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.

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.