|
Location: Portillo, CHL
Chile is not a well-known country. There was nothing in popular culture, history, or recent news that I could rely upon to inform my presumptions about Chile. Only bits and pieces, from the horrors of the Pinochet regime to the likely beauty of the Andes Mountains, however contaminated by Santiago’s smog, really occupied my mind. But really, it was a clean slate. The only thing I really knew was that I was headed for South America, a place that, in general, I imagined to be poor, but in a rustic kind of way.
Upon landing, I found Santiago, at least by way of its airport, to possess an almost European sensibility, of the hinterlands variety. One of small cars, unique people, and exquisite food. The fog that I saw over Santiago turned out to be smog after all, but the rest of my trip provided me with a much different, clearer portrait of the country, though I haven’t all begun to see even a small percentage of what it has to offer.
On the drive from the airport to Portillo, which was just under three hours by bus, one starts in an urban-industrialized sprawl that could be set around any large city. Warehouses and office buildings. Logistical companies and merchandisers. On a Sunday morning, devoid of people. Just concrete and metal. I began to form the impression, however, that boundaries are sacrosanct in Chile. Every parcel of land seemed to be surrounded by a fence, demarcated as distinct from neighbors. This, even in an urban environment.
Chile as poor couldn’t really be seen here. There were luxury car outlets and giant displays of earthmovers. Gourmet food and clothing brands advertised on billboards. There was even a billboard touting a national cell phone provider using my very own Blackberry Pearl 8120. Top it off with the fact that, not only did I get a Wi-Fi connection in the airport, but further on down the road, amongst houses with tin roofs, there were half a dozen Wi-Fi networks in range – and each of them had WPA encryption!
Out of Santiago, the bus rose into the foothills of the Andes. Here, the landscapes are green, even in this, what was wintertime in the Southern Hemisphere, albeit at 35 degrees of latitude and sunny skies. Except, it was a very unique landscape. One part lush, out of Vermont, providing greenery, and another part arid, like the areas I known in northern Utah, providing the scraggy-type vegetation. The grasses were neatly cropped, but this was a huge expanse of cropped grass, on hillside after hillside, with very little sign of human habitation. Then I saw the lawn mower: sheep and cattle. Sprouting out of the grass and American suburbanite would kill for were decrepit trees, with their limbs entwined and their bark rough and scuffed, foliage many weeks away. Interspersed amongst this are craggy outcroppings of rock. As I said, a very unique landscape.
The hillsides became steeper, and the steep cliffs began to converge into a canyon, whose terminus we eventually reached. We proceeded through a medium-length tunnel, emerging into a completely new landscape. This was one of reddish rocks, devoid of the grasses on the other, more temperate side. The Andes loomed ahead of us, at the end of the valley below into which we were descending. Now signs of human life were more common, though they were surprising. Chile is one of the most prosperous nations south of the United States, with a per capita GNP of around $14,000 US, but it has one of the highest disparities in its distribution of wealth (top 10 percent hold 47 percent of the wealth). More than a quarter of the people here qualify as poor or live in poverty. Some estimates peg that value at one-third.
Here, on the other side of the tunnel, that statistic became visible and tangible. Houses beside the highway were made of plywood and a corrugated tin roof. Each room was a separate entity. Livestock and farmers mingled, as did their living spaces. This was rural Chile. Electricity was present, as surprisingly enough so too were satellite dishes, but the lifestyle here must be rustic, cabin living, without the prospect of returning to a clean, comfortable house in the suburbs after the weekend get-a-way.
In Los Andes, the settlements witnessed earlier morphed together. Plywood walls now were made of stucco. People were dressed rustically, but walked proudly and smiled broadly. A few farmers drove their produce to market with horse and buggy, but there weren’t animals plaguing the streets of town. A stray cat or dog here and there, but, as I said, there were Wi-Fi networks everywhere. Looks can be deceiving.
