A First Night in Chile
Sitting in the panoramico seat, top front, setting out on a quite nice two-level Oltursa bus, bound five hours south for Tacna, the main city on the border with Chile. It is seven forty five in the morning and the sun is bright in the sky. Emily is sitting next to me, and we’re both trying to resist watching this Will Ferrell Mark Wahlberg Christmas vehicle on the TV in front of us. It’s a battle. Of course it’s dubbed into Spanish, and of course they’re playing it too loud. She’s got her headphones in, looking out the window. It’s a good strategy. I’m trying to write, something I am not used to doing at this hour.
We’re starting to meander the switchbacks up the mountains that border the south of Arequipa, dry and rocky. Leaving this fertile river valley, climbing, soon I know that every hairpin curve may be my last look at this place — for who knows how long. Looking back, below us is a lush sea of farmland and pasture, fed by ancient irrigation networks of mountain water winding down the hills. This green is bordered on all sides by desert, and to the north allows for little islands of towns, then somehow a vast city. On the far side I can see where it rises up to desert again, Misti and Cachani towering snow-capped above the horizon behind us. I am sentimental already and it looks dramatically beautiful with the benefit of newfound hindsight.
This morning was my first time walking out with my full pack since I moved into Soul in early June. I am completely out of practice with being a traveller — how to effectively pack, how to walk carrying forty five odd pounds draped across my body, how to properly deal with constant states of unknown. Emily and I met this morning just after six at the corner of Recoleta and Ejercito, at the bottom of Yanahuara right before you cross the Puente Grau, maybe a hundred yards from the picanteria we’d been at the night before. Waiting for Emily to arrive, the sun came up over Pichu Pichu and a deserted city.
This is the day I’m finally leaving Arequipa, after nine months where it was my home. I am in awe of how good this city was to me, how lucky I was to choose this as my stopping place, sight unseen. This is the first step of a rapid last leg of my journey that will take me more than two thousand miles through two large countries to my destination of Uruguay. For budgetary concerns, I have cut off some of my original route; a mere seven hundred miles down the Chilean coast, I intend to cut east and cross the Andes into Argentina on a southeastern diagonal course, rather than continuing as far south as Valparaiso before crossing. In my eight months working as a teacher in Perú, I have managed to save the equivalent of six hundred dollars, and combined with my meager remaining savings, I have just enough to get me to Montevideo in three weeks, if I keep to a tight budget and move fast.
Last night I went out for a going away dinner with some close friends, down to this super rustic little picanteria by the Rio Chili. Really just someone’s farm, with a big shade structure covering the dirt yard in front of the house, some plastic tables set up. It was our third attempt at a restaurant, and everything was closed, being a Sunday night. Right before we crossed the Puente Grau headed for the Cercado I thought of it, where Clay and I had gone one afternoon seven months before, and he’d fallen for a puppy and I left my hat behind. I’d gone there again with Billy and Elise for his going away meal. But those were lunches in normal picanteria hours, and it was dark and Sunday. No way it was open. Clay went down to scout the place out for us, and miraculously it was, but just barely. These are simple folk that run this place, and I think a party of hungry gringos was worth being open for.
My going-away party was Katherine and Karolayn, my two Venezolana housemates; Clay from Illinois, my best friend in the city (who had been gone since August but came back for the past month, when we had just about every dinner together); Emily; Karem, who found us on the street, two failed restaurants in, after Katherine said we weren’t waiting for her, all made up wearing a cute jacket; Clint and Lili, my friends from Wisconsin; and their friend Alex. I was a little annoyed at having someone I didn’t know come to my going away dinner, but he seemed cool enough and I was too overwhelmed by all of it to devote any energy to this matter. Ms. Sharon would have been there, but she’d left a few days back, doing some traveling with her son in the Sacred Valley before returning to California for a season. Jamie and Billy and Elise, too, but they were all long gone, and so it was everyone who should have been there.
Clint and Emily and I had just played our second show in town the night before, and it was even better than the first. I was leaving town on a high note, with an open invitation from Javier, the owner of the venue, to come play again anytime I wanted. We finished with Home, the last lines a capella, Emily and I together: Home, yes I am home. Home is wherever I’m with you.
From the young discombobulated waitress, we ordered whatever they had left from the menu: americanos, where they just give you a little bit of everything they have; estofado — beef stew; soltero de queso for the vegetarians: a salad of tomato, beans, olives, onions, potato and white cheese. This was all washed down by a couple pitchers of chicha de jora, the local chicha of choice, a very slightly effervescent fermented beverage. I think it’s a ferment from the Peruvian national drink, chicha morada, made from purple corn, and this version is slightly less sweet and less purple. It is also very slightly alcoholic, and you can’t really tell how much. When we ran low, the waitress would bring more pitchers, and we didn’t know whether she was charging us or not.
