Chilean Memories #2: Firecrown
Chilean Memories #1: Under a Cloud
End of the Line
Flight EZY2804 to Bristol, Somewhere over Greece. 13.08.
Inch by inch, mile by mile, the wild ride of the summer of ’26 is drawing to a close. Outside it’s approaching the high 30s again, but the fierce heatwave that has held the British Isles in its grip all summer is being swept away by the first cool winds of autumn. Over the last two months I’ve seen it all: scorching heat, howling blizzards, thunder, rain and snow; mist, fog and diamond dust. It seems only right that as my life settles back into some kind of order, the weather should follow suit.
It took just shy of two hours to get from the apartment to Eleftherios Airport, but I did add to the commute by walking to Syntagma Station via the National Garden. I didn’t want my last memory of Athens to be the air-conditioned carriage of the underground, and I needed a wake-up. A steady drip on the plastic roof over the patio beside the bedroom kept me up late last night, until I used a bit of science and drowned it out with a rain track, after which I fell asleep in seconds. Fun fact: the constant change from sound to silence in a steady leak triggers the body’s defence mechanisms, anticipating a threat for as long as the sounds continue to change. White noise, on the other hand, is far less threatening, no matter the volume. The signal wasn’t superb, so thank goodness somebody thought to upload several hours’ worth of rain recordings to Spotify – I wouldn’t have cared much for a YouTube ad waking me up every five minutes.
August is nearly over. Just over a week of summer remains – but it’s certainly been a summer to remember. I’m not sure I deserve even half of the miracles I’ve had the good fortune to witness since I stepped out of the door back in July with a backpack, a suitcase full of winter clothes and a smart new wedding suit – but I’m grateful for every single one of them.
It’s very easy to hit thirty-two and look around at your world with a rising sense of anxiety as everyone marries off and starts to lay down roots. Find them while you’re young, they say – and yet here you are, single and rootless. When will it be my turn, you catch yourself asking. But I think I’ve cracked it. The question you should be asking yourself is very different. Would the child I was look at me now and take heart?
I think he would. I haven’t found Her, but I have found my way back to the thing that made me happiest: the wild. If the eight-year-old me knew that in my thirties I’d be traveling the world in search of pumas, albatrosses and giant tortoises, I think he’d be ecstatic. Nobody could ever dream of replacing Sir David Attenborough or Valmik Thapir (or any of the great wildlife presenters of my childhood) but the fact that I get to live in the world they showed me when I was just a boy is the greatest gift of all.
What was the highlight of the summer? It’s such a difficult question. Dancing with Alex and Elena at their wedding? Teaching my first ever English Literature class? Celebrating Spain’s victory over Argentina in the World Cup Final? Swimming with turtles, sailing with albatrosses or watching a fully-grown mountain lion tread through the snow just feet away? Every one of them has been written upon my heart, which is now so very full. I thought my happiness was conditional upon finding my other half, wherever She may be, but this year I’ve learned to find it in myself by allowing me to be me, the way I always wanted to be.
September is always a bumpy landing. September brings Inset, the annual safeguarding talk that makes me question whether I believe in this job, and the return of a fresh-faced generation of students that remind me that I’m in the best line of work in the world. September will be familiar – I know what to expect – but this time, something feels different. I don’t think I’ve ever gone into the start of a new school year quite so positive. I just have a feeling that, finally, things are going my way.
Oh, for sure. There will be trials ahead. There always are. But I know I can face them head-on as a man, supercharged by a summer of light and life and animal encounters.
In many ways, I haven’t changed since I was eight. I’m still writing the same book about a a brave hero and a red-haired princess. I’m still listening to Juan Martín and Michael Jackson. I’m still singing in school choirs, dancing with every fibre of my being when the beat comes on and playing a passable passage on the violin when the occasion demands. I’ve added a few languages to my roster since then, changed my look a few times, and loved and lost and learned to live again – but fundamentally I still hold true to the same values I built up as a kid. Teaching has allowed me to hold onto these things, and for that much I am truly grateful.
