Month: May 2015

The weirdest thing about Chile is that you are not supposed to flush toilet paper, but put it in bins next to the toilet – everywhere. Apparently the septic system is quite fragile? I quite like Santiago (check out my random photos), I’ve decided so far that it rates “would visit again, would take a temporary transfer to here, would not move myself permanently”. The big drawbacks are the pollution/haze and the general feeling of being slightly less developed/more obvious poverty, both of which are not things I want more of in my life.

Thursday was a holiday in Chile, celebrating “some war with Peru or Bolivia I think”, to quote someone at school (turns out it was The Battle of Aquique). Apparently it’s also the day when the president gives a big speech every year explaining what the budget has been spent on and how any big government projects are coming along – and so, traditionally, there is a protest about whatever is unpopular about current government/policy. The protests this year apparently included people angry about two students killed last week during another protest about student fees – one of the teachers at school said there are a lot of protests and anger about university fees because Chile has one of the highest ratios of average salary:university fees ratio in the world (many numbers in this slightly dated article).

I went for a run at about 11am and found the streets close to deserted, similar to my (much earlier!) Good Friday run with Dad a month ago. In the afternoon, my host family took me along to a big mall (Costanera) – my first trip on the metro! They gave me their spare metro card to use, each trip costs about $1. They explained that there were some great sales on, and although both of them hated clothes shopping, you have to do it sometime and this was a good day. I wandered around a little on my own looking for a charger cable for my Fitbit (I seem to have lost the stupid tiny proprietary thing somewhere since Tahiti, rendering my actual fitbit completely bloody useless) – unfortunately none of the stores I went into had anything. I gather someone should sell them in Santiago, but I’m still looking. At the mall, we saw a protest outside Starbucks (there are lots of Starbucks here). Apparently the workers are in some places on a strike (although at this one the store was open) and there is a court case on? My Spanish is definitely not up to reading about labor disputes! If yours is, try reading this article.

Friday morning, in our conversation classes natural ‘what did you do yesterday’, this led into a fairly wide-ranging discussion of Chilean politics and immigration – there are many Peruvian immigrants, who have been around for a decade or more, and lots of more recent Colombian and Haitian immigrants who are seen as more violent/aggressive/uneducated and are less popular. I didn’t know it, but it turns out Chile is a powerhouse economy of South America. (I have realized that I really knew embarrassingly little about the country before I arrived!) It was interesting to see the reaction of my English (of Jamaican background) classmate, who was shocked to learn that many of the Haitian immigrants didn’t speak Spanish, and asked why they didn’t go ahead and learn it if they wanted to move to a Spanish speaking country. The teacher said something like “well, most of them can’t afford to take classes like this”.  For some reason, although I don’t think there are many Chinese immigrants, there are many many Chinese restaurants. I haven’t been to one to know if they have Chinese staff or not.

Friday afternoon I decided to check out some more of the city, so I walked from the school along through the Parque Forestal  (very nice! Some sweet kids playgrounds, a few joggers, lots of couples hanging out) past the Museo de Bellas Artes and down to the Plaza de Armas, where I took a few pictures of sculptures and giant churches, and bought some books (one English, one Spanish!). Then I successfully caught a bus home by myself (Google Transit does directions in Santiago, so it wasn’t that impressive of me) and hung out at home watching Game of Thrones. Not sure about how that’s going, but I’ll probably keep watching to see how different the story gets from the books now.

 

Saturday I had signed up to go on a day-long excursion to Isla Negre and Valparaiso with the school. We met at 8am at school, with one of the admin staff, and then everyone slept on the bus for most of the two-hour drive to Isla Negre, where we were going to see Pablo Neruda’s house by the sea. We were there pretty early, so we hung around for a bit and had a coffee in the nice café (with a ship-shape outside bar. Heh. Hehehehe.)

During this time, our staff lead (Astrid) may have been in line for us? As we got our coffees she came to tell us all to get in line, and we collected our audio guides and went in as a group of ~15. Like La Chascona, it’s fairly well organised – the audio guides are the kind where you press a number and get that recorded snippet, and the numbers are posted around the house in order. Also like La Chascona, there are no photos allowed while inside, so I only have photos of the outdoors. The house included a room decorated with a dozen or so shipfigureheads, a table made on a giant wagon wheel, a collection of ships inside bottles, etc.  There are photos of the interior (of all the houses) available on the Foundation website.

Going through the house took a couple of hours (when we came out, I saw a sign saying “current line wait time = 2 hours”!!!) and then we went back to the bus to drive to Valparaiso, about an hour away. The countryside was fairly dry with some impressive hills, not terribly exciting, and most people had another sleep. When we arrived in Valparaiso, traffic was terrible – our driver said it was just regular weekend traffic, because Valparaiso is a very popular short getaway location. We started with lunch at a restaurant by the port – kicked off with a shot of Pisco Sour (very sour), we had some miniature cheese empanadas (I do my bit to bust gender stereotypes by being the person to take the one left over, on a table of mostly military guys), then choice of grilled or fried fish with rice and fries, with icecream cake and a shot of some kind of digestif, a cross between amaretto and cough syrup. I chatted to some of the guys next to me, they were in a group studying for a few weeks immersion, sent from a Defense school in California. Apparently they’d all been studying Spanish full-time since January – they seemed decent, but not nearly as fluent as I would have expected just by knowing that, I guess it’s no FSI! Two of them were under 21 so aren’t allowed to drink while over here even though the drinking age is 18, because they are “here for work” and “semi-on-duty” and so on.

After lunch Astrid took us on a guided tour through Valaparaiso. First we checked out the view from Paseo del May 21, a mini tourist market next to the Naval Museum at the top of a cliff (I bought some delicious dulce de leche), then we went down to the port and took a Funicular up to the top of a hill and walking down through a ton of winding streets covered in murals and brightly painted houses. It was pretty spectacular! At random intervals there were also small street markets selling Tarot card sessions, food, toys, etc. A few photos here, a whole album on Flickr!

