The Southead

Back on the road, back heading south towards the lands of fog and ice, snow and sail. Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego - these are names that resonate with remoteness and adventure. Unfortunately, to get there, you have to go through Chillon.

Chillon is a one horse town in the middle of the fertile but boring part of middle Chile, a desolate wet farm town whose only claim to fame is being leveled repeatedly by earthquakes. We wandered for three hours around its small downtown, nearly missing the few malls, the tattered market, the German but not really German restaurants. Eventually, after a day or so, as I waited for the overnight bus to Puerto Montt, I found a strange Zen about Chillon, its complete and total normalness, its utter sameness with thousands of small towns in thousands of small places. A lot of people go traveling to see the sights, to experience an ersatz uniqueness honed by decades of tourists´buses- But in Chillon, I saw the authentic Chile, just hundreds of people living their typical lives.

That isn´t to say I didn´t want to get the hell out of there. The night bus to Puerto Montt was uneventful, generally quiet and generally warm.

Ten hours to Puerto Montt. We were now over seventeen hours south of Santiago, and I saw frost on puddles in the shade. The city looked like a nice town on the edge of something rough, built with rough woods, everything wet and cold. What little skyline exists is totally dwarfed by the seemingly endless horizon to the south, an immense bay dotted with rusting ships pointed into the wind. The downtown is clear and sculpted, but beyond that, along streets radiating back up into the hills and cliffs, the wood homes and small businesses of the city simply crowd together, trying to warm themselves off the frentic energy of the locals.

Puerto Montt is like Anchorage, or whatever I imagine Anchorage to be like in my mind.

Legends of the Fall came on TV in our hostel. The next day we headed south, onto the water, to the big island of Chiloe.