England welcomed me home with golden fields and petty public transport pencil-pushers. The bus driver from Bristol wouldn’t let a girl on the bus because she didn’t have the right ticket and wasn’t helpful at all when she looked distressed, there being few other buses around on a Sunday afternoon. Three of us got up to help her out but the man in front got there first and bought her a single ticket. On top of that, I arrived just in time to catch an earlier train, but the man at the ticket barrier at Bristol Temple Meads wouldn’t let me through on account of the fact that my ticket was for an hour’s time – “you don’t need to be on the platform yet”. With two thirds of the southbound services cancelled, he was probably trying to stop me from using my Advance Single ticket on board an earlier train where there would almost certainly be no ticket checks… but really. I’m out of the country for nearly two months and the most trouble I have with public transport is back to back on the day I get home…? If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s jobs-worthiness, and we English are especially bad at it. When I manage to escape this country, that kind of behaviour will be top of the list of the reasons that drove me away.
Anyway. I’m home, in the familiar comfort of my flat, and July Me had the common sense to stock up so I’d have something to eat when I returned in case the supermarkets were closed – which, being a Sunday afternoon, they inevitably are. Just occasionally I surprise myself by planning ahead.
Here ends the Great Adventure of 2026. It’s been a blast. To those of you who have been reading my adventures, known and unknown, thank you for coming along for the ride! It’s nice to know I’m not always speaking into the void. I’ll write a little less when term kicks off, but do stick around for the next adventure – whenever that may be! BB x
Grand Tour
Smile Restaurant, Athens. 20.02.
I was half-tempted to go to bed without eating this evening, but after walking past a sign in a shop window saying LOOK AFTER YOURSELF in big white print and then seeing a team of chefs preparing sea bass in the next window along, my instincts got the better of me. Chances are this will be my last meal out of the summer, so I might as well make it a memorable one.
I got to bed shortly after six fifteen, after Thomas and Maria dropped me off at the apartment. The wedding festivities went on until well into the early hours of the morning, with the last of the dances wrapping up around half three. Alex, Peter and company enjoyed a few Cuban cigars, blowing liquid smoke rings into the night sky, while the venue staff slowly started to pack up. There was talk of a swim to cool off – had I brought my swimsuit? No, I hadn’t! But that didn’t seem to be a problem. A short pit-stop at Elena’s parents’ house sourced me a pair of trunks and then we found a parking space down by the beach.
Naturally, at half past four in the morning, it was nearly deserted. Just a couple of Greeks listening to trap music over a boombox and a lonely soul sitting on the breakwater and watching the stars.
I’ve never done a night swim before – at least, not in the Mediterranean. I might have gone for a dip after dark with Lucy and Emily many years ago in the summer I left school, but those memories are hazy now – and the cold waters of Whitstable are incomparable to the Aegean. It felt like stepping into a bath. The water was so clean and so clear that I could see all the details of my toes and the ripples in the sand below by the distant lights of the beachfront alone.
My mother used to tell me stories of starlight swimming in the Mediterranean in Barcelona back in the 80s. I’ve clearly been missing out. These beaches are absolutely rammed during the day, but by night you pretty much have the place to yourself, and the water is only slightly less warm. To the Greeks, perhaps, it might have been tepid, but after the chill of the North Sea and the cool waters of the Humboldt Current, it felt incredible. I didn’t feel in the least bit tired, either, though that may have more to do with the fact that I’m almost certainly still on South American time rather than the restorative properties of the Mediterranean Sea.
I slept until noon and waited out the heat of the midday sun in the cool of the apartment. I ummed and ahhed about going up to the Acropolis and ultimately decided I’d be mad to be in Athens and not see its most iconic feature up close. Missing Machu Picchu was… a choice, I’ll admit. But Machu Picchu costs hundreds to see, whereas the Acropolis is a flat 30€. So I packed a bottle of water and set out into the afternoon.
Athens is very quiet around four in the afternoon in August. Most of the city folk are sensibly avoiding the lingering heat. It’s only when you reach Makrigianni Street and the Acropolis Museum that the city suddenly springs to life – with tourists, that is. Germans with peaked caps. Koreans with parasols. Spaniards with GoPros and Americans with sweat-stained XXL tee-shirts and portable fans. All of them defying the 37°C heat to see one of the most famous architectural treasures in the world.
