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Published: April 27th 2008
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Chiloe, an island off the coast of Chile is promoted as being a tranquil, undeveloped and beautiful island with a country feel and a very strong and interesting culture. One of the hostels we were looking forward to staying in was promoted in our lonely plant book, and a travel brochure as being a seaside hostel in a beautiful coastal town (Chonchi) with a friendly host that took you on tours of his seafood farm and occasionally cooked big meals from that day's harvest. He had bikes, boats and fishing gear to rent, centrally heated rooms and hot water. The island lived up to the promotion a little more than the hostel. I was a little let down by the island though and very let down up the hostel. Still, it was still an interesting experience and I am glad we went. I guess I was let down by the island because I had built it up in my head to be a lot different, but it is always like that when you have expectations. This is why I sometimes prefer not to read about a place before I go there. Perhaps we did not give the island enough time to
reveal itself to us. Perhaps we just chose the wrong places. Maybe I just do not enjoy being a tourist as much as I enjoy hiking, climbing and meeting people. But there were some good parts... maybe I should start at the start:
We caught the bus from Puerto Monte to the first town on Chiloe called Ancud. We stayed in a beautiful, clean, new, though not too cheap hostel right opposite the beach. There was a really nice, all glass sun room with a beautiful hand made wooden table to sit at and watch the day go by from. A comfortable place to stay when you just need to recover some energy. I was a little tired from our stay at Michael's place, where we needed to always be sociable, as fun as it was. We also did not sleep so well there, as the bed was quite small, and sometimes the guests in the room upstairs were not so quiet... so, we enjoyed the change of scene. We got to do some hand washing, catch up on a bit f this blog (This is where I wrote the Cochomo blog from) and recharge. We met a super
Dinner in Ancud
With the couple we met from a coastal town near Santiago friendly couple from a town near Santiago, who shared their meal with us. They had come back from the marke with a huge heap of muscles, and cooked them up in a traditional southern Chilean dish. They also invited us to stay at their house on our way back up North, which we are excited about.
Ancud itself is a cute-enough weathered seaside town of about 20 000 people, which had not been prettied up for the sake of tourism, something we always like to see. It was yet another town with a strong German influence, seen through the steep pitched shingled houses. Even though they were painted in bright blues, pinks, yellows and greens, the paint was more often than not chipped, peeling and salt stained. It was a real town, rather than a fake one. Also, similar to Osorno, this town seemed like it had not really changed since the 1950's or 60's. There were shops that sell all kinds of odd things in one place - fishing gear, pharmaceutical products, farming supplies, clothing, and small selections of food, for example. There were a few shops like this still in Thirroul when I lived there too, and
Dinner on a deck which is falling down
in Chonchi, with the stench of greywater and rotting plums I always liked it. Wonder if they are still there...
Speaking of home, it was nice to hear seagulls and smell salt in the air again. There is definitely something in me that wakes up when I am near the ocean.
The next day, we caught the bus to Chonchi to stay in the cool sounding hostel we had read about. Reading about both hostels in a brochure you would think they were quite similar, both being right on the water and all... but they were polar opposites. While one was clean, beautifully designed and decorated with a great breakfast and friendly staff, the other was falling apart, rotting, dirty, neglected and run by a strange man and his strange son. The guy could not even clean and button his shirt properly let alone look after a hostel, and his son was as silent and sullen as they come. There were fruit trees, but the fruit was just left to rot on the ground and attract fruit flies. The bathrooms were mouldy. The kitchen table was sticky and everything in the kitchen was grimy. There was only enough hot water in the shower to lure you in, before
Chonchi
at low tide it went cold. The sleepy eyed sloppy dressed owner is a Pinochet supporter and made some comment about how Chile's left wing government did not know how to deal with criminals, and if he had his way he would use cement shoes in the middle of the ocean strategy to deal with anyone who committed a crime. Need I say more? Oh and there were no feasts of fresh seafood, tours, bikes or boats. As grotty and depressing as it was, it was cheap, and we had both been in worse (i have lived in worse in my student days), so we stayed for a couple of nights. Later though, an older Australian couple turned up, and the guy (maybe he was sick of having guests) totally ripped them off and charged them twice what we were paying.
Chonchi itself was a dead sea port, with alcoholics roaming the streets and litter lining the beach and road. There was a little bit of charm in some of the houses and the church, but that was about it. Instead of the freshness, I associate with a beachside town, Chonchi was stagnant and stale and had something strange about it, that
low tide in Chonchi
I wonder if you can eat this seaweed... I could not quite put my finger on. It was a strange mix of cute and ugly. The brightly painted boats bobbing up and down on the ocean added a children's book like brightness to an otherwise seedy port town. The seediness, I think, became more evident on low tide when the boats were stranded and tied up on the beach, which stunk of rotting seaweed and litter. Also, it got seedier as darkness enveloped the beach and people started gathering in groups to drink (throwing their cans and cigarettes on the beach when they had finished with them). These groups, it seemed to me, lacked the festive spirit we have noticed elsewhere in South America so far.
The next day, we caught a bus to Castro, the Capital city of Chiloe and wandered through the seaside markets and through its streets which date back to the 1560's, when the town was established. The town did not feel as strange as Chonchi, which was great. The brightly coloured palafitos (houses built on poles over the water front) looked like they had been roughly crayoned in a children's colouring book. We had lunch inside one of these which was definitely
a cultural experience. It felt like we were inside a boat from the 60's. Cheerful latin american music flitted around the bright bold reds, blues and yellows of the decor. We could look out of arched windows that looked like port holes of a boat and I swear I almost felt like we were rocking with the waves. I ordered the local specialty called Curanto: a hearty bowl of shell fish, chicken, chorizo, lamb, potato and potato cake with a buttery, creamy broth. It was enough protein for an entire week, and as inimidated as I was, I thought I should try the local specialty. I could not finish it though, and Jono was no help as his own meal was huge. After lunch, with very heavy stomachs, we caught a bus out to Isla Quinchao, the most accessible of the many islands around Chiloe, and home to Chiloe's oldest church built entirely out of wood, even using wooden pegs instead of nails as they had no steel or stone. We wandered about the town a bit, which was tiny so this did not take very long. Then we went to the water, watched some fishermen working on their boat,
a buildin in Chonchi
made from tin cans, with a plastic bag blowing past down the road. There was a lot of litter in Chonchi, especially on the beach. walked back into town and caught the next bus back to Chonchi. We planned the next day to get a bus to Quellon, and a boat back across to the mainland and head south through Chile down to Patagonia.
Chiloe was interesting, and it definitely had a different feel to the mainland, but it was not the pristine and untouched island I guess I was hoping for. Perhaps we would have been left with a more positive impression had we gone to the National Park, but as it was raining and cold every day we did not do this.
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