Pucón y Chiloé

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4/12/07 12:04 AM
Oh wow, so I guess it’s been quite awhile since I’ve written. Two big adventures in the past weeks: Pucón and Chiloé.

I just got back from Chiloé so I’ll write about that first. It was a difficult decision to go to Chiloé for semana santa, but I’m really glad that I did. You’d think that in a catholic country like Chile we would get more than just a 3 day weekend for Easter, but that’s not the way it works. But no matter, In the last 2 weeks I have had six classes cancelled because of student protests and riots (and one today for my professor being sick, and then the week before I had a class cancelled because there was an organized drunken beach trip for the freshmen, where the university hires busses to take students to the beach, and apparently everyone was told to write their bus number on their hand so that when they passed out on the beach they could be carried to their bus. I didn’t go because I thought I had class, but then it turned out that the class was actually cancelled so we could all get trashed at the beach. Oh well), so I’ve had plenty of time off, though my homework is getting a little overwhelming. Anyway, we had Friday off, so I went down to Chiloé to meet up with my friends Ben and Sara.
Chiloé is a little difficult to explain, but it’s supposed to be a very unique place in Chile. It’s an island, so for years and years it was very isolated from the rest of the country, and the world. They grew into a very strange mix of Chilean Catholicism and indigenous superstition. They have their own mythology that includes a lot of hideous hags and trolls “ravenous sexual appetites.” There’s also a tradition (I guess you can call it) that it’s pretty common for a woman to get pregnant while her husband is away, and the adultery is never questioned. I guess in the old days they used to blame it on one of those sexually ravenous trolls named El Trauco. But today I guess people just accept it. Also on chiloé they supposedly have something like 200 different species of potatoes or something like that, so they make a lot of potato and seafood dishes. The most famous is called curanto, which Tiara, Christina, and I have pledged to make in the woods in Santa Cruz. Traditionally curanto is made in a big pit dug in the earth, they throw in all kinds of different potatoes and mariscos (mussels, clams, maybe some shrimp or something tentacly, maybe even fish) and different kinds of beef, and pork, possibly chicken, I’m not sure, and then I think they put in red-hot rocks, and cover the whole thing with GIANT leaves that grow wild on the island. They leave it for however long, and then come back with forks and plates and all dig in and eat from the pit in the ground. Nowadays they also make curanto in a pot on the stove.

