With strong winds and heavy rain forecast for much of central and southern Chile this weekend, I decided against any madcap travels beyond Santiago. It’s just as well, too: even my whimsical considerations of hopping over the border to tick Argentina off the list with a flying visit to Mendoza would have been impossible, after yesterday’s renewed snowfall blocked the mountain pass, closing the terrifyingly steep Ruta 60 for what is likely to be quite some time.
For once, I erred on the side of common sense and spent my Saturday in downtown Santiago, stocking up on a few important supplies for my final adventure in South America, now less than a week away. My main target was the sportswear giant Decathlon, but while I was hunting it down I stumbled upon a fabulous bookshop specialising in natural history in an underground mall at Tobalaba. I’ll simply have to come back here before I go – the selection of books on offer was incredibly tempting.
I still can’t get over how much birdwatching is a thing over here. I’m so used to Hispanics being generally disinterested in birds they can’t shoot out of the sky. It’s so heartwarming that that particular aspect of Hispanic culture is shifting, and that Latin Americans seem to be the driving force behind it.
With my Decathlon business concluded, I popped into Jumbo – Chile’s answer to Spain’s Mercadona – to grab a couple of snacks for the week ahead. Amazingly, the supermarket did me for lunch, too: they were giving out free samples of the seafood stew mix (which was amazing!) as well as free samples of strawberry yoghurt and pistachio ice cream. They weren’t exactly full-size dishes, but Tomás ordered far too much pizza last night, so I was quite happy with a couple of free nibbles for lunch.
The heavy rains of the past couple of weeks have transformed the Mapocho River which runs through the city. When I arrived, it was little more than a steady flow in a largely dry canal. It’s now a roaring torrent that cuts above the din of the traffic when you’re close enough. Chile really is a country of extremes: when it rains here, people have to be prepared for property damage and flood control, even up here in the mountains.
By the time I reached the car park at the foot of Cerro San Cristobal, it was already half past one, and a lot of city folk had come to the same conclusion as me: that is, that it would be nicer to go for a walk today, rather than tomorrow, when the scheduled rains are due to come down hard. Parquemet was full of cyclists and runners, as it was on my last ascent now three weeks ago, but after a flying visit to the Japanese Garden – which was probably the noisiest zen garden in creation, thanks to it being located within a Hispanic capital city – I ducked off the road, following one of the many forest tracks intended for downhill mountain bikers. But for a lone jogger, I had this route to myself, which meant it was alive with wildlife.
The first critter to show up was a woodpecker. I never did find the famous Magellanic woodpecker during my visit to Patagonia – a very good reason to come back someday – so this striped woodpecker or carpinterito is my first in Chile. Like most woodpeckers, it was a nightmare to capture on film, being in the darkest part of the forest, moving constantly and under a dark, overcast sky, but I just about managed a couple of shots before it disappeared among the trees.
A large flock of finches followed me along the spine of the cerro, feeding among the dead foliage at the side of the path. The siskins here look and sound a lot like the ones back home, but the sierra finches are really rather special. I saw some of these pretty birds in Cusco, but in Santiago they’re essentially garden birds.
I hoped I might find some of the pretty diuca finches that are so common at school. There weren’t any on the cerro today, but I did keep running into diucons, their fiery red eyes even more obvious in the midday light than they were the other day, when I was shooting into the sun.
The best find of all, though, was a bird I’ve become very familiar with here in Santiago. I hear them every single day, and see them at least three days out of seven, whenever I should be near a poker plant. The green-backed firecrown is probably Chile’s most well-known hummingbird, since it seems to have a home on even the busiest streets in the city centre.
The last time I had a close encounter with one of these living gemstones, I didn’t have my camera on me. This time, I came prepared. Firecrowns are fearless little creatures, driven by an insatiable hunger that is a side-effect of their rapid metabolism – so, once again, I was able to sit quite close and watch, until the bird landed so close I could see its heartbeat and its tiny tongue tasting the air.
The firecrown gets its name from the male’s plumage, which really is quite something. Even with the naked eye, you can’t miss that sudden flash of scarlet when they alight upon a branch, just like hoopoes do with their crests when they land.
The secret is the iridescent sheen to its feathers, each one bending the light slightly differently depending on its position on the bird’s forehead. They can, of course, flatten and raise their crests at will, so I had to wait a little while before I was able to capture that ripple of red light.
After spending a happy half hour or so with the firecrowns, I wound my way back down the cerro and used what little battery I had left on my phone to catch a bus back to Las Condes. I only stopped one more time, just before stepping on board the 409, to see a couple of Southern Lapwings that had flown in and gone down to the river. I see and hear these birds every day, too, as they’re a lot noisier than the firecrowns, but I haven’t yet had the chance to get a photo. They’re usually patrolling the rugby pitches in pairs, and they have a reputation for being ferocious with passers-by in the spring, when they have eggs or chicks near at hand.
Well, it’s getting dark outside. I didn’t expect to have such a good afternoon’s birdwatching on what was essentially an extended shopping trip, but sometimes, it’s the outings you don’t plan that turn out to be the best.
That said, I’ve done a lot of planning for next week’s mad adventure, so I hope that turns out for the best, too. It really is going to be rather special. BB x
I’m up early after falling asleep far earlier than usual last night (around 8pm – shocking!), so I thought I’d use the time to pencil in my afternoon’s adventures.
