Chile with Giuseppe

2007, my Chile trip with Giuseppe

On 7 November I set off from Pisa airport with my travel companion Giuseppe, final destination Santiago de Chile via Paris.

Air France is the airline I use most, precisely because it leaves from the airport closest to where I live, at Cinquale, just a stone's throw from Forte dei Marmi.

The flight to Paris lasted an hour and thirty minutes, nothing compared with the 14-hour non-stop slog from Paris to Santiago. Luckily we got the seats by the emergency exit, so we could stretch our legs and get up whenever we wanted without making anyone else move to let us through.

During the night, as we flew over the Amazon and everyone was asleep, a jolt woke us up. The Boeing 777 dropped five metres of altitude in a second. The guy who was in the toilet shot out like a rocket, still with his trousers down, and ran to buckle his seatbelt in his seat. At first I got a fright, but as soon as I saw that little scene I doubled over laughing.

Landing at Santiago means a spring-like descent, because, just like at Malpensa, you're surrounded by mountains. Very beautiful too is the highest mountain in South America, Aconcagua, around 6,000 metres.

The airport is modern, a nice surprise given Pinochet's past. The rental car is a red Avis Toyota Yaris three-box with a few kilometres on it and a manual gearbox.

The guy explains how to get out of the airport and slip straight onto the motorway heading south, and we manage it well. Around Santiago the motorway is paid automatically via a sort of electronic pass; further on, though, there are toll booths like ours, and in any case not expensive.

The motorway is well built and with little traffic, running 3,000 km down Chile from the north by Peru all the way to Puerto Montt, where we're headed. The odd thing is that you occasionally see tractors and other strange vehicles, and there are bus stops. The speed limit is 120 km/h. The mobile phone works but only if you have a triband; in fact, as in the USA and Canada, in Chile, the only country in South America, you need a triband.

Once in Puerto Montt we try to take advantage of a boat excursion to see the fjords and maybe some marine wildlife, so heavily advertised in the tourist brochures, but at that moment only a five-day voyage was departing; naturally it would have been a wonderful experience, like when I spent three days on the Hurtigruten mail boat in Norway. Unfortunately, though, no excursion of a few hours, so we decide to book at the offices of the local airline LanChile a flight from Santiago to Easter Island, to be taken in the last three days of this trip. The booking goes through and we're happy.

So we set off for the most coveted destination of this trip, the Valdes Peninsula in Argentina, three days' travel away.

We get back on the motorway and retrace the same road, covering again the roughly 180 km that separate us from the town of Osorno.

Off the motorway heading east towards the border between Chile and Argentina in the middle of the Andes. A multitude of birds of prey and other species accompany us among the conifer forests we encounter in the mountains, with enchanting choreography. Rivers complete with rapids and immense lakes, three times the size of Lake Garda; the road is almost perfect, it reminds me of New Zealand's.

At customs everything's fine. In the stretch of no man's land we come across snow that along the roadside reaches four metres high, a few photos and then off towards the other customs, the Argentine one.