travelogue

It’s (at) the End of the World as We Know it & I Feel Fine

adventure, chile, South America, Travel, Travel Photography, travelogue, Valparaiso
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There’s the End of the World, Then There’s the End of the World

Exaggeration. It’s nowhere near the end of the world; it’s not even near the world of the end. Nor is it at the end of Chile. Far from it. For that you’ve got to motor another 2000km south to Punta Arenas. But you get the idea, and if you remember a certain REM classic from the 80s, you’ll get the cultural reference, too. One fact in the title is incontrovertible: I did feel fine. Chile left me feeling as fine as I’ve felt for a while. Moreover, when the actual end of the world is unravelling half a world away in the Near East, Chile’s Pacific coast might well be the other end of the world spared the end. That enhances its attractiveness all the more.

Travel Writing Should Always Start with A Geography Lesson and End with a Life Lesson

Way down south lies a land of immense variety. A land that the relatively few who visit will not readily forget. Rigid like a backbone that runs down the southern cone of South America, Chile is tierra blessed by nature and by virtue of the 40 lines of latitude it straddles on the great southern highway reaching from the subtropics to the subantarctic. 40 degrees of latitude! As far as parallels go, that’s unparalleled, anywhere.

If i may stoop to condescend for a moment, with that irritating air of a geography teacher who always fancied himself as a geophysical mystic, the only true frontiers are natural: rivers, ocean, mountains, deserts, and so on. All else is political and therefore abstract. Chile is pinched between Earth’s longest mountain range above sea level and its deepest blue wilderness below. The altitude range within the space of 150km is about 40,000ft. With the exception of islands, Chile is the embodiment of a sovereign nation as nature intended. To its north is the Atacama, the world’s highest desert, recording some of the driest non-polar conditions on Earth; to its south a subpolar peninsula recording some of the strongest winds on Earth. So unusually-shaped within its borders, Chile is rather unlike anything else out there. Only its Andean neighbour, Argentina, comes close. Chile is a beautiful ecological layer cake. As mentioned, northern Chile, on the altiplano, is a high altitude, volcanic desert of spectacular beauty and otherworldly mystique. NASA use it as a Martian lab. Beneath that is a Mediterranean belt, where vines are grown, climate is optimal, and where most Chileans choose to live. Beneath that lies the cool temperate zone. This region is verdant like Scotland or the Pacific Northwest. This pristine region is studded with inlets and ring-fenced by national parks. Its coastline is so jagged it’s positively fractal.

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Beneath that you’re entering true Patagonia: a subpolar zone dotted with glaciers, guanaco, and granite fingers pointing up to their creator. Torres Del Paine is the most celebrated of these granite peaks. Beyond this storybook wilderness we come to the nub of the habitable world: the Chilean Antarctic and the Straits of Magellan. Beyond this point, history attests to where fools have rushed in where angels have feared to tread. Not mountains and ocean. Rather mountains of ocean.

Geography class over. Psychotherapy Class Underway.

Valparaiso – San Francisco of the South

How do you cross a country three times the size of Great Britain in a single day? Well, you go to Chile is what you do. From Santiago’s Pajaritos (‘little birds’ – what a name for a bus station where pickpocketing is rife) it was an hour and an half to Valparaiso, the erstwhile ‘Jewel of the Pacific’. These days this coastal city of a quarter of a mill is not so much of a jewel, but more like a frayed patchwork quilt. But nonetheless, Valparaiso was immortalised by Sting in an eponymously-titled song from his 1996 album, Mercury Falling. Since I heard that song the year it was released when, coincidentally, I was on the other flank of the Andes in Argentina, I think I had harboured a longing to see this nineteenth century pride of the Pacific for myself. I knew of its dashing, federation-style, clapboard houses. I had seen images of it as an artist’s messy palette, all splashed in mixed hues of gouache across a Kraken’s bite mark in the coast where deep ocean becomes a narrow continental shelf, then suddenly and dramatically breaking the surface as South America in the form of a magnificent natural harbour.