Los Andes is the gateway to the central Andes, where the largest peaks are, including Cerro Aconcagua, the highest mountain outside of Asia, and the highest in the Americas, at just under 7000 m (22,800 feet). We went into a grocery store in town, a store that was large by American standards. To give you a sense of how weak the American dollar is ($1 equals 519 Chilean pesos), my grocery bill was actually higher in Chile than in the U.S., with comparable items. The only thing cheaper, perhaps, were Hass avocadoes, at 70 cents each, and a decent bottle of Chilean wine (Carmenere, of course), at $3.79. Box of six rice-crispy-like granola bars (mostly filled with air)? $6.16 each. A liter of orange juice from concentrate? $1.98.
From Los Andes, we drove on a mountain highway towards Portillo and the Chilean Mountain Warfare School, where we would reside. The highway is actually the major route between Santiago and Chile’s Central Region to Argentina and its capital, Buenos Aires. Up until the 1980s, there existed a narrow gauge railway connecting Los Andes with Mendoza, Argentina, through the Andes, but it has gone into disrepair since then. The railway is adjacent to the highway and the signs of wear were quite apparent. In drainage areas, like at the bottom of a slide chute, the track was broken, with jagged rails aimed in every direction but straight across the channel. Apparently, the Chilean and Argentinean governments plan to refurbish the railway as a method to reducing the truck traffic on the highway.
The settlements became more haphazard and random again as we leave Los Andes. Fences continue to strictly demarcate property, even though neighbors can be seen pleasantly enjoying one another’s company on the porch or in the garden. One joke about South America is that the reason why it remains poor, especially in rural areas, is that people stand around all day watching car’s pass by. If the car’s stopped coming, people could get to work! It’s not a very “culturally sensitive” joke and it probably is far from the truth. Honestly, that a highway and railway exist in the terrain we eventually ascended to is testament to Chile’s determination to tame its natural environment.
In a smaller sense, on the individual level, I could see this in the plots of land carved for crops and gardens beside the highway. Piles of rocks in one corner of the plots bring memories of the harshness of farming in northern Maine. The narrow canyon had very little level ground and the Rio Blanco below, tore back and forth, alienating small mesas of land that someone had turned into useful pasture, connected to the highway by an Indian Jones-esque wooden-plank bridge.
But one cannot help but get a sense that Chile is “not quite finished, yet.” Everything seems to be under construction, or in need of refurbishment. Or, temporary, and just visiting. From those rails to the transitory appearance of the plywood and tin houses. As aesthetically pleasing as the mountains were, it was impossible to ignore the copious amounts of trash strewn everywhere – in the river, beside the road, in yards, in the middle of nowhere. We actually found plastic bags ground up by the groomer on the ski trails.
As we climbed further, our Officer in Charge (OIC), who’s the official in charge of our group, commented that the place looked like Afghanistan, with the rugged mountains, whitewater rivers, and rock everywhere. Usually, the OIC on our trips serves a ceremonial function at military events. We’re expected to have one since most often there are events specifically scheduled to bring together the OICs from the different groups with the ranking officers of the host nation. It follows our goal of improving military cooperation and friendship through sport. This time, however, our lieutenant colonel from the Vermont Army National Guard proved helpful in giving feeds, scoping a few shots, arranging logistics, and providing good stories for our meals.
Eventually, the rocks became covered in ice and snow and we were quickly amidst winter. Being a Sunday afternoon, it wasn’t surprising to see people enjoying the snow. However, in Chile, this apparently involved walking across newly slid avalanches in your day shoes and sledding down perilously steep and craggy slopes on anything from plywood to plastic bags. All with a smile, mind you! Where the slide zones encountered the highway, the highway was covered with a snow-roof, a concrete slab, open on the down-slope side. This proved quite helpful in keeping the road open! Good thinking, Chile!
The highway above snowline turned aggressively as it followed the movement of the Rio Blanco, until we reached a hydroelectric station, at which point it turned upon itself with dozens of switchbacks, which one unfortunate Cadillac was unable to summit. Here, we ran into the tractor-trailers we were warned about. Some of these vehicles were really a hazard, not only to the occupants!, but also everyone else on the highway. The air smelled of burnt rubber and diesel fumes.
We passed the base of the longest ski run in the world, measuring 2.6-km with 1810-m of vertical. The chairlift goes over the switchbacks, while the run goes over, in one place, the road itself, too. Ski Portillo was established in the 1940s. Their infrastructure has been wiped out on a few occasions by the catastrophic avalanches innate to being below some of the tallest mountains in the world. The ski area has a 450-person limit per day, keeping it from becoming overcrowded. Ski Portillo hosted the World Championships in 1966.
