Easter in Bolivia
As soon as we arrived in Bolivia in Uyuni, we realized that we had landed in a completely different world in South America. Uyuni is a small town where the people are much more traditional, and the town itself is much less modern than Potosi or Sucre. Most of the older women and men in Uyuni were dressed in traditional Bolivian garb. From head to toe the Bolivians look distinctly different than the Chileans and Argentines. There is more of an influence of indigenous culture here in Bolivia than in the other countries we have visited. The traditional Bolivian women wear black fedoras (like bowler hats), full velvet skirts, nude color stockings pulled up to their knees, and two long braids down to their waists that are sometimes tied together at the ends behind their backs. Their faces are beautifully weathered from the sun, which makes it hard to tell their age. Tied to their backs are colorful woven blankets full of their wares or oftentimes a sleeping child is wrapped up inside. The traditionally dressed men wear colorful woven ponchos and very distinctively pointy Bolivian hats knit of llama wool with earflaps.
Bolivian food is very different from what we have been eating in Argentina and Chile. Salteñas are what Bolivians eat for breakfast or a mid-morning snack...they are like empanadas, but they have a sweeter crust and they are a little messier to eat. Most of the side dishes are made with dehydrated potatoes, regular potatoes or rice. One of our favorite dishes is picante de pollo, which is chicken prepared with a yummy spicy sauce that tastes like a cross between paprika and mole...it´s a bit like Chicken Paprikash that Billy´s mom makes.
The weather in Sucre is very comfortable. We are starting to see signs of Fall in South America, and the days here are warm and sunny. We are at a much lower altitude than we were in Potosi, so we have no altitude sickness here and the temperatures are much more moderate at night.
Sucre itself is a very attractive city with a busy city center, well maintained parks, stunning colonial buildings and churches that are painted all white (just as they were during colonial times). It is a place where we can set up camp for awhile, so we have decided to stay for at least 10 days and take Spanish lessons for a week.
We have been in Sucre for four days waiting for our Spanish classes to begin. In this short amount of time in one place, we have become familiar with the rhythm of life in this city. All the shops and restaurants shut down between 2pm and 6pm and the place becomes a ghost town in the middle of the day. This week may be different from the norm, since it is Semana Santa--the week leading up to Easter, but it has been a quiet couple of days for us. Every night the city comes alive again and we see the streets and sidewalks transform into bustling thoroughfares. We start to recognize the people on the street in the same places each night. There is a little boy who strums away on a small guitar with his hat sitting empty in front of him on the sidewalk waiting for someone to give him a Boliviano or two. During the day, we have seen him sleeping on the sidewalk across the street...he uses his carefully folded sweatshirt as a pillow.
Bolivia is the poorest of the South American countries, but it is rich in culture. We have stolen glimpses of the poverty and have had a few experiences that have taught us that the people here are desperately trying to prosper. There is much natural beauty and a unique culture, from the desert to the salt flats to the jungle to the cities, and it is very affordable to travel here.
The Bolivians are warm and welcoming. There is something about the Bolivian attitude and approach to life that I can´t quite put my finger on. There is a sadness and a grit deep down that is hard to discern and explain. There is opportunism under the surface that is more evident here than in Argentina, Chile, or Uruguay. However, Bolivia is much more industrialized than we expected it to be. Of the countries that we have been to so far, Bolivia is our favorite.
21 del Marzo - Potosi, Bolivia
There is no way to tell the history of Bolivia, and of all Latin America, without talking about Potosi. Potosi is situated at the base of Cerro Rico (rich mountain), at about 12,000 feet, making it the highest city of its size in the world. This is where the Spanish, when they began to colonize South America, capitalized on a mountain of silver. From the 16th century to the mid 18th century, the Spanish imperialists exported over 2 billion ounces of silver. This became the first international money in the world (the Real), which made Spain the most powerful country in the world at the time. The wealth that they extracted from Cerro Rico is what financed the Spanish Armada, as well as the rest of Spanish imperialism. The native Indians who lived here got nothing, of course, except to be forced into slave labor extracting the silver from the mines.
Potosi was the richest city in the world, and in 1620 was larger than Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin. Since all the money was created here, all the best goods from China, India, the Spice Islands, and across the world were imported and bought with Potosi silver coins. The wealthiest viceroyalty lived here, and the town still has remnants of those glory days. In Potosi you marvel at the enormous churches with incredibly intricate stone carvings on their facades, narrow streets on the hills stacked with old theatres and other colonial style buildings. In Spain to this day they say ¨Es un Potosi¨ to describe something incredibly rich.
On our first afternoon here we adjusted to the altitude, and walked around the streets. It is a bustling town, with tons of teenagers and old women in their traditional garb rubbing elbows in the streets. Cerro Rico is still being mined for zinc, lead, silver and tin, so a good portion of the town´s inhabitants are still miners, and the second largest profession seems to be lawyers (abogados) who help with miner disputes over ownership of territory in the mountain. We have never seen so many law offices anywhere in our lives. George Bush would be very dissapointed. There are also lots of cafes and restaurants, making it quite a nice place to be.
