It’s a happening place, Santiago. A sprawling capital city of six million people and almost certainly the most modern and ‘westernised’ city on the continent. That’s not to say it is without culture, history and character – it has these in spades too. We had spent a week in this cool city before our little detour to Easter Island and got a feel for the place. Cuthbert had waited patiently at Santiago airport for us to return, but we still had things to see and stuff to get done before hitting the road again. We had found a marvellous central but peaceful and secure park-up spot by one of the city’s parks with a friendly guard-chap, so it felt a bit like coming home when we returned.

Hop-on, Hop-off

To orientate ourselves when we first arrived we took one of the Hop-on Hop-off bus tours of the city. This is obviously a very touristy activity and slightly cheesy, but Santiago is a huge city of several barrios (neighbourhoods) with things to see, so it’s convenient to get your bearings with this tourist facility. It took us around all the main sites and gave an interesting commentary in English. We had great weather to wander around the city’s many plazas and also did the hike up to Cerro San Cristóbal. On the top of this city-centre hill stands the 14m high Virgen María statue overlooking the city. The Virgen isn’t remotely on the scale of the much more impressive Christ Redeemer in Río, but you get a reasonably impressive view over the city and out to the Andes looming behind.

One area that the tour bus (un)surprisingly didn’t cover, was Marcus’ ‘target’ barrio – the tool-shop district. Yes, there is a whole area of Santiago city where the streets are lined with all things hardware – Marcus’ dreamland. He only needed a couple of bolts for a minor job on the truck, but he had, of course, to investigate what else he might really ‘need’ from their stocks – on a ‘just in case’ basis! Of course another must-see destination for an over-lander starved of regular retail opportunities is the enormous shopping mall just 5 mins walk from our camp-spot – the largest mall in Chile, in fact. We haven’t lived near this much ‘civilisation’ for a long time and we take full advantage of the facilities 🙂

Water, water everywhere

We were aware that on arrival back from Easter Island we would be in for a bit of a soggy time in Santiago – some serious rain was forecast. The rain that came however, was a few drops worse than predicted. Then there was the additional factor that the temperature was slightly warmer than is normal for the first rains of the season, so the precipitation didn’t settle as snow on the mountains. Instead, it washed down the slopes bringing mud-slides into the Mapucho River and the city. The city’s water system very quickly became contaminated with un-treated mud-slide water and the authorities switched off the water supply to over 80% of the city’s population. For over 48 hrs heavy rain continued and while the people struggled to cope without water supply, the city’s drainage system struggled to cope with the muddy floods. The few shops that could open, quickly sold-out of bottled water and all the cafes, bars and restaurants were forced to close. Soon the electricity also had to be switched off to several areas of the city. It was, to put it mildly, all a bit of a pickle. But there was more pickle to come!

Coincidentally, the city is undertaking some major works for a new highway junction over the river. According to local media, the contractors should have put in place an adequate system to divert the river-water around the works. However, they reportedly miscalculated the potential volume of river-water by a factor of ten! When the deluge and mud-slide came, it washed over the contractor’s inadequate river diversion course and flooded the city’s central commercial area with thick sludgy water. The streets were inches deep in fast-flowing mud-water, building basements and ground floors were flooded, fences were washed away and large chunks of debris were deposited all around. The police and the military deployed to rescue people and dogs, whilst the President appeared on TV to declare a state of emergency for the city. The local social media quickly voiced calls for the municipal council to ‘sue the pants off’ the road-works contractor (yes, that’s a technical legal term, trust me 🙂 ). However, the local environmental groups added their view that the urban mud-bath is a direct result of the deforestation of the mountain foot-hills around the city. We’re no environmental experts, but having seen the volume of mud that flowed into the city that weekend, it seems difficult to argue with this point.

