Chile: it was about memory

Not much more than a year after my last visit I found myself — somewhat inexplicably — in Chile again. This is how things unfolded and ultimately made sense to me.

Valparaíso

Chile’s second largest port, Valparaíso, the Jewel of the Pacific, is known for its colorful hillside houses, steep funiculars, and vibrant art community. Sadly, it also counts several disasters in its history, including major earthquakes in 1822 and 1906, the Great Fire of Valparaiso in 2014, and a fire that erupted just a week after we left and killed more than a hundred people.

Because the rich architecture of its historic district, Unesco declared it a World Heritage Site.

Corrugated metal is everywhere

The best thing to do is to meander around its narrow and intricate cobblestone alleys admiring the street art that makes the city an open-air museum.

The former prison, or ex cárcel, is now a major cultural center, the Parque Cultural de Valparaíso, which preserves the memory of political prisoners who were confined within its walls, while fostering today’s artistic expression.

Santiago

For me, Santiago is synonym of errands, dirty air, hurried people and aggressive drivers. And because it’s my home town, it’s hard to engage the part of my brain that gets excited when visiting a new place. I promise I’ll make a conscious effort (and tame the fear of getting my camera stolen) next time, and play explorer to find the interesting spaces of Santiago’s beauty.

For now, however, I have only a cell phone picture to show. A significant one though, that evokes deep emotions and touches my wounds, our wounds.

The Museum of Memory and Human Rights commemorates the victims of human rights violations during the 17-year military dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet. A sobering statement is a three-story wall with photos of the victims, which serves as an altar and poignant memorial. Facing this wall there’s a glass room with a screen and a keyboard where you can look up information about the victims and dedicate notes to them. I saw a young man in his late teens, accompanied by his mother and his sister. He typed a name, tapped on a picture, and started writing a note for someone he’d never met: “Querido abuelo”. Unable to hold my tears I left to give them privacy.

The museum is keeping our painful memories alive, but that’s essential, because we must not forget. We need to remember so that we never again live in a country where its citizens are burnt alive, where people are tortured and their mutilated bodies thrown from helicopters to the sea, where mothers don’t have a place to bring flowers to honor the courage of their disappeared sons.

Valle de Aguas Calientes

From Santiago, if you drive four hours south to Chillán (where our second mate lives), and then 90 minutes up the Andes to the Termas de Chillán ski and hot springs resort, and then hike six strenuous hours mostly uphill, you’ll reach the remote, breathtaking and aptly named Valle de Aguas Calientes. It’s a broad valley where a multitude of springs and rivers come down the mountain, spanning the whole temperature spectrum from boiling hot to freezing cold. I voluntarily and willingly submerged my body into a freezing cold one, a lukewarm one, and a goldilocks one; lied in the confluence of a very hot and a very cold one — so statistically speaking the average temperature was just perfect, only that the left half of my body was too cold and the right half too hot; and accidentally stepped with both my feet into an almost boiling one because that solid stepping stone was not that solid after all.

Carretera Austral

An overnight bus ride plus a rental car in Puerto Montt took us to Route 7, or Carretera Austral, a remote road that connects small towns in Chile’s Northern Patagonia. Well-known among adventure travelers, the Carretera Austral provides access to a plethora of pristine environments, including ancient forests, glistening fjords, and towering mountains, amidst a backdrop of exquisite natural beauty that is iconic to Patagonia. We only traveled a small portion of its 1,240 kilometers (the easy, mostly paved part), but that included enough places of sheer beauty.

At the Parque Nacional Alerce Andino we hiked deep into the Chilean native rainforest. It was a beautiful day with some dark clouds that brought an occasional shower. The wet soil aroma, the impenetrable surrounding greenery, the breeze making the treetops dance in unison, and the enthralling chucao’s song¹ brought my spirit back to my land. My homeland, the place where I grew up, the forest I craved and made part of me. I inhaled deeply, my eyes getting wet, trying to register that feeling because I finally understood why I was called to come to Chile. It was to remember the good parts of my childhood. It was to be again, after ten years, with those trees. Their names, some of them almost forgotten, speak to me: lenga, canelo, coigüe, luma, tepa, mañío, ulmo.

And the maqui, my goodness, the maqui. It’s not a particularly beautiful tree but it offers a gift in the form of pearl-sized, dark purple, almost black fruit. Long ago I was willing to climb the steepest hills to get to a maqui tree and spend hours picking and eating the fruit, never stuffing myself because it’s so tiny and requires so much patience. At the end of the day we had our hands and mouths dyed with that characteristic deep purple. So here I was, half a century later, reaching as fast as I could to get just a few of those magical pearls.

My soul needed what that forest provided; I just didn’t know that I needed it.

Huailahué

1. The chucao is an unassuming little bird that sings my favorite birdsong: a distinct pattern that reminds me of a stone skimming across water, and is so loud and clear that you’d think the source is a much larger critter.
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