Travelogue Time: Checkin' In On Chile

(Author’s note: One of the best things about being a poor steward of one’s own scribbles is that once in a while you stumble upon something of value you have zero recollection of writing. If it’s good, which I think the below is but that’s your call, it’s just the best, as you fly past the sometimes painful and often tiring writing part to the blissful wonderland of Having Written, and even if it isn’t your best work you’ll still put it out there because, in a mildly tortured analogy, you won’t catch a lot of farmers wasting food. Today’s reclamation project comes from a trip 6-7 [how about that, kids?!] years ago to Chile, and features one of those fun formats I seem to like so much. It goes out to my son Max, whose birthday was yesterday and is the reason we went to Chile as he worked in a hostel there during his gap year and studied there his sophomore year of college.)

What’s wrong with Chile:

Its shape. It’s an absurdly long and skinny country: 2,653 miles long and averages 110 miles wide. This would be less problematic if not for the truly groundbreaking collage I conceptualized while we were there because Chileans are crazy for receipts. I got a receipt every time I got on a bus or bought an empanada or paid to use a public bathroom, so many and so varied that I figured I‘d keep them, flatten them out using very heavy books I’ve never read, then print an oversized outline of Chile and fill it with all the receipts in as artistic a manner possible given my extremely limited talent. But the dang country is so slender that I’d have to print out a 12-foot-tall outline to even put a dent in my receipt collection, and none of our ceilings are that tall so I’d have to display it diagonally which, now that I think of it, might be kind of cool.

What’s right with Chile:

Its shape. Because its western border is the Pacific Ocean and its eastern border is the Andes Mountains, you’re rarely more than 50 miles from one or the other. Somehow they even managed to shoehorn a bunch of really beautiful lakes and several snow-capped volcanoes in between the mountains and the ocean, and whoever was in charge of that project deserves a hearty pat on the back.

That’s the view of the volcano Osorno from our Airbnb in Puerto Varas in Chile’s Lake District. It’s kind of also its Volcano District, as if you drive on one nearby road there’s a clearing where you can see three volcanoes simultaneously: Osorno, Calbuco, and another one—they’re like The Three Tenors that way. That’s Lago Llanquihue in the foreground, which is Chile’s second largest lake, about 25 miles across, dotted with lovely beaches and filled with very chilly water.

What’s wrong with Chile?

You can’t put toilet paper in the toilet. As in much of South America, Chile’s plumbing simply isn’t robust enough to allow one to deposit one’s used toilet paper in the toilet for the purpose of flushing. I suppose it isn’t robust enough to handle unused toilet paper either, but that didn’t come up in the toilet briefing. This is really not a big problem, except that every once in a while I forgot, and chucked a sheet or two into the toilet, at which point undoing my mistake was not really an option. I got really good at it right before we returned to the U.S. and had to recalibrate my targeting process, and let’s just say the road back had its bumps.

What’s right with Chile?

Public bathrooms. Chile is right up there with New Zealand, at least in my limited experience, in the prevalence and niceness of its public bathrooms. I try to stay hydrated in my old age, the only downside of which is an increased need for access to public bathrooms or, I suppose, acceptable places in the Great Outdoors. But I have to be careful, because one time we were driving across Spain and hadn’t seen a gas station or other bathroom source for miles and miles and I really had to pee, so we pulled over and in my haste I almost peed on a small but colorful homemade shrine that had likely not been placed there as a urination target.

But Chile gets an A in public bathrooms, the only wrinkle being that sometimes there’s toilet paper in each stall, and sometimes there’s one big roll on the wall near the sinks for everyone to use, in which case you need to remember to get some before entering a stall, which didn’t always happen. There are, thankfully, no visuals for this entry.

