16: "To the north, to the desert: Part 5"

Lucy and I got into La Serena just before sunrise, Saturday morning. We took a cab to her house up on a hill high up in the city. You can see a peninsula in the distance lit with hundreds of street and house lights. Next to that is the ocean. It was the first time I saw the Pacific.

A lot of Fulbrighters were coming to visit Lucy that weekend. There was Sam and her boyfriend Lucas, who were already there when we got there and asleep in bed. There was Andra and her boyfriend Andy, who were staying in a nearby apartment. There was Matt, who got into town just after us. The next day more would be coming.

We slept a few more hours then got up for breakfast.

Sam cooked eggs. I had some cheese leftover from the day before. The paper it was wrapped in had gotten wet and stuck to it. I peeled off the paper and washed the cheese and threw it into the skillet.

Andra and Andy brought Nutella and mandarin oranges and bread.

We sat and ate and drank tea and juice.

Matt showed up. After he got into town he took a shower at the bus station and was feeling good and decided to walk around town and try to find a Laundromat. He’d just gotten back from Peru and a village in the Andes and his clothes smelled.

After breakfast, Andra and Andy took a bus out of town to a valley, to visit a vineyard.

The rest of us walked down through town to the beach. I felt like I was in southern Spain. The sidewalks were continuous and unbroken. There were big clean chain superstores and big smooth parking lots and a lot of cars. There were billboards for luxury apartments and luxury apartments being built in a field near the ocean.

We got to the beach and stopped to eat at a Lebanese stand. I got falafel and an empanada and a Pepsi and a Nestle ice cream cone. Sam and Lucas got a schwarma sandwich.

We went to the beach. It was sunny and clear out on the water, but misty down the beach and to the mountains in the distance. The silhouettes of horses and their riders were coming to us out of the haze.

We walked along the sand and I was talking to Lucas about the University of Illinois and its Chief mascot and how I’ve been reading a lot of David Foster Wallace recently who grew up near Champaign and how I identify myself with him through that.

Lucas looked at me and said, “Dude, I went to Pomona.”

DFW had been teaching at Pomona College in California until he hung himself last year.

Lucas said he’d thought of taking one of his classes but they were hard to get into and he didn’t want to take a spot away from someone actually studying writing. He had studied geology.

Lucas said he was actually in the middle of reading Infinite Jest, and that him and Sam had a couple DFW anthologies down here with them that they’d been reading.

We sat down on a circle of boulders and talked about DFW and sports journalism and Dostoevsky and 9-11. You could see snow in the peaks of the Andes from where we were on the beach. It was warm and breezy and the sun was getting low and mellow and orange.

We left the beach and walked to a big mall. I said this reminded me of southern Spain. Lucas said southern California. We stopped to check our mail then walked back up into town to Lucy’s place. I explained to Matt a long essay I’d just written, about wonder and interpretation and how it’s all based on this Walt Whitman poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”.

We stopped for ice cream cones and I kept going on about this essay and the point I was trying to make about interpretation and wonder not being opposed to each other.

Andra and Andy came back and we went to an Italian and Sushi restaurant for dinner. I got spicy tuna rolls.

We came back. I packed my bags and said goodbye and walked to the bus station. I got on an overnight bus to Santiago.

* * *

I got into Santiago just before sunrise, Sunday morning.

I sat in the bus station café and read and drank coffee and ate a pastry until it was light out.

I walked along Alameda – the main boulevard – to get to a hostel that Sam and Lucas had stayed at a couple days earlier.

Nobody was out. Everything was shut and locked. It was grey and quiet and cool.

I got to the hostel. It’s in an old, preserved medieval-looking courtyard. There’s no sign on the door, just one for a café upstairs.

I rang the bell.

Nobody came to the door.

I turned away, thinking I’d walk around for a while.

A man opened the door. He was bald and thin and wore gym shirts and a fleece and looked tired and impassive and annoyed. He spoke quietly and asked what I wanted.