After walking for a couple hours, we got back down the bus and piled in for a quick drive across to Vina del Mar – this is today’s cool kids spot, with high-end restaurants and shopping, glitzy hotels and bars. Valparaiso apparently skews older and artsier, though still pretty expensive. After driving down the main street and jumping out to look at the beach and city skyline, most people got some coffee (I don’t know why, when they all went straight to sleep on the bus!) and we headed back to Santiago.

I got home about 10.30pm and a few family guests were still there, for the end of get-together for the one-year anniversary of the death of my family’s dad/husband. I was pretty tired so as the evening wore on I pretty much lost the ability to follow the conversation, I probably should have given up and gone to bed before 2am! A couple days later my host semi-apologised for the loud and vehement arguing that the gathering had involved, saying that she knew from her time in New Zealand that a lot of Australian/New Zealanders were uncomfortable with that kind of discussion. I said it was fine, I was just too tired to understand people talking so fast/over each other, but my family dinners used to be just like that, our friends used to say it was very intimidating!

Sunday I slept in, and when I woke up around 11am I thought about whether to go for a run or not. Eventually the decision was made for me when I realised my running gear was freshly washed and on the line – I am supposed to do my own laundry outside the house but I think the cleaning lady who came on Friday just picked up my pile of dirty clothes (neat pile! Waiting to build up until I took them out to be washed!) and put them in the laundry, so they got washed. (Apparently laundry has been a frequent source of problems for host family relationships, so now the school just says the student must do it themselves outside the house, cost me about $7 to wash all my clothes when I arrived here). So after a leisurely breakfast, I decided to do something active and go walk up Cerro San Cristobal, since the weather seemed fine and clear and the views were supposed to be pretty awesome. I strolled over and once I found the start of the walking path up the hill I think it took me almost an hour to get to the top – it really was a pretty steep hill, I think it was a rise of about 1m in 15? There was quite an extensive layout at the top of the hill – a church (where John Paul II said Mass when he visited Chile), a kind of open-air amphitheatre, a small area filled with candles for prayers next to the giant statue itself at the top, a restaurant and two open air plazas with cafes and touristy sales. I wandered around for a bit and decided I didn’t need to funicular down, it would be easy enough – and it was much easier on the way down, but still a 45 minute walk. At the bottom I rewarded myself with a mote con huesillo, very traditional Chilean drink which I’d heard about and was available at approximately half of the market stalls at the bottom. Then since it was 5pm and I hadn’t had lunch I had a (very traditional) sandwich ‘chicken italian’, which means ‘with avocado mayonnaise and tomato’ (get it? Like the colors of the flag?). It wasn’t bad, although a slightly odd combination. I then went for a stroll through Bellavista, which is well known for its artsy café style and murals all along the streets. I took photos of a bunch but stopped when some old man kind of yelled at me as he walked past – I was getting out of the touristy area towards the run down deserted area, where I’m pretty sure the murals were painted/organised by shop owners simply in the hope of escaping the otherwise endemic tagging. Guidebooks say that Bellavista is not somewhere to walk around alone at night, and I can believe this – would be tricky if you wanted to attend any of the some dozen large nightclubs I saw right on the edge of that rundown area! More photos on Flickr

Monday I stayed up unreasonably late Sunday night (again) so was pretty tired. After class I walked to the shopping mall to look for a fitbit charger again, but although I found a shop that sells fitbits (the Mac store. WTF?) they said nobody sells chargers/replacement parts so I’d have to order it online. Oh well. I ate lunch at the food court in the mall, at a restaurant called Dominos which I had read was a decent, widely available source for a Chilean hot dog. I ordered the Brasilena, featuring cheese and avocado – it had a huge helping of both, and I have no idea what kind of cheese it was, a very odd melted texture. It was ok but a little bland, I think I might have been supposed to select some add-ons? (http://www.domino.cl/productos/1568-agregados.html) When I got home I had a short nap, which was brilliant, before being super productive with homework and reading and trip planning, and then headed to a barbecue at the school which had some 50+ students, the vast majority of whom were in some large groups that had just arrived from America – a group of random students from Wisconsin, and a teachers school in Buffalo (thankfully, based on their level of Spanish, they aren’t going to teach Spanish, just looking to be able to communicate with non-English speaking kids). The barbecue was delicious and I talked to quite a few other students, probably the most I’ve done since I got here.

Tuesday (today!) I was still tired, for similar reasons, which made me really impatient with the general confusion displayed by a lot of the new students. You don’t have to speak Spanish to understand when the room is taking turns reading line by line and you’re next, you just have to pay attention!  So I had a less productive afternoon of grumpiness, but at 6pm the school had organised a soccer game at a nearby park. We split into four teams (I found it interesting that although the group was about 60% girls, the guy organising us picked four guys, including one who didn’t play soccer, to be the ‘team captains’ and by interesting I mean backwards and irritating). We were playing on a basketball court, 5 minutes or first team to 2 goals, then the losing team goes off and another team switches on. We went for about two hours and not only did I not injure anything (although I think I have a few bruises on my shins that will show up tomorrow) but I also scored about three goals and set up a bunch – my team was pretty good at passing to me, but the usual tactic of ‘be a girl so defenders ignore you’ worked on some of the opposition, which helped. We won about two thirds of our games, I think? One of the girls was really interested to hear that I’d been running in Santiago and wanted to join me, which would be fun, so I’ll try and schedule that in my remaining few days! She was a bit concerned when I said that I went for a run last Thursday morning, until I explained that it had been a holiday and I had no intention of running before our 9am classes!