While I’ve been working around the Craighouse campus, I’ve had a lot of time to watch the comings and goings of the birds that make their home around the capital city. Taunton has its fair share of feathered friends, of course, but I’ve had thirty years to get used to herring gulls, crows and woodpigeons. I might be in my third week out here, but I still get a big smile watching the rufous-crowned sparrows hopping about. Naturally, I don’t bring my camera to work, so given that we actually had some sunshine today – and that my colleague Tomás was done an hour before the end of the school day – I thought I’d capitalise on the sunlight and do a bit of suburban birdwatching.
One bird that’s easy to find around Santiago is the mockingbird. I’ve come across these characterful creatures in New Orleans, Lima and the open steppe of Patagonia, but the cheerful Chilean mockingbird is very much a feature of Santiago itself. I imagine they’d be garden birds, if one had the money for a garden in this habitually dry part of the world.
I thought I might try and snap one of the many Chilean swallows circling the heights of Cerro Calán, but they were much too fast and never came down to roost. I did, however, finally have manage to capture a fire-eyed diucon – a little grey bird with striking red eyes, almost like those of a Victorian doll, that moves just like a flycatcher from back home.
It was really encouraging to see more than a couple of other walkers up on Cerro Galán with binoculars and the BIRDA app on their phones. I can’t help but notice that birdwatching seems to be a lot more popular here than I anticipated. I suppose it helps a lot when your average city birds are really quite spectacular to start with.
Take the meadowlarks, for example, who make their presence known with a tremendously loud wheezy call that goes off like a Mexican wave as soon as the first one in the flock puffs out its chest and sings. These are the birds that the locals in Santiago seem to love the most, and with such an eye-popping splash of red on the males’ chests, I can’t say I blame them.
Definitely saving a corner of this post for my favourite little sparrows, though. Slightly smaller than our house sparrows, with an endlessly cheerful chip to let you know they’re nearby, they also have a beautiful song when they’re feeling more musical.
I was up on the cerro long enough to catch the sunset, which was an added bonus. It must have been tremendous from Valparaíso, no doubt, but even here in Santiago, with the forested mountains of La Campana between us and the horizon, it was quite a sight to see.
Today I think I’ll wander over to the Senior English department and try to catch a few more lessons. Be proactive for a change! BB x
The sun has returned. It feels like quite a long time since I last saw it. It has been so cloudy with the constant threat of rain here in Santiago that I haven’t really seen the sun since the day I arrived, now some three weeks ago – with the exception of that glorious afternoon down in Patagonia when the snowclouds cleared. I have missed it: Chile looks so very different in the sunlight. The lingering snow in the high mountains is a special shade of blue, though it looks about as soft and cold as marble. The students spent their breaktime playing one of their quarterfinal intercolour football games, with a mixed team of boys and girls. A meadowlark is singing somewhere above the classroom block, and every time I turn around, I can see a harris hawk or two gliding high up in the wintry blue sky. This is a very special place.
One of the most reassuring things about this Chilean exchange is the renewed confidence I have regarding my text choices for the Spanish Language A course I’m rolling out. After a chat with the English department yesterday, it turns out they are studying some of the texts that I planned on exploring with my students next year – so there is a precedent! As it stands, my reading list looks something like this:
Rebelion en la granja (George Orwell, UK)
Maus (US)
Pedro Paramo (Juan Rulfo, MX)
El tunel (Ernesto Sabato, AR)
Romancero gitano (Federico Garcia Lorca, ES)
El reino de este mundo (Alejandro Carpentier, CU)
El burlador de Sevilla (Tirso de Molina, ES)
La casa de los espiritus (Isabel Allende, CL)
Cien años de soledad (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, CO)
El maestro y Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov, RU)
Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada (Pablo Neruda, CL)
Otelo (Shakespeare, UK)
El extranjero (Albert Camus, FR)
To be honest, I’m surprised at myself with this list – primarily because of the tremendously heavy Latin American focus. Years ago, in my university days, I steered my Hispanic Studies degree firmly away from Latin American texts, focusing instead on all things Iberian: Castilian medieval epics, postmodern Spanish literature, and the Quijote module that never was. However, the parameters of the IB are clear: the texts studied should cover a broad range of geographic regions and time periods, so that students can discuss the similarities and differences between the overarching themes, and in so doing, ask insightful questions that push them closer to being truly global citizens. That, at least, is the idea.
It’s a big ask. My usual stomping ground is medieval epics like El Cantar del mio Cid (which, funnily enough, is one of the set texts for the Spanish Language and Literature course out here), but I really want my students to get to grips with the wider Hispanic world – just as I am getting to grips with it myself, after stubbornly ignoring the Hispanic World beyond the Atlantic for far too long.
I´ve tried to cover as many countries as I can while threading together a coherent corpus that lends itself well to comparative work, revolving around five primary themes: power, identity, memory, morality and the supernatural. It’s a tall order for my students, I know, and I hope they are up to the task. Hell, I hope I am up to the task! But I am seriously looking forward to being a full-on teacher of literature at last, even if I have had to come by the road of Spanish Literature in order to do so.
With that being said, I had better crack on and get some of these presentations whipped up. This curriculum won’t write itself! BB x
Today marks the halfway stage, both of my three-week exchange post and font five-week extended summer break in South America. Life goes on for the students at Craighouse, and I have to remind myself that while it’s cold and coat weather here, and everyone is hard at work, my summer holidays are ticking by. Not that I haven’t made the most of them, of course – I can scarcely remember a more action-packed summer than this one – but it is something I have to tell myself when it feels like I might spend another day observing lessons.
