Santiago Area Trips

From Santiago you can be in the country in half an hour. Two trips this past week to places just outside Santiago —
1. Last Friday I headed southwest to Pomaire for lunch (comida tipica de Chile) and pottery lessons and to a vineyard called la Viña Chocalan for a tour and tasting with about a dozen Fulbright grantees.

Lunch was on the patio of an old hacienda turned tourist restaurant at the edge of Pomaire. Pomaire is an otherwise sleepy rural town that every weekend gets inundated by tour buses in search of its locally famous pottery (production pre-dates the Spanish arrival). Two or three of the little streets are lined with outdoor shops selling their everyday, heavy, mud-colored earthenware. Men and women selling their wares sit in the shade of their open-air shops, swatting flies and waiting for customers. Even the gait of the street dogs seemed slowed by the intense afternoon heat and languorous energy of a Friday afternoon in a small town.

After a lunch of onion-tomato salad, beef, potatoes and sweet corn mush we were lead into a little studio where we were encouraged to make pitchers (or some hideous variation thereof) in the local style. After half an hour of unsuccessful squeezing, poking and pushing I had a lumpy, asymmetrical concoction resembling an urn.

The adjacent kiln lead most of us to believe that our craft skills were going to be preserved as permanent mementos of our Pomaire visit. Instead the pitchers were collected, smashed (or schmushed is probably more accurate) and rolled back into their original form as mounds of clay. Probably for the best. Afterwards we were herded back onto the bus and taken to la Viña Chocalan vineyard.

The grape harvest begins this week, so the day we visited the vines were sagging under the weight of their fruity progeny. We surreptitiously sampled a few grapes from the edge of a row and decided that the grapes themselves are just as good as their fermented liquid cousin. The vineyard sits tucked under a sloping hillside and huddles in the shadows of the mountain foothills. The rows of vines extents out across the valley floor, and continue halfway up the surrounding hills, leaving a sharp horizontal delineation between the green of the cultivated vines and the yellowish brown of native grasses.

Because vineyards make some of their profit from tourism as well as wine distribution, they seem to invest heavily in their outbuildings for show. La Viña Chocalan recently completed a massive wooden barn / visitor’s center. The roofline is an asymmetrical barrel shape supported entirely with wood beams. A tasting room and offices sit at the front and the remaining 85% of the building is where the wine is produced.

I’m catching on to a pattern in vineyard design / construction. Chilean and Californian vineyards both seem to build long, wood structures that are tucked into the landscape. If I had to label the genre, I’d call it Eco-Modernist barn architecture. From the few I’ve seen, the design intent seems to be that the building should play a visual second to the surrounding land that the vineyards depend on.

After some wine-tasting (very acidic) and cheese scarfing we headed back to real life (or something like it) in Santiago. The bus driver was nice enough to drop me off right on my street.

2. Trip to the moon / ski resort El Colorado / the mountains

On Sunday, I headed off with Andres and Sarah (housemates) up into the mountains in an old Nissan truck. What I thought would be a trip to pretty hillside with a river and trees turned out to be more like a trip to the moon–I’d forgotten how surreal Andean mountains are. Andres, our host and guide did take us to a park, but it was a vacant, off-season ski resort called El Colorado near the village of Farellones. The whole place has the feel of a zombified foreign planet. The only sign of life were the street dogs (I guess they don’t have the luxury of going back to Santiago in the off-season) and a lone backhoe preparing the place for winter crowds. The lifts sat hovering over the dry terrain and the ski trails were hills of combed dust, void of anything except for a few scrappy plants.

After some wandering about on the dirt patches of the ski slope and getting cut up by a benign-looking plant that behaved like a mutant stinging nettle (the points are much longer and sharper than any north american variety i’ve seen and have a knack for embedding themselves deep into your skin and clothes), we decided to head back down. A lone kiosk along the way sold us potato chips and soda (they only had non-perishables—it’s a long time between customers at the end of summer on a ski mountain).

To reach El Colorado, we had to climb to 2,300 meters from the 520 meter elevation of Santiago. To get a better idea of where all this is, here’s a google map satellite shot showing where our trip ended:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=109127639865242863881.000454f86ccad16e1346e

To get to Farellones / El Colorado, you have to pass through the new sprawling mall / cul-de-sac neighborhoods of Las Condes and Vitacura (passing by, on Avenida Kennedy, the largest mall in South America) until the highway fades away, the road narrows and the ascent up a long canyon begins. As the density of the suburbs fades away, the exurbs begins. It feels a lot like how I imagine Hollywood and the other hillside Los Angeles looked 60 years ago. The suburban growth into the mountains is still pretty new. The steep hillsides are scattered with houses—none close enough that they have next-door-neighbors but near enough that at night the hillsides are spotted with light. After 20 or so minutes of climbing up through the valley, the houses recede and the mountain ascent truly begins. From there the houses are few and seem to belong to ranchers and people who make a rural living. The occasional man on horseback sashays down the narrow road, but traffic is mostly busy with people heading up to the mountain-biking / sports center that’s about 3/4 of the way up the mountain.

All this only took about 2 and a half hours — the ski slope is only 45 minutes (at least in snowless conditions) from the city. Santiago is one of the only cities in the world where you can be high in the mountains or at the beach within an hour and a half.

Next up…in an hour I am leaving for Las Cruces, a small town on the coast with a marine biology research station to visit my Fulbright orientation roommate Chrissy Murphy and inspect crab collections and south american ocean detritus.

On Monday, with any luck, I’ll have my library pass (which I’ve been waiting a week for) and can begin my project in earnest).