Jack Straw from Wichita

I sit here on this 23rd day of October with my liter of Escudo, that`s Chilean for piss-water, or beer, in the town of Coquimbo. The month of rent expired in the pension in Valparaíso and it was time to rubber tramp it up north. La Serena and little sister, Coquimbo are 450 kilometers or so north of Santiago on the Pacific Coast. I got off the bus the other day, packed to the gills, with directions in my head to an inexpensive hostal in La Serena. After searching for what seemed like hours because of the miniature house on my back and asking many an innocent bystander how to find Hostal Hibisco, blisters starting to form on my feet I stopped into a natural remedies store, Hierba Santa. I knew I had to be close, but the Peruvian lady sitting at the counter didn`t know either. She asked her husband of the hostel`s wherabouts but he was unsure as well. The two conferred for a moment and offered me a room in their house, connected to the storefront through a door in the back. $5.000 pesos a night, which is right around $11 US dollars or so, is $2.000 pesos less than any hostel I`ve been able to find so I took them up on their offer. This might be a good way to get to know some more normal, hard-working Chileans from the 4th region of Chile. It turned out to be a great opportunity to meet Ruben and Lila, her daughter and granddaughter and to be temporarily a part of their family. We exchanged phone numbers, emails and Lila even has a daughter in Lima and a brother in Iquitos that can possibly help me down the road.

It turns out the Hostal Hibisco was literally right around the corner, not half a block away. Funny how life`s plans can twist and be completely changed by coincidence, fate or some other force unbeknownst to us. I made my way to the beach, probably the last time I will be able to sink my toes into the sand for a while, and inquired about surfboard/wetsuit rentals. I would gladly pay US $11 dollars an hour, but the weather was overcast and cool for the first couple days here. Go figure the sun decides to come out on the day that I`m heading for the desert. Exploring the city, I found a scaled-down version of the archaeological museum I saw in Santiago. Rambled on down to the Plaza de Armas, which is just like Spain`s Plaza de España, in that it seems like every city, no matter how small has one. I wandered into the main cathedral in La Serena and realized that Thursday twelve o´clock mass was about to start. Uh oh. Better get outta here while I still can... No. I decided to stay for the duration, dawning my "Anthropological lense" to see what a Chilean mass was like. Hopefully this isn`t too technical a description, but it seemed like any other mass except for the padre and his helper spoke in Spanish, oh, and it was a lot shorter than all the others I´ve been to.

Roughly 30 minutes later, I emerged from the cold and solemn hall tp find a band setting up. ¡Buena honda! People adorning coats embroidered with the Gobierno de Chile logo, gobierno being government, were testing the sound quality, arranging cables and what not. Thinking nothing of the Government`s presence, I proceeded to cross the plaza, Gypsy women persistantly asking for money for their babies, to buy some postcards. The band started playing so I returned to the other side, skillfully dodging the gypsies, to find a badass quartet including an electric/acoustic guitarist, an electric/acoustic bassist, drummer and an accordian player. Is accordianist a word? Even though they were held at gunpoint to play Chile`s traditional Cuica music, it was hard to restrain myself from dancing. But I did a pretty good job nevertheless, in part, because informal dancers lined up across from their respective partners who knew exactly what they were doing. And my best attemp at describing the dance would surely be better than my best attempt at atually performing it. White handkerchiefs in hand, clapping above their heads, they proceeded to perform a type of "chicken and rooster" routine, coming close but not too close and then backing away again. Some fancy footwork and the uncanny ability to finish the routine exactly when the song ended was quite swell to observe.

On Friday, I hopped on a micro to Valle Elqui, or more specifically the town of Pisco Elqui. Shortly after leaving La Serena, we passed a rather large earth dam that was retaining an equally healthy-sized reservoir. It was after this point in the journey up the valley that vast vineyards of grapes started to proliferate. It was easy to see the water line, where the irrigation stopped and the steep dry mountains began. This area is surely (one of) the Napa Valley(s) of Chile. Many of the big pisco sellers have distelleries in the valley, including Capel, Mistral and Tres Erres. I may have touched on it briefly before, but pisco is a hard alcohol made from fermented grapes. Think wine on steroids. The "Piscola", pisco and coca cola, "Pisco Sour", pisco, lemon juice and sugar, "Papaya Sour", papaya juice, pisco and sugar are just a few of the specialties mixed with this dangerous drink. The type where one is enough, two is perfect and three is too much. Luckily, tourist season still hasn´t officially sprouted its full set of wings so the valley was relatively calm. Pisco Elqui is about an hour and a half from the Pacific Coast, in one of the innumerable drainages of the Andes Mountains. A quaint little town whose economy is undoubtedly fueled by the tourist boom in November, December and January and the sales and production of, yep you guessed it, pisco. Many more places than not had signs advertising places to stay, tours, tourist activities, food, spirits y punto. Exploring the town didn´t take too long, a couple main streets, a few back alleys and a main plaza. I wandered into a real touristy joint with gravel floors and a multi-armed lighting system in the shape of flower stalks spreading out across the main room´s ceiling. The one tourist accessory they don´t have in Pisco Elqui is a cajero automático, or rather, an ATM. But oh great, they accept credit and debit cards with the mere twitch of a pen. After my ham, tomato and cheese pizza, minus the marinara sauce of course, I asked the waitress if there was a path leading up to one of the surrounding mountains. She immediately mentioned that she had a friend who gives tours. "Yeah, but I´m really just looking to take a walk without the tour", I said. Accurate directions have been relatively hard to come by so far in my South American travels, but this lady accurately described my desired path. Maybe I´m getting better at understanding the Chilean version of Spanish, yeah, don´t break your arm patting yourself on the back buddy. Walking up the hill past the main plaza, complete with benches, a fountain, swingset, trees and even a church, I took a left just past the artesans fair and another right a block up the road to the promised land. Walking for a half hour left me sweating, parched and burping up pisco-flavored fumes. There was a nice rock to provide some shade at the first "leveling out" of the road. I wouldn´t have even noticed it if not for the mountain biker on the trail high above, leading further up the valley. Following it for awhile led to a smooth outcrop where the wind was whipping, the sun blasting and vistas stunning. It´s neat that vista mean the same thing in English and in Spanish. It was a great experience to sit down for a 30 minute meditation session in this miraculous location. There were towering peaks all around, expansive and brilliantly green vineyards covering the valley floor below and a solid row of alders that separated the green from the brown, the inhabitable from the uninhabitable, civilization from wilderness. I try not to think about the conversations I had with the cute girl, native to Elqui Valley, on the bus this morning, nor the process of comparing bus ticket prices for the upcoming journey, but what I am doing at the current moment: breathing and sitting. Cross-legged, palms facing up, letting nature´s best "freebie" warm the skin. Not a complete sentence.

Heading back down the valley, the town of Monte Grande is the birthplace and home for many years of Gabriela Mistral, or rather, Lucila de María del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga. She was the Chilean poet that won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945 and passed on in ´57. I remember reading some of her works in prior Spanish classes, but as for their specific names or content, I am at a loss. Sacked of energy from the sun and all the tourist activities, I zonked out on the bus ride back to "Hierba Santa". Finished out the night with some seriously heavy conversations with Ruben about his involvement in various military factions helping to fight the Communists. I´ll try to expand on this later, because I really couldn´t believe the stories, but also didn´t think that he was lying or embellishing. When I wrote this it was 3 o´clock in the morning of October 24th, the Expreso Norte carrying me and my bags northward through the early morning fog.

I leave you now in the grace and favor of the Lord, whichever one(s) that may be. Buenas tardes gringolandia.