Today I finished my myths and legends compilation for the Middle Lenguaje department and popped over to the Senior English department to get to know the team. Turns out that’s where French is based too, so I guess I’ll be up there a fair bit for the rest of my placement. They seem like a really friendly bunch. Hell, everyone here is really friendly. It’s been a really neat choice, coming out here for the summer. I’ve also had a lot of time to speak Spanish and work on my novels, so that’s been pretty useful, too.
Bit by bit, my last week is steadily falling into place. It’s going to be something to look forward to, to really set a seal on what has been a phenomenal second outing to Latin America. I hope it’s the first of many. BB x
I’ve been assigned a task to do for the Middle Lenguaje department that is right up my street. The students of 6° Básico are working toward familiarisation with Criterion C of the MYP (already!) and, to liven things up a little, they’re going to start working on a myths and legends project next week, which they will explore during a parent-teacher conference event in two weeks’ time – one which I shall sadly miss, being somewhere totally different by the 10th of August. But I still won’t say where!
To really bring their presentation and storytelling skills to life, they’re going to create their own kamishibai (the one word in our meeting on Monday that I could not decipher for love nor for money, being neither English nor Spanish!). A kamishibai is a sort of slide theatre, with the script on the back of the cards so you can tell the story moment by moment using the images on the card. Think of it as an ersatz cinema.
I’d have been all over a project like this one in Year 7. We did do a poetry writing challenge around a set theme, which was really fun (and I did reasonably well, if memory serves), but nothing as arty as this.
To help out, I’ve been tasked with offering six additional folktales from around the world to complement the North and South American stories the kids will have the chance to work with. After careful consideration, I chose the following:
Gawain and the Green Knight (UK) – I felt an Arthurian legend had to be in there for England’s sake, and the Green Knight’s tale favours a standalone event.
Mr Seguin’s Goat (FR) – A rogue choice, but I needed an animal-centred story and a French folktale and this one ticked both boxes. I slightly tweaked the ending so that it might be a bit more appealing. I hope Charles Perrault would forgive me!
Martin Tkiki (ES) – A Basque legend I have always taught to my Year 8s when practising the past tense and consequently one I know really well. I also like the idea that it might even hint at our earliest interactions with Neanderthals and what we may have learned (or even taken) from their society.
How Maui Slowed the Sun (PF) – A lot of these kids will have seen Moana, but I first learned about the mighty Maui in a beautifully illustrated Myths and Legends book. Disney’s Maui merely alludes to his great deeds in You’re Welcome, but they’re worth reading for yourself.
Urashima Taro (JP) – I could have gone with any number of Japanese folktales, but this East Asian parallel to Rip Van Winkle is both short, imaginative and easily accessible to non-native readers.
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (IR) – Probably one of my favourite folktales of all time and easily the longest in the collection, but it could not be strimmed down without losing the magic. It was Ali Baba or Sinbad and the former is, admittedly, a lot easier to follow.
If I can get my hands on a functioning school laptop tomorrow morning – as planned – I should have them written out and tied up by lunchtime tomorrow. I wonder which ones they’ll choose? BB x
Week two started slow today. A couple of meetings and a non-starter quest for a functioning laptop meant that I spent the day working on my books, which was a lovely way to spend the day productively – as well as a reminder to myself that I am technically on holiday – albeit perhaps not as exchange-heavy as it could have been. I have bigger events coming up this week, though, and I suspect it will be the last week of my exchange when it really feels like I have a fully functioning timetable.
There are always so many birds around campus. The nest boxes the students have put up all over the school site for their CAS project obviously help, but it’s not just the charming little rufous-crowned sparrows that make the place feel so friendly. The mockingbirds are always perched somewhere, every time I look up I see a caracara of some description hanging in the air, and just before break this morning I know I saw the faraway silhouette of a condor circling the heights of Manquehue.
It’s the meadowlarks that are currently lending some extra charm to the place, if I had to choose a standout. I first got to know these characterful creatures in snowy Patagonia, but it turns out they’re just as common up here around Santiago, hopping about in the car park and sitting quite fearlessly on the school fence, singing their hearts out as the Year 7s play some kind of tag game just feet away.
My BIRDA app tells me my total count of species I’ve seen so far is up to 818 after this weekend’s exploits. Even I have to admit that’s getting to be a dizzying figure, and well over three hundred of that total are birds I have seen in the last five months. I’m not a professional lister like many seasoned birdwatchers, chasing a particular total on my life, year or patch list, but it’s fun having an app where you can log it all, and in so doing learn something about the sheer diversity of species you have found – and, consequently, discovering what is still left out there to see.
I probably could have seen more species if I’d paid through the nose for that Abra Málaga trip, but I wasn’t really after that kind of number-obsessive behaviour. One albatross would have been magical enough on yesterday’s boat trip, and I was blessed with four different kinds. It does not pay to go out into the wild with great expectations. Nature provides on its own terms.
Not too much to report for now, but keeping my writer’s block at bay with regular note taking. And it does seem to be working! BB x
I grew up within sight of the sea. You’re never far from the sea in Kent: the furthest I ever lived from the coast was about ten miles as the crow flies, while the second half of my childhood was spent less than a mile from the white cliffs of Dover. As such, I am very attached to the sea and all its smells and sounds: the salt spray of the winter waves, the hushing rush of pebbles pulled down the beach by the tide and the cry of the herring gull. If I should be so lucky, one day, I should like to live by the sea.
