Chile is an easy place to travel around. Really simple. Ok, as long as you can brave some linguistic complications… Put it like this – if you’ve read the blog for a while then you’ll remember the trouble we had making ourselves understood in China. Hardly anyone there understood English – and to make matters worse ‘Chinese’ is actually a collection of hundreds of mutually unintelligible tonal languages with a horribly complex pictorial written counterpart. To put it mildly we struggled – you’d have laughed your head off it you’d seen our first attempts to buy train tickets! Lets just say it was only possible because we looked up a few Chinese character place names in advance, and we were lucky enough to be served by a lovely bloke who was more than willing to make himself understood by a very graphic sign-language! But by the end of our stay in China we were proud to have mastered a few phrases in Mandarin, perfected the art of miming, and become scarily adept at drawing of beautiful little pictures to make ourselves understood!
And now we’re in South America, where approximately the same number of people speak English as in China (i.e. about 0.0000001% of the population). But luckily it’s not so bad! Latin American Spanish is a slightly softer version of its European counterpart – but most importantly as far as we’re concerned it’s a nice, Latin-based non-tonal language! Yay! No more worries about whether your voice goes up or down at the end of a word. OK, the pronunciation takes a bit of getting used to, but it’s not so bad. Especially as they use the same alphabet as we do! Gary is even finding bits of the French and Latin he learned at School useful (he’s much better at these language things than me). Today he managed to make a hotel reservation by phone with someone who spoke no English. Although perhaps I shouldn’t hype his linguistic ability too much before we attempt to check-in to the place…
Anyway, apart from our struggles with booking everything in Spanish, Chile has proved very easy and relaxing to travel around. The buses are fantastically comfortable and inexpensive compared to Europe, with huge amounts of leg room and reclining chairs resembling those you’d get in Business Class flights. The skies here seem to be permanently blue and cloudless – we haven’t felt a drop of rain since leaving Tahiti. And genuinely dramatic, stunning scenery seems to be routine. Chile is a very pleasant place to travel.
No, my only quibble with the country is the food. I always thought the UK was the birthplace of a particularly malignant form of cuisine – combining boring, bland non-flavours with soggy-cum-iron-hard-chewy textures. Especially nasty cook-until-well-and-truly-dead meat and veg. if you know what I mean. But at least eating in the UK has been saved by the abundance of culinary imports. It’s very easy to get your hands on a delicious Italian, Indian or Chinese meal, and in many places you can choose between Japanese, Thai, Mexican and many others too. But here in Chile the food is a bit like traditional British fare, and there’s a distinct lack of imported flavours. Apart from Santiago (where we had some lovely fresh Sushi) it’s a struggle to find anything but fried meat and potatoes. Great. So far our only saving grace has been a chain of fast-food restaurants called ‘Telepizza’, which (believe it or not) actually produce pretty good thin crust pizzas in a few minutes for about £3 a shot. Not bad. But at this point we’re getting a bit tired of pizza, and (even worse) as we travel north to more and more remote places we’re a bit scared that there may not be any outlets of this wonderful chain. Argh! Fried chicken and potatoes! Help!!!
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