Ñandú

Not much more than a year after my last visit I found myself — somewhat inexplicably — in Chile again. This is how things unfolded and ultimately made sense to me.

Valparaíso

Chile’s second largest port, Valparaíso, the Jewel of the Pacific, is known for its colorful hillside houses, steep funiculars, and vibrant art community. Sadly, it also counts several disasters in its history, including major earthquakes in 1822 and 1906, the Great Fire of Valparaiso in 2014, and a fire that erupted just a week after we left and killed more than a hundred people.

Because the rich architecture of its historic district, Unesco declared it a World Heritage Site.

Corrugated metal is everywhere

The best thing to do is to meander around its narrow and intricate cobblestone alleys admiring the street art that makes the city an open-air museum.

The former prison, or ex cárcel, is now a major cultural center, the Parque Cultural de Valparaíso, which preserves the memory of political prisoners who were confined within its walls, while fostering today’s artistic expression.

Santiago

For me, Santiago is synonym of errands, dirty air, hurried people and aggressive drivers. And because it’s my home town, it’s hard to engage the part of my brain that gets excited when visiting a new place. I promise I’ll make a conscious effort (and tame the fear of getting my camera stolen) next time, and play explorer to find the interesting spaces of Santiago’s beauty.

For now, however, I have only a cell phone picture to show. A significant one though, that evokes deep emotions and touches my wounds, our wounds.

The Museum of Memory and Human Rights commemorates the victims of human rights violations during the 17-year military dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet. A sobering statement is a three-story wall with photos of the victims, which serves as an altar and poignant memorial. Facing this wall there’s a glass room with a screen and a keyboard where you can look up information about the victims and dedicate notes to them. I saw a young man in his late teens, accompanied by his mother and his sister. He typed a name, tapped on a picture, and started writing a note for someone he’d never met: “Querido abuelo”. Unable to hold my tears I left to give them privacy.

The museum is keeping our painful memories alive, but that’s essential, because we must not forget. We need to remember so that we never again live in a country where its citizens are burnt alive, where people are tortured and their mutilated bodies thrown from helicopters to the sea, where mothers don’t have a place to bring flowers to honor the courage of their disappeared sons.

Valle de Aguas Calientes

From Santiago, if you drive four hours south to Chillán (where our second mate lives), and then 90 minutes up the Andes to the Termas de Chillán ski and hot springs resort, and then hike six strenuous hours mostly uphill, you’ll reach the remote, breathtaking and aptly named Valle de Aguas Calientes. It’s a broad valley where a multitude of springs and rivers come down the mountain, spanning the whole temperature spectrum from boiling hot to freezing cold. I voluntarily and willingly submerged my body into a freezing cold one, a lukewarm one, and a goldilocks one; lied in the confluence of a very hot and a very cold one — so statistically speaking the average temperature was just perfect, only that the left half of my body was too cold and the right half too hot; and accidentally stepped with both my feet into an almost boiling one because that solid stepping stone was not that solid after all.

Carretera Austral

An overnight bus ride plus a rental car in Puerto Montt took us to Route 7, or Carretera Austral, a remote road that connects small towns in Chile’s Northern Patagonia. Well-known among adventure travelers, the Carretera Austral provides access to a plethora of pristine environments, including ancient forests, glistening fjords, and towering mountains, amidst a backdrop of exquisite natural beauty that is iconic to Patagonia. We only traveled a small portion of its 1,240 kilometers (the easy, mostly paved part), but that included enough places of sheer beauty.

At the Parque Nacional Alerce Andino we hiked deep into the Chilean native rainforest. It was a beautiful day with some dark clouds that brought an occasional shower. The wet soil aroma, the impenetrable surrounding greenery, the breeze making the treetops dance in unison, and the enthralling chucao’s song¹ brought my spirit back to my land. My homeland, the place where I grew up, the forest I craved and made part of me. I inhaled deeply, my eyes getting wet, trying to register that feeling because I finally understood why I was called to come to Chile. It was to remember the good parts of my childhood. It was to be again, after ten years, with those trees. Their names, some of them almost forgotten, speak to me: lenga, canelo, coigüe, luma, tepa, mañío, ulmo.