Today I took that lifelong love for the sea and dialled it up a notch by taking a pelagic trip out into the Pacific – into the open ocean.
Rodrigo, my guide for the day, picked me up from outside my hostel in Valparaíso shortly after seven. A punctured tyre delayed him by forty minutes or so, so he was anxious to get going, so as not to hold up the crew of their ship up in Quintero, a seaside fishing town some thirty miles north of Valparaíso.
Shortly before we got there, the sun rose into a fiercely red sky. A certain old English saying came to mind:
Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight
Red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning
It was a beautiful sight, even if it did threaten rain. More spectacular, though, was a clear view of Aconcagua, the tallest mountain in all the Americas and the highest peak outside of Asia. The great white sentinel was so immense that by some trick of the light it seemed to throw the entire south of Chile into darkness. Apparently, only 30-40% attempts to scale Aconcagua are successful. The mountain is evidently as much an apu – a sacred mountain – as its better-known kin to the north of the cordillera, and not to be underestimated.
The local fishermen of Quintero were already hard at work as we arrived, slicing up some frighteningly large squid and cleaning their skiffs after a night out on the ocean. They seemed curious about the small group of day trippers herded onto a boat waiting in their harbour – all of them Chilean, with the exception of one wandering Briton – but paid us no more attention than the pelicans: a sort of intentional acknowledgement, as they went about their work.
I couldn’t help being totally bowled over by the frighteningly large squid laid out in the fishery. Humboldt squid – or jibia as they’re known in Chile – are among the largest squid species in the world, reaching a whopping five feet in length. They’re so numerous along the coast of the Americas that they represent a third of the squid catch worldwide – and despite the fact that nearly two thousand tons of them are hunted in Chile alone every year, their population is still expanding. That’s a testament to just how rich the Humboldt current truly is. It’s also why Chile has always been home to a healthy population of sperm whales, who devour these and even larger prey, including arguably the most famous whale of all time: Mocha Dick, an aggressive and exceptionally cunning albino sperm whale who survived nearly a hundred attempts on his life before being brought down off Mocha Island. His story inspired Herman Melville to write the American classic Moby Dick, but it’s the original tale that is taught here in Chile as part of the national identity-building curriculum. How cool is that?
We left the harbour – with its attendant sea lions and pelicans – and started out on the hour’s journey out into the open ocean. For most of that first hour, we were tailed by kelp gulls – Chile’s ubiquitous answer to the herring gull – and strange shapes in the water, many of which turned out to be discarded bottles or cans floating eternally along the Humboldt. I counted at least four Fanta bottles and two bicycle tyres, the latter floating nearly side by side. I wonder what happened to the bicycle itself?
Some of the shapes moving along the surface of the water were a lot more interesting. A curious sea lion, a huala or great grebe fishing offshore, or a family of penguins, spending the winter at sea. Over the course of the morning we saw both species native to Chile: Humboldt penguins – the kind I saw in the Islas Ballestas in Peru – and Magellanic penguins, a more southerly species that have colonies right down to the Chilean Antarctic.
We didn’t have to go far from the harbour to see our first pelagic species of the morning. The first to make their appearance were the shearwaters, experts of the open ocean, zooming low over the surface of the water, banking this way and that. With the roll of the waves, they seemed to slice through the surface with the tips of their wings in the way that gave them their name, though I swear I never saw them touch the water once.
In the descending gloom, they were hard to catch on camera. A little easier were the diving-petrels, tiny auk-like birds that preferred to paddle away from the boat, popping in and out of sight beneath the waves in the habit for which I suppose they were named.
As the rocky headland of Quintero faded into the mist, we were almost entirely enveloped. This dense sea mist is one of the reasons there haven’t been any pelagic tours since April: if the visibility is this poor, the harbour doesn’t let ships out into the open ocean, lest they become lost, disoriented by the waves – or worse, collide with another ship.
Only the fulmars kept us company in the mist, slicing through the fog on silver wings.
After what must have been an hour, the first sign of relief began to glow in the east: the sun, clear of the mountains and their attendant clouds at last, was trying to fight its way through the fog. Curiously, some trick of the light warped its shape into something that looked like a cross or perhaps even an angel with arms outstretched. It’s so easy to see how legends could form in such a strange and unsettling space as the open ocean, in a time when there was so much less knowledge and so much more wonder in the world.
As the mist began to clear, we reached the feeding grounds of the open ocean. There were plenty of shearwaters around, mostly sooties – a dainty species of southern waters that can sometimes be seen as far north as the British Isles on their wanderings. But this is their home, off the southern coast of the Americas, and there were plenty enough of them to prove it.
A young lad on the crew lifted the lid on one of the chum buckets – fish heads and squid tentacles, mostly – and threw some into the water for the birds that had followed us so patiently. They were watchful, at first, as wild things should be, but once the kelp gulls cottoned on, the shearwaters lost their timidity.
One bird I had not expected to encounter at all was a prion – known around here as a paloma marina or sea dove. These Antarctic birds had been driven north by weather currents in the South Seas, by the looks of things, and it was a real delight to watch them bobbing around beside the boat, dipping their heads beneath the water in a constant, frantic search for food.
The real prize of the open ocean took its time. A cry of “albatross” from the captain (one Chilean bird whose name is seemingly universal) drew our attention to an enormous shape gliding through the mist behind the boat. It was there for a moment and then it was gone.
