Days 1 and 2 –
Travel Days

January 31 – February 1, 2008
Keene, NH, Hartford, CT, Atlanta, GA, Santiago, Chile, Puerto Montt, Chile

Submitted by Pat

Travel day. A quick flight from Hartford, CT to Atlanta. Eat dinner at On the Border – a Mexican chain restaurant – then board a full flight to Chile. They have trouble with the reading lights after we take off, so we sit in the dark. Nancy and Don are in the row ahead of me. I sit at the window next to a quiet young man named Evan. When they finally get the reading lights working, I turn mine on but instead of shining on my lap, both of them shine on Evan’s lap so I am basically out of luck for reading. It’s close to 11:00 pm so I just tuck myself in and try to go to sleep. The Bee Movie is the featured film. I fall asleep for a few hours and then wake up during the second showing, fall asleep again, then wake up at 2:00 am and 3:00 am. The flight takes a little over nine hours and they have a visual on the TV when the movie isn’t playing that shows the track of the plane as it flies south over Cuba, Panama, skimming the coast of Ecuador, then over Peru and finally Chile. Don and I were both anxious about the length of the flight, but it isn’t as bad as we feared and both of us get at least a few hours of sleep. Nancy sleeps almost the entire flight. Lucky. The time in Chile is two hours ahead.

We land at the Santiago airport and pay $131 to enter the country. The web site had said we had to pay in cash so I hand the clerk a bunch of twenty dollar bills. She looks at each one and hands back two – one that has a torn corner and one that has a minuscule rip. What’s up with this? I guess they need absolutely perfect bills – Luckily I have them. What would have happened if I didn’t? Would I be sent back to the States? After we pick up our bags and start to try and figure out where to go to check in for our next flight on LAN, the Chilean airline, we are accosted by a couple of skycaps wearing suits and they whisk us and our baggage up stairs to the check-in area. They speak so fast that I can’t keep up with them and basically I tip them what they ask for and get swindled. What a racket. Never again. After waiting in line to check in, we are off to the gate. The flight to Puerto Montt lasts around an hour and a half. We take a taxi, crammed in with suitcases that won’t fit in the trunk, to the Gran Pacifico Hotel – four stars is what it’s rated. Nice accommodations but my Spanish comes in handy when the guy registering us is going to give us one room with a single and a double bed. That gets fixed, and my room has a king bed and a view of the bay and theirs has two small double beds. I offer to change rooms and after some convincing we do.

We decide to eat some lunch in the hotel. Well, friends, my Spanish is good, but you have to understand that every Spanish-speaking culture has different foods and different names for foods so looking at the menu is like reading Russian. I have no idea what anything is and the waitress becomes impatient with my questions and is not really interested in helping explain anything. We all order an American hamburger which really is some kind of mystery meat on toasted white bread, with tomato, lettuce, and a ton of mayo served club sandwich style. Don can’t choke it down. I finish half of it. Okay, so this is going to be really fun…

We decide to walk down along the Malecon or waterfront walkway. We walk, sit on the wall and look out across the bay, sit on a bench in the sun, listen to a group of indigenous musicians from Ecuador playing in a park. A hotel guest we had met in the elevator recommends a restaurant called Club Aleman (The German Club) so we find the restaurant and check the menu. Again my Spanish and the unique names for food in Chile have me stymied. We walk back, buy some water, and take a break for an hour before meeting to walk down to the restaurant. Mineral water, by the way, came in three flavors – with gas (red label), without gas (blue label) and light gas (green label), gas being carbonation.

We are seated at a window table in the empty restaurant – no one eats down there before 9:00 pm so we are the only ones in the place. Music is playing and Don immediately goes into a rapture of memory of his childhood when he heard a song by Bert Kaempfert called Swingin’ Safari. He is so tickled that he gets up and goes out into the lobby, and without knowing any Spanish, asks someone what the CD is that is playing and tells him that the songs on it are reminding him of watching the Sandy Becker Show, a children’s TV show that aired in the 60s.

Our waiter has piercing eyes and wavy styled hair, is very interested in pleasing us, but does not know any English. I’m on the hot seat again to translate and he helps as best he can to describe dishes using words that are specific to Chile so it’s kind of like a circle that never ends. I order a filet of beef, Don pasta and seafood, and Nancy some onion soup. My beef is tender and delicious, cooked to perfection. Don eats what he can, but the seafood that is unidentifiable is left behind. It’s a huge portion and Don isn’t a big eater, more of a grazer, so a lot is left. The waiter is mortified and the owner of the restaurant comes out to ask if there is a problem with the food. I try my best to explain that it’s delicious and to tactfully say that Don isn’t really fond of squid or mussels. They decide to give him the meal at half price. After the owner leaves, two men come over to our table, one interpreting for the other, and give Don a copy of the CD that has been playing during our meal. That is sooo cool.

I pay with my credit card – in the States you can add $$ for the tip, well, in Chile you have to either state an amount or a percentage for the waiter to add on. That sucks – I don’t have any Chilean pesos so the three of us try our best to calculate a decent tip. After thinking more about it we realize we have undertipped him so I go to him and ask if he will accept American dollars and give him a $10 for his efforts. His pretty blue eyes light up and he smiles, bows and thanks us profusely. Despite the different tastes, the language barrier and the undertipping, we have a great experience in the Club Aleman.

Lighthearted, we walk back to the hotel into a bright western sun – 9:00 pm and still light out. We are beat, close the shades in our hotel rooms, and get into bed, dreaming of tomorrow’s adventures to come.

Day 3 – A small farm near the Parque Nacional Laguna San Rafael