Tripped

Looks Like We Chose the Right Year to Go, Pt. II

Exactly a year ago at this time we were picking up a car in Santiago to drive to Valparaiso for the weekend, then south for a week of wine touring. Now thanks to the 8.8 earthquake destruction has been wrought in many of the places we visited. Our thoughts are with the people of Chile.

Those Global Distribution Gaps

It's the soap that's the odd one: we found Neutrogena, unscented formula, available in Chile, in Peru, in Ecuador. In Argentina, it's nowhere to be seen - even while the original formula bars and a range of other Neutrogena products fill the shelves in the Farmacity. Now that we're on our fourth country and our third extended stay, what we've learned about global distribution of consumer goods is that plenty of the major brands we're all familiar with back in the States have penetrated these markets. But as expats everywhere seeking the comforts of home have long documented, it's impossible to predict which ones make it across which border. I

Take that Neutrogena soap in Latin America: it appears to have an oddly antagonistic relationship with Neutrogena shampoo. The latter was impossible to find anywhere for ten weeks, from the moment our initial flight landed in Lima, through Peru and Ecuador and Chile, until we arrived here. Now it's in every Farmacity in Buenos Aires even while the unscented bars have disappeared. Multiple other American shampoo brands, however, have been ubiquitous across the continent, especially Head & Shoulders in its many different formulations.

Our old standby Tom's of Maine toothpaste has been a no-show on shelves throughout, so if they're getting a marketing boost or improved retail channel access via their acquisition by Colgate-Palmolive, it's not internationally. And there's been plenty of Colgate around everywhere we've gone - that and Aquafresh seem to be the most popular American toothpaste brands, in their full range of flavors and types.

Atra razor blades, still widely available as replacement cartridges to the installed base of handle owners in the States? Forget it - in Argentina, they've already been phased out. If you're a Gillette customer you're either a Sensor Excel, Mach 3, or Fusion user.

Peanut butter had been everywhere, until Argentina.

The pervasiveness of Coke and McDonald's are well documented and railed against, although no one in any of the countries we've visited appears to be railing - they're enormously popular. But Oreos have been just as pervasive.

Those are off the top of my head, I'm sure Eileen will now remind me of some more and I'll append them here.

View From Our Current Window

Stealing shamelessly from Andrew Sullivan, who posts "The View From Your Window" photos submitted by his readers, this is part of what we see from the terrace at our current apartment in Las Condes.

 

Photos That Deserve Further Explanation #2

Those street parking entrepreneurs I mentioned in my last PTDFE post? They also distribute sun visors on parked cars - I haven't figured out if they charge for them, or if they just hand them out in hopes of getting an additional tip. We saw the same thing with a private parking attendant when we stopped at a roadhouse restaurant for lunch in the wine country.

Obviously someone involved with marketing for Durex here is a genius, and has managed to get an exclusive on the visor concession with the parking attendants in Viña. What's odd about it is that Chile is a very conservative Catholic country socially - they only legalized divorce five years ago, the last nation in the Western Hemisphere to do so. And yet, condom ads on all the cars at the beach. Go figure.

The Cree-Sus

We had asked the perky young blonde girl at Altaïr Vineyards how many visitors the place usually received. Altaïr is a very high-end place, like an Opus One in Napa, that limits its production to two blended wines, with its primary focus on its Grand Cru, which costs $65 per bottle in the States - the kind of place that tends to attract only those wine lovers with a lot of disposable income.

"Not so many since the 'cree-sus'" she answered.

The cree-sus! We see it on the news everyday, and now we've started to see it more and more reflected in our visits to tourist destinations here in South America. As I mentioned when we booked it, we managed to get a 2-1 special on our Galapagos trip, and our boat still ended up with two empty berths. We learned on our departure that the next 8-day trip would only have six people on board!

