Chile

It was not originally in our plans to visit Chile, our focus during this, our first visit to South America, being on Peru for the Amazon and Ecuador for The Galapagos Islands. In fact, the genesis of this trip was Tracy’s desire to be in The Galapagos on her 60th birthday, specifically to see the Blue-footed Booby. More on that when we get there.

The only direct flight from Australia to South America is with Qantas to Santiago and when we discovered this we decided to stay in Chile for a couple of days, mainly to get over the jet lag before venturing onwards. We’ve gone a bit cool on Qantas in recent times, like most Australians. The flight was ok though, the staff were great and the food excellent. If my screen had worked without having to be rebooted and my seat functioned without me having to stand up the whole experience would have been perfect. I’m sure those minor problems would be Alan Joyce’s fault, everything else seemed to be.

This was one of those flights where you are in the air for over 12 hours and arrive before you took off. A concept that is amusing to children and even as an adult I still find quite intriguing. The time difference is 14 hours behind, or I think of it as 10 hours ahead the day before, which Tracy says is stupid. With a 38 hour day to endure there was a lot of time adjustment to contend with. We pushed through to about 7.30pm local time (26 hours after we got up!) before finally flaking out.

So, Chile. First impressions were positive. The airport is very large, shiny, and new. That they managed to create such an impressive piece of infrastructure is surprising given what we soon discovered about the state of the built environment in general. The roads, the pavements, the buildings are all a bit decrepit. The variety of architectural influences is very wide but most of the historic buildings have not been well maintained. A large earthquake in 2010 didn’t help. Graffiti is endemic. Tracy’s idea is to cut off the perpetrator’s ‘spray finger’ but it seems in practice there is no such deterrent.

Other than their propensity to tag the city, we found the people to be delightful. Diminutive in stature but big on friendliness. Like Oompa-Loompas but without so much chocolate. I jest! They are not all orange at all, in fact they embrace an impressive diversity of ethnic origins. Despite warnings not to hold our phones in public for fear of it being snatched we felt safe wherever we went.

One of the things about visiting a new country is that you learn so much. The shape of the country for example, is bizarre. Averaging 177km in width it is sandwiched between the Andes and Argentina to the East and the Pacific Ocean to the West. So, it’s narrow, but boy is it long. Overlay Chile onto Europe and it spans from the top of Norway to the South of Spain. If you laid Chile on its side it would reach from Perth to Sydney and continue for a couple of hundred km’s into the Tasman Sea.

On our second day we had an organised ‘small group tour’ which turned out to be just us, a driver and our guide Hugo, who educated us on the history of the country. We think of Chile as being a Spanish colony because of the language but the influence of the British was far greater. Once independence had been declared in 1818 it was the Brits and Irish who did most to support the development of the country. More for the trade benefits (mainly access to nitrates) than for any philanthropic motivation, although their legacy is much respected. In the picture you can see Hugo showing us the British Colonial arch in Valparaiso.

We learned about the military coup of 1973 and the reign of the tyrant Pinochet, friend of the tyrant Margaret Thatcher! Pinochet allowed the British to use Chilean facilities during The Falklands War, more because he hated the Argentinians than for any affinity to the British. He knew that if the Argies were successful in taking over The Falklands their next targets would be disputed Chilean Islands.

Hugo informed us that the Americans in the form of the CIA supported the military coup and the assassination of the president, which for 50 years Chileans were told was a suicide. The American’s motivation being to stop the government from nationalising the copper mines which at the time were in the hands of big American corporations. This whole story points to the challenge of determining facts in a post-truth world. Wikipedia suggests Hugo’s version of events was, shall we say, exaggerated. Fanciful even. But who knows, he sounded convincing to us. The truth is such an elusive thing these days.

We’re off to Peru now where our focus will be more on the wildlife than political history. I’m imagining the truth will be less contentious there.