Clay and I try to identify the puppy he’d fallen for in August among the various mongrels. I suspect it to be a mangy, sand-colored dog hanging around; he insists that can’t be the one and pays it no attention. Our waitress is confused by the question, and seems to be saying that the now-grown puppy in question is not here. I still think it’s the one lying in the dust looking bored.
I drink more than my share. It’s my last night in town. I never really know what to say on these occasions — what do you say to people you’re not going to see indefinitely? I’m sure I told everyone that I was happy to be with them, and raised a glass, but maybe I only thought it. Things have a way of getting fuzzy when you’re on your last night with people. I was relatively quiet, but I was happy, happy to be surrounded by friends, happy to be at a picanteria, to have one last night in Arequipa. And it didn’t really feel like goodbye.
While I don’t have any practical plans to come back to this city, I’m leaving holding it in high regard, and think it’s likely I’ll be back. Emily and I were going to travel together for a week or so, and Clint and Lili were miraculously already planning a trip to Uruguay in a month’s time. So that was a see you, soon. Clay was planning to head south in some months, and we hoped to reconvene; Alex I didn’t know; Katherine and Karolayn felt a bit like family, that inevitability, and Karem, who I spent all the last nights with, staying up way too late drinking rum, well, she has got enough of a hold on my heart and mind that it feels like I’ll be taking her with me.
✦✦
Very soon the terrain becomes Mars-like, red and brown, not a plant in sight, gray hills in the distance. We are heading for the driest place on earth, the Atacama, and it feels like it. We are gone now, on the road in earnest, and Emily and I are throwing ourselves into some advanced-level traveling. Our plan once we hit Chile is to hitchhike our way down the coast, wild camping on beaches as much as possible. Wild camping means you just find a place on the beach and camp there. We’ve heard tell that these kinds of activities are possible, and it also fits our limited budgets in a much more expensive country. I am a bit apprehensive — working on four hours sleep and a string of full, draining days, followed by late nights. Any thoughts that I would return to the road with vigor and enthusiasm were totally off the mark. More like limping out of town.
Emily, from Maryland by way of Colorado, my former colleague and housemate, current music-playing mate and friend, had already moved out of Soul Guest House for the second time a few days before. We’ve never travelled together — in fact we’ve never really officially done anything together, just the two of us, other than play music. It’s strange: because of our shared experience musically, on some level we are close, but outside of that context, and the shared contexts we’ve had in Arequipa, it’s like starting over.
At the moment she seems distant, which may have to do with the morning, but she’s usually a morning person. It may have more to do with her leaving behind Alex, the wild-eyed tall goofy Georgia guy that she was seeing for much of her time in Perú. They’d agreed to just let it go when she left town, and I’m sure it feels sad.
Five hours in, we are closing in on Tacna, barest of deserts beginning to be punctuated by little mops of scrub grass, signs that life is ahead. It is early afternoon, and I have been alternately sleeping and watching snatches of movies all day, more movies than I typically watch in a month. All US movies, dubbed into Spanish with Mexican accents. Disorienting. There was Daddy’s Home 2, then Spiderman: Homecoming, and a violent something else I can’t identify is playing now.
And then, coming over a ridge, there in a long wide valley below is Tacna, the last city in Perú. It’s larger than I expected or remembered. I’d been here once before, in July, to do a cross-border run to extend my visa. You are permitted 183 days per year on a tourist visa, but often the customs agents give you less than that, and to get an extension, the only option at that time was to cross the border and re-enter. Last time, it had been dark when we made our approach, so I hadn’t seen it stretching gray and green on the face of the desert.
Tacna is of some note, the tenth-largest in the country, and an old city with some history. It was lost to Chile in the War of the Pacific in the 1880’s, and wasn’t returned to Perú until 1929. Salvador Allende lived here as a boy. When I stayed here in July for a night I had a terrible hotel room with graffiti on the walls, not good graffiti but a shitty room where people could spraypaint something on the walls and no one would even bother to paint over it. I went out to the Centro, on a cold rainy night and off the grand old plaza with a high arch, the symbol of the city like St. Louis, got myself some Chifa (Peruvian Chinese food). There was some kind of a fashion show in the plaza despite the rain so it was closed to the public but you could watch the wet models trying to be dignified while freezing and I ended up going into one of the shitty casinos and playing the roulette machine for awhile. This time we were just passing through.
