Arse sliding

Valdivia :: Chile

Where else can you climb a volcano and expect half a cow on a BBQ when you get home?

Places: Pucon & Valdivia.

Coolest thing I did: Spent 4 and a half hours climbing a volcano and then sliding back down it on the snow in about 30 mins.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: There is a wine grape here called Carmenere that came from France but has been extinct there for 150 years or so and now only exists in Chile.

Now I feel like I'm on holiday. Even though Pucon turned out to be a small alpine town that totally exists to cater to the tourists it was probably the highlight of Chile thus far. The day we got off the night bus was under a perfect blue sky and you could see the snow covered cone of the Villarica volcano at the end of the street, complete with billowing funnel of smoke. It seriously looks like one of those volcanoes that you draw as a kid, a cone with a flat top and smoke coming out, a kind of Platonic form of volcanoes, and pretty soon you discover the number one reason everyone is in town is to climb it.

You also discover pretty soon that these people are not mucking around. You get up at 6am to start the climb and you pretty much have to take all their equipment, including down to the boots unless you've prepared and brought serious shoes yourself. When you open your pack and see spikes, several layers of waterproof gear and an ice pick you know you're not in for a leisurely climb. It's about 5 hours from the car park to the crater but 4 hours of that is through snow on a slope that they use for a black run when the volcano hosts a ski resort in winter. There is also an option to skip the first hour by taking a chairlift up, but out of our group of 12 the 5 youngest and stupidest men decided that would be cheating and decided to walk up that bit too. Funnily enough, once the first one said he'd climb it my man brain took over and I had to as well.

So I've been up volcanoes before, but I've never climbed a snow covered mountain ever and it is really hard going. I did manage to keep up with the front runners the whole way (marathon training may still be paying dividends) but by the time we reached the top I was really feeling the lack of exercise since September. Having said that the views in every direction were amazing, you can see several other volcanoes in each direction and have a lovely photo to take over the town of Pucon with the lake it rests on. That alone would have been worth it, but the ride down made me think I'd nearly have done it all again the next day.

One of the things they put in your pack I've christened the arse slider, because I can't remember what the Spanish name for it was. It's basically a bum sized hard plastic seat with a handle on the front which goes between your legs and you simply point both your feet to the ground and let gravity do the rest. You end up soaked to the bum and with a heap of snow in your face but it's heaps of fun.

The only way you could top that was this kid from Colorado who climbed up with us carrying a rented snowboard. I had jokingly said to the guide it would be awesome to ride a board down and he was quite serious when he said they'd rent me one if I carried it up myself. One look over the East face of the mountain (we slid down the much shallower North face, but the snow was far too messy to board down) told me I'm nowhere near a good enough boarder to have taken that on. This guy just disappeared and I don't think he touched either edge into the snow for a good 100 or 200m directly down. Maybe next time.

So how do you top that? Well the next day the call was made to try hydrospeed, which is the stupidest name for a sport ever. Basically you take these massive fat foam body boards with arm holes cut into them and go down rapids. You know, because doing that in a boat doesn't get you close enough to submerged rocks with your face. We had a very good guide who was good at showing us the right way to go to not end up underwater and despite a little bit of bashing each other over the head with the boards and kicking each other in the fact with our fins it's also never feels at all dangerous. Everyone ended the hour and a half with a massive grin on their face and I would strongly recommend it as an activity if you're ever anywhere with a river fed by melting snow. The water should have been freezing, even in a wetsuit but you're moving so much you hardly feel it.

So while most parts of Chile I've been travelling in are known for their seafood the Chileans like nothing better than a good BBQ, or Asado as I've found out they're called. For the first time in years I've actually fallen back in love with hostel life again and last night's Adsdo was a big contributor to that. I ended up in a place called El Refugio, run by a Dutch guy that's never going back and the atmosphere in the place was such that everyone felt at home and there was always a big group to share a litre of beer or just talk crap with. We invited a few of the travelling companions that have been picked up along the way who were staying in other places in Pucon and they all said they felt a different vibe. I suppose these days most of the hostel kids spend all their time on Facebook at nights so it's good to have that family feel hostels used to have before wifi. Sorry, grumpy old backpacker rant over.

So an asado is a BBQ cooked over charcoal and the staples are Chorizo hotdogs and big slide of beef simply cut into inch thick strips and handed around. Add to that we'd all chipped in for enough beer and wine to keep us going from about 7pm to midnight and it made for a messy night. I think that one night alone furnished the travelling group with quite a few recruits for Christmas at the bottom of the world, which looks like the current plan.

