"Pisco Sour"

Two weeks ago yesterday we arrived at the bus terminal in Santiago after a nine hour bus ride from Temuco. It was hot - almost 30 degrees -, and the terminal was buzzing with people in holiday mode. We, on the other hand, had only one more bus to look for: the 'aeropuerto' that would take us to the airport for our flight home.

I remember thinking, 'once we are home it will be only a little while, and this will feel so far away, soon almost seem like a dream' a week or so before we left, resolutely putting these thoughts out of my mind to not hasten the process. But of course it is true! How could it be otherwise, when surroundings and circumstances are so different? 'A harsh beauty', I wrote in my last entry, and that, at least, is a label that can be applied to the place where we have made our home as well. Harsh and beautiful in a totally different way, and, just like in Patagonia, sometimes needing a second look to appreciate it fully.

It is the everyday reality, however, and it takes a bit of an effort to transport myself back to our wonderful holiday. A glance at my zebra-striped feet will do it, causing a sudden longing for a climate needing only sandals and short sleeves instead of felt-lined boots and a snow suit. Looking at the photos, reading my journal entries - that, too, helps.

And then there is the route via the taste buds ...

Soon after our arrival in Chile we started hearing about the national drink. 'You HAVE to try the pisco sour', we were told by several people. It didn't seem like a big priority: sure, it's interesting to try the local food and drink, but we mostly enjoy red wine, or a beer when the weather is hot. We'd try it sometime in those five weeks, just to know what it was.

Little did we know that it is not just a drink, but a piece of Chilean identity! It took no more than five days until we tasted the first one: a group of Chilean agronomists with whom we went out for supper insisted that no visit to a restaurant was complete without a pisco sour, and by the time we left Chile five weeks later we had grown so fond of it that we stopped at the duty free shop to buy a bottle of this strong colourless Brandy, distilled from grapes. We have experimented with it already, and feel that we can serve a passable pisco sour even here, far from the Central Valley of Chile where the grapes are grown.

My fondest memory of it is not connected with a restaurant, however, but with Isla Negra, and I suspect it has less to do with the pisco sour than with the circumstances surrounding its consumption.

I told the story of our arrival in this little coastal town, the walk up the hill to "The Poet's Madness Hostel". I had found it when I checked the "hostelworld" or "hostelbookers" website, a very helpful tool in finding accomodation. It was the only hostel listed under Isla Negra, and they did indeed have room.

    

"The Poet's Madness"

We arrived at its gate in the afternoon, guided by several wooden signs along the way. The path through a small ravine leading up to the pretty little wooden house included a short suspension bridge, flowers and a little garden to the left and right, and signs that younger children either lived or were welcome here. The door was opened by an attractive woman in her thirties, who turned out to be the sole operator of the place. She spoke very little English - and we spoke very little Spanish. This was only the beginning of our second week in Chile, and we hadn't had too many opportunities to practice.



I have to say that my idea of hostels was definitely antiquated before we went on this trip, stemming from school excursions in the 1970s. Memories of dorms with many beds, strict rules concerning quiet times that were never adhered to, the smell of dirty socks and wet towels and of bathrooms that strongly suggested the need for flip flops to prevent an almost certain infection with athlete's foot came up at the mention of the word 'hostel'. They were a slightly more comfortable but not necessarily preferable alternative to a tent.

Hostels, however, were the accomodation we had decided to use whenever possible for our travels in Chile, encouraged by Magnus's and Courtney's experiences the year before. "They are not much different than hotels nowadays", they told us. "Just cheaper."

We had seen that confirmed in our first two nights in the "Rio Amazonas" hostel in Santiago, and now again at  "La locura del poeta (The Poet's Madness)". Sandra and her seven-and twelve-year-old daughters live in the house as well, and Sandra, with her warm personality, infused the whole place with a sense of peacefulness. We had a private room, not very big, but comfortable and decorated with loving detail, just like the rest of the house, and the two bathrooms and small kitchen were shared with Sandra and the other guests, two students from Germany and two from France.

The two German girls had stayed with Sandra for a few weeks while they did a practicum at a school in Isla Negra, and on our second night Sandra and a few other Chilean friends had a farewell party for them at the hostel to which we were invited as well. This was a very impromptu, unhurried affair. Johanna, one of the German girls, had wanted to learn how to make bread from Sandra, and around nine the first steps were underway, the kids and Johanna all crowding around the bowl to start the yeast, cut onions and garlic to roast while the dough was rising, three dark heads and one blond bent over their task.

Eucalyptus Tree

Everybody walked over to the fire pit beside the suspension bridge to pass the time until the bread could go in the oven. By now we were joined by a few more Chileans and a Columbian, and the small fire, fed by eucalyptus twigs and bark gathered on the road outside the gate, cast a warm glow on our little multinational group talking to each other in Spanish, English, German and French, whatever worked best.

In the meantime the bread was baking, one of the guys was busy cooking choclo (corn) soup, and we were finally getting ready to eat, by now close to eleven o'clock. Oh, but there couldn't be a Chilean party without pisco sour! The lemons were brought out and squeezed with a strange wooden contraption that looked awkward but worked beautifully, and lemon juice, a generous amount of pisco and some liquid sugar went in the blender for a first melding of tastes and textures,  later joined by some ice and an egg white to add the desired frothy crown.

This meal, prepared and shared with so much love, is what I will really remember when I think of pisco sour, and it is indeed true that it represents a piece of Chilean identity for me. It is not so much the taste of the drink itself as that of friendship and warm hospitality, a taste we met with wherever we went.