Anyway, during all this palaver we were parked-up in Cuthbert safe and sound, in a quiet park just 200-300 metres up the road from the scene. We were slightly above the flood-level and grateful for our own on-board fresh water supply. Although Cuthbert’s solar panels struggled slightly with the overcast conditions, we managed to keep everything running off our batteries, so we were more comfortable than many of the residents of central Santiago. We could keep tabs on the situation with local radio news and social media, but out of curiosity, we donned our wellies and gortex to inspect the mayhem for ourselves and to watch the Chilean TV reporters out on the streets doing live broadcasts.

By day four the sun came out and the clear-up began in earnest. Diggers came in to scoop up the piles of sludge and debris; portable pumps were running around the city extracting water and mud from the buildings, and council workers were putting down mini-makeshift ‘pallet and plank’ bridges for pedestrians to get around the muddiest sections of the town that were still ankle deep. It’s going to take a while to clear this lot up. We hope that works contractor has good liability insurance in place – he’s going to need it!

The floods obviously caused significant chaos to traffic which had to be diverted around the city, but no sooner had this been resolved when another event brought central Santiago to a standstill – the funeral procession for former President Patricio Aylwin who had died over the flood weekend. Aylwin was the first post-Pinochet democratically elected president and was, by all accounts, a popular chap. Certainly the turn-out for his memorial procession would indicate this and the city once again ground to a spectacular halt.

French Friends

When the city wasn’t paralysed by events (oh yes, another thing was a 20,000-strong student protest demonstration through the centre!) we managed to do a fair bit of sight-seeing, shopping and general chilling out in a great city. One nice surprise was to receive an email from our French ‘e-friends’ René and Sylvie, that they were approaching Santiago and would be there to see us in a couple of days. René and Sylvie are touring South America in a truck similar to Cuthbert (the same base-vehicle Iveco Daily 4×4) and Marcus has long been in detailed email correspondence with René about technical stuff, routes, vehicle performance and so on. It was great to finally meet them, put faces to names and we had a lovely couple of days with them in Santiago.

Finally, after our second week in the city, we thought we had better move on before the council started charging us local residency tax! We have enjoyed Santiago but are now looking forward to getting back on the road. Some of our wanderings in Santiago took us between shiny office towers and suit-clad business people grabbing take-out coffees on-the-trot between meetings. The familiar sights and smells took me back to my days of that ‘uniform’, but after over two years on the road, we don’t miss that life one bit!

It has been great weather since the mud-deluge, but the forecast is now for rain again over the next few days. Winter is coming ‘down south’ here and we don’t propose to hang around too far south to suffer its consequences. We’re following the sun to the far north-west desert of Argentina, but the question is: which way to go?

Which side of the Andes? 

So far on our way north from Tierra del Fuego we have criss-crossed the Andes at will between Chile and Argentina without the need to plan ahead much. But now winter is coming. Winter brings snow, and in the high Andes, lots of it. Lots of snow will block the mountain pass roads, so we can no longer pop across at just any old border crossing on the map. Hmmm… we finally concede that we need to adopt a little discipline here, ditch the rather laissez-faire attitude and plan ahead. We have to commit to one side of the Andes or the other.

The two options look equally good to us, so it’s pretty much down to the toss of a coin:

‘Heads’ – back to Argentina the same way that we came into Chile a month ago, through Mendoza then north on Ruta 40 through some ‘wild west’ countryside to the city of Salta in Argentina’s far north-west;

‘Tails’ – a stay in Chile, heading to the coastal town of Valparaiso (apparently a ramshackle ‘San Franciso style’ city, chaotically built on several steep hills, with the best street-art in South America) then north on the Pan-Am Highway, taking in some great beaches, the pisco centre of Elqui Valley (not as bad as it sounds! We’ll explain later!) and visits to world-class space observatories. Eventually we will reach the next open mountain pass  which will take us to Salta in Argentina.

Out comes the coin… hold your breath… And ‘Tails’ it is! We stay in Chile for the time being. Valparaiso, here we come!

Link to next blog: Pisco, Astro and Snow      Link to full South America Blog