You have to meet your timeslot with these Acropolis tickets, but once you’re in, you can spend as long as you like in the area. The city seems to descend en masse shortly before sunset around 7pm – the lines were immense as I left – so I wouldn’t recommend leaving your visit to the last minute.
With time on my hands, I hunted for cicadas in the olive trees along the path. It wasn’t hard. Once you get your eye in, they’re very easy to spot, despite their cryptic camouflage. You just need to listen closely and look for the little white stripe at the bottom of their abdomen.
Check the trunks from different angles at first as your eyes adjust, because they really can disappear against the surface of the bark. Once you recognise the white stripe, you’ll see them everywhere. I found four on a single trunk by the Sanctuary of Dionysus.
It can be hard to find peace and quiet within the Acropolis complex, as its swarms with tourists at almost all hours of the day. But there are quieter spots. Curiously, the Erechtheion doesn’t get as crowded, despite being directly opposite the Parthenon itself. I suspect many tourists only go up to the great temple itself and then come straight back down.
An olive tree grows in its ruins, in the same spot where the sacred tree that was the symbol of Athena’s gift to her namesake city once stood. A couple of Americans called it a cicada (sick-aider) tree when asked. Two others said they were glad they’d got ChatGPT to give them the lowdown so they didn’t have to hire a guide. I even heard one family – specifically the adults – opine that the only way they could have got a crane inside the Parthenon was by airlifting it into the centre by jet.
Sometimes – just sometimes – I’m extremely grateful that my American adventure ended in heartbreak. Some of the most intelligent people I’ve had the fortune to encounter are from the States, it’s true, but also, some of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard have been said in that American drawl.
I’m always terribly conscious that I’m just another tourist with a smartphone in places like this, so I sat in the shadow of one of the Parthenon’s colossal columns and sketched the temple ruins in my journal. I’d like to think somebody might have sat here doing just that a hundred years ago, and perhaps a hundred years before that, in the time of the Grand Tour, before Apple put a camera into every hand on the planet.
That being said, it is a fantastic place for people watching. So many different people from so many different parts of the world… You could come up here with a sketchbook and spend hours drawing, if you had the time.
The internet seemed to think that wild tortoises might be found around the boulder-strewn path up to the Eptathrono, just opposite the Acropolis. I looked everywhere, but I didn’t find any. I guess I lucked out with the giant tortoises last week, which are – admittedly – a heck of a lot easier to spot. Still – you should always leave something to come back for, right? The view from the top was worth the climb, too.
I’ve made it back to the apartment and have managed to put my feet up at last. I’m quite happy with this afternoon’s adventure. This time tomorrow – for the first time in nearly two months – I’ll be back home in Somerset. All good things come to an end eventually, right? But not before their time – and it really has been a truly wonderful time. The very best of times.
I might post once more tomorrow to hit a 50-day streak. It’s been fun writing every day all summer, but it does help when you have something to write about.
See you in the UK! BB x
Guest of Honour
Lake Vouliagmeni, Athens. 22.10.
I’ve been to a couple of weddings in my thirty-two years – one intimate, one magnificent – but I’ve never been to one quite like this. The backdrop is totally different. No Ed Sheeran, no Pharrell Williams, no Walk the Moon. Instead, the haunting double-reeded hum of a zurna floating over the hypnotic beat of a daouli drum. Cicadas screeching in an almost perfect polyrhythm. Every now and then, an enormous praying mantis – known to the Greeks as the Virgin Mary’s little horse – flutters past the blue lights, casting a fleeting shadow over the dancefloor.
I did always love a ceilidh, but this is something very different. It feels… older, somehow.
The festivities started last night, with a motorcade ride to the bride’s house to dance by the light of a scarlet flare. Summoned by the revving of no less than six motorbike engines, the bride and her family came down into the street to dance with the groom, his brother and Peter, a colourful character from Naxos. It was only a flying visit – some lingering tradition of not spending too much time with the bride the night before the wedding, perhaps – and after the dances were over and the flares were used up we rode back home.
