Chillin’ in Chile

Happy New Year everyone. I’ve just spent two-and-a-half weeks in Chile with my family and if I had the descriptive powers of a travel writer I’d make this a long love letter to that country. I don’t have those skills but I’d like to give you a few reasons to put Chile on your list of places to visit someday.

To give you a little perspective, the population is about 17 million, a little smaller than Florida’s, and it is a little bigger than Texas in size; a good deal of the land mass takes the form of the Andes Mountains that run the length of the country along the eastern border and the Pacific Ocean borders on the west. On average Chile is only 110 miles wide.

The population of the capital city of Santiago is nearly 7 million but it feels much smaller and less dense than New York which has 8 million people. In fact Atlanta feels bigger to me. I mean this in a good way. The city has an open airy feel to it. There are historic areas with 18^th and 19^th Century European influences, but Chile grew tremendously in the late 20^th Century and much of it has a very modern appearance with very hip architecture and lots of small, attractive parks and wide streets. Traffic is bad, but no worse than most big cities, and they have a modern, clean and efficient subway system that we used quite a bit. The bus system is also said to be good but I didn’t try them. Taxis are plentiful and cheap.

Santiago has lots of modern hotels and interesting restaurants and both are comparable to the cost of visiting a large American city. They are said to have an honest and professional police force, although I had no experience in that area either. The population is almost entirely European, native people, or a racial mix of the two; we saw almost no people of obvious Asian or African descent.

Santiago sits right at the base of the Andes. It was the beginning of their summer when we arrived and, like many basin cities, Santiago is occasionally plagued with smog issues. But we had a nice clear week there. Every day was sunny, about 75-80 degrees with zero humidity. Absolutely lovely.

Our son Joe is spending his junior year at the University of Chile and has been there since last July, so we had a fluent Spanish-speaking guide. A few words of Spanish go a long way there and it is pretty easy to find English speakers if you need one. That said it was great having someone with local knowledge to show us around.

Our daughter Charlotte joined us a few days into the trip and after a couple more days in Santiago we made our way to the coast, stopping along the way at one of several notable wine-producing areas within the country. It’s only an hour-and-a-half car ride from Santiago to the Pacific, but we took a looping route that took us through Viña del Mar on our way to the village of Cachagua.

Our old friend from New York, Jon May, who has lived in Chile for more than 20 years, told us that Viña was the Jersey Shore and Cachagua the Hamptons of Chile; the analogy was pretty good. Viña was a large beach town with tons of hotels, restaurants, bars, shops and a casino. It was also very crowded and hectic. Absolutely worth a visit, but at least three of the four of us were glad to have picked the more sedate Cachagua with its miles of uncrowded beaches broken up by stretches of rocky coast.

The beaches were fantastic but better suited to the sea lions and penguins that populate the area. While the air temp was near 80 the water was below 60 and the only people in it were surfers in wet suits.

These beaches were for lying or walking upon. They alternated with very old stone paths through the rocky stretches so that it was possible to walk for miles though a string of similar small villages along the coast. The stone paths were typically at the bottom of tall cliffs upon which sat large, old homes belonging to the Chilean elite. We saw a couple of helicopters sitting on their beachside pads.

The sandy beach areas were also dominated by beautiful homes, more often of the Chilean modern style, which I like very much. The analogy to the Hamptons is good to a point, but I don’t think I saw a home over 10,000 square feet. While that is certainly a very big home, there were no mini-Hyatt-Hotel-personal-dwellings on these beaches, and I estimate that more than 90% of the homes were less than 3000 square feet. My point is that the area scored pretty low on the mine-is-bigger-than-yours scale. This extended to automobiles; we saw far more Subarus than Mercedes.

We had a really nice, spacious, modern apartment walking distance to the beach, but facing west over the countryside. Rooster crowed at dawn. No alarm needed.

Dogs are everywhere in Chile. The authorities pick them up, vaccinate and spay and then release them. Everyone feeds them. In Santiago they stand patiently at street corners and cross with the pedestrians when the light turns in their favor. My son told me one walked him home one night after he’d had a few beers, warding away a couple of other strays he didn’t like the looks of. When Joe got to his place the dog walked him to his door and then left.

In Cachagua they’d lead us done the stone paths or accompany us to the market. Between walks they laid in the dirt streets in a sunny patch; cars and pedestrians worked around them. They didn’t beg and they mostly appeared to be well fed and clean. They were charming.

We ate very well. Chile is not noted for its restaurants, but there are some good ones and the local fruits and vegetables are excellent. Avocados (called paltas there) are served with everything and were delicious. My new favorite food may be something called “pastel de choclo” which is a kind of chicken and onion soup served in a heavy croc over which is layered something like corn pudding. It is baked until the top has a golden crust. Fantastic.

The local chorizos are very good, although they like to serve them “Italian style” with avocado, tomatoes and mayo, so-called because it resembles the red, green and white of the Italian flag. We had a nice kitchen and a grill in Cachagua, and Joe likes to cook. I preferred the chorizos with his homemade salsa served on a particular type of Chilean bread called marraquitas. I’d go to the paneria every morning for a supply hot from the oven; after ten it was gone replaced by another type we liked less.

On a one day visit to Valparaiso we stumbled across an empanada shop that served nothing but five kinds of empanadas, three kinds of soda, and tea, the traditional accompanying beverage with Chile’s version of the hamburger. They were fresh from the oven and delicious, and we had the satisfaction of being the only non-Chileans in the joint, which is always a fun feeling – like we were in the know.

We had several spectacular seafood meals near Cachagua. One at Punta del Mar in Maitencillo, and two at Chiringuito in Zapallar. The food was similar at both; traditional Chilean treatments of basic shellfish and fish taken from the ocean that morning. It was fresh, simple and tasty beyond my limited vocabulary’s ability to do the food justice. They were both very nice places but Chiringuito was truly special. It sits on the beach in Zapallar, which is a small horseshoe shaped cove – partially sand and partially rocky. We sat in carved wooden chairs outside under a perfect blue sky while pelicans dove for their own lunch as we ate ours. Multi-colored fishing boats bobbed in the gentle waves. I’ve never eaten in a more perfect setting.

As anyone who has been in a wine shop in the past few decades knows, Chile makes some very fine wines and we sampled many of them. They were terrific and cheap. Finally, on the food front, if you go to Santiago, be sure to eat at my friend Jon May’s place, the Tortilla Factory, one of Chile’s few Mexican restaurants. It’s better than any Mexican restaurant I’ve eaten in in New York and they serve the world’s best smoothies. It’s in Las Condes, one of the nicest parts of the city.

I didn’t think this post would be so long, but I wanted to do justice to a lovely country we enjoyed so much. I haven’t even mentioned how friendly the people were, and after all, that’s what really makes any place special. I’ve left out too much. For anyone who is interested you can see photos from the trip on my Facebook page.

Was it perfect? Well, the only downside of a visit to Chile that I can think of is that it is a long way there and relatively expensive to get to. It was ten hours of flying from Orlando plus a three-hour layover in the Panama City airport, not something I can recommend as a good time unless you enjoy unlimited “duty-free” shopping at prices about 20% higher than those at your local mall.

But that was a small price to pay for a wonderful travel experience, and there is so much more to see. We didn’t even get up into the real Andes, or to the southern end of Chile which has some of the most spectacular land in the world, often called “the Yosemite of Chile.” Northern Chile has one of the largest deserts on earth. Maybe next time.

Adios.