I spent last weekend in Ritoque, a beach about two and a half hours from Santiago and a few kilometers outside the nearby town of Quintero. If you walk from the bus terminal in town to the hostel on the beach, you’ll see horses crossing the street freely, pausing in their journey from one field to the next to sniff the flowers on the side of the road.
The hostel is perched above the shore, three small buildings climbing up the hill, and as we ducked through the wooden fence that separates the dirt road from the beach my bare toes drank in the warmth of the sand. The hostel dogs, Rainbow and Paltita, followed us, and before we had made it to the water’s edge a third dog had joined—a flea-bitten, short-legged mutt we named Groupie for the way he panted after the others.
The seven of us—four people and three dogs—followed the gentle curve of the coast, keeping far enough away from the water to avoid the frigid sting of the waves but close enough to hear the crunch of shells under our feet. We walked for a while before we saw the path Angie had described, cutting through the small sand dunes that bordered the beach.
It grew quiet as we walked past the first row of dunes, the ocean silenced by sand. On this side of the world, where the sun didn’t have to compete with the wind, it was hotter, burning a little between my toes. The sand at the water’s edge had been interrupted only by seashells, but here the ground was covered by squat dark green plants. A set of railroad tracks, looking almost too old to be useable, ran alongside the dunes, its two dark metal rails reaching out towards the horizon. We walked along the tracks, stepping from one wooden tie to the next, and the unnatural size of each step reminded me for a moment of Pennsylvania, where we used to do the same—shortening our steps from tie to tie, stretching our legs further to bridge the gap when a board was missing.
We turned left again at the next path, leaving the railroad tracks and cutting deeper into the dunes. The dogs were still with us, scampering around the low-lying bushes and returning to the path every few minutes to check up on our ankles. As we walked, the plants grew scarce and the path dissolved into dunes much bigger than the first ones we had passed through, steep hills of sand rolling up into the sky.
We climbed up towards that sky, blue and cloudless, running when the sand was too hot for our feet to stand. At the top the wind was strong again, kicking sand up against out legs, but we let it beat at us while we stood and watched the world. Behind us, the dunes seemed to stretch on endlessly. The Pacific opened in the other direction, and from where we stood the waves that crashed on the shoreline and the bobbing shapes of the surfers waiting to catch them seemed tiny, nothing but specks of color bordering the endless blue. Standing there at the top, my skin growing red from the joint assault of the wind and the sun, it seemed like there was nothing else: only wind and sun, dunes and ocean. The sand rolling out from one horizon while the waves spilled out from the other.
Paltita raced down the dune, a cloud of shining black fur and sand, and then collapsed on the side of the next hill, panting happily. They were flying kites down on the beach, a few shaped like birds or airplanes but most of them the red white and blue of the Chilean flag, the strings that anchored them to the world almost invisible. I sat down, burying my legs in the warm sand, and Paltita raced back up the side of the dune and then flung her exhausted body down next to me. We watched the kites on the beach below us, Chilean stars tugging towards the sky.
View of the beach from out balcony in the hostel.
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