A woman was standing back in the foyer, looking at him and me.

I said I’d called the night before for a bed.

He let me in and showed me a bed in a dorm. He walked with a hard, slow limp. I tossed my backpack on the bed. He told me don’t put my backpack on the bed. It’ll make the sheets dirty. We left the room and he gave me a map of the city and told me some things to do and see.

I left.

I got to the center of the city and walked into the cathedral and stood by the entrance to a chapel and watched the mass. A priest was at the altar blessing the Eucharist and chanting his prayers. There were Chilean flags behind him.

I left and sat on a bench and finished reading A Scanner Darkly until the Pre-Columbian museum opened up.

The museums are free on Sunday in Santiago. The Pre-Columbian one has just one floor of cases and displays, but it’s got good interesting stuff from almost every early culture from Mexico south.

I spent a few hours there then walked back to the hostel.

There was a group of French kids sitting around the table in the lounge, cooking breakfast, talking, stepping outside to smoke.

I went to a computer and checked my e-mail. I finally got a response from Frithjof Bergmann, a philosopher I’d been trying to get in touch with. I’m trying to go to South Africa in January and spend some time with him there and see these community projects he’s working on.

A couple of French kids were having sex and making noise in the bedroom across from the computers. The door was cracked open.

A hunched old lady came out of another bedroom and said her watch was missing, that she’d gone to take a shower and put her watch down on the bed and now it’s gone. She was telling this in English to a French girl who tried to help her look for it.

I sat down in the lounge and talked to Paola, who was the woman in the foyer when I arrived.

She had made a dessert of rice mixed with raisins and cream and apples and cinnamon. She scooped me a bowl and warmed it in the microwave and we sat and ate from our bowls on the sofa while the French kids took all the seats at the table.

She’s from Santiago but has spent a couple years in Europe. She’d met an Italian guy at an airport. He was a figure skater who was performing in Peter Pan/Magic on Ice all through the continent. They met and fell for each other and she got to go with him to Turkey, to the Netherlands (she hated Amsterdam and all the bikes), to Venice (she hated it there in the winter, too humid).

Now she’s back here and working at the hostel and living with Scott, the owner, who’s an ex-pat from Minnesota. He was the one who answered the door.

She said he’s in a bad mood because the French kids were up ‘til six the night before playing music and drinking and partying, and because he’s got gout in his leg.

Paola said she has seasonal affective disorder and in the winter takes medicine for it.

A lot of French and Japanese tourists have been showing up lately. Too many. She told me how she asked a Japanese girl if she’d ever seen her parents kiss and how embarrassed the girl got.

I finished my bowl and got up and left.

I walked back downtown to a cinema at the Catholic University and saw Kim Ki-duk’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring. I’d seen Time, another one of his movies, at an art cinema in Granada two years earlier.

I stopped at a diner and read and had a cup of coffee.

I walked back to the hostel.

The French kids were sitting all around the table, making dinner, chopping onions, slicing potatoes. There were big liter bottles of red wine and sausages boiling in the kitchen. They stepped outside for cigarettes. They were talking and laughing.

I made sandwiches with bread and avocado and salami and cheese.

Scott, the owner, was sitting in a chair in the lounge, next to a gas space heater, telling people to please shut the door so that the warm air in there wouldn’t go out.

I sat down and tried to talk to him.

He said he hasn’t been to the U.S. in ten years. Even when his dad died a few years ago he didn’t have the money to fly home so he didn’t go back.

He’s always owned a hostel in Santiago, though he just moved to this building a year ago.

In the U.S. he’d been a carpenter, working in the South, taking winters off so he could be mobile and move around and travel when he wanted.

He’s got a brother who just retired from the State Department. He had done the Peace Corps in Brazil, then was in Vietnam for several years, then went to Africa.

Now his brother owns a flower shop in the U.S. with his wife, but his health is bad and he has to takes pills every day for diseases he got in other countries.

