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Published: December 31st 2006
So last time you heard from us we had just landed in Santiago on 1st December around midday - a good couple of hours before we left Auckland. Still finding the concept very bizarre. We were very kindly put up by Stephie’s Dad for our 2 nights in Santiago before flying north to Iquique. (For those of you who don’t know Stephanie, Kez used to work with her in Vienna and her and her husband Andreas are brilliant people and have become good friends of ours). Our first afternoon we basically spent trying to stay awake, knowing that going to sleep at a vaguely normal hour that night would help sort out the jet lag. Staying awake activities included going to a local shopping mall to buy a Chilean sim card (thanks go to the Cairns family for ensuring Kez brushes up on her charades techniques every Christmas); walking through a beautiful park and past the Military School which is where Pinochet spent his last days and where he lay in state (reactions to his death were very varied in Chile, in Iquique life pretty much continued as normal); and having dinner at a quaint little Chilean looking restaurant which turned
out to be an Irish bar and we ate Mexican food there. We tumbled into bed around 8 and slept for a good 14 hours!
The next day we went into the centre to have a look around and we caught the funicular to the top of San Cristobal hill. The view of Santiago from up there is spectacular and it gave us some idea of how enormous the city is. The city centre is remarkably clean, full of green parks and very safe for a major city centre. The people in Chile have been wonderful to us, so helpful and friendly (and we really appreciate it after living in Vienna where it’s very seldom you get a smile from a stranger). That night we were invited to Carolina (Steph’s sister) and family for drinks and we had a lovely evening there.
We flew up to Iquique the next day, Sunday 3rd Dec, to start 3 weeks of Spanish lessons. We thought it might come in useful! We chose Iquique as the school looked good, and the town would be a very interesting place to visit and a stark contrast to southern Chile. Iquique is a beach resort
in the far north of Chile, with 150,000 inhabitants and surrounded by the Atacama Desert. It NEVER rains there, and is about 29 degrees max in the summer. The houses don’t really need proper roofs and one of the local gyms is outside on the beach. They even have a golf course which is just one huge bunker of sand. Kez loved the permanently good weather and Nick agrees it was pretty good!
We stayed with a local Chilean family, Natalia (our hostess), Maru (her sister) and Nati chica (Natalia junior). Natalia was an English teacher at our language school, but that didn’t mean we got off lightly - we spoke Spanish the whole time with the family, and that’s one of the main reasons why we picked up so much in the 3 weeks. Nati chica declared herself as our Professor of Modernisms and taught us lots of Chilean slang.
Their house was wonderful, a beautiful building situated on a pedestrianised road right in the centre of the old town, full of old wooden mansions from the prosperous nitrate mining days- it had the feel of being in a western movie. The house was also only 5
minutes walk from our language school, Academia de Idiomas del Norte. It was only 15-20 minutes walk to the main beach, where we spent many hours chilling out or playing in the great surf. There were also 2 bars within 5 metres of the house, but we were very dedicated in our Spanish homework, so only frequented them on 2 nights. A big change for both of us from our studying days!
We managed to pick up an amazing amount of Spanish in the 3 weeks. We had 4 hours of lessons in a class of 2 or 3 per day, plus homework, plus practicing as much as possible. Our teachers were great. The proof was when we visited some of Stephie´s friends back in Santiago, and had long conversations with them. We were both amazed and very proud of ourselves in how much we´d learnt.
We had breakfast and normally dinner with the family, all delicious and wide ranging, from typical Chilean dishes to classic foreign dishes (such as chile con carne, which Natalia picked up in England!). Lunches we normally ate out, usually a snack like completos (hot dogs smothered in tomatoes and avocados) or empanadas
(bit like a Cornish pasty, delicious). Chile has really impressed us with the quality of their ingredients in cheap food, with good steak used in the empanada fillings, chunks of chicken breast in their sandwiches, and their avocadoes are amazing. We also ate fish sandwiches from a little local shack type kiosk at the port, incredibly fresh and huge, and you can tell how good it was because even Nick thought the fish was amazingly delicious. The port was full of multi-coloured fishing boats and a colony of sea lions devouring all the scraps of fish. Sea lions in Spanish are los lobos, now everyone, la, la, la bamba…. We got so used to eating quality food for cheap, that we embarrassed ourselves one day when stopping for sushi on the way to the beach. After eating really amazing sushi and sashimi of salmon and Chilean sea bass (and admittedly drinking 3 pisco sours each), we didn´t have enough money to pay! Nick had to rush home to get more cash. Bloody tourists! The other place we really liked was the Terminal, the local fruit and veg market with loads of delicious fruit.
A great discovery was that most
films in Chile are shown in original version, so we excitedly went to see James Bond in Casino Royale, what a great film, and none of our Spanish is owed to reading the subtitles!
The first Friday, 8 Dec, was a public holiday, so on Thursday after Spanish class we escaped north to Arica. The bus up took 5 hours and 1 bowl of amazing fruit from the vendors who regularly board the bus. On the Friday we took a tour up to National Park Lauca, which although is only 150km, took 6 hours to do. It’s so slow because we started at sea level, and finished at 4,500m at the highest lake in the world, lago Chungara. Many stops on the way helped reduce the risk of Puna (mountain/altitude sickness), where we saw some amazing geoglyphs (massive ancient art on hill sides), enormous cacti, cool old church at Parinacota and loads of Llamas and Vicuñas. Lago Chungara is beautiful, surrounded by snow capped volcanoes, it really does take your breath away - at that altitude, you have to walk very slowly to avoid getting faint and ill. That night, we stayed half way back at Putre, a cool
farming village. Nick got a headache, and blamed it on the 3500m altitude, and not the dangerous mixture of Spanish homework and beer. The village was very chilled out, we spent the next day reading in the sun waiting for our bus back down to Arica, where we had a delicious dinner of Pollo Asado (Chicken from the rotisserie - like you get at gumpoldskirchen for the Vienna folk). On the Sunday we explored Arica and climbed it’s hill, the Morro, before catching the bus home to Iquique and hearing of Pinochet’s death, and seeing the mourners and celebrators in Santiago on TV.