What’s right with Chile:

The people. The Chileans we met were incredibly kind and hospitable, and they also seem to be very funny, though frankly since I speak almost no Spanish I might have missed a punch line or two. We stayed three places: Puerto Natales (because it’s close to Torres del Paine, a national park with gorgeous hiking—here’s a picture of one of the cuernos, or horns, in the park)

Puerto Varas (as mentioned above), and Valparaiso, a medium-sized city where Max was studying. And in each of the three places there was a bunch of people who were very fond of him and, as a result, eager to meet us and be really nice to us and feed us way too often and way too much. The first night we were in Valparaiso we were invited by Max’s host family for something called “American snack,” which turned out be an astonishing amount of food with seemingly no culinary thread whatsoever, but we certainly did feel welcome.

Our food welcome most often took the form of an asado, which is to Chile what hockey is to Canada.

This was the asado we hosted in Puerto Varas for Max’s friends and families. That’s Max grilling chorizo for choripan, a traditional Chilean dish where you pull the innards out of a roll and stuff a link of chorizo in it and then put pebre—a kind of Chilean salsa—on top. Deee-licious. Some Chileans also put mayonnaise on it, but then some Chileans put mayonnaise on everything. Next to Max is his friend Lucho, a chef who is, and there’s no other way to say this, grilling bull testicles. I think I can safely say that the only item that would rank higher on my wife’s list of “Things I Really A Lot Don’t Want To Eat” than grilled bull testicles would be bull testicles prepared any other way.

If you’re going to an asado in Chile, it’s best not to plan anything else that day as they tend to start around 2 (and since we were staying up until 1 or 2 most nights, our days didn’t get going until noon) and end around midnight. This one featured a few hours at the beach between entrée and dessert.

What’s wrong with Chile:

The asado is not particularly vegetarian friendly.

Here you see four (which I believe is the minimum to qualify for asado status) kinds of meat: pork ribs, chorizo, big hunks of beef, and blood sausage. Peggy, an admirably consistent non-eater of any of these four, positioned herself strategically between Max and me, and when no one was looking (which was not often since there were 16 people at one long table) slid hunks of meat onto our plates. It was summer, and so the markets were filled with fabulous fruits and vegetables, which appeared at every asado, but the animal flesh was always the star.

What’s right with Chile:

There are stray dogs everywhere. Now, even though I know you probably love dogs, you might think that this would be more accurately placed in the What’s wrong with Chile category, but the fact is they are almost uniformly pleasant, seemingly happy and well-fed, and not at all aggressive. There’s apparently nationwide agreement that they should be fed and petted regularly. In Puerto Natales, Max’s friend who ran the hostel had a small, fluffy, white inside dog named Mimi, but just outside the front door on the grass lived two delightful hounds named Amor (Love) and Oejita (Ears), and sometimes they came inside when the door was opened, and nobody had a problem with that. Here’s a picture of them with another hound-like creature.

And here’s where you get the best pizza in Puerto Natales, complete with sleeping dog.

What’s wrong with Chile:

The dogs get pretty dirty, and sometimes they chase cars, which is upsetting for both the driver and anyone in eye or ear shot. I’ll admit that’s a pretty weak case for inclusion in the What’s wrong with Chile category, but I’ve established a rhythm here and I hate to break it. Also the guys who drive the city buses in Valparaiso, known as micros (pronounced mee-crows) are independent contractors, and so make more money the faster they go, and so go way too fast on the city’s hilly, windy roads. Then again it’s pretty fun.

What’s right with Chile:

PENGUINS!!! And Isla Magdalena, which from November to March is home to 80,000 Magellanic penguins, who are just indescribably cute and funny to watch, and whoever’s in charge of the Chilean Department of Keeping Nosy Humans Away From Adorable Flightless Birds is sleeping on the job, because for less money than I thought it should cost we were taken by boat to this magical place, where we were allowed to walk among them as if we were worthy of such a thing. I took about 17 million photographs in the hour we walked with penguins, but I think this gives you an idea of what I’m talking about.

And I saved the penguins for last because after them, even if I could think of anything else that was wrong with Chile it would be impolite to mention it.