Here in Chile, it's been more of the same, especially during our wine country tour. The first hotel we stayed at, which also had a casino attached, was no more than 1/4 full by our best estimate. And then of course there was the second place, the Hotel Il Giordani, a 10-room boutique hotel that by all rights should have been not only full but expensive. In Napa this place would easily be charging a minimum of $500 per night or more; here we payed $120 per - AND WE WERE THE ONLY PEOPLE THERE! The shot below is the view from our room:

That's right, for two nights, our own private hotel in wine country. We stayed in a second floor room with a commanding view of the grounds and terraces both east and west. I joked on my Facebook page that it was the perfect entr'acte to a horror film - all we needed was the Psycho music playing in the background - since it was just the two of us and the staff. The dining room became our own private salon, where we had an excellent three-course dinner each night. The pool was all ours too (well nearly - on one afternoon it looked like a couple of friends of the owner's daughter had stopped by for a dip). And this is a place featured in Frommer's, the most mainstream of mainstream travel books.

The same was true at the wineries, besides Altaïr. I've already described their general inability to handle drop-in business, which certainly cuts down on customer flow, but even the organized bus tour business that most Chilean wine country visits are built around was noticeably lacking at most of the places we stopped.

Then again, the cree-sus did get us an unexpected and unpaid-for private tour of Altaïr, after we bought two of their lower-priced bottles, the everyday drinking blend they sell under the Siderol label, because the perky young blonde clearly saw us as a chance to temporarily escape the lonely boredom of the empty shop. "Don't tell my boss!" she said as she took us into the cask room and cellar.

The cree-sus is also helping us further rationalize the cost of this trip - after all, the money we budgeted to spend on it would most likely have been sitting in an S&P 500 fund right now, frittering away to nothingness. Plus we're stimulating the global economy!

Whether there will be any jobs at all left by the time we get back is a different cree-sus issue, but we'll deal with that when we need to, and not before.

Chile Wine Touring: Not Ready for Prime Time

Eileen summarizes our journey through the Casablanca, Colchagua, Cachapoal, and Maipo Valley regions:

• Days: 3
• Tours: 4
• Wines tasted on tours: 7
• Lunches at wineries: 2
• Wineries "open to the public" where we were turned away with no explanation: 2
• Email/contact form requests for tours with no reply: more than 10. I stopped counting.

The truth is, about the only thing they've mastered in attempting to mimick the California winery tour M.O. is the Napa trick of charging you outrageous prices for tastings (which is why we've tended to avoid Napa in favor of Sonoma trips for years now).

Take the "open to the public" places that really weren't: they really don't seem to have grasped that using men wearing sidearms to prevent drop-in visits, despite having posted open hours for your shop, is not the path to developing additional revenue streams. The photo above is indicative. We arrived for our 3:00 p.m. appointment at Anakena at 2:53 p.m. And there was no fucking way the pistol-packing guard was raising that gate to let us in before 3:00. So we had to park just outside for seven minutes, allowing me to take these pictures but preventing us from, say, dropping a few extra pesos on a t-shirt or even a bottle in the winery's shop before our tour. And this is in the country that is supposed to be the free market miracle of South America.

Then again, it did allow me to take more pictures of the fabulous landscape. The views and the climate for the most part are similar to what you'd find in most other wine regions, especially the red wine ones at the end of summer as harvest time approaches: very sunny, very hot, very dry. The one thing that separates these Chilean valleys from any of the other regions we've visited, including in California and Italy, is the proximity of the mountains. In those other locations, the vineyards are surrounded by mere hills that are 1000, maybe 1200 meters high at most. Even in Amador County and the other Sierra foothill sites it's rare to get a glimpse of the Sierra Nevada mountains themselves. Here it's different: the Andes are close at hand, with dozens of 5000 and 6000 meter or taller snowcapped peaks looming over every vine.

Photos That Deserve Further Explanation

I shot this picture from the terrace of our second-floor apartment on Huerfanos in Barrio Brasil, Santiago. The guy on the left is one of the "parking attendants" you see everywhere in the city. Many of them wear orange vests and/or pseudo-official looking laminated IDs, collect tips for gesticulating at drivers while they parallel park their cars into public street spaces, and offer to wash your parked vehicle for an extra fee. One can only imagine what they do if you refuse to pay them for their help.

The guy in the middle appeared to be one of the local homeless hanging out on the park benches during the day.