Scott’s got two little girls growing up here in Santiago. They live with their mother.

Someone came in and left the door open. Scott pulled himself up and limped to the door and shut it and limped back to the chair.

He said being a hostel owner’s not for everyone, that you have to be a giving person. He nodded his head towards the French kids.

He said with this hostel he only made $3000 profit, last year. He just wants to have enough money to get his teeth fixed before they all fall out.

Even the clothes he wears – a black fleece, yellow t-shirt, nylon shorts, hiking shoes, wool socks – are left-behinds from backpackers.

A French girl asked us if we’d like some of their food. I said no, I’d already eaten. Scott said no, he couldn’t, because of his leg, the gout.

The girl asked him that he couldn’t eat because of his leg?

No thanks, he said.

I was telling him about Frithjof Bergmann and his philosophies of freedom and working and these New Work centers he’s started around the world and how their ideal is that people can work less, divide their work, so they have more time to pursue what really matters to them.

Scott said that if people were working less they’d be more selfish and lazy and all the progress and development that’s been made in the past century would disappear. That the last thing anyone needs is more time off to indulge themselves and take vacations and be selfish.

That all any person wants is pleasure, which is really equal to power, which is really equal to freedom, the freedom he felt when he would be on a plane leaving the U.S. to get away and travel and he could breathe deep and know his time traveling was only beginning.

A French kid turned his head and looked at us talking.

Scott said everybody’s instinct is to be selfish, that that’s biology, that’s machismo and power – like in the Middle East where the travelers say everyone’s so hospitable and caring but that’s really just them men protecting their egos in front of other men – that that and wanting to have sex and enjoy yourself and be happy is all we care about. That there used to be community in the U.S. but money ruined it and more vacation time would just indulge people even more. That Ghandhi or Mother Teresa have such simple and true messages no one can deny but no one wants to follow. That kids down here idolize Che Guevara but Che wanted to kills tens of thousands of people and is disgusting for that.

Scott said his carbon footprint is one-third to one-fourth less than the typical Chilean’s, and one-twentieth than the typical American’s. He doesn’t own a car. He shops at a farmer’s market that he walks to. He recycles. He used to have a compost pile at the other hostel.

These Europeans that come here burn as much fossil fuel flying to Easter Island way out in the Pacific as they did crossing the Atlantic to come here. Maybe he’d go to Easter Island if he were already traveling west to Asia. But it’s all a huge disaster for the flora and fauna of the island, people just going there to see these statues that are a testament to human ignorance.

He could be kind of impressed by a cathedral, but couldn’t help but think of all the people who died building it.

The U.S. is headed for disaster, downfall. He’s got no desire to go back.

He could show me the good hiking routes through Patagonia in Chile and then into Argentina, the next morning, Monday, before I left, if I wanted.

Maybe, I said.

It was 10PM. I got up and left the room and went to the computer. It’s clock said Tuesday, February 24th, 4:54PM.

Scott had put me in the same room as the old lady.

She came in the front entrance, hobbling, wearing a beret, with a man who called her mom, who dropped her off and said he’d be back in the morning.

I went into the room to get my toothbrush. She saw we were in the same room and said in other hostels the women are in one room and the men in another. She had several pairs of low-heeled shoes lined under her bunk.

I went back to the computer. She walked out then returned with Scott. She said I was a stranger to both of them.

Scott winked at me and helped move her bags to a new room.

I brushed my teeth and washed my face and went to sleep by myself in the six-bed dorm.

I woke up at 9 the next morning. The hostel was dead. The computers were off and the wine bottles were empty. The hot water hadn’t been turned on.

I ate bread and an orange and drank tea and read.

The phone rang. Scott limped into the kitchen and picked it up and said “Good day” in Spanish. Nobody was there and he hung up.

He came into the lounge and told me to please shut the door so that the warm air wouldn’t go out. The space heater wasn’t on. I got up and shut the door.