And the maqui, my goodness, the maqui. It’s not a particularly beautiful tree but it offers a gift in the form of pearl-sized, dark purple, almost black fruit. Long ago I was willing to climb the steepest hills to get to a maqui tree and spend hours picking and eating the fruit, never stuffing myself because it’s so tiny and requires so much patience. At the end of the day we had our hands and mouths dyed with that characteristic deep purple. So here I was, half a century later, reaching as fast as I could to get just a few of those magical pearls.

My soul needed what that forest provided; I just didn’t know that I needed it.

Huailahué

1. The chucao is an unassuming little bird that sings my favorite birdsong: a distinct pattern that reminds me of a stone skimming across water, and is so loud and clear that you’d think the source is a much larger critter.
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I was still in the Amazonia when I received a text from a childhood friend, Mister T. He was in Sweden and had just pushed back a few weeks his return flight from Frankfurt to Santiago. Mister T said “you should come to Europe so that we can celebrate fifty years of friendship.” To be precise, it hasn’t been fifty years of continuous friendship, as there’s been some interspersed enemyship, including a punch exchange the very first time we met, but what counts is a solid bond built throughout half a century of crazy adventures, wacky ideas, and some dangerous and not always lofty stunts (which I’m proud of, with a few exceptions).

As you probably know, I don’t need much of an incentive to go visit new places, so less than a month later I was landing in Amsterdam to start what ended up being a fabulous 11-day circuit across four countries.

The Hague

From Schipol, the Amsterdam airport, I went straight to The Hague to meet my friend, so Amsterdam remains in my bucket list. The Hague is described in a online guide written by a local (that is, a Hagenaar if you allow me to sound cultured) as a beautiful and somewhat strange or quirky city that people shun in favor of the bigger sisters Amsterdam and Rotterdam.

Brussels

Tiredness plus rainy weather conspired against a deeper exploration of Brussels, but we made sure to visit the most significant landmarks: the central square or Grand Place, and the Beer Capital Bar, which boasts over 2000 different beers.

Bruges

Bruges is famous for its well-preserved medieval architecture, cobblestone streets, Venice-like canals and numerous chocolate factories. Perhaps a tad too famous, because the train we took from Brussels was packed and the main square could not have held more people, and all this during what I thought was the low season. It was Sunday, though.

Lyon

Lyon was founded by the Romans, and since it never suffered from any devastating event, you can see signs of its 2000-year history in its diverse architecture and urban structure. It is also considered the gastronomic capital of France.

Annecy

Annecy is a small town 90 minutes east of Lyon, at the foot of the Alps and at the edge of Lake Annecy, which is known as “Europe’s cleanest lake”. The lake with the snowy mountains backdrop, the town’s old architecture and narrow winding streets, and the river and its many bridges make Annecy a jewel well worth a visit.

Chamonix

My friend was fixated with visiting Chamonix, but not for the reasons you might think. It turns out that Mister T has too many friends in the mountaineering community whose gloating about Chamonix rub him the wrong way. He just wanted to be able to say “I’ve been to Chamonix and you are wrong: it’s dreary!”. A noble goal that I was more than willing to share and help realize, particularly if it took only a 90 minute bus ride to get there. We naturally succeeded. The fact that it was winter and I’m not a fan of winter sports made it very easy.

Cologne

My flight back home was from Amsterdam and Mister T’s from Frankfurt, so we decided to spend the last two nights together in Cologne, which is in between.(The actual truth is more complicated than that, but as you know, I’m a minimalist and more keen on simplicity than accuracy).

I had heard that Cologne is a lovely city, but I have to confess that I got off the train without having the faintest idea about what to expect. Upon leaving the Hauptbahnhof or central station I looked around to get my bearings… and almost fell backwards when I saw the gargantuan and elaborate masterpiece of a monument I had right in front of me.