The old man on the right lived in the building across the street. He came out of the building carrying the half watermelon in his hand, eventually handing it to the homeless guy. When the attendant arrived shortly after this, the homeless guy handed the melon to him. This very friendly, very animated conversation went on for sometime - they were too far away and my Spanish was too weak for me to pick up what it was all about, although you might assume from the exchange that the old man was offering a bonus for keeping an eye on his car. The "parking attendant" left and these two kept at it for awhile, although the old man was doing most of the talking.

The CIA Gets In Your Way

Richard Nixon is still alive in Chile, and it isn't because "Frost/Nixon" is playing at the local multiplex. It's been 35 years since the coup, and the military dictatorship is long gone, but the Chileans certainly haven't forgotten Nixon. Or Kissinger. Or how those two used the CIA to foment the overthrow of the Allende government in 1973. Several bookstores we've gone into have had large displays of titleson the CIA's perfidy - even when they've had little or no English-language material.

The dark side of any visit to Valparaiso and Vina del Mar for an American is the realization that these adjoining cities were Ground Zero for the coup - and for the CIA's involvement in it. The Chilean Navy's takeover of Valpo touched off the coup, and many of the plotters' meetings prior to those events apparently took place in Vina, including their meetings with the CIA. If you've seen the movie "Missing," you know that the American journalist Charles Horman was trapped in Vina del Mar with a friend at the outset of the coup, where he saw and spoke to CIA agents; he was arrested and killed by the Chilean secrect police in Santiago a few days later.

A visit to Pablo Neruda's Valparaiso house includes the reminder that the old Communist's beachfront home to the south, Isla Negra, was stormed by the military during the coup, even as Neruda was dying of cancer in Santiago. Valparaiso is also Augusto Pinochet's hometown, and the place he moved the Chilean Congress to in the late 80s from Santiago in hopes of reducing its influence in the capital before democracy was restored.

Valpo to Viña

Another brief one: we spent Saturday and early Sunday doing a bit more wandering around Valparaiso, including a visit to one of Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda's homes just up the hill from our hotel. In the afternoon we travelled the brief distance around the bay to spend the night in Vina Del Mar, which is kind of Miami Beach crossed with Atlantic City: casinos, a pier, a boardwalk, umbrellas on the sand, apartment towers by the water, and lots and lots of retirees. I'll post pictures soon - still getting caught up on some of my backups because we didn't have wi-fi coverage in our room the last couple of days (oh, the horror!) This afternoon we're driving down the Colchagua Valley for winery visits, with perhaps a stop at Isla Negra, Neruda's other seaside home and his final resting place.

You Can Nearly Go Home Again

A marine layer overhead obscuring the summer sun. Buildings tumbling down hillsides to meet a bay opening onto the Pacific Ocean. Spanish names on most of the streets. Wine regions only an hour or so drive away. A hotel in which Mrs. Madrigal would feel right at home. We're nearly 6000 miles from our last permanent residence and yet it almost feels like we never left: Valparaiso is San Francisco's grittier older sister.

Unlike San Francisco, it still has a working waterfront - the cruise ship to freighter ratio currently in port is at least 20-1 - and there isn't a Silicon Valley nearby driving up real estate prices or putting a glossy sheen on the buildings. We found a small bookstore last night on Cumming Street (see, they're not all Spanish names) that had an excellent selection of English-language titles, better than any we found in Santiago, allowing us to stock up on some reading material for the next couple weeks. Then we climbed a steep cobblestoned street to have a very nice dinner at a restaurant in the city's artists' ghetto, perched on a nearby hill with views similar to the one from our hotel window which you see above.

In a true surprise, our meal was enriched by the musical accompaniment of an incredible female singer named Francisca Santa Maria, who alternated between bossa nova and songs from the American songbooks with not only a lovely voice, but perfect jazz phrasing on her interpretation of the standards. The girl can swing. (The sidemen in her trio - bass and guitar - were also very, very good.) A quick web search this morning turned up her MySpace page here; it looks like she has performed outside Chile but based on what we heard last night she really deserves to be more widely known.