I spent the morning recovering lost sleep (I’m still adjusting to European time) and made it over to Alex’s flat just after three o’clock in the afternoon – in perfect time to catch the ritual shaving of the groom. There seem to be all sorts of traditions to a Greek wedding. As one of the guests of honour, I had to offer him one of his wedding shoes, while his parents set his suit upon his shoulders.
Alex is something of a motorhead, so a motorcade was waiting once again as we set out for the wedding. Each motorcycle had a white ribbon trailing from the handlebars, but the jewel in the crown was a shining scarlet Cadillac hired out for the occasion. Alex insisted I sit in the front, so I had front row seats – quite literally – to the wedding procession as it sped down the highway through central Athens and beyond to the coast.
Alex and Elena chose a beautiful little chapel on a forested hill at the southernmost point of Glyfada. The priest – a young man, but the perfect caricature of an Eastern Orthodox saint – arrived dressed all in blue and smoking a cigarette, but for the ceremony he reappeared in black and gold.
The Greeks seem far more interested in the ritual over the written word: there don’t appear to be many speeches at all in these proceedings, beyond the magic of the Orthodox ceremony itself – which is sung almost in its entirety. No hymns, no readings from the family and friends, no sermon. Just the magic of tradition.
The celebration is taking place just a few minutes away by the shore of Lake Vouliagmeni, under the illuminated walls of a great limestone cliff. The music is predominantly Greek – only every so often does an English or Spanish song slip through the cracks. It feels like being back in the Middle East – a reminder that, in spite of the apparent universality of English, our dominion extends only so far as our influence. Here, as in Jordan, Morocco and Spain, there is a fierce devotion to the ways things were.
In our rush to become a cosmopolitan country, I sometimes feel we lost some of this magic back home in England.
I have no idea what my wedding would look like, because – frankly – I have no idea where I will be. I have dated an Afrikaner, a Pole, a Brazilian, an English girl, an Iraqi and an American – each a different nationality, with radically different perspectives on the future. I suppose I’d like something traditional – being an incorrigible romantic at heart – but until she appears, I remain open to seeing where the winds of fate carry me.
The only thing I know for certain is that, if and when my time comes, it will not be in England. Somehow I’ve always known.
If it could be even half of what I’ve been a part of today, it would be the wedding of my dreams.
Friendship in the old mould. The kind you read about in books. In the decade we’ve known each other, Alex and I have seen each other four times. Once, when we worked together for a couple of weeks at a summer school many years ago. Twice, when he was in London for a show last year. Three times, when he flew out to London with Elena to invite me to the wedding, and here we are at number four. Friendships that survive time, distance and the silence of working life are the most precious of all.
I have already had the most incredible summer of my life, but this just puts a seal on the whole thing. There’s not a day of the last seven weeks that I wouldn’t relive. And you know what? After eight years shut away in a boarding school, I think I’ve earned it.
Here’s to the summer of 2026. A red letter year in every possible way. May it be the first of many more to come. BB x
Boundaries
Gatwick Airport South Terminal, England. 11.19.
I’m on my way to Athens to celebrate with an old friend who is tying the knot with his long-time partner in a beautiful ceremony in a chapel that looks out over the Aegean Sea. I should be ecstatic but I’m feeling downhearted at the moment on account of the GCSE results. They weren’t shoddy, by any stretch, but they were way off what we hoped they’d be – and it all comes down to the grade boundaries.
It’s got me thinking a lot about how we treat languages in the UK.
Back in 2006, an article by the BBC reported that the study of foreign languages had reached the “point of no return”. Only two years prior, Tony Blair’s Labour government had taken the decision to make MFL non-compulsory post-14, after which thousands of students elected to ditch French, Spanish and German from their curricula. While Spanish has seen a decent recovery from the initial “freefall” recorded – bouncing back from 62.413 in 2006 to 132.680 in 2026 – German has been less fortunate, continuing to decline in popularity nationwide: the relatively healthy 90.311 studying German in 2006 have been whittled down to 32.525 this summer. Some schools are now considering whether it is economically viable to continue to offer languages, which command smaller and smaller classes by the year. Northern Ireland is thinking of scrapping the study of German altogether.
