Che´s Wee Sister

It rains in Santiago. Thunder and lightning. The temperature has plummeted to 75 degrees. The clouds have descended to obliterate the ´foothills´ of the Andes surrounding us, although to be honest they´re high enough to be the whole leg! Which reminds me, as we flew over the Andes in darkness on our way here, the sun chose that very moment to beam light around the horizon and illuminate below us a whole stack of pleated terracotta mountains. Magical.
For the sake of those of you yet to visit South America, we have risked life and limb (not ours, you understand), to clamber to the pinnacle of 21st century technological know-how. So, in order for you to avoid our mistakes, study the following:

Mobile phones

1. The 10 quid équipo / hardware (i.e. phone for those of you less techie than ourselves) ONLY works in Chile. It rejects all advances by Ecuadorian, Peruvian, Argentinian etc sim cards, thereby obliging you to
2. Buy a more expensive equipo, more welcoming towards foreign sims, but
3. Don´t expect to be able to buy this hardware just anywhere, and certainly not in the local supermarket (a breakdown in our communication systems), and not even in the biggest Entel store we could find. However,
4. If you´re prepared to sign a contract, you can get anything you like that goes wherever you want and does everything you need, all of which has led me to the conclusion:
5. Forget about mobile phones! You won´t know anyone here, so who´s going to phone you, and anyway, there are absolutely zillions of payphones wherever you go in Santiago that handily eat up all your coppers which weigh a ton. (And then there´s always the low tech phone card if you´re hankering after the sound of English voices – the YHA one works a treat!)

Mobile Internet (neat little satellite connection contained within a dongle gizmo, that according to PC World, Tottenham gyratory system, works anywhere there´s a handy satellite circulating overhead):

1. DO NOT BELIEVE PC WORLD!
2. E-mail me for the extraordinary twists and turns, ins and outs, ups and downs and unbearable suspense of this particular saga.
3. Just go to an internet café!

Now turning to the matter in hand: Santiago. You have to go to La Chascona, one of Pablo Neruda´s 3 homes. Make sure you get Gonsalvo as your multi-lingual guide because he was a mine of information and author of a truly great phrase (which I shall return to later). Neruda turns out not just to have been one of THE great poets and activists of the 20th centrury, who knew everyone – Hemingway, Frida and Diego, Picasso, Allende etc – but also a great big kid who collected things (not valuables, apart from the paintings his mates did for him), but fun stuff like paintings of watermelons, bottles, shells, coloured glass, Russian dolls, books. Oh, and boat-shaped houses – he had three, and La Chascona sails beneath the cliff of Cerro San Cristobal, a metropolitan mountain complete with funiculars, and has the most spectacular urban view right across the city´s rooftops to the Andes. Only slightly marred by some multinational plonker dumping 30 floors of unimaginative steel and glass in the middle La Chascona´s seascape of roofs. Neruda died about 10 days after the coup, but not before the junta had ordered La Chascona to be ransacked. Some of Frida Kahlo´s paintings were dumped in the river and most of the books were burned. The army running scared of art. Which brings me to Gonsalvo´s great phrase: ´Military intelligence ís an oxymoron.´ 100,000 citizens turned up to Neruda´s funeral, despite the military curfew on Santiago. There wasn´t a thing the army could do. Such is the power of art.

Nous sommes arrivees!

Nous sommes arrivees … Wir haben angekommen …We have arrived, it takes being in Chile to bring all other languages to mind! Spanish doesn´t come easily but I think it´s Hemos llegado. And then there´s Chilean Spanish, what our friend Franklin calls Chilean slang, whereby ´s´ s are often omitted, even in the plural, and various verbs that we have learned one way sound quite different, so we are in for lots of brow-scratching. Celine and I spend all our spare time (i.e. when not enjoying the sunshine, sights, general atmosphere, sounds of people talking – even on the metro in rush hour), reciting Michel Tomas´s CD instructions to stress the first syllable in the present tense and hit the ending hard in the future tense. There are so many past tenses I forget what he says about those!

We are staying in Las Condes, the financial district, with massive skyscrapers competing with the great ring of mountains all around us. Our flat is part of a much older community which used to be surrounded by countryside, and which is likely soon to be swallowed up by the developers, once the community´s negotiators have settled on a fair price for everyone. It´s like a decent council block, although the shady, tree-filled courtyard is a bit different. Mercedes, landlady from Heaven, says that the community will probably be completely demolished within a couple of years.

We did a whistle-stop tour with the lovely Franklin round some of the major sites, spending about 3 hours over lunch in Bella Vista (think Broadway Market x Neil´s Yard + wooded mountain with cable cars and big yellow hot sun!), before wandering off to try and pay our respects to la Presidente, Michelle Bachallet, in La Moneda. The public are actually allowed in (like wandering into the White House), but in fact on this particular day, the guard took one look at us and decided that Michelle should be saved. He said something like, If we came back the next day at 10 she´d be out! There are elections due here next year and there is anxiety that the right are working hard to try and topple Michelle, also unfortunately some of the left.

We managed, amidst our hectic schedule, to fit in the film Che. Completely in Spanish, no subtitles. We understood one word in a hundred, but actually, because the acting is brill and the story well-known, we both enjoyed it. However, it´s put me right off becoming a revolutionary. For a start, you definitely have to be under 50, be extremely fit with a penchant for fording rivers, clambering up mountains carrying wounded compadres – always in driving rain – and that´s without even mentioning getting shot at, shooting, and having to keep your beret looking picturesque!