So a short, hungover bus ride has me sitting in Valdivia, and unfortunately due to it chucking it down rain outside I'm sitting inside writing this. I've had a constant travel companion who I met on the way from the airport to the hostel in Santiago from Perth, James who has been happy enough to let me dictate travel plans thus far, but he easily talked me into stopping off here to drink at the Kuntsmann brewery, which so far has been easily one of the better beers I've sampled in Chile. That's on tonight so at least if the weather ends up repeating itself tomorrow I can spent some quality time sleeping. After that it's over the boarder for the first sneaky trip into Argentina to Bariloche, which I'm still yet to hear a bad word about.

If the beer is called Kuntsmann it might also explain why everyone in this room seems to be speaking German. And is on Facebooking on their computers and ignoring each other.

As a side note I met this guy in Pucon who has been riding his motorcycle from Toronto to Tierra del Fuego (via Alaska for the hell of it). Check out the website as it's truly an awesome feat.

Whose house?!?

Valparaiso :: Chile

Pablo's House!
"I am familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda" - Bart Simpson

Places: Santiago, Valparaiso & Quintay.

Coolest thing I did: Wandered the old streets of Valparaiso's hills, where it seems like every space is a blank canvas.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Back in the olden days, I'm guessing sometime before they invented TV, you could become a national hero AND be loaded at the same time, just for being a poet.

So the grand Sudamerica tour starts in the Chilean capital of Santiago, which even after a few days doesn't feel like it's crammed to the gills with tourist sites. It's fairly easy to get a few under your belt in the first 48 hours (even with massive jetlag) and then you don't feel like you're slacking off when you're sitting out on the footpath tables on Pio Nono in Barrio Bellavista, where the student bars will see you a litre of beer for $3, or $4 if you go to one of the posh ones that use glasses rather than plastic cups. The feeling I got from Santiago is it was a far better city to just hang about in than to be a hard core tourist - which was a nice gentle start to 6 months of mangling the Spanish language.

Walking around Santiago's main centre you get the feeling that there was a country here once, with a colonial history that's just been totally overshadowed by the 1973 coup organised by one General Augusto Pinochet. You can't see inside the presidential place, mostly because the President lives there, but that was also the site of the overthrow of a bloke called Salvador Allende, who was elected president, but also a communist, which back during the cold war was a fairly good way to end up in a coup. The army shelled the presidential palace, Pinochet took over with material support from the CIA, Allende ended up dead from suspicious suicide and Chile got the kind of repression you only really get from a right-wing military dictatorship. The weirdest result of the coup is the fact booze is really cheap and books are really expensive in Chile, even to this day. It does explain everyone's really impressive alcohol tolerance.

One thing worth at least seeing for it's total wrongness in the commercial downtown of Santiago is Cafe con piernas, which seems to be a stand up coffee bar where businessmen and old blokes with nothing better to do but read the paper all day are served coffee by girls in short skirts and high heels. I can imagine back in the day there was just one of these places, with someone's sister serving coffee with her ankles showing and then a kind of hemline arm's race ensured so now the girls where something that could best be described as "a thick belt". I can imagine the longevity of a place like that in Sydney's CBD.

Santiago has two hills with parks on top of them that you climb to get a view over the city, which is a nice thing to do on a day when the smog isn't too thick. The one to do is Cerro San Cristobal, which has the bonus of being much higher and having a statue of the Virgin Mary at the top to be photographed next to. In my first the hell with you, Lonely Planet moment of the trip (I expect many more) it seems like going the back way to take the cable car doesn't work since the cable car stopped working about 2 years ago. I did climb up for a couple of hours, passing wrecked looking cyclists riding up and being side-swiped by wild eyed cyclists tearing it down the other way. The easy way up would have been to take the funicular which left from about a block from where I was staying, but who does it the easy way? I was lucky with how far I could see, and it seems like Santiago is a massively flat city, except for the few places massive hills with nothing built on them punch through.

Really, the best thing to do in Santiago is to go between cafes and wander the streets of Lastarria & Bella Artes and spend the nights tearing up the bars and night clubs. My big Friday night out ended up being so massive that the next day when I walked past the bar we started in the staff shook my hands and I had no idea who most of them were. I have vague recollections of being a nightclub at some point and woke up at 2pm on Saturday, which I blame on the jetlag. This is a object lesson in why you don't help a new mate you met on the plane over from Oz polish off 3/4 of a litre of duty free Bombay Saph before going out if you want total recall of the rest of the evening. G&Ts are apparently very good for fending off malaria I'm told, but I suspect more research will be required.