As a language teacher, I naturally don’t like where this is going. What makes things worse, however, are the barriers within the surviving MFL syllabi. There are a number of factors blighting the study of languages that aren’t helping us to promote them in lieu of the flashier, brash-ier and cash–ier subjects like Economics and Business Studies.
The MFL GCSEs are a mixed bag. Sometimes they feel formulaic and predictable. At others they can be surprisingly progressive, asking candidates to describe a photograph about sports where half the players on a basketball court are in wheelchairs, or a family scene showing a same-sex couple and an adopted child of a totally different ethnicity. This year’s Listening dictation task in the Pearson Edexcel features the infamous “Ma petite sœur est bisexuelle”, read by a childlike voice that really threw my students, who might well have spent the two repeats wondering how and why a little girl would have already decided to self-identify as bisexual – and in the middle of their GCSE exam, no less. I’m glad we’re on the frontier of pushing positive representation, but I can imagine the response in the nation’s more conservative Muslim students and their families.
Recruiting for A Level is an uphill task with or without the competition from maths and the three sciences – especially with Further Maths elbowing a fourth subject out of the picture so often – since MFL A Levels can be fiendishly hard, relying more on the candidate’s ability to retain a vast breadth of knowledge both historical, political and literary in both spoken and written formats. Add to that the sky-high grade boundaries driven at least in part by the large number of native speakers who take the subject for an easy A and you have a whole host of reasons why students think twice about studying languages. They’re definitely a hard A Level, I’m not about to deny that, but if we don’t get the numbers, we run the risk of leading our country and its children into even more of a monolingual and inward-facing nightmare than the one we’re already weaving, spurred on by the global ill-sentiment toward the ongoing refugee crisis and the perceived erosion of our national identity.
I’m not sure what to suggest. I do what I can to make learning languages as fun and inclusive as possible. I’m sure I’m not the best at what I do – especially since I’ve always seen languages as a pathway to meeting people and telling stories, rather than finding any particular joy in their acquisition for its own sake – but I work hard together with my colleagues year on year to try and convince our students that speaking a second language competently (that is, post-GCSE) is an increasingly rare gift among the English which will take them so far.
I might use this trip of mine as an example. For the first time in a long time, I’m going to be completely at sea. I might be able to speak seven languages with varying degrees of fluency, but I don’t speak a word of Greek. I’m so used to being able to muscle in and go native in Spanish, French and Italian that suddenly finding myself in a situation where I can’t manage much more than thank you and goodbye is extremely disorienting. Sure, I could speak English at them and expect to be understood – but that just strikes me as rude at best and colonial at worst.
I’m tuning in, slowly, but it’s hard from zero. Alex is my host, but he’s the one getting married, so I can’t expect him to spend his weekend translating for me. There’s so much I’d love to do. I’d love to know what Petros from Naxos is recounting, since he seems to have a raft of stories with proper Greek gusto. I’m dying to know what Alex’s brother is saying when he’s clearly running through some of the steps for the dances. I’d like to ask Alex who the girl is with the smile of an angel in the corner of the room. But I can’t do any of these things, because I can’t speak Greek.
Monolingualism is an enormous handicap. Even a capable linguist should remind themselves of the gift they have earned by putting themselves in a position where they are truly lost every so often, if only as a reminder of how precious the ability to move from one language to another really is.
I’ll paraphrase the above for my students when I get back. Whatever it takes to buck the national trend and fight the death of MFL, I’ll do it. I just wish we’d been given a fair idea of the new spec grade boundaries a year ago, so our students knew just how much harder they had to work to get what they deserved.
My body clock is all over the place. Three hours ago I was in the UK, two hours behind Greece – but five hours ahead of Chile, and seven hours ahead of the Galápagos Islands, where I was until Saturday. Little wonder I’m having trouble sleeping.
I’ll report on tonight’s events together with tomorrow’s in one big fat Greek wedding post. I just thought I’d sandwich my thoughts on languages into my funk over the grades.
It’s gone two in the morning, which is approaching my usual bedtime in the UK, but probably only halfway through tomorrow night’s festivities which are due to go on until the dawn. I’d better try to get some sleep tonight at least. BB x
Dry Country
Hartley Wintney, England. 22.20.
