week than i've met in the last two years was a wonderful, if bewildering at times, experience.
(2) 4 days in Pucon. Spent climbing Volcan Villarricca. A snowcapped, extremely active volcano. At the top you could peer down at the Lava sloshing around a few hundred feet below you, in between bouts of being pepper sprayed with lungfuls of acrid, sulphurous volcano fart. For some odd reason I've always preferred ascending mountains, but i think the high-speed-arse-slide descent of 1000 vertical metres was about as much fun as it's possible to have on a mountain without a gaggle of French actresses and a bag full of Rohypnol.
The Summit of Volcan Villarricca, not a bad place to while away a few hours
Also a days mountain biking got me away from the crowds, onto some gorgeous riverside single track, and even more sunburned than i was already.
(3) A week's rambling in Torres Del Paine, Patagonia.
Basically the intial reason i bothered to stop in Chile, the Torres are a super pointy group of mountains, that seemingly everyone i met in Chile was going to visit. Happily though, most of the non-hardcore ramblers took a day trip out to see them, wheras i lugged a tent, sleeping bag, a litre of cheap wine and 5 days worth of muesli bars out with me, to do a full circuit of them.
The circuit is supposed to take 10 days, but i hoped to do it in 5 due to a shortage of time, and an overly confident assesment of my own fitness. The guffaws from various people in the know in Puerto Natales didn't put me off one bit. However the weight of my bag, a gammy achilles tendon and general knackeredness on day 2 did start the doubts creeping in.
The final straw was on day 4, when an all day soaking and a worsening ankle lead me to wimp out, and catch the oh so tempting catamaran round to the start, where i did the final leg, and caught the next bus back to Puerto Natales, where i was met with several "told you so" type looks, but more importantly with a plate full of top veggie tucker at the wonderful "El Living" cafe.
At times the walk was hilariously grim, picking your way though knee deep bogs, in the snow, on your way up a 1200m pass, carrying the equivalent of a wide screen tv on your back, but even so every day you saw Condors wheeling around overhead or could look down on glaciers the size of Coventry. So well worth all the effort.
Me getting in the way of the Torres del Paine
(4) Possibly the thing i did most of all in Chile however, was ride on buses. 8 hours from Santiago to Pucon. 8 hours from Pucon to Puerto Montt. 36 (and the rest) from Puerto Montt to Punta Arenas (Via Argentina). 4 from Punta Arenas to Puerto Natales. Etc, Etc, Etc....
Sometimes they were like the best ambient music video you could imagine, crossing a pass over the Andes, rolling on through the indescribably beautiful Argentinian Lake district and then on through the never ending Pampas heading into Patagonia, all to the sounds of the Beta Band, The Orb, Belle & Seb (natch) and The Smiths (Shouldn't work but it did).
At other times though, the airline-steward like bus conductor came up with worse sonic torture than the US army could ever devise for the poor buggers stuck in Guantanamo bay - bad, high volume JC VanDamme films, The fast and the Furious dubbed into Spanish (Still fairly easy to follow) and a ridiculous selection of music videos - numerous 80s hair rock acts (inc. "Carrie" by Europe - "the final countdown", i could forgive) and multiple Swayze videos (She is not like the fucking wind, and i want to look at these mountains in peace!) once beginning at 8AM, good lord. The numerous nappy changes on the seat ahead of me weren't the best either.
Hmmm, i'm starting to realise that the two tinnys of Cristal (the Stella of Chilean lagers) have lead me to ramble on much more than i meant to, and this email has in fact descended into the typical self indulgent travellers codswallop. If so, i apologise, and i will now bugger off, as it's 10pm, and i need to find my way back to the hostel, get packed and be ready to leave for the airport at 7am, a time i have not had much experience of since leaving England.
Well, thanks for reading this far if you have and a very Merry Xmas / Feliz Navidad to you all!