Today I also finished reading Isabel Allende’s “My Invented Country“, translated into English. When I looked up Chilean books I should read, the list was basically her and Pablo Neruda, so I picked up a copy last week when I found it in English. I enjoyed it and will probably re-read, but it was a bit of a strange book. It’s a memoir, but she’s already written a full memoir and this is more a memoir of her thoughts and feelings about Chile than her life story, although that is the background structure of the book. Some of what she says about Chile seems almost like secondhand knowledge, and since she’s lived in California now for some 20 years, perhaps it is. A couple of the stranger facts that were mentioned I looked up out of interest, and they were not-quite-wrong (eg: she mentions that no alcohol can be sold the day before Election Day, but apparently it’s actually the day of) – perhaps these were translation errors. There were a few jarring references that made it clear the book was actually published in 2003 (mention of Pinochet still being alive, for instance). Somehow I got an overall feeling of only a superficial familiarity with Chile of today, or as a specific place, but under or through that was an impression of very deep familiarity with Chilean culture and history – and this impression felt like it matched perfectly with her self-description as having been gone from Chile for so long, and so much of her childhood before her eventual exile, that she had created a country out of her own reading and unreliable memories. In the end, I wished I’d read this before I arrived in Santiago, and I expect I’ll read it again mostly for the thoughts about travel and where ‘home’ is once you’ve ever moved to somewhere new.

Now I’ve finished that, the only book I’m reading right now is The Walking Dead Comic Volume 1 – in Spanish! I picked it up back at Powell’s in March and I’m really enjoying it (I’m much more interested in horror stories in book form!). I’m thinking about reading the whole series but that will add up to a fair bit – I did find a random set of the other volumes in a bookstore the other day, so I think if I find the next one in the series I will get it. Wait, I just looked at the prices in that link I found and there are 50 volumes?!! At about $17 each?!?!!1? Yea, I’m not going to read the whole series. Maybe in English, I assume it costs much less!

I also finally booked my bus tickets and hostel for Mendoza, leaving on Sunday morning and returning on Friday to overnight before flying to Lima. My plan is to drink wine, eat steak, do some web dev and do puzzles from The Code Book so I am finished before I get to London and have to give it back to Mum! I decided against taking more Spanish lessons because I want to stop waking up at 8am every morning!!!

–posted at 2.22am 🙁

 

 

 

I’ve been in Santiago three days now, and it’s going pretty well. The flight on Sunday was quite nice – we were on a DreamLiner with a pretty good entertainment selection (I watched McFarland, I’m a sucker for inspirational sports movies) and a neat window I’d never seen before – instead of a physical shade, you could press a button to make the window darker or clear. It meant that they didn’t have to ask people to raise or lower them, too! Despite the flights having been late every day that week, our flight actually landed about 40 minutes early, and I got my pre-arranged shuttle to my host family’s house. They’re in a pretty central area, Providencia – a very nice residential area, 15 minutes walk from the school my Spanish classes are at. Maria, my age, speaks English well (she worked in New Zealand for several months last year and her brother is now off on a round the world trip going the other direction to me!) but her mother doesn’t, so there’s some positive pressure to speak Spanish in the house which will be good for me.  It’s very relaxing having a proper house to stay in, although I do get pretty tense being a houseguest, especially with the language barrier! I get breakfast and dinner at the house each day, which works well because I can go for lunch with other students during the day or just grab a sandwich. They’re very nice and have taken me grocery shopping and we’ve been eating dinner together. I’ve been eating a fairly sugary cereal called estrellitas, or little stars – I thought it was going to be like corn flakes but it’s way more processed and has a sticky sugary taste. Saying that makes me want Nutri-grain!

I had my first lesson Monday morning, placed in the beginner class with three others – I’m in the middle of the range. It was quite a bit of effort doing Spanish for four hours first thing, but I think it’ll be a solid learning experience. I think I was ready for some more structured time, and this will work pretty well with school in the mornings and afternoons off. I walked around a bit the last few afternoons and the city is quite hazy, it feels like there’s dust in the air, but nothing like Beijing. The tall building in this photo is maybe six-ten blocks away?

The haze is much worse in the afternoons – as I walk to school in the morning I can see a mountain quite clearly (turns out it’s one of the Andes!) and in the late afternoon it’s almost invisible. Despite this, there are tons of bike commuters – the city seems very flat, and there are separated bike lanes along the street, which both help. Traffic is pretty terrible too, walking along at ~6pm there are just cars sitting still for minutes at a time. There’s an Israeli woman in my class who moved to Santiago to live with her Chilean boyfriend, on the outskirts of the city somewhere, and it takes her one-two hours to drive in to school in the mornings, depending on traffic!

I’ve been taking a mini thermos of instant coffee to school every morning (thanks Mum!) A couple people have complained that the coffee in Chile is terrible, and it’s true that the instant stuff at the school is horrific. I went with Rona (the Israeli woman) to a cafe across the street from the school today and tried an espresso, it was ok but (sigh) not as good as the ones Pat makes. Later, after the visit to Pablo Neruda’s house, we stopped at Starbucks, and again I had a drinkable but not great espresso – then in the evening I went out to a cafe with my hosts and had a coffee with a mix of chocolate, condensed milk and something else I didn’t recognize (maizan? manzar?). Nice but turned out too sweet for me! I’m not really a coffee connoisseur, as most people would probably agree – I’m generally happy to just put enough sugar and milk in to cover up any flaws, so it seems fine to me. Some other students mentioned how all the milk here is UHT and they hate it, but I hadn’t even noticed – of course, I have been buying UHT milk for a couple years now in a fairly hopeless attempt to stop it going sour in my fridge before I finish the carton.

The classes I am taking go from 9am-1pm every day – although this week it’s 9am-2pm and none on Thursday, because it’s a national holiday commemorating a war. Most of the students are actually my age or older, which is great – I feel like some of them could still stand to put more effort into speaking Spanish instead of English, but that’s mostly their problem and I’ll just avoid them outside class, basically. The classes are very small, only three of us usually, which is pretty good. Amusingly enough the English guy in my class wishes we did more grammar and less conversation practice, which wouldn’t suit me at all – but of course I have a huge advantage in already speaking French and knowing all the grammatical concepts like reflexive verbs, different tenses, etc. I like the teachers, and I think I’m understanding the pronunciation rules (they’re very straightforward, just different to English and so take a bit of remembering). I keep reaching for French words when I don’t know the Spanish, which works just often enough to encourage me! I should be doing more practice outside of class, but I think after two weeks even without extra practice I’ll be able to get by for the rest of my trip. This week we are only using present tense, I think next week we’ll learn past tense.

