Hard Times in Santiago

We were really looking forward to visiting Chile and had originally planned to start our travels there. Unfortunately and fortunately, Chile’s COVID restrictions made us change our plans and start in Argentina. We ended up spending more than 3 months in Argentina and had a great time. When it looked like barriers to entering Chile were letting up, we took our chance. You already know from our Trip Interrupted post how that turned out. We have a general policy on our travel blog to always try and find something beautiful and interesting to share and try to avoid the negative. Nobody wants to read about our bitches. That being said, we were surprised and somewhat saddened by what we encountered in Santiago and need to be honest about it. The city may have once had a lot of beauty, but it clearly suffered under the influx of Venezuelan refugees, the civil unrest of October 2019, and the following COVID pandemic.

The Incarceration

We have to say that the owners and staff at the Hostal Rio Amazonas could not have been nicer to us during our week there. Thank you to all of them for making Ande’s quarantine in our room as bearable as possible. They brought our breakfast up to the room everyday, provided clean towels and sheets so we could make up our own room (They weren’t allowed to enter the room, but I could come and go freely. Go figure.), and also had a dinner menu full of soups and sandwiches, all of which we had over the course of a week. I left the room occasionally to explore the surrounding neighborhood alone, but it wasn’t fun knowing Ande was locked in her tower. That is not hyperbole. Here’s the tower.

If you want to feel just a little more depressed about it, here’s the picture from the inside that Ande took of the single chair in the room. It wasn’t glamourous.

One bright DARK spot of the event is that we did have the small balcony and we happened to be there during the full lunar eclipse. That was at least pretty cool.

To add to the torture, ironically the building next door was the Argentinian embassy, with a lovely garden that made us wonder why we had left the country. Otherwise, a burned out and graffitied building across the street was the main view out the front window.

We had to know why it appeared that half the block had burned down and when it might have happened, so we started doing some research on Google Maps. Turns out it used to be a lovely colonial building with a tower called the Schneider Hernandez House that was set on fire during the 2019 civil unrest. Here’s a picture from 2015 we found on Google Street View. (Interestingly enough, the photos from 2019 have been removed but apparently existed at one time according to the timeline.)

Here’s the most recent Google Street View of the same location, directly across the street from our hostel from March of 2022, just a couple months before we arrived.

And, here’s the picture we took just a couple months later when the property was finally boarded up and a fresh canvas for local artists was provided.

Ande endured six days unable to leave the room. The one night we ordered pizza, she got food poisoning. There really isn’t much more to say other than had the circumstances been different, our Hostel was perfectly located and very near many of the local sights. Although we were repeatedly told not to walk at night for safety reasons. Super unfortunate, as we hadn’t run into that anywhere in Argentina. We’ll leave the incarceration there and transition to what I found when I left the room and sent pictures back to Ande via text.

A Breath of Fresh Air

I headed out that first day to find La Chascona, about a 10 minute walk from our hostel. One of the draws to visiting Chile is to follow the path of Pablo Neruda and visit his houses in Santiago, Isla Negra, and Valparaiso, expertly preserved as museums by the Pablo Neruda Foundation. I studied Neruda’s poetry in graduate school and also used it to pass my Spanish translation class for my foreign language credits I needed to graduate. He’s a fascinating figure and his houses did not disappoint. Pablo deserves a post all his own, so we’ll cover that later. Suffice to say, visiting his house in Santiago was my motivation for leaving Ande behind in the hotel room on her first day of incarceration.

La Chascona was about 8 blocks from the hostel near Cerro San Cristóbal, which is a big hill in the middle of the city near the university that is also home to the zoo, botanic gardens, and hilltop cathedral, and funicular, tram, and tourist busses. La Chascona sits at the base of the hill in the Bellavista neighborhood (one would assume once aptly named). What I discovered as I headed down the street away from the hostel is that the supposedly prominent geological feature wasn’t actually visible.

I texted this picture to Ande to share my adventures and also have her find out if this was just the morning fog that might lift should I wish to go up the hill. She promptly asked if it smelled like pollution, a question for which I didn’t have a good answer. I was hoping for the best. With nothing better to do, she looked it up and sent me this:

It was a bit of a shock to discover that the air quality was unhealthy for anyone to be out in regardless of physical fitness and that there was only one other city on the entire planet that actually had worse air quality. Not something either of us expected. In the event you might think this was a one-off temperature inversion kind of issue, the air quality did not actually improve at all throughout the week. When Andrea was finally free to leave the room 6 days later, we did visit Cerro San Cristóbal together and took these pictures.

We took a bus up to the summit of the hill because the popular funicular was closed due to either COVID or neglect, we never learned which one but made an assumption based on the fact that we were in a fully packed bus that carries more passengers than the funicular. On our ride up to the top, we saw plenty of local residents hiking and biking their way to the top. One of the highlights of visiting the top is the tram ride down, in which we were required to wear our masks even though there were just two of us. Turns out, it was a good idea simply because of the air quality and not COVID.