The 2nd weekend, we traveled up to Pica, an Oasis in the desert, famed for growing mangoes and citrus fruit. And they are damn good! The Saturday was spent in “La Cocha”, a thermal spring where the water is about 30 degrees, perfect. We also sunk a few fruit juices, some with added Pisco, the famous Chilean spirit, but the original pisco sour is still the best (Pisco with lemon juice, sugar and egg white). Pica is also famous for alfojores, a small cake with mango jam. As far as we can tell, they’re all made
Iquique - Pelicans waiting for the fish scraps
The locals who prepare the fish are amazingly quick!by one 70+ year old guy in his factory/ shop. Not sure quite when he made them though, as his busy routine of sitting in his chair outside seemed only to be interrupted by popping across the road to ring the church bells. On the Sunday we took another tour up high to the salt lakes of Caposa and Huasco at 3700m, both surrounded by mountains and volcanoes. Our tour popped in on the only family that lives up there, for the guide to pick up the Alpaca (relation of the llama) wool used to knit jumpers.
We said bye to Iquique in style. On the Thursday, we had a pisco sour at the Casino Espanol, an amazing morrocan style building and hub of Iquique´s social elite. On the Friday we had great lunch at a seafood restarant with our favourite professor, Waleska, which included ceviche (raw white fish soaked in lemon juice for 8-20 hours, the lemon juice “cooks” the fish). At last we managed a night out at the same time as Chileans, turning up at the Runas bar at 11:30pm and heading onto the Kamikaze disco for some hip shaking latino music at about 2am. Be
quite interesting if they can get to new year on time…
On Sat 23rd, our Iquique adventure ended when we flew back to Santiago. We had a great time and learnt loads of Spanish. Many thanks to the Natalias and Maru for being great hosts, and to everyone at the Academia del Norte for teaching us so much and so well.
In Santiago we checked into our very lovely hotel in the vibey district of Bellavista and then met up with Stephie and Andreas who had just arrived from Vienna (so good to see them!) and we all spent another lovely evening at Carolina, Felipe and little Sofia’s place. The next day we sorted out bus tickets and had our all important afternoon siesta and then headed over to spend Christmas with Stephie and her family.
In Chile, Christmas is celebrated on the evening of the 24th. Little Sofia (6 years old) was very excited when we arrived because Santa would be arriving anytime to deliver presents. She went with her grandfather to fetch his mother and while she was gone, Santa came! We all saw him of course and were just waving goodbye to him from the balcony
when they got back and she was bitterly disappointed that she had missed him…again! We reckon Santa has it easier in South Africa where he comes sometime around 3am when all good kids are asleep and in Sweden where he always has time to meet the kids when we delivers the presents. Nevermind, Sofia soon forgot all about Santa when she opened her first present to find her dream princess dress, in pink! And from then on, 98% of all her presents were pink too! We drank lots of delicious Christmas drinks including Monkey Tail which tastes kind of similar to Amarula. Christmas dinner was delicious turkey with an amazing stuffing sauce, we felt right at home! Thanks so much to Stephie and her whole family for adopting us for Christmas, we really enjoyed spending the evening with you and it really meant so much to us to be able to celebrate with a family. It made being away from our own families that little bit easier.
The next day we went to one of the most famous churches in Santiago (Los Dominicos) for Christmas mass with Steph and Andreas. They also got married in this church. It was a
lovely ceremony and we sang lots of familiar Christmas Carols, just in Spanish! We spent the afternoon with them too, lunch at a typical little café restaurant and a walk up the Santa Lucia hill, with more wonderful views over the city. In the evening we went to one of Steph’s friends for a Chilean braai/barbecue and it was soooooo good! We had Chorripan (Chorrizo sausages in a roll with homemade tomato salsa) and they had cooked a massive piece of beef, which was then sliced into pieces and it was cooked to perfection!
The 26th we headed to Valparaiso, we walked around the old town for a while but Kez was feeling very tired and very useless so we ended up going home for a nap and then going out again to see the murals on the walls on one of the hills (there are apparently 42 of them surrounding the port town of Valparaiso but we reckon they are stretching the truth a little cos some of them look remarkably like one hill!). The next morning we caught one of the many little lifts (kind of funicular type things) up the Concepcion hill and did a lovely walk
Iquique - The sand golf course
The white lines mark the fairways - a whole new meaning to being stuck in a bunker along the narrow streets to the Allegre hill. The houses up there are all so bright and colourful and it is all very quaint. And of the course the views back over the bay are amazing! In the afternoon we went around the bay to Viña del Mar, it is a much more modern city but still charming in a different way. We walked around and had lunch on a pier overlooking the beach before heading back to Santiago to catch our overnight bus to Puerto Varas. And that’s where we are now! And that’s where this edition ends!
We hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and thanks to everyone who sent us happy wishes! Have a brilliant New Year wherever you are let’s hope 2007 is a year full of all of our favourite things!
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Linds
non-member comment
Happy New Year
Hi guys. It was fantastic to chat to you both yesterday, and good job with the update Kez! I hope you caught your flight OK and still had fun last night. Love yas