Notes from a bus

              We are back home, and already it is hard to imagine that it is no more than ten days ago since I wrote the following entry. My good intentions to post a blog once a week were thwarted by the unexpected death of my computer, or rather its screen, and I found it impossible to 'quickly' write a blog the few times we had internet access at an internet cafe.


              I did write in my journal, however, and will try to post blogs in retrospect, though not necessarily chronologically, more like a series of impressions of different stages of the journey. Here is the first one of them.

Saturday, January 8th, 2011

After three days on the ferry from Puerto Montt to Puerto Natales through the Patagonian channels, after hiking up to the foot of the Torres del Paine, after watching and listening to Perito Moreno glacier calve, we are now sitting in a 42 passenger bus, on our way north on the (in)famous Ruta 40, Argentina. We started out in El Calafate and will get off in the little town of Gobernador Costa after 23 hours of travel.

7:50 pm

The bus is finally leaving El Calafate, half an hour late because of some mechanical problem in need of fixing, and another stop on the outskirts of town to go through a police control. I’m still not sure what these controls are good for. A policeman came through and wrote down everybody’s name and passport number.

Although the bus is not even half full we got the two last adjacent seats available when we bought our tickets yesterday. I assume we’ll pick up more passengers on the way who probably booked earlier than we did. Our seats are at the very back, right beside the bathroom – not ideal, but we are happy that we managed to get on at all. The next bus goes in a couple of days, which would have made it too late for us to stop at Gretel and Nikita’s at Lago Vintter.

It is pretty bumpy already, even though we are still on pavement. I wonder how my back will feel at the end of this journey: a good part of the way it is still ripio, the Argentinean version of gravel road.

10:30 pm – first stop on the way in El Chalten. Very few people got off the bus here, but a big bunch of backpackers is getting on, and the bus is now full. All of these travelers are tourists, from many different nations, and I believe all but one of them are not much more than half our age. They’ll go all the way to Esquel or even Bariloche; I’m sure nobody will get off at Gobernador Costa with us.

We still had enough daylight to see mighty Mount Fitz Roy, one more of the trademark peaks of Patagonia and one of the reasons why El Chalten is so popular with tourists. Even now it is not totally dark, but it is very windy. I watched the play of clouds across the huge sky stretched over the plains earlier, mountains in the background, with another big lake and its “house glacier”: Lago and Glaciar Viedma. These mountains rise almost without warning from the flat steppe, without the presence of real foothills, just a buffer of bare mounds, one layer thick.

Sunday, January 9^th, 2011, 11 am

At the bus terminal in the town of Perito Moreno, with a 1 1/2 hour break

More than half of our journey lies behind us, and I slept for a fair part of it, even though at first I thought I couldn’t.

When we left El Chalten we were given lunch packs, and the driver pointed out a stack of Styrofoam cups and a big container with water we could use as we needed. After a few minutes the lights in the bus were extinguished, and as the little spotlights were too dim for reading I soon fell asleep. Whenever I woke up during the next few hours I saw a mass of stars through the slit in the curtains.

I must have slept for quite a while after that, because the sky was a deep, flaming red when I woke up next. It was close to 5:30 in the morning, and we had turned onto a very bumpy stretch of road and eventually came to a halt in the middle of nowhere. Far and wide the plains stretched in the pre-dawn light, hills in the distance a black ink drawing against the slowly brightening sky, a river, band of shining silver, meandering through a shallow  valley.

This was a scene I will remember for a long time:

A small house – a kind of truck stop, it turned out - in the midst of all that empty vastness, our bus, almost as big as the house, parked beside it, the gravel road getting lost in some invisible distance. The warm glow of light shining through the windows like an invitation, and the group of about 40 tired tourists, rubbing the sleep from their eyes, lined up for bathrooms and a breakfast of coffee, tea, mate, cake and media luna, croissants.

The restaurant owner, a tall, neatly dressed Argentinean with a grey ponytail, looked well rested at this early hour and handled the many orders calmly, patiently repeating the cost of an order for those who weren’t well versed in Spanish, and I, too, got a good, strong cafe sin leche.

To heighten the sense of surrealism a TV screen showed Beatles videos. How strange to watch John Lennon and Yoko Ono, to listen to “Imagine”, in these surroundings! The hallway leading to the baños (bathrooms) ended in a fair sized room filled with shelves of books, couches, arm chairs, labelled “Public Library”. What was this place? Had we landed in some Hitchcock movie?

There was nothing to worry about, however:  a good half hour later we were on our way again. The sun had just appeared on the eastern horizon, and it was light enough to see that we were now driving through a landscape that would be called bleak by many who love the verdant green of moister climes. I, too, would have counted myself among them, but again and again I am surprised to find that this barrenness has its own appeal for me.


It is so enormous, and in all its dryness so variable, ever changing colours and structure, rocks smoothed and ground to small pebbles by the force of the ice of long-ago glaciers; hills upon hills, valleys wide and narrow, some with a hint of green because of a bit of water, sometimes not even visible anymore, and above it all the endless sky, deep, deep blue; sometimes a cloud ship sailing by, casting a shadow on the bare hills below.


Guanacos and sheep live here, never many in one spot except in those green valleys, and every once in awhile a carcass is stretched out over the tightly strung fence: a misjudgement of height, maybe, or the result of a panicked flight from a predator or a vehicle. Bleached bones, too, are loosely scattered in the ditch from time to time, no longer showing what animal’s skin and meat once covered them.

It is an unforgiving country, harsh in its beauty, glaring sun and lack of moisture, creating an environment not suitable for the weak – but boring? No, boring it is not!