Weekend in Las Cruces

Two weekends ago I went to the visit Chrissy Murphy, a friend I met at Fulbright orientation, at her beach house in Las Cruces, Chile, immediately adjacent to the marine biology station where she is researching crab behavior in the intertidal zone of the Pacific coast.

From Santiago, the drive is an hour and a half on a highway and then a turn along the coast road, wending through two shipping towns, Cartagena and San Antonio (the largest port in Chile by volume of cargo shipped). The road goes through dusty roads touching the coast and then moving inland till it peaks at a little hill with a bus stop, the municipal office and road into the town of Las Cruces. Las Cruces is basically due west of Santiago. The coast turns east and west, so the beaches are sometimes sheltered on one side. Las Cruces itself is a peninsula that extends out into the ocean. The whole coast is yellow sand beach interspersed with dark, craggy rock. Maybe a little like northern california.

Up the road in Isla Negra (not really an island) is Pablo Neruda’s house, which has been turned into a tightly controlled museum. The place reminds me of a wunderkammer. The house is filled with old bottles, ladies from ships, paintings of ships and far-flung places, ancient books, slices of ancient trees placed sideways as tables and old globes. It’s halfway between an ancient, meandering cave of and a 1960s wood-paneled suburban home that happens to be filled with knick-knacks.

Neruda was famously obsessed with the ocean, but having severe problems with sea-sickness, was resigned to build his beachside house as though it were a rambling captain’s quarters. He even took a 30′ boat and planted it in his garden on a cliff overlooking the sea, so that if you bring your eyes low enough, it appears that the boat is adrift in the water below.

Down the road, on the other side of Las Cruces, (to the south) San Antonio is very much a working port. Chrissy and I went to the fish market, which is teeming with cats with ripped ears, aggressive, stinky sea lions and fishermen in plastic bibs and wool hats selling their wares. The market is really just an old pier where the catch comes in, with business spilling over into a parking lot and the adjacent street. There also is the major shipping port on the southern end of town, but it’s barricaded and guarded, so there was no getting close to it.

After a long day of wandering in search of used clothes, fruit and fish we returned to the little peninsula in Las Cruces. The bus goes along the main coastal route, and from there it’s a 15 minute walk out an wide, unpaved road that ends at the marine biology lab at the point. Chrissy’s house is just off it looking north up the coast. It’s already off-season, so the roads are empty except the locals, street dogs and the occasional straggling tourist.

After cooking dinner with the lab maintenance people (we made empanadas in the communal kitchen at the station), there wasn’t much to do but watch movies and fall asleep. Seemed good to me. Back to work in the library.