Valpo, that`s just jokes!

I have spent the last week in Valparaiso, a large port to the west of Santiago, and in re-tracing Darwin`s hallowed footsteps from Santiago, over the Andes to Mendoza. While in Valparaiso, I stayed in a hostel with three English girls from London, two of whom are going to Oxford next year, and the other to Bristol to read Medecine. Londoners are different, and London girls even more so. Whenever they found something funny, they would break into peals of laughter and cry, "Oh, that`s jokes, real jokes", or "Gosh, do you really think so". They were also incredibly organised, lugging around a thermos flask and a cool bag, (which, incidentally, they lost). They spent long evenings planning exactly where they were going to go, and in writing voluminous notes in their journals (they refused to call them diaries, for some reason) from seven until ten at night. One evening, one of the English girls, Jessie, accidentally missed out two pages in her penguin diary and spent the next twenty minutes agonising about how she could overcome this apparently insuperable problem. Tippex wouldn`t work because the paper was cream, she just couldn`t bear to tear the pages out...etc. On the first night we got there, I was delegated the job of chopping up the mushrooms for the stir-fry, but was reprimanded for my technique...,apparently I wasn´t qualified to chop the onions and the girls debated among themselves the order in which the vegetables should be cooked. I left them to it and fled to the dorm. Another night, a Canadian girl in the hostel started explaining how she was organising a world-wide revolution to spread love and peace, while an American girl was contemplating getting a tattoo; the tattoo would depict the first three sounds that the universe made when it came into existence, sounds that she makes in yoga to find internal peace. Did someone record the sounds? The Canadian topped it all off by suddenly declaring that the American had exacted justice in a past life. It was obvious to any perspicacious adult that the scars on her fingers meant that she had chopped people`s hands off in ancient Rome. It goes without saying, then, that she thought that disabled people had committed sins in a past life, like a certain English football manager.

Maybe there is little difference then, between a girl educated in one of the world`s richest countries, and the inhabitants of Chiloe, (a peninsula in Chile) who make a brief appearance in Bruce Chatwin`s enlightening, hodge-podgey book, "In Patagonia". According to folklore, Chiloe boast a council of witches, the "Council of the Cave", which has its own boat which attracts sailors and then marroons them on an isolated rock. They also have a guardian of the cave, an Invunche. To create this demon, a baby is kidnapped from his parents, his arms and legs are broken, and his head is twisted 180 degrees (exorcist?). It is forced to feed on human flesh and its left arms is twisted behind its back and sown into its right shoulder blade. Since it cannot move, it is carried around by members of the sect.

There were no witches and demons in Valparaiso, only the ghost of an old poet, a politician and a dictator (Pablo Neruda owned a house here, while Allende and Pinochet were born here). The money from international trade and the warehouses has long gone, but it has left an indellible imprint in the huge, imposing banks which line the streets and in the lofty cranes which swing there heads across the bay. Old, battered furniculars creak up the steep hillsides and give tourists access to the maze of streets lined with multicoloured houses painted in every colour from bright yellow and chocolate brown, to electric violet and lime green. There are more telegraph poles in Valparaiso than in any other city that I have ever seen, tangled masses of cables radiating from them like the spokes of a wheel, giving the city a strange, almost Eastern-European air, reminding me of the Alexanderplatz in old East Berlin. And as you wend your way higher and higher into the hills, the wide, semi-circular bay shines below you, new monstruous high rise buildings hugging the shore in Vina where beautiful, old buildings would have stood before the earthquake hit at the start of the 20th century.

The most interesting thing that I saw in Valparaiso, far outstripping my visit to Neruda´s house or the many markets, was a demonstration held outside the Municipalidad, or town hall. A huge crowd of, mostly, women had congregated outside and were being led in a series of ear-splitting chants by an old man with two loudspeakers taped together. I eventually realised that it was a protest of teachers demanding better pay and conditions. There were lots of children dotted amongst the crowd, many of whom thought the noise was a good excuse to prance around, ala Archie at Sarah and Colom´s wedding. The women cut an incongrous spectacle. Instead of banging on drums or shaking tamborines, they clutched pots and pans and were hitting them vociferously with spatulas and other cooking utensils, all the time with honest, earnest faces. One of the women at the back of the crowd, who looked like she was just out for a nice Sunday afternoon, was holding a cheese grater, while another, in the heart of the crowd, beat a biscuit tin with a cake slice. Aftering shouting a lot and marching into the nearby square, they announced a teachers´ strike for the following Monday and dispersed.

That is the sort of protests that I approve of, tied to modest, concrete goals. Che Guevara was nowhere in sight. He stills lives on, however, in Argentinian slang. According to a guardaparque who I was speaking to yesterday, "che" is used in the same way as "amigo" or "tio", as in "Eh, Che, vamos al parque a beber mate". "Che Boludo" is the most commonly used slang (jerga) phrase and combines "che", with "boludo", which means "big ball or testicle". (Pelotudo means the same thing). Like the word, huevon, which means the same thing, it used to be used as an insult (a synonym for estupido), but can now be used affectionately.

After three days in Valparaiso, I was retracing Darwin´s steps from Santiago, across the Andes to Mendoza, a journey that was apparently very useful to him in developing his ideas on volcanology, the uplift of the Andes and how the ocean subsided. First stop, Puente del Inca, a natural bridge that I imagined traversing a deep canyon. We passed small hillocks rising up in sweeping curves, covered in stubbly grass, the only thing that the earth can support when it is so dry (The El Nino effect has meant that rainfall in Chile this year has been unnaturally low). I watched a dire Nicholas Cage movie as we climbed ever higher into the Andes, nostrils invaded with the pungent whiff of fresh manure, the crests of the hills indistinct through the mist. The town, Puente del Inca, is incredible. It is a small dusty excuse of a settlement with corrugated iron roofs and wooden shacks, but it is surrounded on all sides by towering mountains shining dark brown, Cryptonite green and every shade of purple. I would marvel at the rocks again and again as I walked up the valley to Aconcagua the following day, the highest mountain in the world outside the Himalayas. However, my reaction to the bridge was similar to that of Darwin;

"When one hears of a natural bridge, one pictures to oneself some deep and narrow ravine across which a bold mass of rocks has fallen, or a great archway excavated. Instead of all this, the Incas bridge is a miserable object"

I wouldn´t go quite so far in my strictures, but the bridge itself pales in comparison to the mountains that surround it and the spectacular drive between Puente del Inca and Uspallata to the West. I am now in Mendoza and am planning to get suitably groggy with fine wine when I do the wine tour tomorrow. Until next time...