I was thinking of leaving without paying. I put my backpack on and was double-checking my room. Scott showed up again.

I paid him the 5000 pesos. He asked didn’t I want to hear about the hiking routes in Patagonia? I said I had to get going.

He brought me over to a map on the wall and told me about a route he took, that the Chilean side is beautiful and the Argentine side is ugly and has got nothing until you get far south.

He gave me fliers for the hostel and told me to e-mail him about Frithjof Bergmann.

I left and walked to the bus station and drank a Nescafé. I got on a bus to cross the Andes again and pass near Aconcagua and then get to Mendoza. From Mendoza we went to Cordoba. We got in before dawn. I got off the bus, bought a ticket to Parana, drank a cortado, then got on another bus to get home by midday.

It was cold and grey and raining when I got into Parana.

My trip north had been a big right triangle. It lasted two weeks. I covered 3,000 miles.

15: "To the north, to the desert: Part 4"

Lucy and I got up and went to a café. I got coffee and pancakes with manjar, which is the Chilean dulce de leche. In Chile the coffee is almost always Nescafé. Nobody seems to no why. I said maybe it’s got something to do with Pinochet.

We went and bought some groceries then stopped at a tour agency and booked a 6,000 peso sunset visit to the Valle de la Luna. The town of San Pedro is a few small blocks of tour agencies, restaurants, cafes, hostels, and souvenir shops. The population’s supposed to be a few thousand, but you see tourists – from Europe and North America and South America and Asia and Australia – before you see Chileans.

We went to the archeology museum, which is devoted to the Atacaman culture that lived here before the Europeans came. It’s a nice museum in the shape of a wheel – with a central hub and spokes that extend out.

Because the desert’s so dry a lot of things survived that would’ve rotted in other climates – tapestries, pipes, baskets.

We walked out of town and sat down near a creek. There was a lot of trash - bottles and wrappers - but we found a clean spot. We made sandwiches with avocado – of which there are dozens of varieties in Chile – and cheese and tomato, and ate oranges for dessert.

We came back to town and called Brad – who’s also a Fulbrighter in Chile and whom we bumped into the day before in San Pedro – and he said he’d come with on the sunset visit.

I ran back to the museum and its outdoor market and bought an ocarina and a decorative tray. Shamans used the tray to gather ground-up cebil seeds and snort them into their noses and hallucinate. The vendor asked me if I knew coca and he gave me a few leaves from his pouch.

I put them in my cheek and we got into the van for the sunset visit.

There were a dozen of us in the van. The driver and the guide were Chilean.

We floored it out of the city and stopped off the highway at the edge of a valley. The mountains near San Pedro are made of soft rock. With sandy wind and thousands of years, they get shaped into ragged and strange ways.

We had ten minutes, the guide said.

We got out and took pictures and he explained some things.

We got back into the van and went to the Valle de la Muerte, where there’s a couple tall rock walls that come so close together a wind tunnel was formed. The European who named this valley originally called it Valle de Martes, which means Mars Valley. There was some confusion and it became Valle de la Muerte, Death Valley.

We squinted and covered our faces and hiked around there, keeping the sand out of our eyes.

We got back into the van and drove to the Valley de la Luna.

We got out and looked at some rocks that looked like people praying. There’s a border around them so you can’t get too close. A few years ago a lady walked up to one of them and put her arms around the neck of the rock to take a picture. The head fell off.

The rocks are at the top of a plain. There’s no plants or shrubs or trees. Just red rocks and white salt that looks like snow. Clean, smooth sand dunes are in the distance.

We got back into the van and drove to a cave. We walked through the cave then climbed out and walked on the side of a hill then came back down and got back into the van.

We drove to the famous spot at the Valle de la Luna. We had thirty minutes ‘til sunset. We had to get back into the van by 7:00PM.

We hiked up a sand dune to the lookout spot. There were dozens of groups up there, taking pictures, looking, walking around, turning about. One guy was dressed up as Superman and, as Brad pointed out, took it very seriously.