At the top of one set of switchbacks, we reached the Chilean Mountain Warfare School’s mountain campus (it has a second area lower, near Los Andes, along the highway and Rio Blanco). The place resembled an Antarctic research station, with buildings buried in snow. In fact, the entrance to the main building is through a tunnel dug through the snow pack to the wooden front door. Our accommodations were nice. We had six people in a room on bunk beds, with one modern bathroom. We were thankful that the school did not practice disposing of toilet paper in wastebaskets, which is common in the rest of the world, I’ve now learned, but which I first encountered personally in the grocery store in Los Andes hours earlier.
Above the school, about a mile up the road is Hotel Portillo, the epicenter of Ski Portillo. (Actually, it’s the only lodging option.) It is perched on Lago del Inca, Lake of the Inca, which itself is a glacial lake at the terminus of massive glaciers cascading down from Cerro Aconcagua, Tres Hermanos, and the other surrounding mountains. From the porch of the hotel, I was able to make out the summit of Aconcagua, but only the tip, since most of it was blocked by another mountain. The hotel was well kept and bustled with activity. Most of the visitors seemed to be Americans or Europeans, with a few Chileans, and a scattering of New Zealanders and Australians. Their Wi-Fi was great, that’s what mattered!
Further up the highway is the Uspallata Pass and the Cumbre Tunnel, which connect trucks and some passenger vehicles traveling between Chile and Argentina. With no car and not enough confidence (or stupidity) to flag down a truck for a ride (it wouldn’t have been faster, since the trucks creep along in traffic, as officials inspect at the border), I didn’t get a chance to see the international boundary. However, Aconcagua is in Argentina, so by that, I have seen Argentina.
I saw only one small (though tall) piece of Chile. This nation of 16.5 million people is one of the most diverse in the world. There’s the Atacama Desert in the north, the driest place in the world. The Central Valley around Santiago has excellent agricultural lands and has a cool Mediterranean climate. In the south, there are extensive forests, volcanoes, glaciers. In the east, the Andes. Chile controls Easter Island (think of the massive cone head statues facing the Pacific Ocean) and has a claim (and a base) on Antarctica. It is the longest continent, spanning more than 35 degrees of latitude.
On the way to the airport, I had a chance to speak with one of our assigned officer. I attempted to make use of my high school Spanish and a long-ago acquired English-Spanish dictionary (though he spoke passable English… besides the unfortunate mistake of confusing “after” with “before” in regards to an important scheduling event we had).
* I asked him about how school is arranged in Chile. Indeed, school schedules are a relic of our agricultural past, for classes start in March, which is fall in the Southern Hemisphere, and end in December, the onset of summer.
* I asked about climate change. This was difficult to translate, especially since he didn’t seem to be familiar with global climate change. He confirmed that summers have become hotter and that winters are not as extreme and see less snow than in the past.
* I asked about how the military works in Chile. He said Chile has a form of draft, where citizens are conscripted for two years of service (not sure if it was two years). Chile also has professional soldiers; its officers are all professional. The professional military is primarily located near the Bolivian and Peruvian borders, or are in training for potential conflict there, as apparently Chile has poor relations with them, stemming from border issues dating back to the nineteenth century, when Chile took control through force of Bolivia’s access to the Pacific Ocean, and parts of Peru.
* Military training in Chile is measured in months, not in weeks, as it is in the U.S. Like in the U.S., officers are commissioned following four years of studying at the military college and one year of further branch-specific training (armor, infantry, support, and so forth).
* I asked more about the Mountain Warfare School. He said it is visited by military personnel from around the world. Likewise, Chilean military personnel visit schools in other countries. Many of the instructors at the school had been through similar courses in Italy. He would be traveling to India in a few days himself.
Chile is a wonderful country. Though I came down with a cold a few days after returning, missing several days of training, it was a good decision to accept the offer of a free trip to race in Chile with the National Guard team. In the future, I would like to return to Chile and visit the other regions that make up the vast and diverse nation. And of course, I must ski the powder some day at Ski Portillo!
 |