Our second day in Potosi we booked a tour to go into the mines of Cerro Rico. We got into a van and were provided with protective gear for our feet and rubber pants and jackets to wear over our clothes so they would not get dirty, as well as helmets and head lamps. We were not sure what to expect, but what we saw was the highlight and the low point of our trip so far. On our way to the mountain, we stopped at the miner part of town to buy the miners gifts at the market, namely dynamite, coca leaves, and soft drinks. We headed up to one of the mines with our gifts, there are over 500 mines in the mountain, but only about 150 are active.
With all our gear on, we started into the tunnels of the mine. After about 1 minute it was totally black and cold and the dirt floor turned into a wet and sludgy mud. We walked along what looks like small train tracks, where the miners bring their days work of minerals out of the mine by the ton on trolleys. Two men push one ton of rocks through the innards of the mountain on these trolleys at least twice a day. When we descended to the second and third levels down inside the mine, it became very hot and stuffy. We could smell and taste the arsenic and asbestos that forms naturally and is pervasive in the mines. Our throats burned with every breath. Since we were up inside the mountain, it was more like 14,000 feet, so walking and crawling through the hot, stuffy mines at that elevation is not easy. As we would pass different miners working, we would give them our gifts, some coca leaves, something to drink, and sometimes dynamite. We met one old miner named Ciento Seisciento (100 - 600). All the miners have nicknames, and his is Ciento Seisciento because like most miners he is Indian, and speaks Quechua and not Spanish, and he had trouble saying 160 in Spanish, instead he would say 100 - 600, hence the nickname.
Our tour guide was Pedro Blanco, an ex-miner himself. He worked in the mines from age 13 to 18, but was lucky enough to get a different job as a tour guide as his back was hurt from bending over in a small section of the mine to transport the minerals all day long. The mine shafts are not tall, so every step you take while hunched over. He told us many stories about working in the mines, and how he had to do one year of military service at age 18, which he likened to a vacation.
We then slid down a shaft about 30 meters deep to another part of the mine where they were still excavating. We came across a guy who was working by himself, chiseling a hole in the rocks above his head to place dynamite in. He was wearing only jeans, and was completely dripping with sweat as he hit his chisel with a hammer time after time after time. It takes 4 hours of constant work to create one hole big enough for one stick of dynamite. It was very sad to see someone working that hard for such a little payoff (average salary is 400 Bolivianos a month, or $50 US). He had 5 kids to feed, and had 5 children die after birth, no doubt due to the toxins in his blood from the arsenic and asbestos.
From there we climbed through another small shaft to a spot where we actually worked with the miners. Well, Jen and Billy worked, the rest of the tourists couldn´t be bothered to do much of anything to help out. We shoveled rocks into a wheelbarrel, and then took it down the tunnel and dumped it in a pile to be put into the trolleys. This is where we saw two kids, no more than 14 years old, and one woman working, sweating, chewing coca leaves, and we could tell that they had aged beyond their years because of such hard labor. After 4 loads of rocks, we were totally dripping with sweat, having trouble breathing, and feeling light headed. We both could not imagine what it would be like to spend 10 hours a day doing that for a living.
That was the end of the tour, so we made our way up the small shafts and out of the mines, where we could breath easily again and cool down in the fresh air. On our way out, both of our head lamps ran out of battery power, so we were in complete darkness in a very small and steep spot for a few minutes and had to yell for Pedro Blanco to come back and guide us out. That was a bit scary. It was nothing but incredibly sad that after 500 years in Cerro Rico, nothing has changed. The poor indigenous people still work the mines the same way they did in Colonial times, and the rich foreign companies reap the profits. It was also amazing to experience first hand such an important part of history. As Pedro Blanco said, without the silver from Potosi, there would have been no industrial revolution in Europe, and it might have been in Bolivia.
The next day we toured the Museo de la Casa de Moneda which is the mint where the Spanish viceroyalty turned the silver into coins. It was another impressive place full of 17th century artwork and all the Spanish riches. We learned a lot about the process, and saw coins with date stamps of 1594. I´m sure this would be the coin collectors Mecca.
For us Potosi is the most historically significant place we have been on this trip, and makes us realize how lucky we are to have been born in the States. The materials that make our industries move forward are often taken from places like Potosi for next to nothing. What we found most amazing is how the Bolivians that we have talked to don´t seem to feel very much resentment about having their natural resources taken by foreign countries. They are almost proud of their linkage to the Spanish glory days in colonial times. The cover of the Sports section on the Potosi paper always features what happened in the Spanish Soccer Leagues the night before. People here are nice and very welcoming, but we can´t help but feel embarrassed to be from one of the places that exploits and bans (in the case of coca where the US withholds humanitarian aid from Bolivia unless the Bolivian government agrees to destroy their coca crops) their natural resources at the expense of their people. This is a place that we will never forget.
16 - 19 del Marzo - Salar de Uyuni
The Salar de Uyuni (Salt Flats) in Bolivia is made up of the most bizarre collection of natural wonders you can imagine in one place. We have heard many stories about it from our friends who have traveled in South America, as it is one of the sights that a tourist must see while here, but nothing could have prepared us for the severe beauty and strange extremes that we encountered on our three day tour. The only way to visit the Salar is by jeep or 4-wheel drive trucks that cross the desert and salt flats between the cities of San Pedro de Atacama (Chile) and Uyuni (Bolivia). There are usually groups of six in these tour vehicles. We got very lucky and were matched up with two other couples, who were wonderful and interesting people. One couple was from Switzerland and the other from Luxembourg (but originally from England and France). By the end of the three days we felt like family and we began learning French under the blue skies of the Bolivian salt flats.