Today (on an organized trip with the school) I visited Pablo Neruda’s house – or at least, the one in Santiago. It was really cool – reminded me of some Gaudi architecture in Barcelona. There was a short movie about him at the house, and I had no idea he was such a prominent politician as well as a poet – I might really have to pick up some of his stuff. On Saturday the school has organized a trip out of the city to his two other houses, in Valparaiso and Isla Negre. My host family both said separately that the Isla Negra house is their favourite – I’m looking forward to it! We weren’t allowed to take photos inside the house, but here’s some of the outside (it’s really three houses connected by stairways and terraces). 

 

Tomorrow for the holiday, Maria is going to show me around a little, check out the Metro and nearby shopping center, etc. I’ll also try going for a run – I want to go in the morning because it gets much hazier later in the day, but I’m not planning to be up early enough to go before classes at 9am!

Easter Island seemed like the coolest place in my itinerary while planning this trip, and it turned out awesome – a nice relaxed little town with great scenery, lots of water activities (scuba diving, snorkelling, surfing, body boarding..), and obviously the super cool remote unique culture. If you’re ever on that edge of South America, you should absolutely consider a few days over there.

(Tenses are a little weird in this because I wrote it over several days, but the hotel wifi was too poor to post anything while on the island).

After not much sleep (the flight was only about 4.5 hours), we landed in Easter Island. Flying in in daylight, you could see just sooooo much ocean around it! And getting off the plane was a pleasant feeling, the weather here is more like a nice summer day in Seattle – a tiny bit more humid, but not really to notice. Another pleasant surprise – my hostel was at the airport to pick me up! (I booked a random one on booking.com, it turned out to be a great location, friendly host, shame about the schoolkids). I felt a little bad that I couldn’t see the girl I’d met at Tahiti airport, we’d said maybe we could share a taxi into town together – but I’m sure she was fine. I’ll see her again on our flight to Santiago 🙂

My host and I spent a few minutes trying to communicate in her poor English and my poor Spanish, before I saw that her phone was in French and we switched to that – it turns out she is Tahitian 🙂 I waited at the car for a bit while I think she was trying to collect some impromptu guests off the flight, and then we drove to a nice little guesthouse just off the main road, not far at all from the airport. On my arrival, myself and a Chilean couple were the only guests – she told me that on Thursday two more would be arriving, and then on Friday 18 18-year-olds on a school trip :/ which I guess will liven it all up a little! For now it’s very quiet. The internet is spotty – sometimes the wifi drops out altogether. I tried a café around the corner that advertised internet but the guy tried typing the password in for me twice and got it wrong both times, so I gave up. There was also a small grocery store where I ran into my Chilean co-guests.

Tuesday afternoon I went for a walk to get my bearings, saw a soccer game and a swimming area which looked nice. Today I went up to the Archaelogical museum, taking the much nicer walk past the cemetery along the cliffside to a couple of moai instead of the direct road there. The museum was very small but interesting and free – frustratingly enough the second section, on the history of Easter Island since 1900, was only in Spanish. I was able to make out broad strokes but it was quite tiring and I probably missed a lot.  I’ve booked a full-day tour of the island for Friday, and Thursday I might hire a bike and try and ride down to one of the big sites near town. For Saturday morning I’ve booked a snorkelling tour of the rocks around the edge of the island, I heard before coming that it’s a very good area.

I’ve noticed that the town is pretty much empty at around 2pm, seems like they take the siesta seriously here? At 6pm there are a lot of people around and it’s still very sunny. There seems to be some decent surf right at the town beachfront, or at least good enough that there’s a dozen or more people out in it. There’s also a small rock-barrier lagoon for little kids. There are dogs wandering around all the streets, and I decided not to be nervous about it since nobody else seemed to pay attention, then I asked the woman at the hotel who said yes, sometimes they are dangerous, so now I’m definitely nervous of them.

My spoken Spanish is feeling very weak, but is a lot better than it was before I started “studying” in January – I can say simple things like “I want this”, my big weakness in most real scenarios is numbers. I’m a bit worried because I think the tour on Friday might be mostly Spanish – I’m sure it’ll be good practice! The snorkelling guy spoke quite good English, was amused by my good Spanish name and not speaking it 🙂

On Thursday I ended up not doing much – got up, went for a run, thought about going to hire a bike but it started raining so I officially called it a day off. I did some bodyweight exercises and stretches (goals for the end of the year: solid handstands, pistol squats) and then went for a swim in the protected rockpool. The tide was much higher than I’d seen it earlier, and there were very few people there. The water was incredibly clear: one family spotted a turtle about a foot and a half long, which was just swimming around all of us, I saw it a couple of times. I chatted to two Americans I overheard talking to each other, they were on vacation for a week from Florida with his mother and had rented a car and driven all over the island.

When I got back to the hostel, another guest had just arrived but Vahina wasn’t there – I wondered why she hadn’t picked him up from the airport and it turned out he had just missed seeing her, eventually I called her and she came to the hostel from the airport. His name is Keith, from Singapore – he is nearing the end of a several month trip through South America. H walked up to the post office with me where I posted a card to Nick, and he got his passport stamped – I hadn’t heard of this at all, but they had a big stamp there ready for passports, I guess for people who want something that looks more interesting than the regular Chilean stamp to show they’ve been there? A little while later we walked down to the shore and took a ton of sunset shots, running into a group of kids on a Rotary exchange that Keith had met on the plane. It kind of makes me feel like I wasted my life so far, seeing a bunch of 17 year olds from around the world who are living in Chile for a year, but on the other hand I’m doing something pretty awesome now. Eventually we had dinner at a restaurant on the main strip, it was quite good – fish of the day with rice and coconut cream sauce.