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I knew of its reputation as an outpost of bohemian art. I knew a little of its rich history, its links to Victorian Britain. Though it was what i didn’t know that outshone what I knew. This in itself is the essence of discovery. For instance, I had not a clue how shabby Valparaiso was, how far she had fallen into disrepair. My legs were shocked at how steep her hills were; how every chipped and tattered surface now doubled as a work of art writ large; and, finally, how shady it was to walk her threaded streets after dark. This town struck me immediately as San Francisco’s doppelganger. The bay minus the tech giants. Full of dreamers, freaks, addicts, and creative types. A city falling off its elegant hinges, overwritten by the hand of youthful self-expression, I quickly realised there’s probably little else like it, never mind in Chile, or even Latin America, but across the entire world. Except for San Francisco, that is. And maybe Seattle. And Vancouver. Why don’t we throw in Vladivostok into the Pacific coastal family, not that i’ve been to the Russian Far east.

With vigour i set off out into the night. Pacific sunset falling down walls that told a story of decay and rebirth. This civic decrepitude you see across much of Latin America – from old British railway stations and Baroque colonial style in Sâo Paulo and Rio, to the flaky shutters and crumbling facades of San Telmo in Buenos Aires. But this decay does not mean death in Latin America. The blood of Latin creativity transfuses into the old, ailing body, rather like Count Dracula on his nightly prowls.

The day was handing over to the night shift when i got there. Scrawled metal shutters were coming down while the warm glow of micro pub lanterns were coming online. People sat on street tables quaffing the nation’s favourite tipple, which, by the way, is not wine. Chile has artisanal beers aplenty, many of which hail from the far south. It does red beers, ales, porters, lagers and pilsners, and all to a standard that even the Brits, Belgians and Germans might approve of. Yes, it’s official: Chileans fucking love beer, about as much as they love marijuana. In fact, they often combine them for a night to remember that gradually descends into a night forgotten. I sat outside at one such bar. The waiters were impeccable in their service in a way that puts my people to shame. They even spoke English, not that I wanted them to. But seeing that Chilean Spanish is a dialect unto itself, hearing English turned out to be a welcome tap on the eardrum.

On returning from el baño, the waiter warned me about leaving anything unsupervised, even four raw eggs, two bread rolls and a lump of cheese. Why, i asked. Because they’ll steal the clothes off your back in this town. It quickly became apparent that Valparaiso was the long-lost twin of San Francisco – a place where dreams come to die, a town where for every up and coming sort there down and out to match. When you think of South American cities you think of Old Portugal and Spain surrounded by cement. But not here. Here it’s Amityville meets neo-Baroque meets German half-timbering meets art nouveau meets grimy post-industrial meets the deep, blue yonder.

It’s sad really – seeing this once vital port of the South Pacific, for so long not just a refuelling station for naval and merchant shipping, but also an endpoint for Europeans seeking a new start – going downhill like a decrepit old dame rattling her jewels, wearing her tattered cha cha frock she kept from her heyday in the roaring Twenties. Yet, for all those flaked louvre shutters and all that graffiti scrawled across neo-baroque stonework, Valparaiso has reinvented itself in ways most other cities would have neither the chutzpah nor the imagination to do.

Why bother scrubbing the walls when you can bedaub them with a riot of colour which is the world itself if you can only move beyond the grey of the everyday? Valparaiso is colour writ large. It’s subversion in the way Paris’ Pompidou Centre is subversive. Murals extend out root and branch as if their host building existed purely for the moment the artist eyed their surface relief; just like the exoskeleton that wraps France’s greatest museum to modern art.

Valparaiso might well be the end of the world’s greatest open-air art gallery, but I’m running out of platitudes for a city falling so far apart it’s falling back together as a mass mania of magic murals that lend themselves to what survives of a human race that is failing in so many other ways. I’m all out of words. Speechless, even. Let each picture speak a thousand of them.

Until Valparaiso I never knew how decay could be subverted in such spectacular ways.

Socorro Answers a Cry for Help.

#Brazil, Brazil, Säo Paulo, Socorro, South America, Travel, travelogue

Made ancient by granitic bedrock jutting through in megalithic outcrops, while at the same time made new by the accelerated growth rate of vegetation rampaging over every sod of this Capricorn earth, the topography takes a sideways glance at normality. It’s a split personality of rural France and equatorial South America: piebald cows grazing upland pastures that border dense strips of Atlantic rainforest. Nobbled hilltops, a punk mohican of Atlantic rainforest on one flank, scalped green on the other. If ever Gondwana had an affair with Occitanie, the hills around Socorro is where the child was raised.