Our first day in the Salar was very eventful. We went to see the jade waters of Laguna Verde, which glowed green when the minerals in it were stirred up by the wind. An incredible sight with a giant dormant volcano at the foot of the lake. Then we went to natural hot springs to bathe in a shallow pool, and the temperature was perfectly comfortable for relaxing in the sun. After lunch we went to see the geysers at Sol de Mañana, which were spitting and bubbling brown muddy water like cauldrons and smelled of sulphur (huele mal). We ended the day with a trip to Laguna Colorada, whose water was a color of red that I have never seen before. It looked as if the water was on fire and the flaming orange color of the water was contrasted by the gypsum and salt crusted white shores. The lake was home to hundreds of flamingoes, so we sat on the shore and watched and listened to them as the sun set. We climbed to high altitudes on the first day of our tour, so we chewed coca leaves and drank tea made from coca leaves (mate de coca) to fend off altitude sickness (this is what the locals do, and it seemed to work for us). That night we nearly froze to death at high elevation in a very simple accomodation (refugio) in the middle of this vast expanse of desert.
The second day we got back into the 4-wheel drive Toyota truck to continue the journey across the desert to the Salar. We stopped at many more lakes along the way, each was as beautiful and unique as the last. One lake was so silvery and glassy that it looked like a giant pool of liquid mercury. In its reflection we could see a perfect upside down image of the distant volcano situated behind it. Later we stopped at a dried up river bed where the rock formations looked like something out of a Dali painting. The shapes of these rocks were formed by the rushing water that once ran through the valley. The most famous of these rocks was the piedra arborales (rock tree), which literally looked like a petrified tree. We drove past la montaña de siete colores (the mountain of seven colors) that looked like a backdrop created in chalk pastels with colors of yellow, green, brown, red, purple, white and orange. We stopped for lunch on some volcanic rocks that created a lunar landscape and we admired a smoking active volcano in the distance. Next we drove through a small village, where we stopped to talk to one of the locals who was herding her llamas and digging for some kind of root that grows naturally in the ground. The llamas here are like pets...pets with many valuable properties (their wool, their meat, etc.). They have colored string tied to their ears and around their necks, which they are given on their birthdays. We ended the driving tour as the sun was setting and then we visited a very sacred burial ground in caves in the hills above the hotel where we would stay that night. This "museum" was founded and maintained by the pueblo (the people that live in the town). We saw amazingly well preserved relics and mummies in these caves. Everything in the caves was left exactly the way it was discovered, and life has not changed much in this part of Bolivia, because the methods of weaving and cooking are still the same today as they were hundreds of years ago. From the hilltop, we watched the sun set over the white expanse of salt flats, with these huge cactus perched on the hill in the foreground. That night we stayed in a hotel made of salt (apparently, salt is a great building material in a place where it never rains because of its excellent insulative properties). Everything in the hotel was made of salt--the tables, the chairs, the floor was sprinkled with rock salt...a very surreal place. We had a wonderful traditional Bolivian meal by candlelight with our four travel companions.
Our third day we drove through the Salar, which is covered in about six inches of water right now. It was completely surreal to drive through and then walk around in this shallow, salty, white water. They say that this is a dried up lake bed that has salt under the surface of the earth, which is released when it rains, and this is how the salt flats were created. At times as we drove through it we would look out the window at the horizon and we couldn´t decifer where the salt flats ended and the sky began. We stopped for a quick hike on an island called Isla del Pescado (not sure why it´s called Island of Fish), which was studded with these cartoon-like cacti. We then drove to the salt-mines near the far end of the Salar, where they make mounds of salt that are shaped like cylinders. Once excavated, the salt is then transported to facilities where they add iodine, making it safe for consumption. We ended our three day tour in Uyuni, and parted with our Swiss and Luxembourgish friends there. We look forward to sharing our photos with you, as words can not do this place justice.
Our friends from Luxembourg are going to the US next to travel from NYC to SF in a campervan. If anyone would like to meet them and show them around, please let us know. She is worried about how Americans will receive her as a French woman...freedom fries and all. We would love it if they were to meet some of our warm, open-minded, worldly friends from home...to help make their experience in our country a good one.
15 del Marzo, San Pedro de Atacama
We decided to rent mountain bikes to go to the Valle de Luna (valley of the moon) for the day. We packed our bags for the cold evening, bought some water, and headed off to the Valle. It is about an hour and half ride to the Valle, and once we got there we realized that we did not have enough water to last until sunset (the big event in the valley). We are not used to the dryness of the high desert, and did not know how quickly we would go through our water. Luckily, we met up with two other guys on bikes, and American architecture student from Montana, and a German student from Hamburg who were happy to share with us. We were very lucky, because otherwise we would not have been able to continue on much further, and they were a lot of fun to be with on the journey.
