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Published: August 8th 2007
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Chile In the last two years I´ve crossed about two dozen borders but this is the first new country I´ve visited in that time.
Same time zone as Toronto and New York even though its on South America's west coast.
Not ¨Chillie¨ but ¨Chee-lay¨ unless you want people down here to put that puzzled look on their face that means - ¨What´s this gringo trying to say?¨
Crossing the border is an ordeal. Lot´s of banned items like fruit, vegetables, milk and cocaine.They x-ray all baggage. The border guards have those fur hats with ear flaps that gives them that intimidating Russian-border-guard look and seems to give them that old bureaucratic attitude. Even travelling within the country from state to state, the luggage searches are more intense than most other international border searches. Apparently its because of the potential cocaine smuggling from Bolivia (South America's poorest country) into Chile (South America's richest country).
The Spanish spoken in this country is more like Klingon.´Parut´d¨ can mean ¨¿para ustedes?¨
Minimum wage (that means, lots of people) is about $200 per month for a 45 hour week. That's much higher
than the other countries down here but the prices here are high.
Bus trips are twice
as expensive as other South American countries, or are they? It costs about $2 per hour (as opposed to $1 per hour in other countries) but because of the good roads, that is road, from north to south along this narrow beansprout shaped country, the bus probably travels twice as fast. Hostals are definitely twice as expensive.
Moving down Chile to Santiago, The landscape along the 5 hour bus trip from Arica to Iquique was more barren than any Peruvian journey and reminded me of the landscape in the StarWars movie where Anakin Skywalker was born. Arica had a good hostal run by a friendly Kiwi who always had a good story. Iquique was a much larger city which had a long beach for surfers and wind gliders.
From Iquique to La Serena was a 19 hour overnight bus trip. La Serena is a comfortable place.
From La Serena to Valparaiso was about 6 hours by bus. It's a port city and most of the residences are on one of the hills that surround it. For some reason the popular hostels
are on the hills also and I wasn't about to walk up the hills from the bus terminal looking for them.
Both Allende and Pinochet were born here in Valparaiso.
From Valparaiso to Santiago is only an hour and a half by bus.
There's lots of stray dogs around most of these cities. These aren't the little mixed mongrels you often see in cities. These are big purebred dogs sleeping in doorways.
Santiago has a very modern infrastructure. Wide roads, not so many traffic jams, wide pedestrian walkways. But it doesn't have heating in it's stores or hostals. The temperature today is between 2°C and 8 °C. The coldest months are yet to come, July and August.
The department stores have their wide doors fully open and there is no or little heating inside. The people working in stores from McDonald's to the bakery stores wear winter clothes all day.
Since I'm here and really can't see myself coming back in the near future, I decided to visit one of the most remote communities in the world.
re, Photo of Allende's tomb,
On September 11, 1973; the Armed Forces overthrew Allende's government
in a coup.
Allende committed suicide just as troops burst into the presidential palace.
Pinochet took over the presidency and has been accused
Pelican hoping some fish arel eft over from all these bloody sea-lions
of massive political murders.
The attempt to bring him to trial was foiled by his death last year.
See the movie : "Missing" with Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek on the CIA inspired coup that deposed democratically elected President Allende in 1973 to get a little insight to Chile's history.
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Alex Mumzhiu
non-member comment
Aliende
Hi John, I perfectly rememned the day Aliende was died It was big event in Soviet Union My co-worker who was a little bit anti-sovietic wrote little poem Which you can understand even it is in Russian Nety y Aliende bolshe hasiende Ne ispit comrad_y bolshe limonad_y Alex