Monday, August 26, 2013

Santiagogogo

I've probably said this before, but it's no less true today: the most interesting stories are those unplanned crises.

Santiago, Chile. It's 8am on a Friday morning and I've slept through my alarm. I've missed my shuttle transfer to the airport and I'm wondering how late I'll be. It's going to be a close one.

But let's start at the beginning.

I've quit my job to tour the Americas. Ok, that sounds a bit extreme, but it's been a long time coming. It's nothing against my employer but my heart just wasn't in it, so I've thrown myself into the deep end, the land of uncertainty and no income. But first, a holiday.

My friends and I had been talking about a trip to South America for over a year but it kept getting postponed. It's not easy to co-ordinate such a big trip to fit into everybody's schedules. At some point, I made the decision to just fly solo.

The upside of going alone was that I could slot in a beer-centric jaunt into the USA without anyone complaining. Most of that has been booked, and I'll go into more detail when I get into the States. The South American portion, however, is more of a vague plan. In my research, I remembered my first big trip, a semi-planned European adventure, and I wanted to capture that same spontaneity for this trip. After the first week, I've left a three-and-a-half week chunk unbooked, so it will be an on-the-go and (hopefully) fluid journey northwards.

I waited for a sale and bought an open-jaw ticket to Santiago, returning from San Francisco two-and-a-half months later. I noticed a sale for an Inca Trail tour at the local STA Travel; I booked that, too. The multi-day 42km hike at altitude is something I am both excited and slightly terrified about.

A week after leaving my job, I boarded a Qantas* 747 headed for a continent on which I have never set foot.

False starts

Take two parts jetlag, one part insomnia, and one part homesickness.

Jetlag was expected, insomnia has been ongoing, but the homesickness usually comes later in the trip. It happens, I guess, and on reflection, it's for the best that I got it over with early on.

The flight landed in Comodoro Arturo Merino Benítez International Airport an hour before leaving (time travel!) with only a thirty minute delay for mechanical reasons on the tarmac at SYD. I left the flight full of optimism for what's ahead. I was, however, about to hit a wall.

After checking into the Princesa Insolente hostel in Barrio Brasil, I planned to keep myself awake by attending a free walking tour of the city. I find walking tours a good way to see some sights and learn some history in a short amount of time, and I try to go to one in every major city. Halfway there, the lack of sleep on the plane started to catch up to me and I headed back to the hostel for a snooze. Although I arrived in the morning, the day was a write-off in terms of tourism.

I woke up just as a group of fellow hostellers were heading to the supermarket to buy ingredients for dinner so I tagged along. Erick, a travel writer from America, offered to cook for everyone, so we all sat around in the hostel kitchen drinking, eating, and talking shit all night.

The next day, I climbed Cerro Santa Lucía for a nice view of the city against the backdrop of the Andes before once again hitting the wall and missing the walking tour. Another afternoon nap later, I had a wander around for dinner and a beer only to find that most places were closed on Sundays. I stopped at the first open place I could find, a Peruvian restaurant where I had a giant portion of ceviche that I got nowhere near finishing, and watched part of the (rather bad) Eddie Murphy movie Meet Dave dubbed in Spanish. Random.

The homesickness hit the next night. I had mumbled my way through dinner with barely passable Spanish and was beginning to question both my preparedness and my reasons for going on holidays in a foreign land. It's the same spiral of self-doubt every time, brought about by that certain lost feeling and of missing the familiar. The jetlag and insomnia certainly didn't help. I always get over it, too, and this time was no different.

At 2am, after an hour or two of being unable to get to sleep and trying to get myself out of that negative thought pattern, I finally picked up my laptop and chatted to a friend. The littlest, most mundane of conversations can do wonders.

"It's always about the people"

That's the kicker. You visit a place, and you see the sights, but what really completes the experience is the people you meet along the way.

I finally made it to the Tours 4 Tips walking tour on that third day, which took the group through the morning markets (sadly, not too lively on Mondays) and the Cementerio General (ironic in its liveliness). The tour was fun so I decided to come back for the second route in the afternoon, covering the more popular sights of the city.

I find comparing the different styles of walking tour interesting, and I imagine it takes a certain skill to strike the perfect balance between visiting places and recounting history. I still consider one of the very first walking tours I ever did, I think it was the Sandemans one in Berlin, as the gold standard. Berlin had gone through so much so the tour was rich in history, and you got to walk through the important landmarks of that history. The Santiago ones were pretty good, too, and the history of the short presidency of Salvador Allende, and of the Pinochet regime, were obviously still very fresh in the minds of the people.

Anyway, it was on the second tour that I met Jacqueline and Peter, backpackers from Australia and England, respectively, who turned out to be staying at the same hostel as me. They asked if I was Adrian and it turned out they'd spotted my name on both my bag in the hostel and the tour sign up sheet, and put two and two together. Along with Erick and Colten (another American), they became good comrades for that short overlap of time and helped lift my mood.

One night over drinks, chatting with another Brit, Rob, about the backpacking experience, we all agreed, "It's about the people. It's always about the people."

Bringing wine to a beer party

One of the reasons I stayed in Barrio Brasil rather than the city centre was so I could visit Cervecería Nacional, a craft beer bar in Barrio Yungay. Wine, bad beer, and other libations kind of got in the way.