The scenery driving through the desret is very surreal. It really does look like you are on the moon, or mars. There are red rocks everywhere, and the desert stretches as far as the eye can see, all the way to a string of volcanoes in the distance that are snow capped. Once we got to the entrance of the Valle de Luna, we went on a 45 minute hike through caves that have been formed in the rocks by rain (not sure when it ever rained there, it was dry as a bone with no vegetation at all). We put on our head lamps and went through totally dark caves that had lots of quartz formations and salt deposits embedded in the rocks. The shapes of the caves were amazing, looking like a large sand castle made of wet sand dripped through a child´s fingers. There were some parts we had to crawl through in the caves, but overall we could walk or crouch to get through. It was our first spelunking experience, and was a lot of fun.
Then we continued on our bikes to huge sand dunes that looked like a scene out of Star Wars. We hiked up to the top of the dunes an hour before sunset to watch the sun go down over the desert and to see the pink light on the distant snow-capped volcanoes. It was just the four of us on top of the world, in this beautiful setting as the sun went down, and we felt lucky to have it all to ourselves. Then, about 30 minutes before the sun was going to drop behind the cliffs, tour bus after tour bus pulled up to our spot to let off those damn touristas. Our beautiful spot was corrupted by 100 people who came just for the sunset. We still enjoyed ourselves in spite of the gathering crowd, and after the sun was gone we began the ride back in the dark to San Pedro de Atacama. With headlamps to light the way, half a bottle of water for 4 people, and empty stomachs (we brought crackers, but the last thing we wanted to do was put dry crackers in our mouths with a short water supply) we hit the road. It was a really fun journey, the stars can not possibly be seen better from anywhere in the world, and we had total quiet and the stars to guide us back. We felt like we really accomplished something when we got back to town, and all went out to a steak dinner. It was our last meal before heading to Bolivia, so we felt we could splurge on one last decadent meal. All the restaurants have outdoor fires to keep warm by, so we sat around the fire and ate and felt good about our day, and prepared for the jeep ride to Salar de Uyuni the next morning.
14 del Marzo - San Pedro de Atacama
San Pedro de Atacama is a magical place and a rustic little town. It is a small oasis of a town in the middle of the Atacama desert. The town has one small river that runs through it, which gives it life. It is like a pioneer town situated very close to the border of Bolivia, so many travelers come here to make their way across the border into the Salar de Uyuni. It is very peaceful here and it has a very relaxed energy. It is physically much different looking than any place we have been so far in South America. All the buildings are made of adobe clay and have a Spanish feel. At night the main calle looks like the old west because of the way it is lit up, all the buildings look like saloons. There are so many quaint restaurants and cafes with outdoor areas that are shaded during the heat of the day and then at night when it cools down fires are made in the open air to keep warm by. We can see the night sky here better than anywhere we have been. The air is so dry that the visibility is very clear and we can see for miles around during the day. The view of the surrounding snow-capped mountains and one huge volcano is spectacular. This afternoon we are riding bikes to the Valle de la Luna to see the sunset there and then we will ride back to town in the dark by the light of our headlamps. Tomorrow morning we are getting into a 4-wheel-drive vehicle with 4 other tourists for a 3 day tour of the Bolivian Salar de Uyuni (salt flats), which is supposed to be the most dramatic natural wonder of this part of South America. We have heard amazing things about the red and green lakes, the natural hot springs, geysers, the flamingoes, and the stark white salt flats and volcanoes that we will see on this trip. We are excited to see Bolivia, as we have read that it has been dubbed the Tibet of South America, so we should be writing again soon about one of the most culturally rich parts of this continent.
12 del Marzo - Santiago, Chile
Thanks to Steve Golik, we now have a link to our photo album from this blog, so check it out below...
Our first day in Santiago was sweltering hot, so we did as much sight-seeing as humanly possible when we arrived in the afternoon. We toured parts of the city on foot and explored Barrio Brazil (the area that we are staying in), Bellavista (a quaint neighborhood situated at the base of a hill, where the city´s nightlife flourishes), and Providencia (the upscale residencial part of the city). We walked to the top of a hill in the middle of the city, which has a castle built on it. From there we were able to see a 360 degree vista of the sprawling city and it is much bigger than we imagined. It is the 5th largest city in all of South America and 85% of Chileans reside here. We ate dinner at a Chinese food restaurant, which was a nice treat and a welcome change of cuisine.
Our time here in Santiago is short (two days), as we are on our way to San Pedro De Atacama and then on to Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, and we needed to utilize some of the time to prepare for our journey to less developed destinations. We had a few errands to take care of--stocking up on toiletries and other supplies, replacing Billy´s sunglasses (gafas del sol), and getting haircuts. Neither of us have had haircuts in months, and we were starting to look a bit shaggy. Our Chilean friend at Cafe Vinilo in Valparaiso said that Billy looked like Pete Sampras, with his long hair and beard. So began the adventure of the corta pelo, which was very interesting because the woman that cut our hair didn´t speak any English. We used pictures and sign language and were able to achieve shorter hair, but perhaps not the styles we wanted. Mission accomplished anyway. We went to a shopping mall here to shop for sunglasses, and we were surprised at how much the malls here are like our malls at home. This was comforting and depressing all at once. It was easy to shop at a place like that with all the familiar conveniences of home, but it also felt void of unique character and culture. Unfortunately, we would say that about most of what we´ve seen of Santiago. Perhaps if we had more time here, we would have a different opinion.
