Bob and Karen's Circle Pacific Tour: Chile: wine surrounded by mountains

Peru was the right place to begin a year's travel

Peru was an eye-opener of a place to launch our trip. It’s a little difficult to remember all the things that went through our minds as we settled into our year off during that first month of leisure. But I recall being sharply aware of the need to travel differently than any previous travel we’d done. This was a year off, and there was no way any person could spend that many days in full-on explorer mode. You have to stop and let the time pass you by. And you have to do that surprisingly frequently. You can bully your way through the strenuous two days of climbing Mount Putukusi and neighbouring Machu Picchu after a big bad bout of altitude sickness, but there are serious physical limits in the longer term. I speak now from a position of clearer understanding. Our first major steps on returning home were health care – Karen to a naturopath to fix her digestive tract, me to the family doctor to treat a knee injury. Now the knee MRI data is in and it turns out that a year of stress to one’s knees doesn’t necessarily cause ligament damage. At least not in my case. Instead, a year of daily strain (and about a dozen mountain climbs) results in bone injuries – extensive bruising and a small fracture to my left femur. My knee may take as long to heal as it took to cause the damage. And Peru was a powerful dose of knee wear with which to begin our year’s adventure. About two-thirds of the way through our year off we began to look back at Peru and comment that it was a good thing we’d done Peru first, because at that point we didn’t feel capable of the mountain exploits we’d done back in September. Now, a full year later, I have similar thoughts regarding the year off. I don’t think I could do it again. I certainly can’t do it again in the condition I’m in now. The effects of aging isn’t the point of this piece but I had to get past that to get to the wind-down in Huanchaco. While Machu Picchu was one of the icons that we built our year off around – the others were Easter Island (up next) and Angkor Wat (towards the end) – the lazing away of days and weeks in Huanchaco is the travel style that we wanted to perfect. Later, we executed a nearly perfect down-time dropout on the island of Koh Phangan, where we spent 33 days doing as close to nothing as two people can manage. In Peru, we spent almost half our month in Huanchaco. It is a small fishing village, with little going for it but charm, and we made it our home. By the time we had wandered every street I knew we were successfully living in the moment. That’s a sensation that we are striving for in our travels and, as much as Machu Picchu was a miracle in the mountains, Huanchaco was its own miracle on the seashore. I am more likely to go back there, but that may just be the bad knee talking. We could always bus it up Machu Picchu.

Re-living our tour in photos

A totally unexpected result of travelling for a year (unlike any other number of months) is that we are re-living the experience month by month as we sort photos. It's September now so we have spent weeks sorting and editing our Peru pictures. As we build a slideshow of our month in Peru, we are choosing from photos that weren't available for posting during our trip. We carried two cameras but only blogged from a backup point-and-shoot. So, here's the result, a handful of our Peru favourites. We might find a few more before the end of September when we switch to reminiscing about Chile. But first we'll have an essay on Peru, which will be our next text post.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Chile: wine surrounded by mountains

We did mainland Chile in two hits: three days in Santiago followed by six days in Santa Cruz. Both were about the right duration for two people travelling without a car. You should double the time if you've got a car and can wander about the countryside. The central part of Santiago is reasonable for exploring on foot, though the distances are a bit long. We spent one day climbing a mountain (okay, it's a hill) in the centre of the city. There were spectacular views of the sprawling city of 5 million people, surrounded by snow-capped mountains, followed by a funicular back down to the drinking and dining neighbourhood. We loved the logo for the Escudo brand of beer ... "more beer" ... because it's cheap at $2.50 a litre. No subtlety there. Our other days in Santiago were also filled with hiking, eating and drinking, although we stuck to level ground. The city has one astonishing museum absolutely loaded with pre-Columbian art. Before visiting Peru, we had no previous knowledge of most of those cultures and now we have a stronger sense of the sophistication of the pre-Columbian (even pre-Incan) peoples of this continent. After the big city, we jumped on a bus to Santa Cruz where we enjoyed the opportunity to take another break in a laid-back small town (not a surf town this time). This was a wine town. Some days we took a taxi to the outlying vineyards. Other days we just wandered the streets until we ran out of streets. Finally got a beautiful sunset shot from the edge of town toward the snow-capped mountains on our last day. After the food extravaganza of Peru, where every level of dining was quite special, the Chilean food is quite stratified with fabulous fine dining at the top end and particularly boring hotdogs and sandwiches at the low end. Much as we enjoyed the food and atmosphere in South America, we'll be happy not to mangle Spanish anymore. Our bags remain packed after our return bus to Santiago and we should go to bed as we have an early flight tomorrow to Easter Island. Strange thing about our bags: they keep growing more loosely packed even though we haven't used up much of our necessities other than a small bit of toothpaste and a handful of pills from Karen's naturopathic pharmacopia (sorry, tired of pidgin English, just had to use a few big words). PLEASE NOTE, the previous post is also from today.

1 comment:

Unknown said...: Hi guys, missing you! Thoroughly enjoying living vicariously through you and your blog though! Had a great Chilean cab last night (is there any other kind?) and lamented not being able to enjoy more of the same with you in Chile! Can really relate to your comment about mangling Spanish after 2 and a half weeks in Spain. Still, managed to get by quite well and managed to add a few more words and phrases to my vocabulary. Excited to hear about the next leg of your trip. Lots of love, Rose; October 17, 2009 at 6:27 PM