A small celebration.
Santiago de Chile: It´s been 4 months now since I left my work in Seattle and began this journey. Time sure does fly.
I just treated myself to a nice dinner in an Italian restaurant in the fancy Bellavista district of Santiago to celebrate the occasion, alone. Quite fitting for my current state of mind. After four months on the road I am starting to get a little worn out. Every other night in a different city, in a different bed. Meeting new people but never spending enough time to actually getting to know them, constantly seeing new and exciting new things but always on the move to see the next one. It's like living life with the fast=forward button pressed. I am slowly getting ready for a break, ready to be around old friends and my own things again. I must be getting old.
The last few days have been very nice - after a great farewell dinner with my friends from the Navimag boat who then headed in their own respective directions - North, West, and East -, I did a day trip to see the section of the Andes west of Mendoza, the Puente del Inca (Inca bridge), and catch a glimpse of the highest summit of the Americas and the Western hemisphere - the Aconcagua (that part wasn't all that successful).
The following day I took another bus across the Andes (again) to Santiago de Chile, the capital of Chile. It's a huge city, very European in appearance, with a terrible smog problem. I spent two days here seeing the sights, walking the walk, and drinking the wine, and I have come to the conclusion that I like Buenos Aires better. Even though the location of Santiago appears nicer, with the Andes looming in the immediate backdrop of the city, the fact that you can only see them from top of one of the mountains in the city because the smog prohibits it otherwise makes this a whole lot less appealing. Sunset in Santiago begins an hour earlier than in the rest of Chile, simply because the smog reduces the sunlight that comes through so significantly.
In the center of the city on the Plaza de Armas is the cathedral, while touring the city I had the luck to walk into a ceremony - I believe where new pastors were ordained in the church service. The cathedral was brightly lit, a singing chorus demonstrated the great acoustics the cathedral had, and hundreds of people were watching. True to the Latin American way of life the Santiago-ans had no problems using their cameras and cellular phones in the church, so I figured they wouldn't have any objections to me taking pictures either. They didn't.
After the civil uprising in Mendoza, I had the chance of witnessing the Chilenean police in action today. On my way to the center I walked into street that was closed off by the police. A guy with a knife had apparently broken into one of the (closed) side cafes and decided to stay there until the cops arrived. And now he didn't want to come out. By the time I got to the scene, the SWAT team had just arrived and was preparing to end this thing (I was so hoping to shoot a police brutality video on my own). Unfortunately a negotiator that appeared at the same time got the first shot at it, and after 15 more minutes of yelling and throwing around furniture in the cafe, the guy decided to give up (just as the police tried to enlarge the restricted area to give the SWAT more room to move in...). Rubber bullets, mass arrests, stand-offs, and SWAT - you could think I am in the latin America of the late 70s and 80s.
Tomorrow I'll take another bus further north, taking me to the Atacama desert close to the Bolivian border. 22 hours... luckily I managed to get a so-called cama (=Bed) seat, which is pretty much like a first class airline seat. That should make this section a bit more bearable (it's about at 22.5 degrees, Nate - compare that to where we were in Punta Arenas..)
I just treated myself to a nice dinner in an Italian restaurant in the fancy Bellavista district of Santiago to celebrate the occasion, alone. Quite fitting for my current state of mind. After four months on the road I am starting to get a little worn out. Every other night in a different city, in a different bed. Meeting new people but never spending enough time to actually getting to know them, constantly seeing new and exciting new things but always on the move to see the next one. It's like living life with the fast=forward button pressed. I am slowly getting ready for a break, ready to be around old friends and my own things again. I must be getting old.
The last few days have been very nice - after a great farewell dinner with my friends from the Navimag boat who then headed in their own respective directions - North, West, and East -, I did a day trip to see the section of the Andes west of Mendoza, the Puente del Inca (Inca bridge), and catch a glimpse of the highest summit of the Americas and the Western hemisphere - the Aconcagua (that part wasn't all that successful).
The following day I took another bus across the Andes (again) to Santiago de Chile, the capital of Chile. It's a huge city, very European in appearance, with a terrible smog problem. I spent two days here seeing the sights, walking the walk, and drinking the wine, and I have come to the conclusion that I like Buenos Aires better. Even though the location of Santiago appears nicer, with the Andes looming in the immediate backdrop of the city, the fact that you can only see them from top of one of the mountains in the city because the smog prohibits it otherwise makes this a whole lot less appealing. Sunset in Santiago begins an hour earlier than in the rest of Chile, simply because the smog reduces the sunlight that comes through so significantly.
In the center of the city on the Plaza de Armas is the cathedral, while touring the city I had the luck to walk into a ceremony - I believe where new pastors were ordained in the church service. The cathedral was brightly lit, a singing chorus demonstrated the great acoustics the cathedral had, and hundreds of people were watching. True to the Latin American way of life the Santiago-ans had no problems using their cameras and cellular phones in the church, so I figured they wouldn't have any objections to me taking pictures either. They didn't.
After the civil uprising in Mendoza, I had the chance of witnessing the Chilenean police in action today. On my way to the center I walked into street that was closed off by the police. A guy with a knife had apparently broken into one of the (closed) side cafes and decided to stay there until the cops arrived. And now he didn't want to come out. By the time I got to the scene, the SWAT team had just arrived and was preparing to end this thing (I was so hoping to shoot a police brutality video on my own). Unfortunately a negotiator that appeared at the same time got the first shot at it, and after 15 more minutes of yelling and throwing around furniture in the cafe, the guy decided to give up (just as the police tried to enlarge the restricted area to give the SWAT more room to move in...). Rubber bullets, mass arrests, stand-offs, and SWAT - you could think I am in the latin America of the late 70s and 80s.
Tomorrow I'll take another bus further north, taking me to the Atacama desert close to the Bolivian border. 22 hours... luckily I managed to get a so-called cama (=Bed) seat, which is pretty much like a first class airline seat. That should make this section a bit more bearable (it's about at 22.5 degrees, Nate - compare that to where we were in Punta Arenas..)
posted by Mark Peters @ 10:55 PM
1 Comments:
At 2:43 AM ,
Kermit said...
You are making pretty quick work of those latitude lines :) Going from 62 to 22.5 in a couple weeks you sort of get to "ease" into the tropical lifestyle again. Is your bed-liner bus going over paved or dirt roads?
On completely other notes, Anne has become famous. A new book out called Create your own Photo Blog uses her photo blog as an example. It even has pictures in it of Anne and me.
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