We watched the sunset and zipped up our coats as the shadows came down on the sand and the mountains. We took pictures. We got back into the van.

The driver had taped a piece of paper to one of the dome lights saying they appreciate tips. He turned on the light and the piece of paper was lit up and glowing as we drove back to town.

We said bye to Brad. Lucy and I left a tip for the guide and the driver and got dinner and went to bed.

* * *
The next day we went sand-boarding.

We rented the boards and some bikes and packed a picnic and rode out of town to dunes near the Valle de la Muerte.

There were a few other people there, sand-boarding.

We stood at the base of the dune and watched.

It wasn’t going well. They could go a bit, then fall. Then get up and try to get going again but fall down again.

One guy hiked way up high on the dune and waxed his board a long time. He looked like he knew what he was doing.

He got up, jumped into position, got going, then lost his balance and fell into the sand. He got up, then fell again. It took him a few minutes to get to the bottom. He tried to get going one more time, but there wasn’t any momentum left.

We took off our shoes and hiked the dune. We waxed our boards then tried it. We fell down. We got up. We fell down again.

We ate the same picnic as the day before, then walked down the other side of the dune and found a flat spot and threw the Frisbee. There were big volcanoes and big clouds and the desert and blue sky off in the distance.

We rode back to town and booked a 15,000 peso sunrise visit to the geysers. We bought a bus ticket for the next day – Friday afternoon – to head south to La Serena, where Lucy’s working and living.

We ate dinner and went to bed.

* * *
The next day we had to get up at 4 for the sunrise visit. Lucy’s alarm didn’t go off but she woke up anyway and we got up and went to the front entrance of the hostel to wait for the van.

We got picked up and the driver said it’s a two-hour drive to the mountains so go back to sleep and relax. We would be going up to 4,300 meters elevation.

Lucy and I went back to sleep.

We got up to the mountains and the geyser fields. The moon was out and the sky was just blue. It was below freezing.

We got out of the van and the driver said don´t run around and don´t smoke. Everybody went to the bathrooms.

We got to the geysers and the sun rose up over the bare fields and we looked at the steam vents and the bubbling water and the weird colorful bacteria that grow around them. It’s the third biggest geyser field in the world, behind Yellowstone in the U.S. and another park in New Zealand.

The geysers only work early in the morning, before it gets too warm. We walked around and took pictures and then huddled around a plastic table and ate biscuits and drank coca tea for breakfast.

We got in the van and drove to other geysers and a thermal pool.

We took off our clothes and hustled into the pool and kneeled down and scooted around in the water. It was lukewarm and hot. Some spots burned you and others made you shiver.

I was wearing the boxer shorts with the big ink stain from that night in Salta.

We got out and toweled off. I laid my boxers on rocks to dry while we looked at more geysers. When we headed back I grabbed my underwear. The big stain was gone. I wondered if the water was special.

We got in the van and were driven around the high plateau and stopped to look at animals. There were rabbits and llamas and alpacas and vicuñas and some ducks by a pond. We’d shout stop when we saw something and the driver would stop and we’d slide open the windows and stick out our digital cameras and take pictures and then look at the animals.

We got out a couple times to take pictures of the ducks or the llamas and walk around and look at the big empty plateau and the volcanoes in the distance. We stopped at an Atacaman village where they sell food and there are their houses and a tiny chapel they built. The driver said don’t take pictures of the Atacamans. They think it’ll steal their souls.

I went into the house where they were selling fried bread and tea. The driver said the tea is an aphrodisiac. He made a joke about two guys in our group drinking it. An Atacaman girl was working and had headphones in her ears, listening to an iPod. I wondered if that would steal her soul, too.

We drove back to town. Lucy and I waited around a couple hours then got on our overnight bus to La Serena. I started reading A Scanner Darkly as we left San Pedro. I was hoping I could finish it before morning.