In the parking lot behind the Tacna bus station colectivo cars will to take you the thirty minutes down to the border and then across to Arica, the first city in Chile, as almost no buses cross the frontera. This process is chaotic but achievable once you figure out how it works. You buy a ticket at a certain poorly-signed company window inside, and then stand in a line out the back door with lots of travelers with all their bags heading for the border, looking out at a fleet of mismatched cars with people coming and going. Eventually it will be your turn and a car will pull up and pack in you and as many other travelers as they can.
Our Peruvian driver is overweight and sweating and highly stressed and doesn’t like seeing all our bags, but especially not what he finds when he looks at my various documents. For gringos like us, these drivers essentially act as guides through the oft-opaque border bureaucracy. “Muchas problemas,” he said immediately, shook his head and acted like he didn’t want to take us. I argued this point in Spanish, said I had visited migraciones in Arequipa, and paid my Multa. He didn’t seem to have the energy to argue, but he was still muttering and groaning as we drove off.
My situation was certainly an irregularity, a little bit of an odd case, and he just wanted to cross the border smoothly so he could get back to Tacna and take another car’s worth of people across today. I was going to cost him money, he said. Now I didn’t have the energy to argue. Specifically, I had been in Perú for 278 days out of a 365 day period, well over the maximum of 183. What’s more, meanwhile I had left the country two separate times, once for the aforementioned border run, and next for a month of weddings in the states. I had applied for and been granted a final extension online, and then a few days ago paid my fine for overstaying, at a bank. Each of these instances had a separate paper receipt. Four other people were crammed into the sedan-style car with us, and it was a tense ride.
I’d done a fair bit of research and after consulting as many people as I could, was of the understanding that my overstayed visa was not a serious problem. I’d paid my fine for the days I’d overstayed, and was leaving the country on my own volition. The driver was of a different opinion, and as he drove us sulking into the desert, it started to occur to me that he might know better, given that he actual spends every day at this border. Emily was suffering from some nausea and general worn-down-ness, as we’d been doing this for eight hours now after an early start, and I was fairly exhausted myself.
It became a struggle from the point we reached the frontera. This crossing, a comparatively well-ordered and calm border as these places go, is a series of simple white modern buildings in the middle of the desert, under a large umbrella roof with clearly marked signage and people in lines at windows. I was shuffled through various lines and windows, no one seeming to want to deal with my situation. Our driver — emphatically gesturing for me to hurry up, face turning red, repeatedly coming up to me and saying “te lo dijé!” — “I told you!” — was the worst part. While I waited in one of the lines, a Chilean customs official in military uniform with a K9 dog searched my bags, and after berating me, confiscated my paltas (avocados), almonds, pecans, raisins and maybe worst, the palta y queso sandwich I’d been saving. Very sad. No natural food into Chile.
The only bright spot was feeling very grateful for the Spanish I’ve picked up along my migration. As compared to a year and a half ago when I started crossing these fronteras, at least now I more or less understood what the people are saying, at least on the Peruvian side. Things were not much less confusing, but I realized that was due to the confusing process or lack thereof, not my lack of language. Emily had long since been quickly stamped out of Perú, and was sitting on a bench near a line where I’d been standing a few lines ago, not feeling well.
I finally landed in a line with several Venezolanos paying their fines for overstaying. At least I was in the right place. My exasperated driver, who now had nothing to do except try to expedite the process, tried to jump most of them in line and go straight to the window, but they weren’t having it. Mercifully, he was so frustrated that he just walked away. When my turn came, the young man behind the window kept looking from one paper to another, repeatedly flipping through the various stamps in my passport. He would type various things in his phone, and I realized at some point he was adding up and counting the days on his smartphone calculator. This is a modern facility, with computers right in front of him that presumably have my information and an exact count of the days I was in Perú, but he’s not using that. He goes to talk to several of his colleagues, and I start to get concerned. Next he is making copies of all my documents and re-consulting his phone and colleagues, and then he came up to the window with a look of: you’re screwed, and explained the situation with a very serious face.
The fine that I had paid the bank was 60 centimos short, even though I had paid exactly what the officer at the Arequipa migraciones office told me was my multa. I was more than happy to pay this additional microscopic amount, but because he would have to accept a separate payment, it required more paperwork and receipts. The driver, who had come back to hear the exciting conclusion, was beside himself with anger. I handed over a one sol coin, and they very formally gave me the forty cent change. My passport got the normal exit stamp plus a special one that said Salida Por Exceso de Permanencia. Literally, Exit by Excess of Stay. I was free to go.
This whole thing probably only took forty minutes, but the presence of a large angry man cursing me throughout made it feel interminably longer.
