At last, a month after I left, the promised account of my time in Chile.
Part One – The Studies
Well, it turns out I am really bad at Spanish. I tried, I really tried. I studied hard. I did my homework. I asked lots of questions in class. I found the language easy to understand, even when spoken with a Chilean accent. But when I attempted to speak? Towards the end of my week-long course, I went out for lunch with some fellow students, Flavia from Brazil and Federica and Paola from Italy. For the first time I felt I was getting a grip on Spanish, especially the verbs, and I was confidently chatting away to Flavia, who doesn't speak English. Then I noticed Federica smiling. I asked her why, and she said, "It's so cute the way you keep speaking Italian."
So there you have it. I went to Chile to learn Spanish, and I spent the whole week speaking Italian. I don't even speak Italian well, just understand it, but every word I have ever learnt rose to the top of my head when I tried to communicate in Spanish.
Nevertheless I had a great time studying at
Escuela Bellavista, which had a very welcoming atmosphere and great teachers. And maybe I didn't manage to speak much Spanish because of my brain short-circuiting, but in class I discovered a lot about Chilean culture and society that I wouldn't have learnt from a book. I also enjoyed staying in the home of a Chilean couple, teachers at the school, along with some other students from various countries. It was a fun week, and definitely worth it.
Part Two – The Travels
The fact that we couldn't find our way out of Santiago in our hire car should have rung some alarm bells. The only map we had was a very basic and utterly inadequate one in the Lonely Planet guidebook (a real roadmap was nowhere to be found), and the signs on the roads were easily missed and not particularly helpful. At one point we even resorted to the compass app on
Tomomi's iPhone to give us an idea of the direction we should go in. We got on the right road in the end, and headed south to Santa Cruz.
Santa Cruz, a small town in the
Colchagua Valley, was our base for two nights. Earthquake damage was very visible there, unlike in Santiago. As we arrived on the May Day holiday, we had the chance to experience a local fair: crowds, drums, guitars,
reggaeton,
choripanes, and
churros. The stars were unbelievably bright in the night sky.
On our second day we backtracked north from Santa Cruz, and went to the
Reserva Nacional Río de Los Cipreses, a little-visited but magnificent nature reserve that we only had the chance to dip into the north of. (To see more would require much more time, and a four-wheel drive.) A magic moment on the way: we stopped at a river where some
huasos were watering their horses, and they came over to chat. They were heading into the mountains to bring their animals back down for the winter months. Tomomi was persuaded to go for a ride – her first time on a horse. As she rode off with one of the huasos, the guy who had stayed behind asked me where she was from. When I told him Japan, he inquired if she spoke Spanish. I said she didn't; this seemed to confuse him, and he asked, "So how can you understand each other?"
On day three we left Santa Cruz and headed west, first dropping into a vineyard (that we decided afterwards was probably owned by arms dealer
Carlos Cardoen), then
Lolol, devastated by the recent earthquake. Reaching the coast we went to the village of
Bucalemu for a fish lunch, then up the coast to Pichilemu.
Pichilemu, described as Chile's surf capital, had the sad, deserted feel of a seaside resort in winter, but we were happy to find a place to have proper coffee, rather than the ubiquitous Nescafé. (As the Lonely Planet says, "Decent coffee is like gold dust in Chile.")
And then came the hardest part of the trip. Our plan was to drive up the coast to
Valparaíso, to spend a couple of nights there. But, not having a proper map, we only had a rough idea of the route. There were other challenges: really poor signage, wrong turns, a long detour because of a non-existent bridge (destroyed in the earthquake), pitch-black roads, fog, no facilities en route (and three women who'd drunk lots of coffee)... I think it was Tomomi who said it felt like we were in a video game; we would get through a level, to find a greater challenge awaiting at the next. But
Scilla, who did all the driving, somehow kept her cool.
Even when we got to Valparaíso the nightmare didn't stop. We finally arrived really late at night, long hours after we had planned to. The map giving directions to the hostel was terrible (and I suspect the street names were wrong). We spent a surreal hour driving around Valparaíso's steep streets in the rain getting attacked by packs of deranged dogs (only later learning that dogs in Valparaíso chase cars for fun), searching for a statue holding a fork (Neptune and his trident). And when we eventually found the hostel, the door was locked and no one answered the bell; we only got in because one of the guys who worked there happened to return from wherever he had been.
