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.