Chile Day 8 - Ahoy!

chaiten sunset
Originally uploaded by wolftone.

Chile is 3 days away from a presidential election. One of the candidates is a woman, which again reminds me that our supposedly egalitarian country is well behind such forward-looking examples of gender equality as Pakistan and the Phillipines in finding chief executives with low testoserone counts. Her campaign posters say "Bachelet Presidente. Por Chile. Por les Gents" My command of spanish is weak, but something tells me that "Bachelorette President. For Chile, For the Gentlemen" is probably the wrong translation. I spoke with someone who says that politics is so male-dominated here that she doesn't have a chance. Still, her supporters are awfully active. They clogged the streets last night with balloons and flags flying from honking cars. Some industrious hackers also placed Bachelet flags atop every single lamppost in town overnight. This sort of advertising may be a nuisance, but at least it's more creative than disingenuous TV commercials.

Today is Yet More Travel. I'm on a high speed catamaran with 5 choppy hours to Chaiten. The mountains of the world's largest private park rise from the sun haze tothe east, beautiful but unphotographable. On the main deck, I can risk media sickness with hollywood Zorro. I'll take my chances on sea sickness upstairs.

This area of chile is almost exactly Bostonia Australis, coordinates 42s,71w. I had been hoping for some norway-style midnight sun, but I think I'd need to go much further south for that. Nonetheless, Chile has taken my repeated suggestion for boston and shifted itself to GMT-4, the Atlantic time zone. The sun sets around 10pm here and rises around 6, a far more humane alternative to Boston's messed-up schedule.

Today's destination is Chaiten, the jumping-off point for adventures in Aisen. Though it's the second-largest town in the province, it is little more than an intersection and a ferry port. I think I have now left the Beaten Path.

With plenty of daylight to kill, I visited the park in town and hiked to a spectacular waterfall which changes direction twice in its descent. Unfortunately, the trail took significantly less than the promised two hours. Instead, I spent over two solid and linguistically diverse hours with the tour operators in town. I may even have a plan for the next few days. Maybe. The mighty Fu is still overflowing, so creative methods must be applied.

I ate dinner with Kevin, a Kiwi I met on the ferry. He is halfway through a multi-month tour of the continent. While in Bolivia, he did the same thing as the only other person I know who has visited there: purchased a cheap mining license and threw live dynamite off a mountain. (Though he did it without the aid of a liter of tequila.) Do the guidebooks recommend this, or something? Dinner was "merluza", which is only caught and sold here. I didn't taste any difference between it and any other whitefish, but at least I had the Authentic Local Experience.

Kevin is atypical for the endurance solo traveller. He's older, has quit his job, has a blue-collar background, and not much education. I spend so much time with crunchy global hipsters that it's good to be reminded that pipefitters can buy Lonely Planet too. There is this (obnoxious?) uniformity among backpackers which I don't easily notice because I conform to it so completely.

The oversize TV in the restaurant treated me to my first Telenovella. These soap operas feature a combustible mix of sex, violence, betrayal, low production values, and intrusive musical cues. I was eager to see one since they define spanish-language entertainment much in the same way that Bollywood musicals encapsulate Indian cinema. I couldn't really tell what was going on, but some guy really liked this girl but she was angry at him for something he did with this other guy who was currently pointing a gun at some girl who worked in the same restaurant as another girl who may have in some way known the first guy. I think.

Other than that, there's not much to report. Weather nice, wish you were here.