Friday I went out on the tour round the island with a native guide. It was myself, a German guy, Knut, who was only on the island for two days, and two Chilean women (one of whom was from Santiago and gave me her number to get in touch while I’m there). That turned out to be a really interesting combination – while the Chilean women weren’t with us the guide told us that the Rapa Nui people are angry that the Chilean government takes in about 600 million pesos per year in entry fees for the National Park, and only 5 million gets spent in Easter Island – this is why we didn’t pay the entry fee (US$60/person for foreigners) because the guides are on a strike (until May 20th – not sure when it started) and they are not collecting the fees and not allowing the National Park officials on the land. But while the guide wasn’t with us, the two Chileans told us that the Chilean government spends tons of money on Easter Island trying to keep the natives happy but nothing ever makes them happy. I tend to believe the Rapa Nui side, with absolutely no understanding of the situation. I also heard from Vahina that they are planning to introduce immigration controls so that Chileans can’t just move to Easter Island.

The tour itself was pretty cool, it’s a crazy landscape (amazing rocky shores, a lagoon in a volcanic crater) scattered with these immense statues – we saw the largest completed one, 11m tall, and also one of the quarry regions where a statue was left half-carved out of the rock. We had fresh caught fish baked on a fire for lunch, and finished the day at the only (?) real beach on the island, which was incredible – lovely real sand, clear blue sea, palm trees (apparently imported from Tahiti only a few decades ago) and a moai standing above it all.

I also took the online placement test for my spanish classes finally – where I could only even begin to answer the first section of 6, one section on each verb tense. So I guess I’ll probably be in a beginners class after all! Most of the tour today was in Spanish and I think I followed along decently, it helped that I was already familiar with a lot of the information. I found it interesting that where what I’ve been reading talks about different theories for how and why things were done, our guide just gave a definitive ‘this is what was going on’ – I wonder if that’s for simplicity/presentation value, or if the locals have already reached consensus where scientists are unwilling to.

When I got back the school group had arrived – lots of them, but not as loud as I’d been afraid of. Apparently they are going to have a bbq dinner here so we’ll see – I’m hoping to get an early night because I decided to go on an 8am tour of Orongo, the ceremonial village nearby, with the German guy and tour guide from today (it starts early because he is leaving on the 2pm flight, but that works perfectly for me because I can do this and be back for my snorkelling session at 11.30). Will go out for dinner with Keith again tomorrow night, but I said I wasn’t up for seeing sunrise the other side of the island on Sunday morning!

—

 

Unfortunately it turned out the school group was poorly supervised, and they ‘talked’ in that stupid loud “I KNOW YOU’RE TWO FEET AWAY BUT THE GUY DOWN THE BLOCK SHOULD HEAR THIS TOO” way until 3am on Friday night, which was annoying since I was planning to be up at 7am. Anyway, I got up early, and headed out to Orongo with the German tourist (Knut) and Rapa Nui guide from yesterday. It was cloudy and rainy which was disappointing, but more importantly it turned out the park didn’t officially open until 9am, and we were there about 8.20. Fortunately the strike came in handy for us here – we waited at the gate for a little while, then an older Rapa Nui guy came to man the gate for the day and after talking to our guide, he let us in. Orongo contains a reconstruction of a ceremonial village that was built by hand using stone from the nearby volcanic crater. It was inhabited only for a few weeks a year, for the spring festival where the eight tribes competed to have their chief named king of the island for the year. One member of each tribe was entered into a race that started at the top of the cliff (definitely greater than 45 degree angle). They had to go down the cliff, swim out to a nearby island, get an egg from the island, and bring it back to the top of the cliff first. Interestingly, like many of the things our guide described, this doesn’t exactly match what I’ve read elsewhere on the web (eg http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/i-am-birdman-hear-me-roar-19691231).  After all my reading, I am pretty much left with the impression that nobody is sure what happened there but a lot of people are unwilling to say that. (The official museum in Hanga Roa does say “we don’t know”, from memory). Apparently the race was no longer held once Europeans arrived and said there was no king of the island under them – and it took another 30 or 40 years for outsiders to learn the language (or care) and so the only written accounts are built from distant memories, like much else about Easter Island. Aside from the race, the crater was used as a natural greenhouse, and the biggest carved stone from the village is now in the British Museum.

After Orongo, we headed to Ahu Akivi, the only moai that were built facing the sea. Instead of protecting a tribe, they are memorials to the seven kings that arrived from the Marquesas (probably. See above paragraph on uncertainty).

Our tour finished around 10.30 am, which gave me plenty of time to sit around at the hotel before my snorkelling trip at 11.30. On the way over I bought a stamp at the post office before it closed at noon for the weekend, and then met my group at Mike Rapu dive/snorkelling shop. It turned out the two Chilean women from yesterday were there again, and I met an American woman from Oregon who was house-sitting her sister’s house in Easter Island for three weeks. Altogether our group was six women and a female guide – apparently quite unusual! Hannah and Beatrice, feeling inspired? We sailed out to the Motus near Orongo in a little motorboat bouncing over the waves which clearly made some of the group quite nervous. We went close in near some caves, where I could see the giant Rotary group climbing down to look in them – apparently they held an impressive collection of petroglyphs. Unfortunately the sea was too rough to snorkel around the Motus, so we went back nearer to the pier where the scuba divers were. Even so, it turned out to be a pretty cool site – there was a wreck about five meters down, and a school of some hundreds of black and white fish, some scattered colorful golden fish, a few big ones (a metre or more) down in the deeper pockets, and the creepiest looking fish I ever heard, apparently called a needle fish (http://www.wildflorida.com/wildlife/fish/images/AtlanticNeedlefish463.jpg). Most impressively of all, I barely got sunburnt even though the sun had come out above us (partly because they supplied us with wetsuits, partly because I sunscreened up pretty well).

For the afternoon, I had a leisurely shower then went out and bought a coffee to sit reading on my ipad above the lagoon area on the main shore. While there I saw two giant sea turtles (a couple of feet along the shell), and a kid about seven years old freak out over them for at least ten minutes, just standing there yelling ‘turtle! Turtle!’ while her parents were all “yea, no shit kid, we see them too”. The American woman at snorkelling had said that she thought the turtles didn’t show up any more but I saw them two days out of three so I guess they do?