One thing that is markedly different about shopping here is the caja phenomenon. You pick out items that you want to purchase and then you are given a bill, which you take to the caja which is in another area of the store. Caja literally means box, but the word is used to refer to the cash register and sometimes ATMs. Some purchasing transactions in Argentina worked this way (buying ice cream, buying ferry tickets to Uruguay), but it seems that this is the standard here in Chile.
We wanted to see more of the city on our second day here, so we skipped the wineries, because they are located outside of the center (some 40 kilometers away) and they require reservations (which we didn´t have time to secure in advance). We had a chance to visit two museums here--Museo de Bellas Artes and the cultural center that featured a Chilean photographer´s black and white photos. The Museo de Bellas Artes was being renovated, so only part of it was open to the public, but this meant that we didn´t have to pay the admission fee (very nice). The Museum had two exhibits--Chilean paintings and comtemporary art (sculpture and mixed media). The building itself was a work of art, with very ornate metal work everywhere and a glass roof that illuminated the museum beautifully (reminiscent of Musee D`Orsay). We walked to the central market afterward to try fresh fish for lunch, but it was too expensive and too much of a hassle (with aggressive waiters trying to persuade us to sit and eat at their restaurants). Instead we ate lunch at an eclectic little cafe that offered a lovely menu del dia for just $3 US each. Great atmosphere and really good food.
After lunch the rain began to fall, so we put on our rain gear and stormed through the wet city streets until we found the cultural center that was once the train station. The center hosted a small photography exhibit that we had heard about by an artist named Alexis Diaz. The work was beautiful and consisted of images of very Chilean scenes and very iconic political, historical, everyday life, street and subway imagery.
We took the subway back to our hostel to avoid being splashed by more water from the flooded streets as cars sped past. The subway in Santiago is well planned and extremely easy to use. Everything in Santiago is modern and developed. We were shocked by the convenience and modernity of the bus station when we first arrived in the city. This set the tone of everything that would follow here. It was much like an airport at home in a multilevel building with piped-in muzak, fast-food restaurants, organized lines with queuing passengers.
Chileans have very typically Latin American physical traits, most have dark hair and eyes and olive skin. In Argentina we´d see a lot more blondes, brunettes and people with lighter color eyes (often blue). When we walk down the street, especially when wearing our backpacks, we often hear passersby yelling "Hello! How are you!" The overzealous tone is not inviting a reply or even directed at us. Instead it is anonymous and strange. Not sure why this goes on, other than the fact that we stand out as foreigners and they want to let us know that.
The Spanish in Chile is spoken much quicker than in Argentina--similar to the pace in which everything else moves. There is much more English spoken in the cities that we have been to, which makes travel much easier. They drink Nescafe (instant coffee) here instead of brewed coffee, but you can still get a cortado here (thank goodness). The infrastructure here seems to be more healthy than in Argentina (well maintained roads and highways, nicer buildings, modern transportation, etc.). It appears that the economy is prospering, and people are working, making decent wages, and paying their share of taxes to keep things growing. It seems like everything here is more expensive than in Argentina, save wine (at least the one bottle of Concha y Toro Cabernet Sauvignon we bought in Valparaiso was very well priced). We will do a little more work to continue our investigation of the price of wine during the rest of our time here in Chile.
8 del Marzo - Valparaiso, Chile
We spent another day walking around the hilly streets of Valparaiso. Above the bustling shipping port and the downtown area, the houses are haphazardly perched all over these steep hills. The houses range from rusty old shacks made out of corrugated metal and painted in the brightest colors you have ever seen to tattered Victorian-style mansions. The gawdy colors of SF´s homes pale in comparison to these. We spent most of our time in the two artsy cerros (hilly neighborhoods), where there are really funky cafes, amazing museums, and artisan´s shops and homes.
When we first got into town this morning, we noticed all these kids walking around with no shoes, no shirts, torn pants, and covered in mud, paint, and stinky food. They were all approaching people and asking for spare change, and nobody seemed to think twice about it. It was a very weird sight, but it got even more strange as we continued through the town and saw literally hundreds of kids in the exact same state of mess. We finally held our breath long enough to ask one of them ¨¿Porque? ¿Que paso?¨, or why in hell are you all dirty and disheveled and walking around this city asking for spare change? Well, we learned that they are all members of the incoming class of the Engineering University that is in Valparaiso, and this is the yearly ritual on the first week of school. They get hazed like this, and then they are sent out to the streets to beg for money. The entire city takes part in this ritual. The cover of the local paper featured a photo of three of them and said something along the lines of ¨The Future of Chile.¨ It was really funny once we were in on the joke. It´s good to see that hazing doesn´t only happen in the military and in fraternities.
We spent the rest of the day walking around the neighborhoods in the cerros (hills), and then took a short boat ride on the bay to see all the ships docked in the port. Valparaiso is a huge shipping port, and there are about 25 enormous ships in the harbor at any given time. We also went back to the same restaurant where we ate the day before up in the hills on a tiny little cobblestone street. We had the menu del dia again, which for $5 has been one of the best meals we`ve eaten on the trip. We savored the 3 course meal, because we are only eating one meal a day in restaurants, and we prepare our own breakfasts and dinners at our hostel. On the menu tonight is pasta with red sauce and veggies, exactly what we ate for dinner last night.
