“And only change th’expiring flame renews.”
John Gay (On A Miscellany of Poems)
John Gay (On A Miscellany of Poems)
Two days of driving across the desert - dispiriting not because of its uniformity of landscape but because of its uniformity of colour - brought us to the coastal resort of La Serena which was plush and upmarket and could have been the South of France from its white sands and its calm deep blue ocean and from the large numbers of tanned and gorgeous women strolling around in very little clothing. The only thing wrong with it was our timing. We were there on the day of an election which in that part of the world means all the pubs and bars are closed and the restaurants and even the shops and supermarkets have their alcohol supplies locked away. As the bar on the truck had almost run out we had been relying on La Serena to restock.
The town too had a nice feel about it. It was pretty with a large number of craft markets selling leather goods, paintings and pottery and one store with a whole series of bizarre sculptures on a gynaecological theme. Quite who would want to buy a caricatured representation of a caesarean birth done in terracotta was a mystery I couldn’t fathom but there were several dozen variations on the theme so there must have been a market. Perhaps they are the South American equivalent of three china ducks hanging on the wall and people display them in sets in their living rooms. Unusual certainly, but not to my taste and I don’t know anyone I dislike enough to buy one for them as a present.
La Serena though was very much just a stopover on our way to Santiago where, once again half the group were leaving and being replaced by newcomers. As we drove into Santiago it struck me as a large, modern city with a certain European style about it. It was filled with crowds and traffic and noise and bustle and didn’t look at first glance anything unusual. The buildings all looked like insurance offices apart from the one sprouting a roof full of satellite dishes and microwave transmitters which looked like - and was - a telecom tower. We arrived on a day as hot as any I had seen and checked into our rooms at the Youth Hostel, a marvellous modern building with superb facilities. Until this trip I had never really considered hostelling as an option but when I travel again it’s certainly something I shall think about. All of the hostels I stayed in - probably about four or five of them - were splendid places which not only had all the facilities you could want but were filled to bursting with English speaking backpackers.
For the next few days I explored Santiago - the trip changeovers always provide an opportunity for a longer break - and realised that in at least one important respect my first impressions were quite wrong. Away from the main road that led in and out of the city it was quite unusual. It still had a very European look to it but on the streets away from that insurance office architecture it was extremely pretty and photogenic. The extensive pedestrian sections were broken up with plenty of civic parks and wide palm lined squares. The modern glass high rise buildings form a backdrop to the much older colonial style ones so that the city manages to simultaneously have both the obvious European look to it and a subtler Mediterranean veneer.
The more I saw of it the more I liked it. The downtown area has something of a dearth of good bars - I spent an hour searching before a friendly shoe shiner abandoned his stand and led me down into the bowels of a building to the strange and deserted Bar Ingles. On the other hand a metro ride out it’s hard to find anything but bars. As you wander through the Provedencia district it is as if it has been designed as ‘Pubs of the World’ theme by someone who has formed his ideas by visiting Disneyland. There is the ersatz Australiana of Boomerang where nothing other than the names of the cocktails and a gigantic neon boomerang is noticeably antipodean. Just along the street is the similarly imitation Irishness of Brannigans, all green neon lights, plastic shamrock and waiters in green velvet waistcoats that a leprechaun would be ashamed to wear. Half a mile away the british entry in the bad taste stakes is The Phone Box is a British pub which surprisingly lacks the tackiness of most of the others. If it doesn’t really look much like a British pub then it hardly matters as they have at least made an effort with the food and drink. It offers a range of English bottled beers from Old Speckled Hen to Ruddle’s County and typical English menu including Steak and Kidney Pie and Cod and Chips. It was a pleasant surprise and a chance to remind myself of what real beer tastes like. After all I was about to begin the final section of the trip and the wind down to my return to England.