Cologne’s medieval cathedral is the tallest cathedral in the world and 800 years in the making. And there I was in sheer ignorance and awe, an insignificant soul among the 20,000 that visit the landmark daily. The cathedral was severly damaged during World War II but, amazingly, it remained standing in an otherwise flattened city.

The last night we went to Peters Brauhaus brewery, a lively pub in a beautiful old building, where we intended to try some local fare. Upon seating us, the waiter asked “Bier?”. Since I only saw dishes on the menu, I assumed that choosing a beer would require a conversation, so I asked him if he spoke English.

“Come on, bier, beer… it’s universal!”. I must have looked puzzled. He tried: “Do you want beer?”.

“Yes!”

And he brought us beer. It turns out it was just a yes/no question.

This trip started to unfold almost a year ago, when we learnt through word of mouth about a retreat center in the middle of the Amazonian jungle that offered the kind of spiritual experience that we were looking for: with native healers and ages-old traditional use of sacred plant medicine. We signed up months in advance with the boldness that you get when you look at something scary from very far away, but as the time to board our flight to Peru approached and we learnt more and more about what we signed up for — which required among other things depriving oneself from alcohol, caffeine, and other earthly pleasures for weeks in advance — we got more and more anxious.

Regardless, we were heading to Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon. It seemed absolutely obvious to us that after the retreat we had to leave Iquitos the hard way: by public fluvial transportation downriver to Brasil.

The retreat

To get to the retreat center From Iquitos it’s a half-an-hour bus ride to the village of Santa Clara, plus a 25-minute boat ride up the Nanay River to a dock in the middle of nowhere, plus one hour of walking. Yup, it is remote.

The experience was ultimately profound, healing, empowering and all those new-agey words that you can overhear any random afternoon in Sebastopol’s¹ local cafés. Likely transfomative too, but you’d have to judge by yourself or ask us a year or two from now.

Iquitos, Peru

Iquitos is the world’s largest city (not on an island) that cannot be reached by road. Sitting less than 4 degrees of latitude south of the Equator, it’s a bustling town that will hyper-stimulate all your senses, especially if you’re sensitive to humid heat. It seems to exist in that dreamy boundary between fiction and reality, with its crazy but uncannily smooth traffic of mostly two- and three-wheeled vehicles and buses with glassless windows, and the vestiges of a wealthy and ruthless past that was the rubber boom, more than a century ago.

Before and after the retreat we took some time to explore a few of the many offerings around Iquitos, including a couple of nights in a floating lodge on the Momón River.

Iquitos to the Triple Border

The second half of the adventure started with figuring out how to do this down river thing. The research we carried out before the trip led us to conclude that we had two options: the pasteurized one, and the authentic one. The pasteurized one is to reserve a spot on an expensive cruise ship, which feels like looking at the world through a glass window. The authentic one is to do what locals do. Except for the few towns that have an airport, boat transport is the only option that natives have to travel to and from their communities, so there must be a way. The problem is that what we found on the web was mostly anecdotal and somewhat inconsistent, so we decided to do it the old way: ask the locals and improvise. Things were even more uncertain because the river was at its lowest level since records began in 1902, which made navigation difficult and prone to running aground. The only thing that was clear when we left home was that we had to take a boat to Santa Rosa, an island in the Peruvian side of the Peru-Colombia-Brazil border, cross the river to Leticia, Colombia, and from there cross a street to Tabatinga, Brazil where we could take another boat to Manaus.

Once in Iquitos we learned that we could either take the “fast” passenger boat to Santa Rosa for a mere 15-hour trip, or the slow cargo boat that would take about three days. We opted for the former and secured our space, which made us the proud owners of two old-fashioned paper tickets with the blanks filled with handwriting.