We have noticed many differences between Chile and Argentina already. One of the main differences is that people in Chile are in more of a hurry. Life here is a little more similar to life in the States in this way. In a restaurant in Argentina, getting the bill was a painstaking task. There was no rushing through a meal, which was nice for a change. On the roads we have heard horns honking and people yelling at eachother on the streets, something we never heard anywhere in Argentina. We also noticed that here people in cars will brake for pedestrians, and obey stop signs. In Argentina, cars did not stop for people, ever, and stop signs were merely a suggestion (not sure why they even bothered to put them up). People here also speak more English, and all the grammar school students dress in private school uniforms. The men (and especially the women) dress much more informally or casually here. The cost of living seems to be a bit more expensive here compared to Argentina. The language is different too...Chileans speak much faster. Otherwise, things are quite similar in both countries, especially in the cities, like Mendoza and Buenos Aires.
Two places I would go back to in Valparaiso--
Cafe Vinilo in Cerro Concepcion (the funky, kitschy cafe where we ate lunch twice)
Thomas Somerscales in Cerro Alegre (a very upscale hotel...a cool $95 per night)
6 del Marzo - Viña Del Mar y Valparaiso, Chile
Our last day and night in Argentina were fantastic. There was another parade through the streets of Mendoza, with all the reinas as well as a lot of gauchos (cowboys) on horseback. There were little gauchos no more than 5 years old that were dressed in fully authentic Argentine gaucho garb, riding full sized horses by themselves. There were also old gauchos who really looked the part, wearing their high boots, baggy pants tucked into the boots, an old baggy cowboy shirt, with a sheath wrapped around their waist, and a long knife stuck behind their back. All the gauchos wear the same thing, old and young. As we watched the parade we were peppered with more grapes, bags of pasta, plums, large squashes, apples, chocolates, and lottery tickets thrown by the reinas as they made their way to the park for the election. Miss San Carlos won, and she is now proudly Reina Vendimia 2005. They are all queens to us though.
After the parade we went to dinner with an older English couple we met at our hotel. They made reservations for the four of us at a restaurant that had a dinner show of singing and tango dancing. It was absolutely amazing. The dancers were great, and they did a lot of funny acting scenes during their dances, and even broke out into an amazing swing dance to ¨Blue Suede Shoes.¨ This ensemble of talent could be found on Broadway, they were so impressive. One couple danced so skillfully and displayed so much emotion that it made Jen`s eyes fill with tears. It was very inspirational, but we didn´t dare step onto the dance floor after that act. It was the perfect way to end our time in Argentina, and a night we will always remember.
The next morning we took the bus over the Andes to Viña Del Mar, Chile. The bus ride is spectacular. It goes high over a mountain pass right next to Mount Aconcagua, the tallest peak in the Americas. Once we got past the mountains, we dropped down into Chile, where we could immediately tell we were in a different country. The landscape was lush, full of greenery and lots of agriculture. The Andes block all of the precipitation from the Pacific, so the climate is much more wet in Chile, and looks nothing like the desert of the Argentine pampas. Chile is also more developed, we have already seen more fast food chains like McDonalds and Pizza Hut than we did in all of Argentina...not that we are happy about it.
Viña Del Mar and Valparaiso are right next to eachother on the Pacific coast, each occupies half of a large bay. Viña Del Mar is where we chose to stay, because it is cheaper and has more options for accommodations, but we are really here to see Valparaiso. We took the bus into Valparaiso this morning, and the town is amazing. It is all built on very steep hills, much steeper than San Francisco. It used to be the main shipping port of Chile about 100 years ago, but has declined over the past few decades, and the city was left in a bit of disrepair. Now it is making a huge comeback, mainly because of its natural beauty, and all the huge, colorful abandoned homes that sit on top of all the hills. UNESCO has made it a natural heritage site, meaning there is a lot of funding for rebuilding old facades, and the city is coming back to life.
The hills are so steep that they have built little lifts (ascensors) that transport passengers up each hill. They are like large elevators, anywhere between 7 to 15 people can fit in each one, and they are pulled up and downhill by a pulley system. We went up Cerro Concepcion and walked around the winding and narrow cobblestone streets, looking down on the bay and Viña Del Mar. We had lunch at a kitschy cafe where we discovered the Menu Del Dia offer, which allows you to feast on a 3 course meal at lunch for a bargain. Many of the houses in the hills of Valparaiso are painted in different bright colors, not unilke SF, and they all overlook the bay and ocean. The houses we walked past were huge, incredibly old, and dilapidated, with so much character. We went on a walking tour of the Museo al Cielo Abierto (Museum of Open Sky), which is a section of town where murals have been painted on the buildings and houses by 20 famous Chilean painters. It is a really cool idea, and along with the bright buildings, hills and blue ocean in the background, it is a site worth seeing. We loved getting lost in the streets of Valparaiso. We also visited the home of the famous Chilean author and poet Pablo Neruda, which is now a museum. His house was incredible, with views from every room to the sea, and beautiful mosaic tile artwork inside the house. We both have a newfound appreciation for his poem THE QUESTION.