A few minutes later, one of the crew spotted it again. The giant – a black-browed albatross, and presumably the same individual – must have caught the scent of the chum and was following the boat at an increasingly shorter distance, arcing across the water in the kind of wide waves that children do on bicycles when following something too slow for their liking.
In time, it seemed to lose all suspicion of us whatsoever and flew in incredibly close, so close that you could see the glint of sunlight on the tip of its bill.
One of the Chilean birdwatchers sitting at the back of the boat beside me remarked somewhat ruefully that he had seen far more activity in previous July expeditions. To him, the ocean was unnaturally quiet today.
I couldn’t have cared less. I was hoping to see one albatross, but I didn’t expect it to be so close, and so bloody impressive. They really are magnificent creatures.
The albatross is a perfect gliding machine. The only time they need to beat their enormous wings is upon takeoff, which is a somewhat clumsy affair requiring one heck of a run-up – although, when you consider that said run-up usually takes place on the surface of the water, that feat is all the more impressive. To aid them in this endeavour, their webbed feet are absolutely enormous, giving them serious launching power as they race across the waves. Once airborne, they can glide for hours, riding the wind on wings that have evolved to make them the true masters of the open ocean.
As the scent of chum in the water drew more and more seabirds, other species began to appear. There was much activity on the boat when a Salvin’s albatross came riding in to join the bounty: a larger, greyer species with a smart yellow lining to its bill. Like the black-browed, its eyes sit beneath a dark shadow, giving the peaceable bird a perpetual frown – though it looked stern enough when it came charging in to chase the other gulls away from the discarded fish heads thrown overboard.
As more and more birds were drawn to the bounty, others besides the albatrosses came in to investigate. Petrels of every kind: smart pintado petrels, Westland petrels from New Zealand, tiny storm-petrels – known to Spaniards a golondrinas de mar (sea swallows) – and southern giant petrels, like the ones I saw in Natales. I quite like these dark morph birds, but there’s a pale morph that look truly sinister, with cold grey eyes – much more suitable for the vultures of the southern seas.
If it weren’t for the albatrosses, these giant petrels would have dwarfed everything in sight. As it was, the best they could take home was second-billing (no pun intended).
There was a great deal of excitement on board when another albatross appeared: a waved albatross, a stranger to these waters that usually makes its home in the Galápagos Islands to the north. The albatross is a true wanderer, scouring the length and breadth of the ocean in search of food, so they can turn up just about anywhere outside of the breeding season. Even so, the captain remarked that in the last twenty years he had only seen five of them, so it was quite a special sight.
For me, though, the most spectacular bird of all was the last to appear. Towards the very end of the expedition, a truly enormous shape coasted into view from the direction of the open ocean, riding in on the wind on three-metre-long wings. A royal albatross – tied with the wandering albatross for the largest wingspan on the planet.
More wary than its kin – or perhaps more stately – the wanderer kept its distance, gliding in enormous circles around the boat. I’m not sure where they stand in the pecking order, or whether the royal in their name is a flight of fancy on our part in allusion to their size, but the giant was indisputably the largest and most powerful of all those gathered to the feast.
Just once did the wanderer come in close enough to truly appreciate how much larger it was than everything else: even the other albatrosses looked like gulls beside it. Unlike the angry-looking black-browed and Salvin’s, the royal albatross has a kind face with deep black eyes and a clean pink bill.
To see one is to understand how sailors of old were enchanted by this bird, spinning legends about it, including the famous belief that to kill an albatross was to invite disaster – upon ship, captain and crew.
What an incredible encounter! I hoped for one albatross and saw at least fifteen, including the largest of them all. My ears may not have fully recovered yet, but I couldn’t feel more fortunate right now.
Upon returning to Quintero, we all had lunch together at a seafood joint opposite the harbour. Quintero is not on the tourist trail – it isn’t even mentioned in the Rough Guides book I brought with me – so the fare was local, fairly-priced and fresh – and absolutely divine. I mulled over the menu for a bit before opting for a mint and ginger lemonade – my favourite Chilean drink – and the caldo de congrío, a wonderfully warm Chilean seafood soup.
I would have caught the bus back to Santiago, but one of the birdwatchers was tremendously keen to offer me a lift as he was headed back south anyway, and thought he might show me parts of the interior I might otherwise not see. I don’t tend to turn offers like this one down, and I had plenty of time, so I accepted.
Manuel – a Chilean marine researcher of proud Basque extraction – was a proper fount of information. He has been into birds his whole life, studying ornithology at colleges across the United States and working primarily in pelagic research. His job has taken him from the coast of California to the Galapagos and the Pitcairn Islands, as well as both the North and South poles. He remembers when they were proper frontier territories, before modern tourism sank its teeth into the far-flung corners of the world. He remembers also when much of the coast of Valparaíso was a giant lagoon, with bird-rich wetlands that have long since dried up and turned into cattle country after so many years of drought. The recent downpour is an anomaly: the Chilean palm trees that grow in the hills to the east all bear the blackened scars of the fires that rip through the countryside when the summer heat is at its worst, aided by the invasive eucalyptus trees that do so love to self-immolate.
As well as a crash course in Chilean fauna, flora, history and politics, Manuel was something of a prankster, hellbent on stopping in the middle of nowhere to take a photo of me so that I could send it to Rodrigo, our guide, so as to let him believe that I had been dropped off in the middle of nowhere. The average citizen might have left the joke at a passing comment, but Manuel was adamant to see it through, passing over several promisingly desolate spots in the hills before finding one to his liking.
