Chilean Memories #9: Snowy Sunset
Chile
Chilean Memories #7: Sea Lions
Chilean Memories #4: Fire and Ice
Chilean Memories #2: Firecrown
Chilean Memories #1: Under a Cloud
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
Hasta la Vista, Mister
Aeropuerto Arturo Merino Benítez, Santiago de Chile. 23.23.
Three weeks at Craighouse School have come and gone in the blink of an eye. In that time I have seen and done all sorts of career-boosting things. I have observed Maths, English, Spanish and French classes, as well as a number of department meetings: sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish. I have taught the basics of French conjugation with -ER verbs, folktales from England, the Basque Country and the Middle East for a middle school kamishibai project and Augustinian theology within an exploration of good and evil in Othello. I have moderated an extended essay, taken part in an MUN debate on the two state solution, discovered that what I have only dreamed of doing for years – teaching English Literature – is well within my capabilities… and I have made some friends for life out here.
I think one of the reasons I avoided anything and everything to do with Latin America at university was because I wasn’t ready yet. I should have known that, having lost my heart to an American once already, I would be drawn back across the Atlantic like a moth to a flame. It’s not the light – it’s the warmth. The warmth of the people here. I have barely begun to scratch the surface of this country.
First things first – my Othello lesson was a triumph. After dropping in on a couple of Y12 classes and offering my take on Carol Ann Duffy and the religious context behind Shakespeare’s work, I was told that the senior deputy head and former head of English wanted to see me teach. Teaching a forty-five minute French lesson that I’ve taught for years is one thing. Teaching a ninety minute class on hardcore morality ethics, Protestant ideology and social context within one of Shakespeare’s weightier plays is another matter entirely.
Lucky for me, I had a bloody good teacher back in my schooldays, and a quick refresher last week was enough to remind me that I had forgotten very little of what I was taught, even across a distance of fourteen years. I’ve also been gearing up to teach Othello myself as part of the Spanish Language A course, so I was not unprepared. Still. No pressure.
I’ve got to hand it to the kids. They might have only been a standard level class, but they handled the higher level material extremely well. When I circulated as they were practising a Paper 2-style comparative task, I had some really enlightening conversations. So many great questions, so many bright ideas. I was really proud of them. Ninety minutes seemed like a tall order when I turned in around eleven o’clock last night, but it was over far too soon.
I spent the afternoon wrapping up. Signing out of all my accounts on the school laptop. Handing back the IB Language books I’d borrowed. Switching out my teaching boots for hiking shoes. I dropped in on the middle school Lenguaje department to say goodbye and had it corrected to a see you soon. Hispanics don’t do goodbyes. Much too final.
One final and unexpected resident of the English department hung around to see me off: the mockingbird that has been hanging around the office for the last couple of weeks. Somebody had left the door open so it had popped inside to see if there was anything edible. After a small circuit I managed to guide it back outside. They’re extremely characterful creatures, mockingbirds. I hope to see more of them where I’m going next. It’s a place where they made history. Natural history, that is.
To close out my time here, Alfredo (the head of English) took me and a couple of colleagues out to dinner at Baco, a swish restaurant in upmarket Providencia. It felt like I’d been part of the team for a year, rather than a week. Chileans may have more in common with the Basques than the Andalusians, but they’re an incredibly warm and honest people.
I’d say that’s that, but I’ve got to come back to Santiago to pick up my suitcase and catch my flight home in nine days’ time, so I’m not quite done with Santiago yet. But now I’m sitting in the departures lounge of Santiago’s Arturo Merino Benítez airport, absolutely buzzing about the last great adventure on my South American odyssey. It’s been an amazing month so far, full of unforgettable wildlife encounters and exceptionally warm people. This will just put a seal on the whole thing.
Or maybe even a sea lion… BB x
Anagnorisis
Las Condes, Santiago de Chile. 19.22.
How do I describe what I’m feeling right now? I’m not sure. So I’ll do my best to reason my thoughts as I write. That’s what this whole blog exercise is for, after all, right? To throw down all the scattered puzzle pieces in my head so that they make a lot more sense on paper. That’s the idea behind it, anyway.
It’s like this. I’ve spent the last ten years of my life teaching foreign languages: English, Spanish, French, Arabic and even Italian. I do it because it’s what my degree was all about, primarily, but also because I have a pretty good ear and, frankly, I’m pretty good at it. In the last five years – after I’d earned my stripes – I’ve started teaching more and more literature, first through the Spanish Language B section of the International Baccalaureate Diploma, then as a fundamental part of the A Level course for both French and Spanish. The further I get into my teaching career, the more I hunger for the literary side of the course, genuinely revelling in the exploration of theme, character, identity and authorial philosophy. I love teaching the little ones, too – it’s immensely entertaining to go from discussing the corruption of the soul in French to learning Spanish phonics with various animals within the space of an hour – but every year I feel myself drawn ever closer into the literature.
Here in Chile, for the first time since my schooldays, I’ve had the freedom to teach English Literature as though it were my alma mater. It feels as natural as breathing. It helps that I have being using the same skills for years now to deliver the literature aspects of the French and Spanish courses, but… there is something more to it. This feels… right, somehow. Like this is what I was meant to be doing all along. And I’m feeling very conflicted about this.