4 del Marzo - Vendimia
Mendoza is wonderful. We can´t decide which we like more...Buenos Aires or Mendoza. This would be a great place to live for awhile. In Mendoza you have a fairly large city with activity and culture, and just outside of the city you have mountains, lakes, rivers, vineyards and natural beauty. It doesn´t hurt that we are here at the best possible time of the year, the weather is great and we can enjoy all the harvest festival activities this week.
We learned that Vendimia, the name for the festival, means Vintage. There are two parades through the main city streets on Friday night and Saturday morning, and we attended both of them. The parades were a wonderful cultural experience. Young and old, all the people from the Mendocino area gather in the streets to watch the procession. Everyone in the crowd talks about which queen in the most linda or the most simpatica. The floats carry the queens from each province and as they throw fruit (mostly grapes, but sometimes even cantalope size melons), candy, packages of mate, raffle cards, printed photos of themselves (like baseball cards), newspapers, and other goodies into the crowd of spectators. Little girls sit on the shoulders of their mothers and watch the queens float by in their glory. Teenage boys get on eachother`s shoulders to get a better look at the queens. Everyone is yelling, ¨Aca! (Here!)¨ in order to get the attention of the queen so that she may throw them some loot. Some of the kids have cleverly constructed a receptacle that looks like a net, by using a small bin attached to the end of a long stick in order to better collect the treasures that the queens throw into the street.
These floats are amazing. They are colorful and creative. Some of them have live musicians and dancers on them, some of them are painted beautifully like bunches of grapes, some of them are illuminated. The most unusual float we have seen had a parillada (a mobile barbeque) on it, with ten different kinds of meat grilling over the heat of a huge flame. In the procession in between the floats there are cabelleros (cowboys) riding their horses waving Argentine flags with women in long dresses sitting on the back of the horses, and dancers in costume moving to the beat of marching drummers (some of the drummers are elderly ladies). This has been a fantastic and memorable way to spend our last two days in Mendoza. We can only imagine what Carnival in Rio is like compared to this event.
Next we are headed to Viña Del Mar, Valparaiso, and Santiago (in Chile), which are just over the Andes from here (only a six hour bus ride). Apparently, we have a beautiful journey to look forward to tomorrow. On our way to Chile we will pass through the Aconcagua Mountains, which are 7,000 meters tall, and are known in their own right as a tourist attraction. We are excited to see more of Chile, but we are sad to be leaving Argentina. After two months here we have become quite comfortable and have started to feel at home in this beautiful country.
3 de Marzo - Mendoza Bodegas
We have been taking the public bus out to some of the Bodegas, each day hitting two different places. We finally got a chance to head out to Navarro Correas, which is owned by Diageo, who also owns Sterling Vineyards and BV in California. Through Sterling before we left the States, we met one of the winemakers at BV, who was the winemaker at Navarro Correas here in Argentina 3 years ago. He gave us some contacts here, so we set up a tour with them in advance. The winery was amazing, newly remodeled by a famous architect from BsAs. The people were all so nice to us, and we ended up spending almost 4 hours there talking with them and picking their brains about growing Malbec grapes. They invited us to a private dinner at the winery the following evening, which was catered by a famous Patagonian chef who fuses food from Patagonia with food from Mendocino (that is what they call the Mendoza region). We accepted, and enjoyed 4 courses of amazing food, all the Grand Reserve Malbec, Cabernet, Merlot, Chardonnay and Champagne we could drink, and paid $15 a person. The winery was beautifully set up, and we had our own private table overlooking the wine cellar in a candelit room with about 30 other people. It was an amazing experience. We also got more time to talk with Marcos and Fernanda, the two people who run PR and guest services for the winery, who are incredibly nice and welcoming folks. They refilled our wine glasses before we could finish them, and since we have been on a tight budget, we weren´t going to turn down free, high quality wine. Needless to say, we left a little tipsy and fully stuffed.
We also went to several other wineries, most notably Catena Zapata (the pioneer of Argentine premium wines), Dolium (great young malbec and tempranillo), Chandon, and La Rural. Catena Zapata`s visitor center is an amazing structure. It is built like a mayan temple, in a pyramid shape with 1,000 acres of beautifully cultivated grapes surrounding it, and the snow tipped Andes in the background. We walked there from Dolium, which is 6 kilometers down some old dirt roads, and we did not have reservations. Anna, who works in hospitality there, let us come up even though they were closed for the week because of the harvest festival, and she showed us around. The place is so impressive, built with huge stones and redwood, all local materials. If you are looking for good wines, especially malbec, you should try the Catena Zapata, they export to the States, and have joint ventures with Lafite Rothschild and other big names in the wine making industry. After our private tour, they offered us a ride back to the main road, they thought it was funny we had walked there.
Mendoza is a very interesting wine growing region. It is basically a high desert. They get only 8 inches of rain per year. All the water for their grapes comes from runoff from the Andes. The way a lot of vineyards irrigate is by diverting the runoff into their fields once every two weeks to flood them. They also get a lot of sun during the day, and the nights are cool, which make for perfect conditions for good grape growing. For years they have focued on the Argentine wine market only, and produced low quality, cheap wines for the local masses. Now they are realizing there is a lot of money to be made in exports, and a lot of money is being spent to upgrade facilities, and produce higher quality wines. I am sure that we will all be much more familiar with Argentine malbec in a few years.