One afternoon a few days later we boarded the ferry, and the following morning we had a mini-adventure with the mandatory immigration dance that reminded us of the cruising life bureaucracy. In Santa Rosa, the ferry ties up to a floating dock in the middle of the river. From there it is: a water taxi that gets you most but not all the way to shore; a walk over a long, narrow, rickety walkway; a white-knuckled tuk-tuk ride over the muddy river bank and across town to the immigration post where you stand in line to get your exit stamp on your passport; another tuk-tuk ride back to the river and the rickety walkway; another water taxi to the north shore of the river; a walk up the steep river bank, underneath stilted houses, and across a bridge over a smaller river… and voilà, you are in Leticia. You are not done, though. You still have to go to the airport to get your passport stamped with your entry to Colombia, which was another mildly kafkaesque process: once there they told us that we had to prefill a form on the internet, but there was no internet.

Leticia, Colombia

Leticia, Colombia’s southernmost city, is a friendly town that relies heavily on tourism and acts as a hub for many attractions and activities centered around the river and the jungle. With its twin city Tabatinga they form a borderless unit where people and languages mix; when you go down Leticia’s main street the only indication that you are in another country is that the shop signs suddenly turn to Portuguese.

In Leticia and the tri-border area the river is the connective tissue that supports the economy of the region.

The Oliveira II

After a few days in Leticia it was time for an even more outlandish experience: four days on a cargo boat that would take us from Tabatinga to Manaus. Given that it amounted to less than $100 per day for the two of us, including food, we splurged on a cabin. The cheaper option requires sleeping in your own hammock that you hang from the middle deck’s roof. You also need to bring your own plate and silverware to get food.

We had heard (and, actually, seen) that some of the boats that do that route have decent cabins with sliding doors that open up to a small private balcony. We had also heard that meals are buffet style. Our luck had us boarding the Oliveira II (only because that was the one ship departing on the day we wanted to leave), which had… none of that. In fact, when we saw our abysmally dark and spartan windowless cabin we thought we would have been better off on a hammock, but after the first night we reconciled with our space and learnt to love it. Okay, maybe “love” is an exaggeration, but we did get quite fond of the AC.

The food experience deserves a whole paragraph. Breakfast was at 6:30 (reasonable, especially if you overlook the fact that the coffee was utterly undrinkable); lunch at 10:30 (weird, but manageable); dinner at 4 (outrageous, because it means more than 14 hours until the next meal!). The very first meal was an unpalatable soup with bits of meat of unconfirmed origin (likely from more than one species) that had me almost panicking on the prospect of three more days of similarly objectionable fare. However, the next six meals were chicken, rice and beans, which I’d happily have for the rest of my life if that keeps me away from the abomination we had the first day.

I didn’t have a chance to take a picture of our ship. Actually, I did have a chance when we disembarked in Manaus that I missed because I forgot, but since that’s a much a larger explanation I hope you excuse me if I choose a simple lie to a complicated truth. Fortunately, there was a calendar on the boat that I had the foresight of photographing, so here it is, The Oliveira II (and the phases of the moon) in all her glory. Two things I’m realizing just today: either Ñandú had an oversize anchor, or the Oliveira II has an undersized one, by a huge factor, because the anchor in the picture looks about the same size as the one we had. And, speaking of lies, April fool’s day is called the “day of the lie” in Brazil.

The ship stops at several villages along the way, but it’s not recommended to get off, as the stopovers are as short as needed to load and unload passengers and cargo, so we just enjoyed the scenery and the action from the deck.

Every stop provided an intriguing snapshot of life on, around, about, for and by the river. You see people waiting for the ship, their dreams and struggles packed into cardboard boxes and suitcases, and wonder what their stories are. A woman taking one last picture of a loved one — is that her son heading to Manaus for a year of higher education? A huge pile of about 300 empty five-gallon water bottles waiting to be loaded into the boat — do they need to import all their potable water? Two big bunches of plantains — are those for our next meal? Three cars parked nearby — what makes you get a car when the roads don’t go farther than five km in each direction? The river bank is so steep that I wonder how did the cars even get there — perhaps you have to wait for the river to be much higher? A terrified pig is pulled and pushed uphill while he squeals as anyone would do if there was no tomorrow — does he know that’s likely the case for him? A traveling salesman getting off the boat to sell sandals — does he have a lover in this town?

