At the central market teeming with fish of all types, a benefit of Chile’s long crinkly coastline, we bought a whole side of a big Atlantic salmon. Along with a bag of asparagus, tomatoes and olives, and another of strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and apricots, we dined like kings for the next couple of days, at a pauper’s price. Chile has great fruits we discovered.
We also managed to squeeze in a dinner at Republica Independente in the nearby barrio (suburb) of Bella de Artas where great Chilean steak was on the menu, and on the waiter’s recommendation we ordered a bottle of silky smooth Carmenere, a medium-bodied red wine variety these days almost exclusively grown in Chile.
Saturday we took a longish walk to the barrio of Bellavista, where amongst fragrant flowering jacarandas we stumbled on a great street party. It started with a dancing display by a local studio (boy, could they dance), followed by some eye-catching cavorting by a scantily clad Carnivale-like troupe displaying far more bummery than is ever seen on the streets of Adelaide, and finally a fashion parade featuring a team of long-legged clothes pegs and what seemed to be some of the local football heroes, on all of whom genetics had smiled really kindly.
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Sunday morning we were on the subway early, getting off at Pajaritos where we transferred to a bus for the 90 minute drive north to the UNESCO-listed historical port city of Valparaiso. Valparaiso - think San Francisco meets bohemian grunge. Valparaiso has survived all sorts of calamity over recent centuries – earthquake, economic, political. Once a wild and seedy stopover for seafarers, these days it’s tourism that brings people, and money, into town. We spent the afternoon puffing and panting up and down the steep streets, poking our noses into some of the art/craft studios, and admiring the views out over the colourful houses to the ocean beyond.
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And that should have brought our brief Chile sojourn to an end, for we were scheduled to fly out from Santiago at 7 the following morning, bound for Cuba. We were up at 3.30am, and at the airport before 5. At check-in we were asked to show our Cuba visitor cards, necessary to enter Cuba. We said we’d read that we could buy the cards at Lima in Peru, where the plane would be stopping on the way. No, replied the Avianca Airlines rep., we could not board the plane in Santiago without the cards, and Avianca did not sell them. Another airline did, but their office wouldn’t be opening until 10, three hours after our scheduled departure time. We cajoled, then wailed, then gnashed teeth, but Avianca wouldn’t relent (I did think at that point of trying the tactic once successfully employed by my brother, who when taking our 88 year old father on a trip around the world arrived late at night at a busy hotel in Scotland that disclaimed any knowledge of his booking. He was in no mood to be messed with at this hour and he promptly dropped to the floor in front of the reception desk, refusing to rise until a room was found. After some time, the unseemly tableaux of luggage strewn across the floor and a bemused weary octogenarian standing over a muttering figure on the floor for all they knew of quite possibly unhinged personality and unknown dispositions became increasingly worrisome for hotel staff, and a room was duly found). Would that work for us too, I briefly wondered, but lacking the requisite gall and impertinence, we meekly accepted our fate and our flight left on time, leaving behind in the airport two long faces. Ours.
We sat around in ugly mood until the Copa Airlines desk opened, bought the Cuba cards, then not able to face sitting at the airport for the next 16 hours until the rescheduled flight Avianca had provided us, took the airport bus & subway back into the city. We’d left at 4.30am and now we were back at 11! We got off the subway at a stop where someone had said there were a lot of cafes. There weren’t, and it wasn’t a particularly nice area either. We wearily trudged around in the heat, looking for a cool place to sit and rest. Relief came when we spotted a cinema; even better there was one English language movie screening – a ‘suspense/revenge genre’ flick starring Nicole Kidman (whom we usually avoid) and Julia Roberts.
In the movie the daughter of the character played by Julia had been brutally murdered, and we learn towards the end that Julia herself had tracked down the killer and imprisoned him in a cage in her own back garden for the past 15 years, meting out along the way depravations and punishments fit for the crime. Still rankling from the morning’s airline events, I found this quite an appealing concept and didn’t altogether approve of Julia deciding that enough was enough after 15 years and opening fire with a pistol on the wildly unkempt killer in the cage, bringing the issues between them to a close. Personally I felt that at least another seven years would have been in order – then open fire by all means Julia.
The movie over, the hours inched by and finally at 2am the following morning we took off from Santiago international airport, bound not for Lima in Peru, but Bogota in Colombia. Sleep came quickly as our plane climbed above the Andes.