When we loaded back up in the car with all our bags, the couple and their child and the older single man passenger, Emily and I, there was a strange quiet to the group, not angry but more like we had just lost a sports game but later won on some kind of technicality. The driver said nothing. We started driving back into the desert, the Pacific to our right, on our way to Arica, the first place in Chile. The driver, shaking his head resignedly, having accepted that he wasn’t going to be able to make another trip on this day, calmly and quietly said “es lo que te dijé. muchas problemas.” That it was what he had told me, many problems. In my most earnest, contrite voice, I said that he did tell me. I was sorry. Lo siento. Gracias para tu paciencia. He didn’t talk about it any more after that.
✦✦
The bus terminal in Arica is really just a parking lot surrounded on two sides by stands, some selling bus tickets others lotteries and various manner of small goods. Not so different than Perú but everything just slightly better organized. Dazed, Emily and I change our soles for pesos chilenos and try to make sense of what a 10,000 peso bill means ($15, it turns out). In the briefest amount of time in the sun, Emily’s fair skin is turning red, so we take shelter under a shade tent waiting area at the edge of the bus lot, along with a good number of in-transit Venezolanos. They seem much less affected by their probably-multi-day travels than we do from our one day on the road, lounging casually on makeshift pallet-benches, used to borders and buses and customs officers and taxi drivers. They had gotten the swing of things, though at some level they do look dead tired, too.
We apply sunscreen and set down to formulating a plan. The first thing was to get some provisions for dinner and breakfast; strategy-wise, we don’t get much farther than that. The humans need food to survive, however wild we were going to be. On the way in, a handful of blocks up, we’d seen a Lider super-store (the South American version of Walmart) so we hoist on all our various baggages and instruments and set out that way. At this point in my journey in addition to the full 70 liter backpack, daypack on my chest, and food bag in one hand, as I was when I made my down here, I have added a classical guitar in its soft case. I look and feel absurd. And it could be worse. I have accumulated things: when my Dad came down to visit me in Arequipa in July, he brought a little carry-on suitcase full of more respectable clothes that I could wear to work. To my incredible luck, my friends Clint and Lili are bringing that to me when they fly to Uruguay in a month’s time.
It was hot and we are weary, the sun still blazing in the late afternoon. Immediately out on the street the differences between Chile and Perú are evident. The car exhaust is dramatically less; traffic, as well as the signs and markings directing it, are more orderly; drivers actually stop for pedestrians waiting to cross. This part is almost shocking, and sends a person who’s used to Peruvian custom into a state of utter confusion. Fashion seems much more modern, and women wear sun-dresses, something you just don’t see north of the border.
Somehow we find ourselves lost in an upscale busy mall, with lots of fancy stores and people eyeing this pair of over-laden, sweaty, dusty gringos wandering through. I act like I know where we’re going but in truth I am just taking us in circles. We finally locate the Lider after walking down three long passages. In the gigantic fluorescent-lit superstore, we put our bags into two shopping carts and try to stay on task amidst heavy shopping going on around us among the disorientingly long wide aisles with merchandise packed above our heads, and are shocked by the cost of things, from people who as of late were paying Peruvian prices. This appearance of great expense is only exasperated by the lengthy number of zeros following. We manage to corral enough of the wanted items to get by and fit them into our carts already full with our bags. It is clear we need to get out of there while we still had a fraction of our energy left.
Emily’s card fails to work at the ATM machine, but we have enough on hand for our modest collection of goods. By the carts I tell her I don’t think we are in any state to do wild camping, and that it would benefit our next week of traveling for us to stay at an established campground, with shade and security and bathrooms. She is an easy sell by this point and says she is fine with that. Outside on the sidewalk we hail a cabbie who offers us a reasonable fare, 3000 pesos, to take us to a place a little away from the Centro called Camping La Herradura that I had found on the internet the night before.
He speaks slowly and clearly and is the first person in Chile we can really understand. To me and many other learners, and even native Spanish speakers, the Chileno dialect is the hardest to parse in Latin America. With some Caribbean versions, I can’t understand, but can hear them speaking Spanish very fast with lots of words I don’t get. A lot of times with a Chilean, I’m wondering “what language is this? Is this Italian? Portuguese?” I compliment him on his clear speech, and he responds like it is the most obvious thing in the world: he wanted to speak so we could understand. I tell him that we are teachers and we appreciate that.
Fifteen minutes through afternoon traffic put us on a dirt road, and then outside the closed gate and door of the grounds of our destination. A bell that doesn’t ring, a locked gate. Peering through the slats in the fence reveals a sheepish-looking white bulldog that doesn’t bark; an entirely empty campground. No humans or tents or even vehicles to be seen. We want nothing more than to just put up our tents and rest, on this unextraordinary spot of ground right in front of us, to give them money for the privilege of doing so, but it is a bridge too far.