Day four was spent resolutely on our feet and not in the car, wandering around Valparaíso. We were joined by another friend,
Chris. Valparaíso is not only physically exhausting (it's built on hills running up from the sea) but also visually exhausting; everywhere you look, especially in the upper part of town, there are brightly painted houses, street art, and graffiti. (Check out
Tomomi's photos.) "The madhouse museum beauty of its strange corrugated-iron architecture, arranged on a series of tiers linked by winding flights of stairs and funiculars, is heightened by the contrast of diversely coloured houses blending with the leaden blue of the
bay."
Our fifth day of travelling took us to
Quintay, and
Isla Negra. And finally, back to Santiago.
Part Three – The Summit
Many other people have written about the
Global Voices Summit – if you're interested, I recommend
Ethan Zuckerman's post for a good overview,
Lova Rakotomalala's for some philosophical musings, and
Leonard Chien's for some fascinating "backstage" talk. All I can add to what others have written is that these days, Global Voices feels less – for want of a better word – American. By that I mean that the last summit in
Budapest seemed to have a large number of participants who were either from the US or based in the US or visited the US regularly and were familiar with US organisations and a certain type of US tech-related discussion. All that is perhaps unsurprising, but it did feel a little like a club where people shared a language and were having conversations that outsiders like me couldn't immediately participate in. Now Global Voices (including the
Lingua sites) has expanded massively, and this year's summit felt very different, with a huge variety of places and languages represented. Truly global voices at last.
The Epilogue
In transit at São Paulo airport on my back, I was surprised at the check-in desk when the airline employee switched from speaking Portuguese – as she had been to the people in front – to Spanish when she saw me (then English when she saw my passport). It didn't make sense, because if I could pass as Chilean or Argentinean then why not Brazilian? A little later, still at the airport, I bumped into a Brazilian friend from Bahrain (oh yes, the world is small), and as we were chatting I mentioned that the woman had spoken to me in Spanish instead of Portuguese. My friend's explanation was that Brazilian women are really overdressed compared to other Latin American women, and that Spanish-speaking women look more "relaxed". Which seems like a diplomatic way of saying that I'm far too scruffy to pass for a Brazilian woman.
My short time in Chile, and the reading I have done since coming back, have made me quite obsessed with the idea of returning for longer. I had no time to read when I was there, but afterwards I picked up an old book called Image of Chile, by Graeme Parish; it's confusingly written, being a mixture of historical information and recollections of Parish's various trips to Chile in the late 1940s and late 1960s, but not without its charm (if you choose to ignore incredible statements such as "...the Chilean Indian, by temperament amiable in his sloth and slothful, making a life-long study of the many ways in which to be indolent..."). I have just read
The Motorcycle Diaries; I've never been a Che groupie, but I was certainly engaged by his thoughts as a young traveller.
My daydreams are currently taking me on a journey (in part the reverse to Guevara's) starting in
Lima, Peru, from where I move on to
Cusco and
Machu Picchu. Crossing the border into Chile I travel from
Arica at its northern point through the
Atacama Desert and various national parks to Santiago (halfway down the country). I spend a month studying in Santiago (actually learning how to speak some Spanish this time), then move southwards by bus and boat, through the
Lakes District,
Chiloé, and more national parks, finally reaching
Tierra del Fuego. From there I head up through the Argentinean side of
Patagonia, and across to
Buenos Aires. Actually there are different versions of the daydream, sometimes including studying at the beginning and not in the middle, sometimes including visiting
Isla Robinson Crusoe, sometimes Bolivia, Brazil... I can always dream.
general
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6:40 
In an animal pack, like a wolf pack, a lion pack etc…, you will find that the strongest male controls and leads the pack and the rest follow his lead, this male stays in power until another strong male steps up to the challenge and ousts him from his leadership position by killing him or defeating him in a fight and banishes him from the pack. The same can be applied at work, where an alpha type will try to “kill” or “banish” those whom he deems as a threat to him and his god-forsaken existence.