I shouldn’t. This was always the plan – to move back to Spain and teach English Literature, if I could. But it is never going to happen in the UK. Never. I wouldn’t be allowed to cross over because of a lack of subject expertise and experience, no matter how much I point to my long years teaching literary analysis in another language. Similarly, it’s tremendously unlikely I’d be hired as a Spanish Language and Literature teacher in Spain, for which I am arguably more qualified, because why on earth would you hire a foreigner who has acquired your language from scratch to teach it to children when there are so many native speakers who are far better equipped to do so?
In short, my qualifications and my intentions simply do not add up. I did Spanish at university because I wanted to move back to Spain, but because my profession is teaching – a career path from which I will not stray on principle – I find myself stuck, unable to break into the Spanish education system as easily as mother did with music. I know what I want to do, but the barriers are all around me.
It’s frustrating – and yet the impression I get out here, in a school built upon the IB core philosophy of the universality of thought, is that none of that matters. Where I came from, what credentials I hold, what language I use from day to day. The only thing that matters is a passion for literature and for inquiry, wherever that takes me.
We could learn a lot from this system. Rather, I could learn a lot from it. The only question is, does Spain have anywhere that follows the same philosophy? That really would be the dream, if I could only track it down.
The sun has been out all day. Only now, in the last moments of the evening, has a thin carpet of cloud been pulled up as though to tuck it into bed. This would be only the third day of sunshine I have had since arriving in Chile, now four weeks ago to the day. So I have come up to the top of Observatory Hill to watch the sunset lay its Midas touch upon the Andes, perhaps for the last time, and think about the future.
Tomorrow, one last class of Othello – a proper hour and a half’s marathon on morality and ethics, Augustinian philosophy and Paper 2 preparation – and then it’s over. This strange exchange with Chile that was never on the cards until suddenly it was. I hope I leave a good impression.
And after that… somewhere completely different. Somewhere I have wanted to go since I was six years old. Somewhere… enchanted, even. BB x
AI Agencies Ltd.
Lo Barnechea, Santiago de Chile. 15.00.
Today has been a bit more of an admin day. One of my activities for next week fell through, so I spent a fair part of this morning re-arranging my plans with a couple of other agencies to keep my itinerary as close to the original as possible. It hasn’t been easy. I’ve been leaning heavily on AI, not as a lesson planner, but as a travel agent, and I have to be honest, I fear for the travel industry. ChatGPT and Copilot may need gentle nudging and correcting as they work, but they do a phenomenal job at trawling the net for deals, dates and travellers’ tales from TripAdvisor, Reddit and beyond.
I’m not the biggest fan of AI, but as an impartial entity to bounce ideas off, it’s an absolute doozy. It has really helped me to streamline my plans, keeping them within a very reasonable budget – especially important as my choice of location is not exactly famous for being a budget destination. I do often have to correct its mistakes, which is why I would caution any students of mine from meddling with it unless it’s on terms they understand – good advice for just about anything unknown – but as a rule it does a pretty good job at doing the heavy lifting.
I genuinely can’t wait – I’m practically chomping at the bit here – but I promised to keep it a secret, so I will leave just the smallest of clues in this post in case you want to hazard a guess at my intentions.
I’m currently sitting in the English office, listening in on the weekly department meeting on debating strategies and what constitutes a suitable number of poems within the Language A anthology. On my left, the windows open out onto the hill country around Manquehue, where I saw no fewer than sixteen condors circling shortly before lunch. That makes three days out of three this week where I’ve seen the titans of the Andean skies from my office. Normally it’s just the diucas and mockingbirds that pop in for a lookaround once the kids have gone back inside for the third hour of the day. On my right, the windows open out onto the enormity of the Andes to the north, still wearing a wintry mantle of snow. Further down the hill – just out of sight beyond the classroom blocks – are the school’s sports pitches. Our kids play rugby against the backdrop of a nineteenth-century clock tower and the Southwestern Railway. These kids have the towering heights of the Andes all around them. These are just the foothills: somewhere beyond stands the fearsome Cerro Plomo, reaching some 17,861 feet into the sky.
Upon reflection, by journey’s end, I will have spent an astonishing two months south of the equator this year. The last time I was this far south I was tracking mountain gorillas in the impenetrable cloud forests of Bwindi on the Congolese border.
I remember being of the opinion that Chile was a destination I was only prepared to visit thanks to some generous financial assistance with the flights, considering it otherwise a prohibitively expensive destination. I see now just how wrong I was. Not about the money – Chile is easily one of the more expensive South American countries – but about how much there is to see and to do.
I’m now genuinely considering coming back someday to pick up the things that I missed: Chiloé, Conguilio, Punta Arenas, San Pedro de Atacama and so much more besides. There’s simply too much to see here, even when you have five weeks to play around with, and for a naturalist like me, the fact that it pales in comparison to its megadiverse neighbour, Peru, means very little when a casual glance out gives you one of the most spectacular birds of prey on the planet.
Two weeks from now, I will be back home, a brief pit stop on the island before duty calls me to Athens for one last dance. I had a brief moment of nostalgia for it today when I popped in to help a colleague set up a game of Just a Minute to give her students a boost with their listening skills in debating. I love that game to bits – and the BBC Radio show from which I have poached it.
Two days remain. Let’s do this! BB x
The Book of Barnabas 