I left the UK for Chile at the end of the first week of July, just as the heat wave was ramping up and the first fires were breaking out. When my plane touched down at Gatwick yesterday, it was through the first rain clouds the country had seen since June. Like the first snows of Patagonia, I arrived just in time to catch the changing of the seasons.
What a change it’s been here, though. I’ve never seen England so dry. Dying trees. Trickling streams. Empty ponds. Parks and gardens a shade of yellow that would be more at home in a Van Gogh painting. Chile gets ravaged by the heat in summer as well, but at least they are ready for it when it comes. We even closed the schools back in June, it got so bad – and that takes some doing. We don’t even close for snow these days.
I dread to think of the impact this terrible drought will have had on the wildlife of these British islands – though I know it’s a pretty established truth that life always finds a way.
Like this little vole, snacking on some birdseed. I never did find its larger Chilean cousins, the vizcacha and the chinchilla, though I’m fairly certain I did see one of the rare rice rats during my trip to the Galápagos last week. I’ll have to try again someday – if I can ever take my eyes off those endless South American skies.
No condors here, sadly, but the local population of buzzards and red kites are a perfectly adequate substitute. I only saw the kites a couple of times today, but the buzzard was around a fair bit. Maybe he was looking for the vole? I can’t imagine it would be anything more than a snack for something as big as a buzzard, although at this time of year the hunter may have chicks to feed somewhere in the forest.
Tomorrow – Athens! The last mad adventure of the summer. My wedding suit is packed and I’m traveling ever so light, since I’ve decided to leave the camera behind this time and go all in on the personal side of the city. After all, I’m going out there to see an old friend tie the knot, not as a tourist. From what I’ve heard of Greek weddings, I’d be mightily surprised if I have the energy to do anything the day after, let alone during the early hours of the morning.
See you on the other side! BB x
Gone with the Wind
Flight IB0114, somewhere off the west coast of Morocco. 14.01.
For a twelve hour flight, my return journey from Santiago was a lot better than my flight out nearly six weeks ago. My attempt to walk back to Las Condes (ultimately foiled at the unassailable Cruce del Autopista Costanera Norte) had one important side-effect, besides giving me one last Chilean wildlife adventure: it left me absolutely shattered by the time I got into my Uber for the airport. I nearly fell asleep several times in the cab, so when I finally boarded the plane at around half past ten, it wasn’t hard to get some shut-eye, despite having an assigned aisle seat one row from the back of the plane.
Well – I suppose that’s not strictly true. I fought hard to stay awake for the first hour for the sake of supper, but that turned out to be a wasted vigil. Shortly after crossing the Andes, we hit the most terrifying turbulence I have ever experienced on a flight somewhere over Argentina. For all of forty minutes, the plane bucked and rocked like a horse in a rodeo, sending terrifying shockwaves down the aisle and dismantling the dinner service in quite a startling fashion before it had even got going.
I suppose they cancelled supper because by the time we’d got clear of the winds, most of the meals had gone cold. Either way, beyond the very Hispanic juice club forming at the back of the plane, there was no catering for almost the eternity of the flight.
Fortunately, I wasn’t conscious for almost the entirety of the flight, either. I must have slept for at least seven hours, which has got to be a personal record. It helps that I managed to freeze my telescreen by accident only two hours into the flight, preventing me from watching any more movies. The map service on these Iberia flights looks extremely high hi-tech… too much for my poor telescreen. The best I got out of it was an old favourite: Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas.
If you think that’s a childish thing to watch, the businessman on my right spent the latter half of the flight playing Angry Birds.
Before that, he watched all three of the Star Wars sequel films back to back, which I caught snatches of as I drifted in and out of sleep. I only saw the first of them in the cinema when it was released and promptly gave up on them after seeing the hackneyed cash grab that was The Force Awakens. By the looks of things, I didn’t miss out on the last two. What I saw of The Rise of Skywalker was genuinely the most contrived and confusing plot I think I have ever seen. The original Star Wars films didn’t exactly have the most intriguing dialogue, but it did have heart, a clear plot and – most importantly – originality.
Whatever happened to the movie industry? When did profit, special effects and live-action remakes become more important than a good story? I hope we can break free of this creative wasteland we’ve been in for the last decade and more.