Of course, just to fit in, we took a selfie from the top like everyone else.

Okay, enough on that subject.

A Walk Through Town

You already saw the view from the hostel window where you might expect to see graffiti on construction fence walls, an easy target. Having traveled from Seattle, we are in touch with what happened during COVID while we were all sequestering inside and how the graffiti vandalism ballooned across the city. Seattle is scarred, and Santiago wasn’t any different. We saw almost every accessible building front covered with graffiti on the drive from the airport to the hostel. We were hoping it was just a symptom of the neighborhoods and immigration issues the country faces. Unfortunately it did carry over into the city proper and I saw graffiti as a prominent feature everywhere I walked. There were spots where some building and business owners could afford to repaint and try to fend it off, but that was not the norm.

My journey out the first day toward La Chascona included a crossing one of the busiest roadways in the city along a greenway that also includes the prominent Rio Mapocho that flows through the city and includes a bike path along the shore that residents enjoy for recreation.

The country of Chile is in the middle of a historic drought. After 13 years, it is hard to call it unusual and not start referring to it as Tuesday. I’m sure residents of the Pacific U.S. understand the feeling. Unfortunately, the river wasn’t low simply because of seasonal variation and the lack of civic maintenance was unmissable. I feel a little guilty even sharing it.

After visiting La Chascona, I walked over to the Plaza de Armas, the main city square in Santiago. The graffiti followed me there.

Okay, enough. Santiago has suffered through COVID and political strife just like any other major city. It was hard to look past and only fair to share. However, the scale of it was a shock, just like visiting our once beloved Seattle today. Find a way to get your act together.

The Gems

The story of Pablo Neruda and the Chilean military coup is poignant and tragic, and enshrined in La Chascona. I visited it by myself that first day and Ande visited it with me when she was allowed to leave the room. It was just something that needed to be shared and something I’m glad I got a second chance to visit. Thanks to COVID for that gift. We’ll share that experience in another post.

My walk through the city took me to the bustling Plaza de Armas at the heart of Santiago. The citizens of Santiago are out and about! Even though I was venturing around mid-week in the early afternoon, Santiago residents were outside filling the streets, sidewalks, and plazas. It was good to see. We’ve visited a lot of town squares in our travels around South America, and Plaza de Armas was one of the busiest.

I visited it myself and then again went with Ande on our last day in Santiago. Some of the worthy architecture within the mishmash of styles in the city includes the National History Museum pictured below. We didn’t get to visit, but enjoyed the stately facade all the same.

To give credit to Santiago, Plaza de Armas was also one of the only city squares we visited that wasn’t dominated by a giant monument featuring a dude on a horse. Oh, he was there, but off to the side and at ground level. Given equal footing was a refreshingly modern monument to the indigenous peoples of Chile.

You might also notice that the buildings and monuments in this city square have been spared the graffiti and vandalism that plague other parts of the city. I’d be remiss to not point that out.

Just a few blocks off the square is the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino. Of all the museums in the city, this one is a highlight and a must see. It was the only one I got a chance to visit, and unfortunately Ande didn’t get to enjoy it with me. I took a ton of pictures of the impressive collection of artifacts, some of which I’ll share now. The museum itself is divided into two floors. The lower floor covers “Chile before Chile” with an impressive curation of items from the native peoples of the country. On one end of the hall was a display of Chemamull Statues.

I’ll make you go visit to see the rest of the exhibit. There were amazing shamanistic artifacts, weapons, pottery, etc. The second floor of the museum is apparently the highlight according to our guide book, but for some reason it wasn’t open. Perhaps we can go visit it together some other time. It was unfortunate I only got to see half the museum, but the exhibit in the special exhibitions gallery did help alleviate the disappointment. As a specialty museum, people from all over the world bring in artifacts to be identified and often donate them. This creates a massive collection of stuff in storage that they can’t possibly display all the time. Well, they gave it a shot and put out a massive number of artifacts out on display tables under glass jars, each with its own identifying plaque arranged by region and period. It really was amazing and looked something like this.

Of course, I had some favorites I do have to share. This one depicts a jaguar protecting the village from a rat infestation. As we know, cats are the best hunters. While this could be misinterpreted as a mother with a kitten, it amusingly is not that.

Here’s a few more from the entrance hall. If you’re interested, I do have tons of photographs of the exhibits I took to share with Ande as she couldn’t go.

We certainly only saw a small portion of Santiago due to the circumstances and obviously did not see it at its best. There are many other neighborhoods we didn’t get to explore and national treasures we didn’t get to see. We both hope that someday we return under better circumstances. We met some lovely Chileans who were warm, welcoming, and helpful. All the better reason to come back to Santiago in the future.