Monday, March 5, 2012

Chiloé


I'm back in Santiago now and already back to work, but there are still a lot of summer travels that need to be written about--starting with Chiloé, my first stop after the Carretera Austral.

Chiloé

Chiloé is a small island off the coast of Chile known for penguins, rain, and tradition.  The ferry from the mainland to Chiloé takes less than an hour, but if you step off the bus in anywhere except the main city of Castro, you’ll feel like you’ve traveled years instead of kilometers.  They say that on the island, life is as it used to be—abuelas knit woolen socks, their husbands call goats in from the field, and they say that there is a legend hidden in every cave, explaining every curve of the coastline.

Life is slow, certain.  Even the rain seems to adhere to some ancient schedule, falling in mists and then in sheets and then slipping away, moving back out into the ocean to let the sun shimmer on the damp ground.  Moments before you really feel dry, the mist envelops you again.

After spending the first night in Castro, Laura and I take a bus to Cucao, a town on the western coast of the island, because a guidebook said is was the “center of mythical Chiloé,” the man sitting next to me on the bus said it couldn’t be missed, and the map shows it lying right on the edge of the national park. 

The bus driver asks us where in Cucao we are going, and we tell him the center.

“El centro?” he asks, a strange look on his face.

“Si, si, el centro,” we confirm, not understanding his confusion.  Don’t most of the passengers get off in the center of town, at the bus terminal or the main square?

As the bus pulls out of Castro, he asks us if we know where we’re staying.  We don’t, and he offers to call ahead and book us a room in a hospedaje, saying he knows a good place.  We shrug and agree, figuring he’s trying to help out an uncle or a cousin, but thinking that since we’ll be getting in after dark it will be good to have a reservation. 

Two hours later, the bus pulls to a stop in the middle of a narrow bridge.  Laura and I are the only passengers left, and the rain is pouring so heavily that even after I wipe the fog from my window I can hardly see a thing.  The bus driver catches my eye in the rearview mirror and tells me that we’re here.

“Aca?” I ask, not believing him.

“Si.”

“El centro?”

“Si,” he says, and I understand the puzzled look he gave us earlier: there is one street extending straight from the bridge, boasting six or seven houses, and to the right there is another small street of homes.  There is a river, a bay, and a soccer field with sagging goals nestled at the intersection of the two.  There is a Coca-Cola flag drooping above one of the houses along the river, suggesting that it doubles as a general store.  Mostly, there is rain. 

The bus driver points us towards the hospedaje he has reserved for us, a house at the end of the street.  We thank him, pull up our hoods, and step out into the rain.

We have already seen half of the town by the time we reach the hospedaje, and despite our raincoats we’re soaked.  The señora is waiting for us when we arrive, and she opens the door and ushers us inside, where a wooden stove warms the kitchen/dining/TV room.  We hang our wet clothes up above the stove and she shows us our room—wooden floor, a small window, the ceiling sloping down over the bed.  We sit there for a minute, listening to the rain battering against the small window, and then we head back down to the kitchen and the warmth of the stove. 

It is a strange, slow night.  Not boring, just slow—no one rushes to do anything, there is never any need to hurry.  The señora watches TV, the rain lets up.  Laura and I walk to the house with the Coca-Cola flag, which is in fact a store, and then we walk back, having officially explored all of Cucao.  We watch the señora make break, kneading it with her knuckles, rolling it back and fourth over the table, beating it into circular disks.  Her husband and son, who had been setting fishing nets in the river, come back and hang their wet clothes above the stove next to ours.  It starts to rain.  They watch TV, a Chilean game show in which the participants have to do nonsensical tasks such as move ping pong balls from one table to another with their hands tied behind their backs.  We make small talk with the family, but they seemed more interested in the ping pong balls scattering across the floor on TV.  We open a box of wine and sit closer to the stove.  The rain comes down harder, and the volume of the TV is turned up.  We slip into English, falling into our own little world on one side of the kitchen, and we stay there until it’s time to go to bed.

With my feet tucked up underneath me, avoiding the chill of the wooden floor, I watch the family watch TV and wondered what they think us, the tourists who roll in and out of their home, fascinated by the constantly shifting weather and the homemade bread.  I wondered if they think about us at all, or if our English words slicing through the kitchen are just as constant and unremarkable as the rain; something that comes and goes, grows louder and then softer—sometimes you have to turn up the volume in order to hear the TV  over it, and sometimes you don’t. 

The next morning we wake up early to walk down to the river with the men and watch them pull in their fishing nets.  To be honest, the whole process seems almost too easy: they row out into the river in their little yellow boat, the son keeps the boat steady while his father pulls in the nets, and then they row back to shore, where we watch them pull fish out of the net and put them in a large plastic bag.  That’s it.  I can’t think of a polite way to ask what else they do with their time, if putting in the nets takes twenty minutes in the evening and pulling out the fish a half hour every morning, and so I don’t.  Instead, we all walk back to the house and eat freshly baked bread for breakfast and watch church on TV.

Later that morning Laura and I go for a hike in the national park (first discovering that on the other side of the bridge there is a whole other row of houses, two hostels, and a restaurant—Cucao is huge!) and then stand on the side of road with our thumbs out, hoping to catch a ride across the island back to Castro or onto Achao.  It’s only a few minutes before a pickup truck pulls over and we jump in the back, bouncing over the dirt road and loving the feeling of the wind on our faces, sitting on top of our bags when the truck slows again and three locals join us in the back.  It’s only after the drivers reach their destination, a small shack along the water, that we realize we’ve gone four kilometers in the wrong direction.  We shrug, walk to the other side of the road, and stick our thumbs out again. 

It doesn’t take us long to get a ride back in the other direction, and when the driver drops us off he points us in the direction we need to go to get back to Castro.  Now a whole five minute walk from where we originally started, we throw our bags back onto the ground and wave away the bus that stops to pick us up, determined to hitchhike.  After about twenty minutes it starts to rain again, and then it starts to pour, and we huddle behind the roadside kiosk selling Kuchen and Super Ocho candy bars.  The few cars that drive past us are full, and the rain begins to come down harder, and so when the next bus to Castro turns onto the road we wave it down.  We have no reason to hurry, no idea of where we’re going next, but it’s nice, at least for the moment, to be dry. 


The palafitos, famous houses on stilts in Castro.




Watching the fishing











Laura happy to be hitchhiking!
(this is before we know we're going in the wrong direction)




Beautiful sunny moment in Chiloé




We spent the next to nights in Achao, and mid-sized town on a smaller island off of Chiloé

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