That looks like breakfast making its way down the aisle. I hope it finds its way back to row 52 before we land in an hour’s time – I’m famished! BB x
Coyote
Aeropuerto Internacional Arturo Merino Benítez, Santiago de Chile. 18.40.
Farewells made. Suitcase packed. Rucksack slimmed down to my journal, my camera and a couple of charging devices. Now I’m just waiting in the long line to check in my hold luggage and then – after the inevitable hurdle over my exhaustive middle names – we’re good to go.
With such a late departure, I had time to say a few last goodbyes, so I accompanied Tomás to school for the last time on this trip and sought out Byron, the man behind this whole Chilean exchange idea. I’d managed to miss him on my last day, and I wasn’t about to leave the country without saying thank you to the man who made it all possible.
With that and a few other farewells taken care of, I was done by eleven, so rather than hanging around all day I decided to walk back to Las Condes. The sun was shining, I had my camera on me (just in case) and I thought I’d try to snap some of the birds I’ve seen every day at work but never managed to get on film. I’m pretty sure I want to come back and see Chile again someday, so it’s not the end of the world if I leave a few unfinished tasks, but I did want to seize the chance while the sun was shining. It’s been a rare sight during my stay!
First up: the diuca! This charming slate-grey Chilean chaffinch substitute has been an ever-present companion at work but hard to find beyond the hills around Craighouse, so I’m really happy I managed to find one on the walk down from the school! It’s been bugging me that they’ve been at an arm’s length all the time at school but never when I had my camera on me.
Also: the austral blackbird! No relation to the blackbirds of English parks and gardens, this tremendously noisy South American specialty has been, together with the austral thrush and the meadowlark, part of the soundscape of my morning commute to work.
I saw a few lapwings on the way through the fancier suburbs of Lo Barnechea, but too high up or too far to bother taking the lens out. They still remind me of enormous bats with their bouncy flight, but just like their cousins in England, they’re utterly fearless and will attack anything they perceive as a threat. I’ve even seen them take on buzzard-eagles, which are the second largest creatures of the Andean sky after the condor.
Of course, I couldn’t leave without saying goodbye to the mockingbirds. I’ve become especially fond of these extremely characterful creatures, who have been with me from Patagonia to Santiago and even as far as the Galápagos. If I had a house with a garden here in Santiago, I swear I’d try to tame one – and I don’t think it would take an awful lot of effort, either.
Equally, I wouldn’t dream of leaving Chile without saying goodbye to the Lord of the Andes. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. I took a short walk up the slope of Manquehue to see how far I could go, and as I neared the limit (there’s a fence cutting off the road), three condors came soaring into view over its summit. At times they were so close I could see the royal white flush on the upper parts of their mighty wings.
I didn’t take too many photos. I was just happy to watch them for a while.
I have to admit – and this will come as no surprise to anyone who has been following my adventures – this has been the happiest summer of my life. I can’t remember a time when I’ve felt so alive. That’s especially noteworthy because the seemingly endless summer holiday is usually one of the lowest points of the year for me, made tolerable only by dedicating as much of it as I can afford to walking the Camino de Santiago. For those outside the teaching profession, it might seem incredibly ungrateful to bemoan the concept of a nine-week holiday, but for me, it has always gone on far too long.
This summer has been different. Every day has been full of light and wonder, even when it kicked up a blizzard or sent down a thunderstorm. Many years of hard work and boarding school-induced savings have finally given me the chance to do what I could only dream of as a child: to see so much of South America and its incredible wildlife. Sometimes I think I have been mad to shut myself away in a seven-days-a-week job for almost all of my twenties, but if this is what it was building towards… it was worth every lost weekend. Every single one.
On my way back down from Manquehue I saw something coming up the road towards me that I had not expected to see at all: a culpeo. This South American relative of the coyote is only a little larger than a fox, but has something more of the wolf in its face than the bin-raiding reds of London.
And it was trotting up the pavement right towards me, in broad daylight, in a perfectly twee corner of suburban Santiago, without a care in the world.
After a whole week in the Galápagos, where mammals larger than rats are nonexistent, I wasn’t expecting my final South American animal encounter to be anything but the feathered kind. I certainly wasn’t expecting a miniature coyote.
