Drive to Kakadu -Obligatory Background Check

Before we relocate to Chile, we are taking a week's  holiday driving a great big equilateral triangle (For a given definition of triangle, and an even looser definition of equilateral) through Australia's Top End.   
Enjoy! 

Our first night in Darwin was rather disturbed. Our room turned out to contain a rather large population of cockroaches (all sizes), which seemed intent on bringing the party outside our window inside onto our bedside ledges - and bathroom - and into the mini-fridge, where, in desperation, we'd stashed our toothbrushes. 

            Next door to our hotel was a band with a live singer who was in a worse state, alcoholically speaking, than his parishioners and didn't seem to remember what he was singing past the first bridge. Mr Tabubil and I lay awake till halfway until morning, giggling helplessly.  With pillows over our ears.
            In the morning - we drove south to Kakadu. We had an enormous van; someone sensible (may heaven bless them forever and ever and ever) at the car rental agency had looked at the manifest - five adults and a baby - and made the appropriate deductions and given us a very large upgrade.  It's extraordinary - the amount of stuff that comes along with a baby seems to be inversely and exponentially proportion to the baby's mass.  The sproglet being 14 months old at present, her accouterments weighted approximately four metric tons. And it all fitted into the car boot (the car trunk, for Americans). Don't ask us about our gas mileage.

            Fully laden and riding rather low on the axles, we sailed out of Darwin.  Our car was, in theory, good for 130 on the highways, and fortunately the highways were mostly on the flat.

            Near the city there were mango plantations out to the horizon that make us all fratchety with temptation (it wasn't the season for ripe mangos, and the trackless rows of trees and their heavy mango smell were a source of terrible torment in our mango-less state).Further south, the land is mostly flat - baked red earth, pandanus palms, and termite mounds like cathedrals in Barcelona, with towers and buttresses all tall and accretive like the drip-castles you make with wet sand on a beach , if you made drip-castles six meters tall and baked them in an oven the size of a continent.  It was almost eerie - this flat land: trackless, towered, and the earth vacant between the trees  - no grass, no bushes, no scars.  Earlier in the dry, when the grass had still been faintly green, the bush was fired in small, localized burns - patch burning - to reduce the chance of serious bushfires later in the dry season.  After 40000 years of human management, many plant species now require the heat of fire to propagate, but right now, those plants were still charred seeds, and the ground was empty.

A history lesson:

             One of the first things the white Australian settlers had done during the great Northern Land Grab of the late 19th century was to put a stop to the burns. 

            The consequences were impressive - and eventually, the white powers were forced to concede that the aboriginal people of the great northern Terra Nullius might have had a point.
            They stopped the burns, but before the land had had a change to even begin regenerating, the same clever clogs brought in herds of Asian buffalo. The buffalo immediately went feral, stomping their way through the natural levees in the wetlands that separated the salt water from the freshwater and doing their level best to destroy any balance in the wetlands. At long last, during the 1990s, buffalo numbers were reduced significantly during a Tuberculosis eradication program, and artificial levees were erected to control the salt water flooding into the freshwater areas.  So on that front, at least, the Top End is doing faintly better.

            That's the modern history of Australia for you- a Terra Nullius that turns out to be not so nul - and managed by colonial types who paired wishful thinking and cognitive blindness with silly executive decisions. The latest scourge  in the north is the toxic Cane Toad. After it had wreaked ecological havoc in the Hawaiian Islands, and well into the sensible modern era of preliminary research studies, in 1935, some bright government sparks brought it over here to control pests in the Queensland sugarcane fields. Natural predators were abundant, Australia was told. We won't have the problems that Hawaii had.  Unfortunately, the study failed to connect a few important dots and didn't take into account that while the cane toads are day-creatures, their putative 'native predators' are all nocturnal.  On the Venn diagram of predator-prey relationships, the two groups never meet.

            Today cane toads multiply like rabbits and poison every day-time creature that does try and eat them and the government declares state-wide states of emergency as the toads work their way across the continent. All hail 20th century agricultural management!

Welcome to the Top End

Before we relocate to Chile, we are taking a week's  holiday driving a great big equilateral triangle (For a given definition of triangle, and an even looser definition of equilateral) through Australia's Top End.   
Enjoy!

Before we flew across the Pacific to Chile, we had an important engagement in Darwin with Theadora -a school friend of mine from California, and her Hungarian husband Sandor, her mother Pippa, and her year old baby-  to be known hereafter as the Sproglet.*  Together we had planned a week's holiday driving a great big equilateral triangle (For a given definition of triangle, and an even looser definition of equilateral) through Australia's Top End. 

