थे करसे ऑफ़ फॉरेन Holidays

Aloha,

as I wend my way around the globe I often meet people who say that it is a really glamorous life. "jet setter" they say and smile knowingly to themselves.

The smile tells me a great deal about what that person has experienced in their lives.

If it has a painful tinge to it I know that person has been to places far and wide and has truly experienced life. On the other hand if their eyes light up and they grin like a cheshire cat as they secretly contemplate the debauchery that they consider inevitably part of global exploration I know that they have never been further than the back yard.

Forgive me if that sounds cynical but invariably that synopsis is accurate. You see one of the deep joys of travel is to experience new things; foods, people, cultures, smells, rip-offs and all manner of human life. However one of the deep frustrations is that unless you are truly familiar with the place you are visiting you will never have a clue what is going on.

Of course there are always friendly guides who will describe how Hannibal marched his elephants over yon hill or how in 1956 the President was victorious in his campaign to oust the corrupt regime of the American lick spittle who came before him but that is about as much use as eating coal if you are constipated. The truth is you will never get to grips with what makes a country tick until you give over a significant portion of your life to it.

So it is that I sit here in Australia - my adopted home - on a dreary Sunday and wonder how the hell I got it so wrong this time.

Today is Mothering Sunday here and last week (a week later than the rest of the planet) was labour day and I have been waiting for both these "holidays" to pass before I can get on with my life.

I have had worse: I once went to Chile with my wife. The journey of a lifetime. It certainly was!

I mean, it is not as if Chile is on the way to anywhere is it? You really have to want to go there to get there. If you went any further you would fall off the world or go swimming in Antarctica and neither of those options are specially appealing to me.

So we traveled across the great Pacific ocean and stopped half way - after 10 hours from New Zealand no less - on Easter Island. What a place! Remote does not describe it. Another 8 hours and we arrived in Santiago.

The excitement rose in me. What adventures lay in this great sliver of a country? The only country on earth where the revolutionaries coined a battle chant "There can be no revolution without song" (No ai revolucion sin canson - or something like that). This was the home of Allende and all that amazing story telling and best of all it was where the infamous BERNARDO O'Higgins made his mark. A half black - half Irish revolutionary with a fantastically mongrel name. He had to be a great bloke to have a beer with. I was so enamoured with Chile that I even named my dog after O'Higgins. Finally we were here and I was ready to explore.

We had a plan to go to the Atacama desert and roam through the plains and valleys, mountains and fjords for weeks. All ready and raring to go!

So we check in and after a pleasant interlude off we went to the Zona Rosa. Streets filled with life and love, colour and cacophany. There were mariachi on every corner and all the people were dressed to the nines. I was in heaven.

There. Across the street, a restaurant. Excellent. Just the thing to get us ready for a true Chilean experience. We ordered Gambas and wine and tucked into to our well earned dinner. All was well in the world until 30 minutes in the waiter came over and asked if we would pay the bill please because they were closing.

CLOSING? Oh well, there were millions of other places to go and we were just getting started. It was only 9pm after all. So we paid the bill and wandered off arm in arm through the the streets of Santiago. More and more people - a real buzz of excitement. THIS PLACE IS AMAZING!

So we go to a bar - "Sorry Senor we are closed."

?

Try another bar

same again.

?

What's going on?

"Ah, Senor, there is a Presidential election and we must close so that there are no more riots like in the old days."

OH CRAP!

Well, you guessed it. In 40 minutes the entire city was dark. Not a soul about except for the guys who worked at MacDonalds and a few political activists tooting horns and waving flags, (YANQUI PIG CAPITALISTS have a dispensation to sell their crap apparently).

So that was it. back to the hotel. Except the Hotel was closed and we had to jump over the locked gates and buzz the concierge to get into our room.

This was a country in lockdown. Jesus! We had just come to visit a real life Graham Greene novel, except this time there were no vacuum blueprints to sell and we had no inside track with the espionage rings. We were alone in a foreign land with nothing but Big Macs for company.

To say we were disappointed is an understatement. Gutted from Brisbane and wife. Big fish have bigger guts and ours were spilled all over the pavements of Chile.

The lock down went on for days.

We tried. Believe me we tried. We walked about 10kms each way to the Bernardo O'Higgins parc only to find it was a dry and desolate field where only the homeless and horny visited. We roamed the beautiful streets for days with no one to meet and nothing to do. It was like that Charlton Heston movie where he is the last man alive and everyone else is a zombie.

We even managed to book ourselves onto a Cultural excursion around the city. Our marvellous guide and his driver were excellent but we were the only ones on the tour on a 50 seater bus. It seems like everyone else had got the message. At the end of the tour there is a big dinner and dance show where the tables are set for hundreds of merry makers to dance traditional dances and drink local wines and generally have a great time in the company of other follish travellers. On the night we went we were joined by 5 rather bemused Koreans and a Russian who was trying to sell paper making machinery. The five hour excursion was over and done with in about 2 hours.

Which reminds me - why is it that you take an hour to eat dinner with friends and 4 minutes alone?

BY day 5 we had had enough and made our way to airline office.

"Get us out of here please"

"Certainly sir. We were wondering if you would leave or stay. Only the Embassy staff are here at present. Most everyone else has gone to Argentina." said the wily airline rep.

Would you like to go to Buenos Aires for a few days? I can arrange a nice hotel but they are having some economic problems now so the taxi's aren't running to the Airport. Perhaps you would like a limosine?"

"Nah. Fuck that. Get us home asap!"

And so we left the next day.

A dream of discovery destroyed by the vagiaries of national holidays and blind expectation of perpetual motion in every country but the one you live in had managed to comprehensively destroy our plans.

This is just one story. There are many more and everyone who travels will tell you about the day that a certain country was shut. It has happened to me in Spain, El Salvador, Australia, New Zealand, Wales, America, France (which closes for the whole of August), and many more.

So perhaps now you have an incling of why I am cynical and why travel broadens the mind and expands time to fill whatever voids have been left by local traditions and cultures.

It is not glamourous. It is generally fucking boring and I wish I had a playstation or something.

via condios muchacho's