I’ve been bewitched by wolves since my adventures in the frozen forest of Białowieza National Park in Poland two years ago. I’ve still got my eye on another wolf-tracking expedition – this time in Italy – but to see one of their relatives so incredibly close is just one more reminder of how spectacular even the everyday encounters with wildlife in this country can be.
Dammit, not just this country. This whole damn continent.
Traditionally, crossing paths with a fox was considered a bad omen in the Andes. But I don’t see it that way. I’m more inclined to agree with the Japanese, who once revered foxes as auspicious spirits and messengers of the fertility god Inari. In short, like a black cat, they can either be portents of good or ill luck, depending on your point of view.
Fur of gold and silver, eyes of honey brown and feet as silent as the night. How could such a spirit possibly be anything but a good omen?
I had 11.000 Chilean pesos in cash left over in my wallet, so I bought myself a fried chicken sandwich and a pain au chocolat to keep the wolf from the door. After all, in all of my minesweeping adventures around Manquehue today, I completely forgot to have lunch.
The way I see it, a man like me could fall in love with a country like this every single day and lose nothing in the repeated magic of that first infatuation.
I am decided. I have got to come back. I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but I will make it happen. I may need to save up again after the fauna fantasia of this summer, but when it comes around, I want to embrace it all over again.
Happiness like I haven’t known in years. More wildlife than I know what to do with. Mountains that make my heart soar. Condors that make my heart race. And speaking Spanish every day, which keeps my heart beating. Chile has done a number on me and I’m all for it. Honestly – can you blame me? BB x
Las Condes Again
Las Condes, Santiago de Chile. 17.28.
I’m getting better at sleeping on planes. I must have slept for at least half of the flight from Lima to Santiago, because I remember almost none of it – only the first half hour or so and then a period of ten minutes at some point around half past two in the morning when they served out the in-flight snacks. Even so, the Santiago side of things passed by in a zombie-like blur. I navigated customs and an Uber relatively easily, but after letting myself back into the flat around six in the morning and using the last of my reserves for a desperately needed shave, I tumbled into bed and didn’t wake up again until half past twelve.
I’d suggest that that’s the last time I try to tackle multiple flights across three countries, but that’s exactly what tomorrow’s journey home entails, and I know myself too well to accept that I’d eat my words sooner or later.
What a difference a year makes! South America has gone from being a location on a map that cropped up from time to time in texts we study in class to home in all but name for the last five weeks. By the time I leave tomorrow night, I’ll have totalled nearly six weeks here. That’s half a school term. In my book, four weeks is the cut-off point, beyond which a location stops feeling like a holiday and starts to take on the trappings of a place one can legitimately claim to have lived. While I haven’t spent all six weeks in the Central Valley, Santiago has definitely become as familiar a base as Amman and Tetouan once were, many years ago.
There are many aspects that are still alien. The distance. The exchange rate. The American-style grid system of South American towns. the national insistence on tacking cachai to the end of every single sentence, whether it needed confirmation or not. But I feel I’m getting the hang of the accent, the majority of the modismos (the extremely widespread Chilean slang) and what it might be like to live here for the locals. Lucky them!
It sure is chilly here, though. I haven’t missed the uncomfortable heat I left behind in England back in that first week of July (which, I believe, is still there, outstaying its welcome by well over two months) but I could do with being somewhere warmer for a while. Bouncing from 7°C in Santiago to 37°C in Athens on Friday will be a proper shock to the system, but I’ll have my hands full with this Greek wedding for the ages, so I suppose I’ll manage.
I want to remember this soundscape though. The pitter-patter of dog feet on the laminate flooring. The distant whine of one of Tomás’ sisters blowdrying their hair. The whirring radiator in my room, doing its best to heat up the place. The alarm call of an austral thrush. The faraway engine of one of the many micros plying Avenida Las Condes. Otherwise, the remarkable quiet of Chile’s capital city. Santiago is a very special place.
Popping back into school one last time tomorrow to say a few farewells I didn’t get the chance to make last Friday and to wrap things up with a neat little bow, insofar as I can. And then – home! I could do with a rest. BB x