Since this is the week of the harvest festival, there is a ton to do at night. We have spent two evenings at the Italian Plaza (there are 5 plazas in the center of the city, each is named after a country), where there is a huge party with food and wine and beer, and live opera singing and tango dancing. You buy tickets, and the food and beer is purchased with those tickets, and each ticket has a number on it that is part of a raffle. We have had great Italian food and we have done a lot of people watching in the park. Tonight is the first parade of the reinas (queens). The reinas are selected from each province in Mendocino, and they each have fans and local pride backing them. The shops of Mendoza put up posters in their windows to announce which reina they support, and then the queen of the year is elected at the end of the week. We each have our favorite queens, and we will see who wins at the end of the festival. We have a bet on it.
As the city gears up for the big weekend, we have noticed many police cars driving around at night with their lights flashing. Apparently the Embassadors from each town in the province gets a private police escort. It is stange seeing police cars with flashing lights all over town, it makes us realize that they take security very seriously here. Another thing we have noticed in many towns in Argentina are the street performers. One way to make some extra coins is to go out in the middle of the street while lights are red and put on a show dressed like a clown. These guys are all over the place, juggling and trying to get the cars to give them some coins when they drive by. It makes for some interesting moments, especially when they drop their balls or bowling pins and they go under cars or out into the intersection where traffic is roaring by to retrieve them.
Overall Mendoza ia a really nice city that has the same feeling of Buenos Aires, it is large and modern, but also has the peace and beauty of the vineyards and wineries just outside of town. People here are very nice, and go out of their way to make you feel welcome (except for the lady who runs our hostel). They stick to tradition more here than in other places. All businesses are closed from 2-5 for siesta, even our hostel locked us out once during the day (which was annoying). The town also has a great central market that we discovered, so we have been buying cheese, fruits, vegetables, and bread to bring with us for lunch when we are visiting the bodegas...the fresh food from the market goes perfectly with the wine. Even better is the siesta at the end of a full day of wine tasting.
28 del Febrero - Mendoza
We met up with Pete and Rachel again in Mendoza to explore the Argentine wine country and to check out the wine festival (Vendimia) that kicks off harvest here.
Our first day in Mendoza wasn`t very productive, as we were tired from an overnight bus ride and not many of the bodegas (wineries) were open for tours because it was a Sunday. So, we took a cab to a nearby winery called Escorihuela to have lunch at the restaurant there called Francis Mallman. This is a wonderful restaurant, on par with restaurants in San Francisco or in the wine country in Northern California. We had a delicious lunch with champagne, wine, and some of the best food we have feasted on since we arrived in Argentina. That night we went to Parque San Martin to catch a glimpse of the first event of many to follow in this wine festival. The festival begins with a blessing of the grapes and the presentation of the queens. Each suburban area surrounding Mendoza elects a queen to represent that territory. At the end of this festival one queen is chosen. We are not sure if this is similar to a beauty pageant, or if there is more to it.
We were hoping that the wine festival meant that all the wineries come together in the center of town to host a tasting event, but this festival is much more about the traditions and folklore of wine and grapes than it is a venue for wineries to sell their products to consumers. In fact, as we are learning, the wineries do very little business with tours and tastings. In some cases, the wines are not even available for purchase at the bodegas. This is a very different approach from the way wineries operate in Napa Valley. The wineries here seem to be focused on education rather than sales. The tastings are free of charge, and the bodegas require you to take an hour long tour of the facilities to learn about the production of the wines, which is wonderful when the tour is in English. At one bodega that we visited (Norton), we learned that on Thursdays they allow the public to bring in 5 liter bottles to fill up with the common red table wine they produce. We have learned a ton about the production process, the equipment, bottling, labeling, etc. It is also refreshing to see behind the scenes at these wineries where the work is in progress, and it is a busy time with harvest beginning this month. We`ve been able to see historical methods of production and old equipment in museums built by the bodegas. All of the bodegas are located outside of the city center, so you must take buses to travel to them, and there is only enough time to visit two bodegas per day because they are really spread out. There is very little organized tourism around the wine country here, which is nice because it is an undiscovered gem.
27 del Febrero - Nequen
It`s nice to have a good experience in a town when you are just passing through and have no expectations of a place. That is how we felt about Nequen. Nequen is not a tourist destination. It is a city of commerce...where oil and wine money mingle. We hightailed it out of Junin De Los Andes and had to stop at Nequen and spend 24 hours there before catching our next bus to Mendoza. We walked around town the night we arrived there and stumbled upon a cultural festival in the city streets. They were playing music and they set up a stage for the public to dance the tango. We stopped, bought some popcorn to snack on, and watched as the young couples danced around the stage. It was a very intimate and genuine look at the cultural tradition. We saw tango dancing in Buenos Aires at a supper club where performers put on a wonderful show for tourists, but this type of dancing was much different, since it wasn`t designed for our entertainment. It made us wonder if tango is something that is passed down from one generation to another in Argentina. It is a beautiful expression of emotion and an intense tangle of arms and legs. Jen has not been successful at convincing Billy to give it a try.