In the evening, Keith and I went out to take pictures of the sunset on the moais, which is apparently The Thing To Do because the ones closest to town had quite a crowd. We met up with a couple of other tourists he’d met already, and spent an hour or so chatting and taking pictures before Keith and I headed out to dinner with David. We were going to a restaurant recommended by our hotel host – I was worried it would be lousy, but it turned out to be amazing (http://www.tripadvisor.com.au/Restaurant_Review-g316040-d1494569-Reviews-Tataku_Vave-Easter_Island.html). I had shrimp, lobster, fried bananas and a local beer, Mahina Negra. An excellent finish to the trip!

 

 

To be entirely honest, I wasn’t expecting everyone in Tahiti to speak French. Sure, the clue is there in the country’s actual name, “French Polynesia”, but I guess I was expecting them to speak Tahitian? Maybe from all the place names and so on? It was a nice surprise, and I did pretty well for not having spoken it in a year or more! A lot of people seemed very surprised to learn that I was Australian when I was speaking French to them, which is fair because I suppose there are not that many Australian tourists in Tahiti who do!

I briefly met quite a few interesting people:

There was an elderly(-ish) couple staying at the hotel I was in from the airport. They were Swiss, and they were in town for one night before they flew to another island where they were picking up their catamaran and sailing to Australia. Apparently they got into sailing in Marseilles a couple years ago, after they retired, and now they spend six months a year sailing, then store the boat wherever they finish and go home to family for six months. Not a bad lifestyle!

The girl I shared a room with my first night at Nelson was French, but living in New Caledonia to work for a few months and was on a short vacation from there.

At the hotel I moved to, I didn’t meet any other guests (pretty much everyone I saw was either a couple or a family with small kids).  I had a great productive last day in Tahiti – woke up in my nice hotel room, went for a 2 mile run, rented a kayak and paddled out to an island and back along the coast past the abandoned Club Med up the beach, showered, packed and checked out at 10.30am! So then I felt pretty justified in sitting by the pool reading for a few hours before going to catch the bus to the ferry.

When I got to  the bus stop, there was a was Tahitian guy, Hiva Huevo (I think), already there. He was from the island of Tahiti, but a friend had offered him a place to stay on Moorea while he looked for work on that island. He said he could walk, but it was kind of a long way and he was tired from dance practice all morning (I think? I guess it’s a plausible enough sentence, but it did make me question my french understanding a little). We were both very disappointed when a lady in a shop nearby walked past and checked that we knew the bus was scheduled for 3pm, and the 1.30pm bus had already gone – the current time being 1.50pm. My hotel had offered to arrange a taxi to the ferry for me, but that was $15 and the bus ($3) had seemed pretty pleasant when I caught it from the ferry a few days before. They warned me it was unreliable, and told me it was scheduled for 2pm. Huh. I was hoping to make the 3pm ferry – the backup was the last ferry of the day at 4.45pm, but it was possible I’d have to pay an upgrade for that one (it was faster).

So we’re standing at this stop and Hiva  starts waving at cars trying to hitch a ride. Most people just wave back, but finally a young guy stops. He says he isn’t going far, he’s just out to buy a last-minute birthday cake for his younger brother (but I guess he wasn’t in a rush?). Hiva jumped in and said he’d help me with my bags – it seemed like it was unlikely to go wrong, and I knew we could wave the bus down from wherever we happened to be, so not much risk of being stuck forever. The first shop we came to was closed, so we ended up going about three kilometers up the road with this guy, and then he bought his cake and turned around and Hiva and I walked up the road a short way to just outside the IHG hotel. There, I stood mostly in the shade at his suggestion while he kept waving (still managed to burn a sandals pattern into my feet though). After some time, an elderly couple stopped and picked us both up. Some five minutes later they dropped Hiva off at the post office, and I continued with them to their house. She was a native of the island, he had moved there from France 20 years ago. They dropped me off just past their house on a long straight stretch of road next to the beach, so I could see cars coming – saying that in the old days, everyone in Tahiti would have stopped to give a ride, but today society is so unfriendly, good luck!

I was now about a third of the way to the ferry, at not quite 3pm. I’d given up on the first boat but was pretty confident I’d make the second. I wasn’t at all confident that I’d be able to hitch a ride on my own, but it seemed worth trying, and after only a few minutes got picked up by a guy about my own age who was heading to pick up the kids from school. His name was Kevin, and he was very jealous of my trip. He said he’d always meant to travel but in the end he’d only left Tahiti once, for a visit to Australia when he was 13 years old and went with a friend’s family. I didn’t quite follow the story – either the friend himself, or another boy they’d invited, had been unable to go, and so Kevin was offered the ticket. He dropped me off in a small town at an actual bus stop. Partly because this was at the entry to the town so most people were driving in, partly lack of motivation, I ended up waiting more than 30 minutes here until the bus arrived at 4pm, when I was starting to get nervous. For some reason, I’d even convinced myself that I was wrong about the 4.45 time and it was probably a 4.30 departure! But the bus did come, and got us all there in time for the ferry, and I didn’t even have to change my ticket.

So I got back to Papeete at 5.30pm, shortly before the sudden nightfall that I expected about 6pm. I’d heard that there were some areas of Papeete that you shouldn’t wander around alone in after dark, and I figured it’d be even less advisable when carrying a pack with all my stuff and obviously lost. So I walked down to the tourist info office along the harbour (filled with serious and casual runners of all kinds, backdropped with an incredible sunset) and asked about a bus to the airport. I had 500 francs set aside for the bus, and 1200 francs +some coins for something to eat. “A bus to the airport? Now?” they said, looking dismayed and putting up a closed sign on the door. “There’s no bus at this time of night!” Fantastic. So I went over the road to a taxi stand and asked the first driver how much to get to the airport (about 15 minutes away). 1800 francs, he says. No credit cards. So I count my coins and ask if he will take 1750 francs, and he agrees. Very shortly after, I’m at the airport – only 8 hours before my flight departs at 2am! There is one other flight scheduled before that – to LA, at 11pm – so it wasn’t exactly bustling either. Fortunately businesses here took credit cards, so I got some airport takeout pasta for dinner and settled in with a book.