The taxi driver tells us we can camp on Playa Chinchorros, not far from where we’d started out at the Lider, and not wanting to chase any more wild geese we load our bags up again and ride back across the city. He feels bad that we’d come to a closed place and gives us a discounted rate back, 2000 pesos, though I’m sure he did fine for himself in the whole proposition.
Chinchorros was kind of a beach park just out of downtown, modest playgrounds and fancy beach cafes, toilets and showers for an additional charge, and sure enough there are a few tents pitched out on the sand. It will do. We pay the taxi and thank him for bringing us here.
On an island of grass a little bit out onto the sand, beneath a couple scrubby palms and beside some short beach trees, the day grows dusky while we set up our tents under an illusion of shelter and future shade. No other campers are within a quarter mile, and it seems a mostly respectable if modest place to sleep a night.
Neither of us say much at all for the first half hour we are there. When things are mostly in order, we agree that what we could really go for was a beer, and trusting most of our current life’s possessions to the wilds, we take off on a stroll to see the various establishments at hand.
The cheapest offerings are five dollar Coronas, an exorbitant price by Peruvian standards, and we are advised that we shouldn’t drink them on the beach, exactly what we planned to do, because of police and marine patrols. The alternative is to sit in stuffy upscale restaurant cafes. Feeling thwarted, we walk back to camp to make dinner. But even this is a struggle. Something’s not right with my camping stove, perhaps from not having been operated in nine months, or the elevation change of eight thousand feet that day. Either way, the gas just bubbles out of the cracks in the control knob, a really disturbing sign. I finally get it to work, but a minute after putting on a pot of quinoa, the stove sputters out and try as I might, it won’t light again. We are left to eat the hard-ish flour tortillas we’d bought from Lider cold with cut vegetables browning already from the day’s heat. It is a humbling moment.
This is when Emily declares herself defeated and says she is going to lie down in her tent. Perhaps I should just cut my losses and do the same, but I make myself a lukewarm drink of rum and fanta and look out at the waves in the darkening night. After drinking this, I decide that I am entirely unsatisfied by our dinner and need something more to mark the fact that I have arrived in Chile, and was in another country. I say to Emily, inside her tent with a headlamp on, that we’d have a better day tomorrow, goodnight, and go to seek some small bit of good fortune.
The items for sale on the upscale cafe side had been far beyond my budget, but we hadn’t walked the whole periphery. We’d avoided some food stands on the fast food budget side of Playa Chinchorros that didn’t sell beer, so I go to peruse their offerings.
Sitting on a plastic chair at a plastic table in front of the cheapest food stand playing reggaeton, I order something they call a churrasco and a cup of hot tea. The former is like a low quality philly cheese steak without the cheese, loaded with mayo and guac. I can’t say it was even satisfying but after eating it I am no longer hungry. My cup of tea is a bit salty, but we take what we can get. I have been out here writing for a couple hours now, the story of this day, and it seems slightly less grim and more manageable now that it’s down on paper.
When I walk back to our chosen island, Emily’s tent is dark but another new tent has appeared while I was out, set up ten feet away from us, and on the nearer side of that, a guy is sleeping on the ground with a windbreaker draped over his head. Some vagrant type folks, probably Venezuelan, are playing an out-of-tune guitar and singing drunkenly not too far off but just out of sight. There is nothing I can do about any of it. A Manu Chao song comes to mind, La suerte viene, la suerte se va, por la frontera…
I sit down outside my tent and make another rum and fanta. Getting drunk makes perfect sense to me in this moment, though the food bomb in my belly will prevent that. I miss Arequipa and my life there, my friends, my comfortable bed, the ability to make a good cup of tea in the morning. Here with my stove busted, I won’t be able to even do that. But as I said to Emily earlier, things could always be worse. We made it across the border, and our health and modest wealth are in tact. The first day on the road and the first day in a new country are always hard. Tomorrow is supposed to be the harder day. We’re planning to hitchhike down the Panamericana to wild camp in a place way off the highway called Pisagua. What could go wrong?
After I have a bit more rum and retire to bed, more and more people gather close around our tents, playing loud music, yelling, whistling, talking all night. At some point I try to shush them and grumpily call out “Por Favor”, but to no avail. Weed is smoked and bottles drank and songs drunkenly sung. Somehow gradually the exhaustion gets the better of the noise, and I pass into oblivious, merciful sleep.
