CHILOE

As we make our way through the island, exploring every nook and cranny, we bump into so many villages and people and corners deep inside the Chilean experience, we are drowning in the authenticity we dreadful marketers keep recommending, to little avail, to clients who don’t know what we’re talking about. Today, we travelled for five hours from our new pad in Castro, to a Pinguinera in Puñihuil. Because penguins. On our way, which we took quite leisurely, we discovered a bit more about our surroundings…

First, right as we departed our recently adopted town, we drove past a seemingly abandoned building that required additional investigation…

So Sebastien did what Sebastien does, found a guy inside and waved him out to convince him to let us in. I don’t know what my brother says in these instances but it almost always works and we were soon in the bowels of Pinocchio’s whale, laying our eyes and pixels on the remnant of a marine museum, left derelict by lack of funding. Why does decay invariably look so beautiful?…

Then, Sebastien did the other thing he does, which is find people like him to have lunch with. I kid you not, tasked with finding a place to eat even here, in an island near the end of the world, he will use his mystical powers to sniff out the one building in the one street with the one person that serves food with equal passion, care and consideration that he feels for comestibles. That place today, was Mar y Canela, a wonderful shack, filled with local ingredients and love for putting them together in an artful way.

Low tide through the windows as we ate this wonderful meal…

But it was time to get going because the last boat out to sea was at 5pm and we were not exactly early… We drove along the coast, taking in some of the breathtaking views and through small towns, like Dalcahue, the site of a wonderful market…

A lettuce truck, because of course.

This road is known as the Ruta de las Iglesias (the Road of Churches) where you will encounter dozens upon dozens of small to medium-sized to large edifices erected to the glory of your God, some of them even registered as World Heritage sites by UNESCO such that of Tenaún…

…and a gigantic one built from wood in the nothing town of Achao, so small you could fit all of this village’s houses inside the church…

It is so incredible and wonderful to just drive around, get sort of lost, and encounter such beauty in the middle of nowhere, with no one around taking selfies… A few hours later, we arrived in Puñihuil to board a boat to see some penguins, by this time the least interesting activity of the day, but still, penguins…

Our ship’s name turned out to thankfully not be prophetic but come on, you have a boat and name it the Titanic III?!…

So much learned today, so much still to discover about Chili but we are completely exhausted after three and a half months of almost non-stop movement, so we will take a break now in quiet seaside town Viña Del Mar, where we shall rest these rusty, and still bruised, bones until we return to the homeland for the month of December for some overdue high speed internet. Also, family, definitely family!…