So that said, I went to Chiloé this weekend. The first day I got into Castro, the big “city” and capital of Chiloé, and met up with Ben and Sara who had gotten in the night before. Friday was Good Friday, which is the day when “Jesucristo” was crucified. One of the most famous things about Chiloé is the abundant, unique churches. After dark what seemed like most of the town gathered around the giant tin church. The three of us snuck in to find a group of young teenagers acting out Jesus’ sentencing. When it came to the part where Jesus sets out with the soldiers to climb the hill on which he’s crucified, the kids moved outside, and got on the back of a flatbed truck, and the whole town (or maybe 300 of it’s most pious inhabitants) followed the truck around to the 14 stations of the cross. I didn’t know that there were so many stations, I thought that the parade would end after like, a circle around the block, but the truck stopped 14 times around the town, and the teenagers would act out the different stations of the cross, even up to station 12 (I think) where the student/soldiers actually put nails into the cross and the kid playing Jesus screamed out loud. Between the stations the truck would drive with all of the town following and singing songs about love and god and Mother Mary.
My second day in Chiloé we went to the town of Achao, saw their gorgeous little church that seemed to be chiseled by hand. From Achao we had to finagle a ride with some salmon fishermen to give us a ride in their boat to the little island of Llingue (I think that’s what it’s called), which was supposed to be a “step back in time,” but the mostly wild island, with it’s one outwardly stoic church, a few old but colorful houses, and a community center near the dock didn’t seem any more old-fashioned than Finegold. We took a steep, newly grated road up into the heart of the island, enjoyed tremendous views of ocean, of all kinds of livestock pastures, and peoples’ houses dotted along the island. On our way down the hill a women came out of her house to ask if we wanted to see some of her artesania. She showed us a spread of woven baskets and boxes and bird-shaped something-holders. I asked her where she learned to weave like that and she said that a woman came to the island and taught many of the women how to do those crafts, so now there is a collective of them who weave different things out of native plants to the island, which they sell to the occasional tourist passing by in the high tourist season (Jan-Feb), or take to artesenal fairs on the main island (chiloé’s actually an archepelago), and a lot of it is taken to Santiago by Comercio Justo. I was stoked to hear that because I just started an internship with Comercio Justo! (www.tiendacomerciojusto.cl). We left her house, walked down to the beach, entered the now-open church. It was pretty. It was raining and there were little brown piglets snorting under the church and eating the green grass on the lawn to its side. After seeing the church we were invited up into the community building where the women from the collective were having their meeting, so we got to see all of the faces of the community. It was really cool.
That night we stayed in Dalcahue, which is not too special of a town, but for dinner Sara and Ben both had curanto de olla (the kind cooked ina pot on the stove. WE were told that despite what we learned in the intensive language program, people in Chiloé only make curanto in the ground during tourist season. But somehow I don’t believe them. The true Chilote people have to make it for themselves for special occasions year round). The curanto looked really intense, so I’m glad that I didn’t order it (I had fresh salmon, which was really good). Sara couldn’t even finish hers, so Ben had to eat enough for both of them, though even he couldn’t eat all of the clams.
The next day, Easter, we went to…. A town whose name I can’t remember at all. But it was also very small, and only accessible to us by a bus that passed through three times daily. The church there was the most impressive from the outside that we had seen so far, but it was closed. An old man passed by and said that he had the key or something, and something about 2 PM, but we didn’t really understand what, so we decided to go on a walk and come back around 2 to see what would happen. So we went up another steep hill winding into beautiful hillsides with excellent views of the ocean, and all kinds of pastures. We spent about an hour or so wandering through the hillside, and then around 2 were directed down a new path toward the town by some little girls who were out picking blackberries.
We tromped down the muddy road, admiring the beautiful world around us (it was great, sunny weather), until Sara saw the cutest piglet possible. WE stopped to watch it squeal with joy as it scratched it’s little belly on it’s water trough. While we were watching, the piglet’s owner passed through the yard, and after a few words of greeting invited us into her house. Inside were her elderly parents, and a woman who I think was her sister. The room was hot from the wood stove in its center, and the roof was low. There were lots of windows looking out on the hills around, and a big TV up on a shelf in one corner They sat us down and fed us apple empanadas which they had made for Easter, tea, and hard apple cider, all of which (except for the tea) was made from the apples on their trees. (The apple cider was served from a used 2 liter orange soda bottle. I later found out that Ben thought that they were just serving us orange soda that had been sitting out on the back porch for too long and had turned a little. He had never had hard cider before and thought it tasted like old orange soda, which made me laugh because he drank it so graciously). The old mother, who was hard of hearing, served us 2 servings of empanadas each (I thought that I couldn’t eat finish one!). They all kept asking if we were siblings, or if one of us girls was Bens girlfriend. It took a little while to convey that we were just friends, and then we all joked about Ben being the strong man protecting the two of us, and the old father told us a story about a Russian woman he knew who came to Chile to find a husband. At least I think that’s what he said. And the old mother, because of her bad hearing would repeat everything that was already said. We talked for about 5 minutes about how dangerous Santiago is, then moved on to another subject (perhaps about Ben’s manliness, perhaps about the frequency of tourists in their little town) and when that was over the old women asked “isn’t Santiago dangerous?” It was all so lovely, but unfortunately we arrived at their house at about 2:20 and the only bus that left the town was going to leave at 3 PM, and we had left our big back packs down at another woman’s house by the church. So at 2:55 the three of us, filled as much as we could be with apple empanadas and a little light-headed from the cider, took off running down the hill as fast as we could in our current state. We ran into the bus part way to our bags and had to ask them to wait, then ran to get our bags, and had to run back to the bus with out giant back packs.
That was the best part of the trip. Everything else can be skimmed over. Ancud, the second biggest town in Chiloé, has a nice museum with a blue whale skeleton and lots of artesania. I bought 2 very nice ponchos there, and took pictures of me with wool for my mom. That’s about it. I didn’t get a chance to go to the national park there, but hey, maybe next time. Ok, I have class at 8:30 tomorrow, so I ought to hit the sack, but I’ll give a brief description of Pucón tomorrow.
-Sophie
4/12/07 1:12 AM

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