This is the real deal. The human landscape that’s as rich as the natural one. This is José, who grew up in the jungle where political borders don’t exist — when the time came to move to the city to go to school his father told him: “son, you are going to go to school; they will assign you a country, they will assign you a flag, but don’t forget to be human”. This is Bryan, who’s white grandmother didn’t want him to grow up in the jungle with his Jivaro mother, so she brought him to the city — and his mother moved too just to be close to him. This is Jhon, who lost his transportation business in Armenia, Colombia, to the pandemic, and moved to Leticia — he’s thriving again but unhappy with the isolation. This is Jorge, our water taxi driver, a Peruvian man married to a Colombian woman with Brazilian children — so proud of them that he stopped the boat several times during our ride just to come forward to show us pictures of them.

Manaus

Manaus is a large city half way on the Amazon’s run to the Atlantic Ocean. It was called The Paris of the tropics back in the 1800s, when it was the richest city in South America, thanks to the rubber exploitation. Many wealthy Europeans settled here and brought their ostentatious extravagance with them, including the habit of sending their laundry to Europe because they didn’t like their clothes washed with water from the river. The epitome of such flamboyance is the iconic Teatro Amazonas or opera house. It was built with public funds and using materials imported from Europe: marble, crystal, and even wood, which was obviously abundant in the rain forest. At the end of our tour of the Teatro, Kathy told the tour guide that she missed a mention of the fact that the wealth that made all this possible came at a huge human cost to indigenous people, who were enslaved to harvest the rubber. She was understandably pissed that the guide — a young white man — dismissed her suggestion.

Being surrounded by rain forest, in the center of the Earth’s lungs, Manaus usually boasts beautiful, blue skies. Not this time though. The historically dry season fueled forest fires all around the city, making Manaus temporarily the city with the second worst air quality in the world.

Parting words

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1. Bohemian capital of California. ↩︎

I had a problem. Life gave me a solution. It was a somewhat distressing one, though. You see, I collected all these blog-worthy pictures, but I had no story behind them. Go to some local state park, get back home with a bunch of pictures, repeat. How do I write a post about that without making it appallingly boring and losing half my already thin audience? Internet loyalty goes only so far, after all.

Well, now I’ve got a story to tell. It has absolutely nothing to do with photography or state parks, but so what? My blog, my rules.

The story was provided by the internet itself in the form of a game: wordle. If you know the game please go get a coffee while I explain it to the few who don’t (hi, mom). You have six tries to guess a 5-letter word. In each try you are told which letters from your guess are in the target word, shown green if they are on the correct position, yellow otherwise. And that’s it. It’s become hugely popular because it’s seductive, and because you can play it only once a day, and the target word is the same for everyone each day. Of course, the fewer tries you need to guess the word, the better the feeling, and the holy grail is to guess it on the first try.

I’ve been playing it for more than a year (483 times as of this morning, to be precise), and very early on I stuck to the same starting word, IRATE, because it has five of the six most used letters in English. Until one fateful day, when I decided to free myself from my own chains. Strangely (and ominously) enough I chose STEAL as my break-from-routine starting word. I was feeling proud of myself. Even brave, oh so brave! I got the T, the E and the A yellow. Hmm. Interesting. Feeling that the coolest thing in the world to do next was to try IRATE, because it has those three letters and it doesn’t have an S or an L, I went ahead.

After you hit ENTER, wordle reveals the color of each letter slowly, one by one. The I turned green. The R turned green. When the A turned green my smugness turned into panic. Time slowed down. I knew it at that moment. I had the glory at the tips of my fingers and it slipped, just because I wanted to be cool for one day.

I threw my phone away and began cursing and writhing. I didn’t say anything intelligible, but Kathy, who was sharing breakfast with me, only needed to know two things: that I was playing wordle, which was easy to guess since it’s part of my morning routine, and my starting word, which she knew. With the most diabolical gaze I’ve ever seen in her, she grabbed her phone, opened wordle, and stole the holy grail from me. 

Salt Point State Park

Mendocino

Los Padres National Forest

Robert Louis Stevenson State Park

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