There’s nothing quite like a great view to soothe frayed nerves. We left the madhouse of Säo Paulo later than expected on Friday. Wanting to escape the quantum chaos of Friday rush hour traffic, instead the invisible threads that bind millions to the city’s ailing physiology – with its high cholesterol and hypertension – took us into its sickly hold. A passing thunderstorm brought rain not in drops but in globules. Five minutes of deluge had the streets funnelling a torrent of water. As the afternoon wore on, I feared being held hostage to fortune in what would be a million-man race out of the city before dark. And so it went. Swerving hither and thither, we dodged four-wheel bullet after four-wheel bullet in our haste to pull off a spectacular jailbreak. And we almost made it the 25-odd miles to the city limits without incident. That is, until some inconsiderate arsehole (cuzaö in Portuguese – my new favourite, adopted insult) decided to cut us up by swerving violently off the middle lane to reach the exit (saída) and clipping the flank of our car which was motoring along on the inside lane.

Bang! Time stopped momentarily while fate decided whether to flip the car onto its roof and under the 18 wheels of a trundling road train, or to spare us with a mere metallic slap. Fate chose the latter. Stopped in the central reservation of a 6-lane highway from hell, cars flew past us as we remonstrated with the intransigent old fool, who blamed us for being in the slow lane, and therefore causing considerable inconvenience to his plans to make a sudden and spectacularly boneheaded exit off the expressway. ‘Sua culpa’ I said, which maddened him all the more. Meanwhile, I could see the red mist come down on my girlfriend. The offending driver refused to exchange insurance details, stating he didn’t bother buying any for his €15,000 car. Having given up trying to make him see reason, he fled. Karine snapped at the injustice, and an emotional catharsis ensued. Despairing, she insisted on going home. I said no way, so took the wheel and tried to make a dignified escape into the thickly-forested mountains at the natural delimitation of this red giant of a town.

Catharses often end in a profound sense of inner peace. And so it was with Karine. I placed a reassuring hand on hers, and reminded her that we were uninjured and the car, while pranged, was driving well enough. And best of all, we had escaped Säo Paulo’s potent clutches and were now under a tranquil blanket of night in rural Brazil.

We made Socorro by 9pm. The surrounding hills were just about discernible as an inky staircase climbing into the unsullied night. The town, now just a cluster of lamplight in the saddle of a distant valley, looked inviting in a way that only a boy from the provinces could understand. Our little love shack was waiting for us along the Rio de Peixe (Fish River) tourist valley, off the asphalt and down a red oxide dirt track. Old derelict outhouses that once served the Fazenda Fartura loomed in the shadow. Other than weak porch light from the few farm dwellings dotted around the meadows and beside lone arboreal survivors from a disappearing world of giants, we arrived to nought but bliss, and the sound of Earth spinning soundlessly through the void.

For You Beach Bums, Here’s the World’s Worst-Kept Secret

#adventure, #Brazil, #coast, A Costa Trindade, adventure, Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, South America, Travel, Travel Photography, travelogue

There are coastlines. Then there are coastlines. They vary vastly from pole to equator. Some are drowned mountain chains, others hilly escarpments ending in sea stacks, but most I can think of are fairly flat and innocuous. To quote American comic great, Bill Hicks, the place where dirt meets water. These level coastlines are where continental plains slope gracefully, but unspectacularly, into seas and oceans before falling off the edge of the continental shelf and into the inky abyss.

Just once in a while, though, you come upon a coastline which, for all intents and purposes, looks like it was designed by nature to strike undying awe into all humans. Occasionally, that awe extends to – now here i’m thinking bubbly bottlenose dolphins, leisurely leatherback turtles, and even that daft dog you always see barking at the crashing waves – creatures hitherto considered incapable of feeling awed by something abstract like beauty. Its every contour is divinely formed. Its lush, green, & pinnacled backdrop exists to try and upstage the coastline itself, although all it tends to end up doing is to add gloss to the whole picture. Both its outcrops of tide-smoothed megaliths and its oddly-placed vegetation could have been put there by a mythic giant who fancied himself as a bit of a stage designer-cum-cinematographer. Its intertidal waters are so transparent you wonder what the hell’s coming out of the tap.