His puckish side satisfied, he made sure to send me on my way with some herbs for my tea and a fresh loaf of local bread, superior to any supermarket pan de molde. I had some this morning. It really was superb.
Manuel dropped me off in Melipilla, a one-storey town to the southwest of Santiago that has definitely seen better days. Several earthquakes – including one that had its epicentre in the heart of the town itself – have laid waste to what was once a very pretty Chilean town, with colonial adobe houses and two impressive churches. What remains is a sad mishmash of old and new, houses patched together with new materials, as though the whole town was rebuilt using six different LEGO sets. The street art of Valparaíso has made its way here, too, though it is perhaps less welcome here than it is in the cascading streets of the seaside city.
I bought a bus ticket for a paltry 2.000 pesos (just over a pound, I think) for the fifty minute ride back to Santiago, and as a bus arrived just as I was buying the ticket, I didn’t need to wait at all. It was half six by the time I made it back to the flat in Las Condes, long before Tomás and his family returned from their Sunday outing to see his grandfather. I meant to sit down and write, but after I had put my clothes in for a much-needed spin in the laundry, I pretty much collapsed into bed. It’s funny what a morning out on the ocean will do.
My second week begins. I will try to see some English lessons this week – and, with any luck, get a bit more involved after a week observing the middle and senior teams.
I have also reached a decision as to what to do with my last week out here. But that, for now, must wait. Let it be a surprise. There is a lot more magic in that. BB x
Valparaíso is sometimes nicknamed the South American San Francisco. That has nothing to do with the cost of living and everything to do with the way it soars up skyward out of the Atacama Trench, carrying the city’s elite on its back. Some of the roads winding up the side of the cerro seem almost vertical. I get the feeling living here would give you the lungs of an Inca and the thighs of a Georgian wrestler.
It’s up here on the heights that you’ll find the house of Pablo Neruda, Casa Museo La Sebastiana.
Neruda sure knew how to pick a spot. His five-storey house, which sometimes feels more like a tower than a villa, commands one of the clearest views of the Bahía del Valparaíso. On a clear day, you can probably see for miles, but even a shroud of yellowing cloud, you could see as far as the forested hills of La Campana and the snowy heights of the Andes beyond.
Neruda had his writing room built right at the pinnacle of his Valparaíso home, so that he could draw inspiration from the beauty of the world around him, whipped eternally by the Pacific winds.
He also seems to have loved maps, especially the older ones. There’s an genuinely incredible French map of the Americas by one Monsieur le Dauphin which I absolutely must track down, as it predates the discovery of Australia, with strange, half-finished coastlines fading into nothing at the southwestern edge of the map under the title “Terra Australis Incognita”.
People seem to treat this street with profound respect. Even the graffiti is cultured.
As if in answer to my post last night, I was surprised to find the street on which Neruda’s house stands, Calle Ricardo de Ferrari, covered in verses that weren’t taken from the Chilean poet’s vast anthology, but from his Andalusian friend, Lorca. Beautifully painted into tiles from an alfarería in Granada, Lorca’s verse follows you all the way down the road, perhaps as an ode to Neruda’s efforts in saving so many Spaniards during the Civil War and bringing them here to Valparaíso, far from the tyrannous grip of Francisco Franco.
Lorca lost his life under the fascist regime. So did my great-grandfather Mateo and all of his circle of writers and poets. It’s probably no great leap of the imagination that they might even have been in contact with Andalusia’s greatest poet, since they were all writing around the same time… and all snuffed out around the same time, too. Perhaps that’s why I feel a special connection to Lorca – and why finding him here in the Southern Hemisphere is so comforting.
I didn’t buy any of his books – I can’t recall which ones I have at home – but Neruda’s magic was already at work on me. As I climbed up to the fifth floor of his house, my ears suddenly popped. My Eustachian tubes have been blocked for nearly a fortnight since that false landing in Natales, which has been a real annoyance. Flying for fourteen hours across the Atlantic and half of South America shortly before probably didn’t help, but either way, it’s been an ever-present bother since I arrived here.
But suddenly, just like that, the fuzziness in my ear wasn’t so bad anymore.
Ok, so it’s still there, but it is very definitely better than it was. I feel like I can hear properly again.
To prove that point, I stumbled upon a family of firecrowns on the way back down into the city. This time it felt like I could hear their piercing trill out of both ears. One even let me get close enough to make up for not having the lens on me (I left it behind as it weighs quite a bit, and you can’t take bags into Neruda’s pokey house).
I’ll miss the hummingbirds when I go, just like I said when I was in Peru. There aren’t as many varieties of them here as there were in the Inca capital, but the firecrowns are everywhere: particularly, wherever anybody has been kind enough to plant red hot poker flowers, which they adore.
It’s still pretty overcast out there. I think I might grab some Peruvian food for lunch, as there are quite a few places nearby, and I fancy a reminder of the delicious bowls of salty seafood I had in Paracas. If I am going to eat, it had better be sooner rather than later. The bay may look calm, but out on the open ocean it is likely to be less Pacific than it looks.
Fingers crossed for an albatross tomorrow! I’d settle for just the one! BB x
Santiago de Chile may be cursed to be a smog-bound citadel for the rest of its days, but in one particular sense, it is exceptionally well-placed: it is about an hour’s drive up into the mountains to the east for skiing during the winter months, while a hour and a half’s drive to the west will take you to the Pacific coast. Santiago’s summer sisters, Valparaíso and Viña del Mar, may only be a hundred kilometres out as the condor flies, but they are a world away from the Chilean capital. In some ways, they are decidedly European: winding streets with towering Parisian buildings, complete with tramlines and traffic lights. In others, they are absolutely Latin American: a fiercely compact cultural melting pot, with Peruvian outposts everywhere.