Eventually a girl asked me to watch her pack while she got some food, and then we sat in the same group of couches for about 4 hours before saying hello to each other. She was French and also on a round the world trip – she worked in banking in Geneva before quitting her job about four months ago, and was planning to spend the last couple months of her round the world trip in South America before going home. Finally, after about seven years sitting there, check-in opened! Of course we had been sitting the furthest from the line so everyone else had been lined up already for ten years and we were at the back. Once I got to the front of the line, there were three counters open and for some reason each passenger was taking forever – I think because all of them actually had too much luggage (one girl was trying to re-pack her bag at the counter). Finally finally, one of them is done, and the counter guy goes on a break. So I wait another forever, and the next passenger is done, and the counter guy goes on a break. So I wait again until the third passenger is done, and am mildly surprised when the counter guy stays there and waves me forward. Because I’m magic, I complete check-in in about 30 seconds – although he did ask me for proof of my forward travel from Easter Island, and I suppose if he hadn’t accepted the itinerary of my RTW trip on my phone, then I might have been there forever arguing or trying to dig something up?

And then we got into the international waiting area, with a giant duty-free store and a tiny bar that had a small sign saying “no credit cards”, so people all walked up to the bar, got ready to order, then saw the sign and looked sad and walked away. It was quite a nice area, but still pretty warm so I really wanted a cold drink – I figured it was worth asking if she took any other currencies, and managed to buy myself a sprite with USD$6. Worth it!  I continued reading Ancillary Sword until we boarded, when I found myself in possession of two seats at the sparsely populated back of the plane and managed to go to sleep for a few hours, waking up for quite a decent dinner (or breakfast, whatever).

Impression: it might have been just the area I was staying in in Moorea, but there was a weird kind of decay everywhere. Abandoned buildings, four-five streetlights out in a row (even more noticeable when these two coincided so you’d have a 100m of total darkness), and then of course the abandoned grown-over bulldozer. Perhaps the Club Med going away took away so much business that the area itself collapsed a little? Viewing that from the sea was pretty cool – a caved in mosaic area that I think might have been the pool and lots of quite well-executed graffiti. I didn’t see enough of anywhere else to get the same impression, but in other places I could see new construction and places for sale, so it might have been a very localised effect. Some photos:

Note: haven’t figured out a nice way to embed photos from Flickr yet, so you can view the whole album on Flickr

So, basically I’d say my lesson from Tahiti so far (or more accurately, French Polynesia) is that if you aren’t happy, nay excited, to throw down some money on it – just don’t. Or at least warm up with a month in Thailand or somewhere that’s tropical AND aimed at a range of budgets to get your feet wet. But if you do have the money, it’s everything you wanted.

My first night was great, or at least as much as it can be when you land at 1am. I got my complementary airport pickup to a guesthouse five minutes away, there was a traditional band at the tarmac greeting the plane even though it was 1am and pouring and humid, my hotel hosts were really nice and the room had air-con, I posted my celebratory Instagram, etc. The next morning they drove me fifteen minutes down to the main area of town (actual Papeete – like most airports, Papeete airport is in the next town over, Fa’a’a) to catch the ferry to Moorea.

I chose Moorea because it seemed to have awesome beaches, and was a little cheaper than the main islands (partly because you can catch a ferry for $30 return instead of flying for $400 return like Bora Bora). I’d been hoping to spend less than $100/night (quite a bit less!) and I found a hostel online (http://camping-nelson.pf) that seemed like I could manage this – $25/night for a shared room with three beds. Nice! It had wifi, so it would totally work for my visions of sitting on the beach on my laptop (note: that’s a specific and high priority vision I had when planning this trip), or worst case, if the wifi didn’t reach the beach, I could do a laptop-beach-laptop rotation. So then I got there and basically it’s called Camping Nelson because you are meant to be in a tent, and the rooms are kind of an afterthought. Or else they used to be the main thing and the owners just got sick of it? The whole place looks like it’s decaying. There used to be a kitchen. The owner told me there hasn’t been a kitchen in “forever”. The wifi is only on when he’s in the office, which is 8-12, 1.30-4, roughly, sometimes less, sometimes it doesn’t work. There is no powerpoint in the dorm room, but you can pay 50 cents an hour to plug something into the wall next to his desk. There’s not even a fan in the dorm room. After some disappointed time staring around and a wander along the beach I had a nap, it was nice and cool with strong winds blowing (and rain. It rained most of the time).

After my nap, I felt better about life, and went for a walk thinking about something to eat. I went past a few restaurants but pretty much everything was closed until 6pm, it felt like. There were some pretty neat scenes – the whole place seemed on an edge of decay, like I found an entire bulldozer that had just been left there and had a small forest grow around it. Bizarre. I walked maybe a couple of km, and then got to the IHG InterContinental. It was a bit after 5pm and one of the things I’d wanted to do was see a Tahitian performance at the Tiki Village (tikivillage.pf), but hadn’t been able to figure out how to organise it. I expected that the concierge here could help me, so I went in and wandered around a little jealous of everything and got them to add me to the list of people being picked up by a bus at 6pm.

For $100, it felt expensive (but see: Tahiti) but I thought it was worth it. I might have been a little less sure if I didn’t speak French; French was clearly the main language and then most of it was translated into English. The English presenter wasn’t as good at showmanship as the others, which was a shame. But I got the best of both 🙂 The village tour, where we split into French-speaking and English-speaking, was pretty short in English but mildly interesting. The dinner was pretty good, I was definitely ready for it so it would have had to be terrible for me not to enjoy it by then! But whole roast pork and slow cooked chicken and vegetables is hard to go wrong with. While we ate dessert, we had some demonstrations on how to wear a pareo (sarong) – I don’t know about the group as a whole, but the general vibe at my table was that we’d never be able to do any of what she was demonstrating. The women’s demo was done by a pretty 20-something girl, who showed about fifteen ways of tying it on and then got a woman from the audience to try one (it came out wearable, but looked a little fragile) and then an older, less fit guy got up to do the guy’s demos. I thought this was going to be a joke, and it partly was – by the end he was wearing five of them tied to look like underwear, pants, a vest, a cloak and a turban. Then he got two guys up to try and follow him in one simple skirt pattern – they were useless. Like, sure, maybe it’s harder than it looks, but how can you not realize that he is holding a corner and you are holding the middle of an edge? Or maybe it was just a case of failing to realize that it was an important difference, despite this being the step they failed on every time and also really? This went on a bit long and I wanted someone to put them out of their misery.