Its mesmeric surf, unrolling waves onto the shore with all the panache of the footman unrolling the red carpet for his regal passenger, is so impeccably timed as to be the work of some unseen metronome: let’s call him The Earth Philharmonic Conductor. Its sand has been sifted so many times by the daily rhythms that it could pass for castor sugar if it didn’t taste so unlike sugar and so much like, er, minuscule grains of pulverised mollusc. Another defining characteristic of this perfect coastline is that it doesn’t simply disappear into the vanishing point. Rather, it is framed by virtue of being indented in the shape of a half-moon. Its farthest point, as visible by the human eye, is bookended by a mountain of Atlantic Rainforest that slips magnificently into the big blue.

Finally, the whole scene is capped off by a tropical sky, mercifully obscured by a succession of passing clouds that rest briefly in front of a blazing Capricorn sun in order to take the edge off the heat. But failing the presence of a shifting cloudscape, you – the lucky beachgoer – can always cool off racing into the rolling surf, whose temperature is an optimal 22ºC.

The stretch of coast I’m thinking of is one I’ve just returned from. Lying across both an ocean and an equator from the British Isles, tis true it’s far from here. In fact, it follows the Tropic of Capricorn about 43º longitude west of Greenwich, so that places it firmly both in the Western and the Southern Hemisphere. Yes, the sand exudes more heat than the average sole can handle, but there are shady spots, and tables and chairs under leafy fronds, and pretty girls serving chilled caipirinhas and fried morsels of freshly-caught fish. And away in the distance there are old, leathery hippies with beards too long for the sultry air, and joints smouldering away in their mouths. Music drifts in from who knows where. The singer’s language is exotic yet reassuring. Bodies come in all shapes and sizes, but unlike our overdeveloped world obesity is not really a problem. People who come here look after themselves. Elderly whippersnappers bob in the surf, forming a defensive palisade of golden skin and bone against the might of the ocean. I venture that this is pointless, but admire nevertheless their bravery before such a formidable opponent as the Atlantic.

The post meridian on the world’s most perfect length of sandy coast passes in a pleasant reverie. This is the sure sign of a great beach. An even surer sign of skin damage to fair types like yours truly, seeing as the Capricorn sun is now at its apex. The to-ing and fro-ing of the tide complementing the to-ing and fro-ing of my regular forays, from the spot where our parasoled table stands in the granite shadow of a wall of dripping vegetation, down to the world’s clearest water. I sip the dregs of my lime cocktail and watch a boy and a girl on the beach volleying a football between them without it barely touching the ground. She heads, he chests, she volleys it back with the side of her foot. This is impressive stuff. Never let it be said that girls canna kick a ball for toffee.

The day passes both without incident and with plenty of it. In a kind of Schrödinger’s feline paradox, I experience one memorable incident after another without there being the manner of incidents one usually associates with beaches on a hot day: pissed up louts and boors, stealthy gangs of thieves, drowning in the surf, that kind of thing. The first such incidence in my incident-free day starts with an uncanny feeling that i’ve died without a coroner’s report and then gone to heaven without really believing in either God or his long-haired son. It’s a cheat, and can only be got visiting the world’s most breathtaking bit of coastline. It then continues by dipping under the crest of a pulsing sea with my girlfriend’s son, who is beyond delighted to have discovered that such a place as this can really be in this world. The incidents continue with my girlfriend – no swimmer by her own admission – being upended by a wave, screaming in pure terror she hates me, before proceeding to slap me in the face for having brought her not only to a wild coast, but also almost to her untimely demise. I love her even more after that tiff.

What to say other than that was the noblest, most gratifying slap I’ve ever had. And why? Because i found the best bit of coastline anywhere. You could have stripped me of all my worldly belongings, subjected me to summary humiliation, and even proclaimed me dead from cancer within six months, and so long as these awful things were performed there where that sand met that sea, I would forgive practically anyone their everything.

You know you’ve arrived when all along you thought beaches and coasts came a poor second to the mountains inland. Having witnessed this Shangri-La, I’m not so convinced anymore of the inherent superiority of mountains over coasts. It was the best-kept secret outside of Brazil until I shouted my mouth off about it. It’s now the worst-kept. So, here goes….

You’re looking, but are you listening? See that little bite out of the green land due south of Paraty? Right on the South Atlantic ocean. The beach is Trindade, just inside of Rio de Janeiro state. Follow Highway 101 from Santos to Rio, and at every twist and turn of what is actually a 4,000km squiggle of bitumen running from Brazil’s south to its north, you’ll be picking your jaw up off the ground. This coastline is the stuff of your wildest dreams. See it before you see your end.