It might help if I ever lost my mind and decided to drink the chocolate milk coloured water of Santiago's main water way ("does this taste like cholera to you?"), which always seems to be flowing at a high pressure trickle. Perhaps that's why they've made the most logical use of a river running through the city, which is to put a park along it and then separate that park from the river with 3 lanes of traffic on each bank.

The segue between the towns of Santiago and Valparaiso are going to be the two houses of the poet Pablo Neruda, which I didn't think would be worth doing but both turned out to be highly awesome. The one in Santiago, called La Chascona after his mistresses' messy hair was kind of sprawling compound, where he could house 3 bars, a library and a study that I suspect used to have a view over all of Santiago before the high-rise came in. I like the sound of Neruda, who besides being knee deep in wives and mistresses over the years also had a few real jobs, like ambassador to Colombia and France. I'm not sure if poets could afford to have several massive houses in most countries back then, but I reckon most of them don't do that well now. Actually, he probably would have been a rapper these days so the houses would probably have been even bigger. It would also have more bling, but it's probably kind of hard to top having a Nobel Prize for Literature sitting out on your coffee table.

The house in Valparaiso sits near the top of one of the town's many massive hills you have to walk up to see anything interesting but has a view that would be priceless these days. It's modelled on a lighthouse, with lots of glass facing out to the Pacific on each side and each view is even better than the last. His study was on the very top floor, where he liked to spend his time not writing poems by using his binoculars to look for women sunbathing naked on their roofs. Apparently was common enough for him to do it all the time.

Valparaiso is a town to which earthquakes haven't been kind, which reminds you that Chile sits on the same ring of fire as New Zealand and Japan, except with more volcanoes. The flat part of the town down near the water has been recast with a grid and tends to look a bit down at heel and like Santiago has more than enough stray dogs wandering the streets. I've taken to naming them, and my record so far is a pack of six following me around. That time I only named the natural leader.

You could almost be put off by that part of town, except for the fact that it's either a back breaking climb or a ride on an antique funicular lift to reach the winding streets they've packed on to the hills, which has been converted almost entirely to an open air art gallery. It seems like it's cool to paint a mural on pretty much any flat surface and you can spend hours picking up where someone has painted a green woman in art deco, spray painted a stencil of Kurt Cobain or outlined light blue children escaping from the wall of a school. The layout of the streets is totally dictated by the geography, with sheer drops and steep climbs at the end of streets giving a view to the houses crawling over the next hill, or even better right out to the Pacific horizon. The town looks a bit like an Escher painting at times, and it may not be the kind of place you'd enjoy if you suffered a bit from Vertigo, but there's nothing like sitting on a terrace looking out over a sheer cliff to the port where the fish you're eating was landed that morning.

After an offer to split the hire car costs I spent yesterday between trying to learn about Chilean wine by going to vinyards on a Monday and eating fish in the tiny village of Quintay. The wineries we went to didn't seem all that interested in tourists, which struck me as strange, and wanted a fair bit of money for a fairly small sampling of their wines. We took one tour, of an organic winery, where they seem to try and make the grapes taste better via mumbo jumbo and magic. I assumed organic meant "we don't use fertiliser", not "we make our compost from herbs we bury along ley lines so they gain extra power from the earth". It was nutty. I liked the big commercial wineries wine better, but even then they seemed uninterested in us - it seems like it's just better for them to get bus loads of people on a weekend and not worry about people who show up in their car. It would have helped if any of the wine had been better than the Chilean stuff we've been buying in the supermarket at random, but it could also be because my science poisoned mind won't appreciate terroir based on the fact the peasants used to bury their grandmothers in the field where the grapes grown now.

I liked Quintay on the way back, we sat in a restaurant by the sea and ate seafood while watching some kid do very well at not stacking it into the massive rocks the waves he was body boarding on were crashing into. We also realised we'd be a 50/50 chance of making it back to the highway with the petrol we had remaining so we thought it best to ask in town. Apparently Senor Israel was the dude. You just keep asking people on the street for directions and pretty soon you come to Senor Israel's house, out the back of which he keeps 5 litre jugs of unleaded you can buy for 150% mark up. No wonder he seemed like such a happy old chap.

So this is me killing time before I get on a 12 hour overnight bus to Pucon, which is apparently the Queenstown of Chile.