With my timetable still very much up to me (consisting entirely of lesson observations at the moment), I struck out early for Valparaíso today, very much in the mindset that the part of town where the bus station is – or so the books all tell me – is no place to be after dark. It took me about three hours to get here, all in all, so had I waited until I had got home, it would be around half past nine here – which is definitely pushing it, even by my standards.
So here we are, in Valparaíso, Chile’s second city. With a population of around 300,000, it’s a little larger than the hamlet of 47 in La Mancha for which it was named.
Let’s be real. I’ve come here for two things: sea lions and Pablo Neruda. I’ve been juggling my choice of poet for the Language A course for a while, between Neruda – arguably Latin America’s greatest poet – and Lorca, who I hold in especially high regard. In the end, it is Lorca who has won the day, if only because I have studied him so much over the years (and, no doubt, because I have skin in the game by being part Andalusian myself). All the same, it would be a crime not to include Neruda in the course, so I plan to use his poems to prepare my students for the unseen.
Neruda, for now, must wait. I’ll have time for that tomorrow, after the pelagic expedition. I arrived too soon to check in, so I turned my feet east and followed the coastline as far as the twin piers of Caleta Portales.
I didn’t have to go far to get my sea lion fix. The main pier of Muelle Barón may be out while the city pours time and money into what looks to be a seafront shopping mall in the making, but the real show is a few hundred metres to the east, where the skeletal ruins of an old gas company dock has become one of the favoured haul-out sites for the city’s sea lions.
Alongside the sea lions, the structure is the perch of choice for a surprising number of seabirds, given its safe distance from the shore but proximity to the fisheries. I picked out kelp gulls, Inca terns, a couple of turkey vultures, Peruvian boobies, three species of cormorant and, of course, the Peruvian pelicans that I was hoping to see again.
I thought there might be something loose in my rucksack, as I kept hearing some kind of fabric shuffling sound, but to my astonishment a man in dirty overalls clambered out from among the boulders, seemingly from some crevice beneath the very rocks upon which I had been sitting for the better part of half an hour. He acknowledged me with a gravelly “wenodía”, set down his tatty red baseball cap to mark where he had slept and then picked his way across the rocks, crouching every so often to inspect something between the crevasses of the sea wall.
Valparaíso is a lot poorer than Santiago’s uptown districts like Las Condes. That much is plain.
Moving east, I had my eyes trained on the water, on the off chance that a wandering penguin might show up. I did spot one, a fair distance from the shore, but something else entirely caught my attention – something entirely unexpected.
A marine otter.
Marine otters – known in Chile as chungungos or gatos marinos (sea cats) are not sea otters, like the fluffballs found from Baja California up along the North American coast, but they do live almost exclusively in the sea, rarely venturing into freshwater like other otters. Like sea otters, marine otters were once hunted for their pelts and are thus an endangered species, and quite a rare sight along South America’s Pacific coast. So I really wasn’t expecting to see one here, in the very heart of Valparaíso.
Apparently, marine otters are specialist feeders according to their location, with southern populations preferring fish and northern populations opting for shellfish. This must be one of the northern otters, because in the fifteen minutes or so I spent watching it before it disappeared, it must have caught and eaten at least four small lobsters.
That makes two species of rare otter I have managed to find this year: giant otters in the Amazon and marine otters in the Pacific. And I still haven’t tracked down the otters that live in the Tone, just a stone’s throw from my flat! I’m sure they’ll show up eventually. Maybe I should make that my mission, before the year is out: to see a third and final species of otter, preferably before Christmas!
Not to be outdone, the pelicans put in a good show, sailing in low over the water in that spectacular flight pattern of theirs. I have wanted to see pelicans do this since my mother told me about it after her trip to Peru back in 2015, when I wanted to be just about anywhere but Amman, and I have had the incredibly good fortune to see that sight several times this year.
It’s not the stuff Attenborough documentaries are made of, for sure, and the good people of Valparaíso must see it all the time, but it is something I will never tire of seeing.
Eventually, I reached the busy fishing port of Caleta Portales. I reached it at absolutely the right time of day, too: around noon, the fishermen throw their bycatch back into the sea, loading the scraps into repurposed shopping trolleys and dumping them over the pier into the water below. The local wildlife is well aware of this daily bounty – and, thanks to a quick Google, so was I.
If you needed a clue that the drop was imminent, you only needed to count the pelicans. They had gathered in numbers so great I struggled to put a number to them – and pelicans are not small birds by any measure. They seemed to be perched upon every surface they could find: the sea wall, car roofs, billboards, shipping crates, stalls, bridges, lampposts and on the concrete among the fishermen themselves. After seeing them at a distance in Paracas, they were now far too close for my lens!
One small perk of being here now in midwinter is that some of the adults have started to put on their smarter summer plumage, with a smart yellow tinge to their more defined white faces.
I was already aware of the immense dark shapes in the shadow of the pier, but the appearance of the fisherman with his trolley worked like a magnet, drawing the dark mass along after him, following the overpowering stench of fish – or the sudden vortex of feathers and screeching gulls that followed in his wake.