La Bicicletta Verde is a company that does bike tours of the city, and it was highly recommended by Erick that I take at least one of them. Despite missing both of the city tours, I took a bike and wine tour of Viña Cousiño Macul.

The vineyard, located a subway ride and a 30-minute walk away, boasted some of the country's oldest grapevines, along which we rode on the tour. I imagine it would have been spectacular in season, when the colourful leaves are set against the Andes. In winter it was less spectacular, but still pretty cool. It was sad to hear that those very vines were being uprooted in a few years to make room for housing developments. Money really does talk.

Anyway, it was a good tour that delved into not only the history of the winery but also of the Chilean wine industry in general. The most interesting story was that of the Carménère grape variety, which was wiped out in Europe, and was rediscovered in Chile after an importation blunder; the wine growers had thought they had brought in Merlot when it was in fact Carménère. You can tell a good tour guide by how impressed you are with a story you already know.

After the tour, I had lunch with a couple of Brazilians who had taken the tour. We tried out chorrillanas, a Chilean dish of fries, topped with fried onions, topped with fried beef, topped with fried eggs. It's as ridiculous as it sounds.

My plan when I got back to the hostel was to relax, go through some photos, perhaps write a blog post, and start researching places to visit a little further into the trip. That didn't work out at all. Almost as soon as I took my laptop out, a group consisting of Erick, Colten, Jac, and Peter walked in to the hostel. They had gradually snowballed into a big group and were intent on visiting a Chilean institution known as coffee with legs. I joined in.

Spawning from a Chilean indifference to the beverage due to being a tea country, the way the coffee industry managed to get people, and, in particular, men, to drink coffee was to introduce attractive women into the equation. And so, coffee with legs was born. It has evolved into a weird amalgam of cafes and strip clubs, although we were told that the level of explicitness varies from place to place. The one we visited, Black's, was full of men sipping on (bad) coffee chatting to women in bikinis. Open only during regular cafe hours, I found it very strange indeed.

Our next stop was a random bar to drink cheap litre bottles of beer and then it was back to the hostel, where we opened a bottle of wine I brought back from the wine tour earlier in the day. A heated discussion of politics ensued, fuelled by even more wine, so of course the next logical step was a night out to a cool little salsa bar named Maestra Vida, followed by a karaoke bar, where I heard more Spanish-language songs in one night than I had in twenty-nine years.

Needless to say, the next day was a complete write-off.

Valpo

A day-trip to Valparaíso was on my to-do list and it was on my very last day in Santiago that I finally got off my ass and on that bus.

Jac and I got to the bus station a little later than planned but we got to the walking tour meeting point just on time when we arrived in Valparaíso. The tour took us around the city's quirky and colourful streets while telling us of the brakes that were put on the city's port-based economy after the construction of the Panama Canal. There were a lot of formerly beautiful buildings that stood abandoned due to lack of money, which was a shame to see.

After the tour, we headed to a local place for chorrillanas--the Valpo variety seemed more like a proper meal than a drunken snack, although it was still quite ridiculous--and checked out a microbrewery called Altamira, who made some pretty decent beer. Exhausted, we caught the bus back to Santiago, both wishing we'd stayed longer.

All in all, I really liked the small slice that I got of Valparaíso, with its graffiti-d streets and its vibrant culture, and it's definitely a city I'd like to go back to.

That night was BBQ night at the hostel, which meant all you can eat meat and all you can drink terremoto, a local, potent cocktail named after the earthquakes that Chile so frequently gets. The price of admission also included a driver that took us to a few bars.

"It's my last night," I said in weak protest.

I went out anyway.

So, as I was saying...

I'm sitting in the hostel lobby, waiting for my decidedly more expensive, though still reasonably priced, ride to the airport, sweating it out a little bit. (Literally; I think I'm still slightly drunk.) My shuttle, as it turns out, was taken by a guy who thought it was his shuttle to the snow. While the hostel staff was looking for me, he'd already hopped on and headed off.

A Brazilian guy I had been drinking with the night before greets me with surprise. I tell him I missed my shuttle and I may yet see him later in the day if I miss my flight.

"I hope not," he says with a laugh.

I secretly hope that I do, just to make things interesting.

The driver arrives and the ride to the airport is without incident. I actually make it to the gate with an hour or so to spare. I contemplate the power of the unexpected, and am almost disappointed when I board my plane to Buenos Aires.


*Oh, remember how I was so pissed at Qantas that one time and swore I'd never fly with them again? I got over it. Their safety record is too good to ignore. (Funny how this came up in a post about unplanned events.)

Friday, August 16, 2013

It's been a long time

Yep, I dropped the ball in a big way. No two ways about it. Instead of cramming in everything since the last post into one big diatribe, I will just post links to photos from notable trips in the past couple of years. Some of the photos have longer captions than others so if you're jonesing for the written word, check the captions.

My main Flickr page, from which all the other links spawn

Southeast Asia (Feb 2012)
MalaysiaCambodia
Vietnam

USA (June 2012)
Matt Cain's Perfect Game

Adelaide (November 2012)

Philippines (December 2012)

I'm off on a South American adventure tomorrow (with a month of the USA beer tourism at the end) so I'll try to keep up to date with that.