CHILE : From Puerto Montt to Ushuaia

Continuing the saga, we endured about 60 hours of bus travel in just a few days, 12 from Santiago to Puerto Montt, around 33 on to Punta Arenas, and a further 12 to Ushuaia. Not really an endurance test as the buses are pretty comfortable 'semi-cama', ( i.e : reclining seats) coffee and snacks served and stupid movies shown in case the scenery gets boring or you can't sleep during the night. The towns got progressively more upmarket as we got further south, and just over the border into Argentina was a small town with a very swish patisserie selling pastries and chocolate to drool over. Not having changed money on the trip down, we had to wait until the return bus trip from Ushuaia to Punto Arenas to partake in the pastries, though a kind young guy gave us a couple of pieces of chocolate when we tried to pay with Chilean pesos the first time.

Punta Arenas was a pleasant enough town, with a great bar called Santinos where we went twice for the happy hour pisco sours and plates of papas fritas (french fries) and a delicious selection of mariscos (seafood) floating in parmesan cheese. On our return trip it also offered us a bomberos celebration (firemen are really important here as so many of the buildings are of wood), an equestrian competition and a military exhibition



including a variety of tanks, gun displays, soldiers in camouflage uniform and parachute drops into trees and cars, which we came upon after a visit to the cemetary. Cemetaries in Chile are almost like small towns in themselves, with small buildings housing families, whole walls housing glass fronted boxes with photos, little figurines, flowers and messages, and at the other end are tiny colourful plots devoted to children. This one also had huge topiaried trees throughout, quite surreal. The names on tombstones and crosses range from the Irish to the English, German and Yugoslav, some French and assorted others besides the Spanish, reflecting the varied history of migration to Chile over the last 200 years.


We passed through snow-capped mountains and around large lakes in both the northern and southern part of this journey, while in between were endless expanses of pampas, occasionally relieved by low hills, small oil drills and dusty run-down farmhouses. In Ushuaia we stayed in a backpackers hostel called the Patagonia Pais, sharing a room with two Spanish women from Madrid, people friendly, kitchen available to organise our supermarket food, and conversation with a couple of young French puppeteers who somehow survive performing at lots of festivals - puppetry is popular in Chile.

We took a boat ride around the local waters, seeing sea lions and cormorants, and walking on a small island full of shell middens from the Ona tribe that once lived there. But even the all-you-can-eat-for-36-Argentinian pesos (Aud $12) meal of too much meat, fish and desert didn't make up for the general lack of cooking skills and varied tastes that is common everywhere we've been so far - plenty of fruit, vegetable and meat available, but little use of herbs and spices.
So now I can tick one more dreams off my personal list: I have been to el fine del mundo ( as they call patagonia in Chile), the end of the world (or at least this past of the world) and was only 3000kms from south pole!It was no way near as wild as I imagined and in fact Ushuaia reminds me a bit of ...Megeve, the swish ski resort in the French Alps. The weather was glorious and not even cold. My hug boots - which are always travelling with me now - did not even get an outing from the backpack!

CHILE : From Santiago to Puerto Montt

After arriving safely in Santiago on 15 September, (the same day we left as we crossesd the time line), we spent two nights in a cheap hostel in the centre of the city, wandered around, quickly discovered that the food, as we expected, is lousy - they have absolutely no sense of eating healthily - and you can´t get a decent coffee. But people are friendly, despite the numerous warnings to "watch out for thieves and it´s dangerous sometimes". It feels like a third world country desparately trying to be first world but failing. The buildings in some areas are quaint colonial but very run down, people dress drabbly as if they don´t want to be noticed, and I think the legacy of Pinochet has been a hard one to shake off. A house of torture was just around the corner from our hotel. Then we finally made contact with the friend of our Spanish teacher and spent 2 nights at her home. She is a very nice widow who was a French and Spanish teacher in Australia and has come back to live here after the death of her husband. After 8 years back in Chile she seems to still be in cultural shock.....
The good things we discovered include a very nice local alcoholic drink called Pisco sour and another supposedly also non alcoholic but doubtfully so - Chicha -which is a drink of grapes which have almost reached the point of fermentation. This we found at a "fonda", or dance fiesta huge feed-up on Independence day (18th September) at a large park in the middle of the city.
On Friday night ( 19 Sept) we headed south via a 12 hour bus ride - good semireclining seats in a Pullman Bus -for the colder climes of Puerto Montt, but don´t expect any improvement in the food.
Yesterday for lunch, we just had a local dish of which one plate was enough for two - loaded with mussels, chicken, sausage and meat, potatoes, bread and a bowl of fishie broth - not bad, at an area by the water at a kind of fjord. While taking in the view of the snow covered volcanoe at the end of the fjord, we saw a seal swimming 20 metres away from the shore.

Germans have been here and the local architecture and that food says so. Today we caught a bus to a charming german colonised area by a lake and the whole setting was so much like the lake of Annecy except that from the shore we could see across the lake and in line 4 snow covered volcanoes : beautiful! We are now back in our cheap hotel where we have discovered we have signal for wifi plus cable TV. So I am catching up both with email and silly movies. I have stuck to my decision of drying up and aprt from one pisco sour on our second night in santiago we have not even try yet one glass of Chilean wine. Tomorow we are taking a trip all the way to Punta Arenas which is a 33 hours bus ride! Crazy maybe but much cheaper than flying and also we though a bette way to take in the scenary. As there is no road in the southern part of Chile, the bus will go through the Andes and continue via the other side which is Argentina. We are due in Punta Arenas late Tuesday afternoon. And then a day or two later (after we've recoverd from the long bus ride) following my phantasms to reach this end of the Earth, we will take an other bus to get to Ushuaia, facing Antarctica.