With the seafood sloshed overboard, the shoreline turned into a frenzy of activity. It didn’t take me long to pick out the bull among the sea lions massing around the shoreline: he completely dwarfed all the others, and that’s saying something.
Forget the roly-poly dumplings that you find off the coast of Britain. Sea lions are an entirely different beast. Adult males can reach a whopping three metres in length and weigh in at around 325kg. They’re also fiercely territorial, as was plain enough from the deep scars on some of the males, including the old bull.
At that size – and at this distance – they were simply too big to get on camera. The 300mm would have been useful here, I think, but it’s sitting on top of my chest of drawers back home in Somerset. As such, I had to make do with portraits of the beasts that had hauled out onto the rocks to wait their turn while the bull ate the sea lion’s share of the bycatch.
At this range, of course, you can make out a lot of detail. The thickness of their whiskers. The sharpness of their teeth. The minuscule ears at the back of their heads, and the scars on their torsos.
One male was so close you could see the whites of his eyes twice over. His eyes seemed to have misted over. He must be very old for a sea lion to have contracted such an infection. I wonder how old? They can live to be around twenty years old in the wild, I think, so this one can’t be far off that mark.
Arguably prettier than the titans hogging the spotlight was a small family of Inca terns, waiting patiently for their chance to swoop in and seize some of the scraps for themselves. This is another species I travelled all the way out to the Islas Ballestas to see, only to find them so close here in Valparaíso that they might have been eating out of my hand.
Here, at least, the lens really did put in the yards.
I hung around the port for well over an hour before deciding it was probably time to head on back to Valparaíso, have a decent lunch and check in to my hostel. The skipper advised against having a large supper ahead of tomorrow’s ocean voyage, so I made a mental note to have a decent lunch instead, and acquire some snacks for the journey home.
It’s not the most scenic route back to Valparaíso from Caleta Portales. In places, the city seems to be collapsing into the sea, and where there isn’t the salty tang of the sea, there is the sweet stench of sweat, marijuana and human faeces. There’s a lot of homelessness here. All the carriages of a derelict train seemed very much lived-in, with signs of recent occupation all over the place: a bouquet of flowers tied to the grille, a washing line strung out in the gloom behind a window, and a dog waiting patiently on the step of the driver’s car. It’s probably more homely than the crevasses among the boulders below the sea wall, though I imagine it’s not much warmer.
The city never seems to catch a break. The Spanish blew the city to pieces in 1866 during the Chincha Islands War. Forty years later, in 1906, Valparaíso was ripped apart by an extremely violent earthquake – a fairly common occurrence in this part of the world, with the city sitting squarely upon the Nazca plate boundary. Apparently, there was a small one just a few days ago off Quintero, where I am headed tomorrow. It’s quite something, seeing the tsunami warning signs all over the place.
The captain has just told me that the boat needs a service tomorrow morning, so we have rescheduled. Weather permitting, we are going ahead on Sunday. That should make my journey home a bit easier. Even so, it is likely to be my most out-of-pocket adventure yet.
Tomorrow, then, is wide open. A whole day to explore Valparaíso! I’ll make sure it starts with a good sleep and a decent breakfast. Those sea lions had a proper feast today – I might as well do the same. BB x
Four days into my teacher exchange and I’m still blissfully without a timetable as such. As a matter of fact, that’s actually quite a relief – because I keep running into new opportunities every day, and it’s helpful to be able to say yes to everyone for a change.
Today I spent the entire day in the Senior division of the school, with the equivalent year groups 10-13 (1°-4° Medio by Chilean standards). I also got my eye in on a PAES class, a preparatory class for students preparing to sit the national exams required to enter Chile’s university system, which functions much like the “seventh term” that was once offered by some British schools for Oxbridge hopefuls.
It was a bloody useful class to watch. I even had a go at the paper myself, and got only one question wrong over a 30-minute assault of two reading comprehensions. It’s not that the chosen literary texts were hard – though I’ll admit there were some words I’d never encountered – but the questions were tricky with frustratingly similar choices of answers, and often required really careful reading to decide between two of a possible four.
For the record, the texts were El barco de vapor (which I’m sure I’ve come across somewhere) and El leve Pedro – in case I decide to use them myself as part of my Language A course design. Which I very probably will.
It’s raining again. My trips to South America seem to involve a lot of rain. Since I still have no timetable set in stone – and this is a very ad hoc exchange – I’m hoping to get away early tomorrow and make for the coast, as the weather is likely to be worse next weekend, and I will be off on my travels at the end of the last week – location TBC. For now, at least, the weekend looks like Valparaíso.
Provided the fog that is rolling in off the Pacific doesn’t come sooner than expected, Saturday will see me set out on a small ship into the Pacific Ocean in search of the only bird on the planet with a wingspan larger than a condor: the albatross. I expect the sea will be more than a little choppy, but I’ve always wanted to do a proper pelagic trip, and since the days of working one’s passage on ocean liners is well and truly dead and gone, this is the next best thing.
If the weather puts a stopper in my Pacific plans, there’s plenty to see and do in Valparaíso – including the city’s resident fur seals and its plethora of seafood options. It’ll also be good to get out of the capital for a bit. Host families are lovely and all that, but eight years of living on my own have made me into a very independent sort of creature.
Someday, somebody will shake me out of that. Maybe. For now, this social battery of mine needs the solace of the sea.
I’ll get back you once I get there. It’s a bit touch and go, but the best adventures always are. BB x
The Book of Barnabas 