Finally, the show. Before it began, they got all the women up to try some dancing, and damn my hips were sore after about 20 seconds of it. (Bonus: I will never see anyone from that crowd again. No nerves!).  Then they got all the men, which included two boys of about ten years old who got into it really enthusiastically. I’m pretty sure they did this so that when the show began, we would all look at the dancing and think “damn, that’s sure harder than it looks!”. It was the telling of a traditional myth, I think about how women stopped being mermaids and came to live on land? It looked a bit amateurish to start but better and better as it went on. I just wish that the rest of the audience could have refrained from clapping every time an actor went still for a second,  like they’d never seen a play before and were just constantly thinking it was the end. Kind of ruined the dramatic silence moments. It went a lot longer than I expected, starting at about 8pm and going to 10.30. The last part was all fire-twirling and juggling which was pretty well done, a few dropped sticks but when they throw them five metres up I give them a little slack.  The dancers were all relatively young but the musicians and narrator were older – I wonder how many other places are teaching anyone these dances? The village itself is a reconstruction, and during the day I think they do more cultural tours of it. It seemed like a good thing to spend money at.

When I went to bed at 11pm, exhausted, it felt like the room hadn’t seen a breeze in a decade. My roommate didn’t believe in open windows (security, I think) and after waking up several times, I woke up for good at 4am hating everything, especially the roosters that had started crowing at 3am. (Morons. I think they went all day except for a break at midnight.) Even though I was awake at 4am, unfortunately I was on the other side of the island from the annual Tahiti marathon starting right then, and had no way to get there. I guess I could have tried hitching but that’s pretty far down my list of things to ever try. So I waited until 5am when it was sort of light and went to the beach, because by god if I’m going to be miserable and tired in paradise I might as well get some beach time out of it.

And to be fair, the beach was gorgeous. Of course, it wasn’t great for swimming, having a small reef about three meters out and then more rocks ahead, but it was so nice in the water that it barely mattered. I tried doing some breaststroke back and forth across the front of the property and found out that my breaststroke muscles have atrophied since high school. It seemed like I should do yoga but I don’t know any. So I just lay on my back and floated a bit and swam back and forth. The water was clear, and I grabbed my phone and went for a walk, taking all these amazing pictures – I saw some couples I recognised from the Tiki Village show (one of them had I think been a honeymoon reservation? They had a table up front and were the ones who did the pareo audience attempts) at a very nice looking hotel just a few doors up. Eventually it was breakfast time, and I got a crappy baguette, some sliced ham and a packet of spoons from the grocery down the road, for $6. (The spoons were to try and eat the instant porridge I’d brought and made with cold water). Then I checked my email and found out my Grandma had died overnight, which sucked – at least I had visited just recently when I was in Melbourne, and I knew she was sick, but still.

So by then it was 11am, I was hungry, hot, tired and sad, so I chucked a hissy fit and decided to throw some money at it. I went and changed to a private room for the Saturday night, probably getting overcharged for it , and said I’d check out Sunday morning. Then my options were either head over to the ferry first thing Sunday and check in somewhere over on the mainland, or find another hotel over here for Sunday night. I was 80% just going to walk up the road to the InterContinental, but eeerrmmm, $250/night, that’s kind of an explosion in my budget. Obviously by now the office was closed for lunch which meant there was no internet, so I spent some time reading Beaty’s Code Book and going for a swim. When he got back, I checked out Papeete online: the Paul Gauguin museum that was the main point of being back in Papeete earlier than necessary has apparently closed, so I decided to stay on Moorea until the Monday evening ferry (to catch my midnight flight to Easter Island).  I looked up nearby hotels – the nice one just up the road said it was either booked out or unavailable to book online, no prices listed. A few other options I found for less than $100 were too far to walk to, and possibly not that much nicer than where I was. So eventually I walked up the street to ask about a room, and booked one for Sunday night for $150 with air conditioning and kayaks I can rent and tea and coffee and hot water and all kinds of stuff. They’ll probably even be able to help me get back to the ferry on Monday. I even got complimented on my french when I told the guy I was Australian! And then I went into a shop to get a postcard and bought a french novel set in Tahiti, which is probably terrible and ruins my multi-week streak of not buying any books, but will make me feel good about (a) practicing my french and (b) working towards my goal of reading something from/set in each country I go to.

Back at the campsite, I paid the difference for my room upgrade and moved into my new private room with fan. At first I thought perhaps I’d made a mistake in bothering to get the hotel room for the next night – having the windows wide open and a fan on made it nice and cool. But then I plugged my laptop in to the powerpoint in the room and got a small electric shock, so nope, not a mistake to leave. I did sleep pretty well though, from about 10pm to 8am.

Sunday morning – sunny! Finally! I left my room at 8am and felt like I was going to burn on the 10 metre walk to the bathrooms. I got back and sunscreened up, then had breakfast overlooking the beach. I officially packed and checked out a bit after 9am, then stayed and read my book in the shade for a few hours. Now THAT is honest to god 50% of what I want from a tropical vacation – lovely weather, a great view, and a great book (still The Code Book). Unfortunately the other 50% includes things like being able to sleep, and eat, and not run out of money, which is why I felt good about heading off at noon to check into my new hotel.

It’s now 12.45pm and hot as hell – outside, anyway 🙂 I am writing this from my comfortable air-conditioned room, complete with a lovely indoor shower, and a KETTLE and a powerpoint that doesn’t make me worried about the future of my laptop/health, and a sink in the room. I think I’m going to leave Tahiti tomorrow with fond memories – although, of course, I still have to choose between the $3 unreliable public bus and the $15 reliable booked bus to get to the ferry, and then get another bus from the ferry to the airport, and then survive at the airport until 1am for my flight. But I’m confident all that will go smoothly, ok?