            The Top End is the northern part of Northern Australia - the half a million square kilometers, more or less, of land pressed up into a bulge at the top of the continent.  The Gulf of Carpentaria is its eastern border, and the Indian Ocean lies to the west.  To the south, it peters out into the arid stretches of the red center - but between the sea and the desert is Australia's monsoon country.  And the gateway to the Top End is Darwin.

            The climate is tropical bichromatic: there is a dry season - hot and parched and baking and eventually hot and thick and humid, and just when everything is flat and drooping and suicide rates have peaked under the pressure of the flat white sky - the monsoon hits and six months of water drops in a week. Then the sky settles down and there's a wet season.  It rains steadily for six months; the rivers fill, the wetlands south of the city flood, and everything is peaches and cream and bush tucker for everyone.

            We were there in the dry - one week too early for the Darwin Festival (with which  the top-enders stave off the suicidal peak of the dry blahs) but just in time for the Darwin Cup, and next to that, the dry season looked like a picnic.

            We flew into Darwin in the afternoon, booked into a hotel on backpacker row and wandered out into the street to watch the world go by - the parts of it that were under 25 and deeply, madly, falling-down toasted.  There's a double standard to Australian fashions that bewilders me.  Men get baggier and girls get tighter.  There were twenty thousand people out at the racetrack, and back in town, the pubs were full, stacked three deep at the bar with strapping young men smart in their tropical formal shorts and singlets.   Behind them, perched precariously on tall stools around cocktail tables,  drinking things with sticky umbrellas clinging damply to the glasses, were gaggles of  desperately drunk young women, wearing cocktail dresses that had been too short at both ends before the night even got going - by now they were shrieking sideways down the street with their fascinators tilted over their eyes and falling out of their clothes sideways.

            It was a wild town that night.  About how it used to be once upon a time, one reckons, if one wants to wax poetic, back when it was a real frontier town.  It still IS a real frontier town.  But 95% of the would-be-crocodile hunters staggering down the sidewalks had flown in from out of state for the occasion, staggering sideways and singing old school songs (the versions with the ruder words) imagining that their drunkenness meant; meant anything - romance and excitement and really wild things - a poke in the eye to someone - who remembers and who cares?  20 000 conformists non conforming to rule.  

            Theadora and her family flew in by a later plane, just before sunset.  Thea is long and blonde and teaches high school science.  Pippa is long and blonde and drove a Mustang and danced to the Beach Boys back when they were both the latest thing.  Sandor teaches history and smiles with white teeth through a neat brown beard.  The baby had committed no sins beyond having learned to walk and growing seven teeth. (Eight, as of that evening.  We dined exclusively on ice cubes.)  It was Sandor's first visit to Australia.  He was desperately disappointed not to find the streets of Darwin awash with saltwater crocodiles, but settled for a roasted haunch of same - served civilized fashion, medium-rare, with french fries.   And Chardonnay.

* Sprog = Australian for child.  In Australia, you're a bub until you're walking and talking, but after that you're a sprog. Until you're out of Primary School. (Grade 8.)  

Bah.

The only thing worse than the temperature being 27 degrees C inside your apartment with the windows open is not being able to LEAVE the apartment and go find somewhere cooler because you have to sit and wait for a plumber.  And the only thing worse than THAT is having to sit in an apartment that is 27 degrees C inside waiting for a plumber while a gardener mows the lawn on an ancient manual mowing machine right outside your window and across the street, a handyman is cutting steel. The noise is UNBELIEVABLE. 
Fingernails on a blackboard are nothing to it.  It gets right under your skin and you feel like you are going to go MAD and jump out into the super-heated air and go swimming through it!

Plaza de Armas

On our first cool Sunday we took the subway into town and strolled about the Plaza de Armas. Every town and city in Chile has one.  It was the first thing drawn out by ye old Spanish town planners to be the civic and social heart of the colonial city grid. Santiago's Plaza de Armas is exceedingly venerable, dating back to 1548, only eight years after the Spanish arrived and declared the country west of the mountains a colony.  The buildings that face onto it are equally venerable - all the big bits of architectural history are represented: the rather baroque-ish Santiago Cathedral (1745), the Municipalidad de Santiago (1785) (slightly more renaissance, in a middle-classic solid sort of way), the Palace of the Royal Audience (1804) (not quite with the neoclassical program) and the historic Central Post Office (1882) (French Second Empire, very up to date).   
            Regardless of what fronts it, a Plaza de Armas always has fountains and palm trees, heroic statues of military men and horses, and most importantly, benches under the trees where you can sit and watch the people of the pueblo pass you by. 
            Santiago's plaza is full of tourists, but it is very much still a living city square.  The benches are occupied by tarot readers and balloon sellers, theater students reading poetry, gaggles of teenage girls giggling and painting their nails, and around them babies are running through the fountains, old men play chess in a band shell and in one corner of the plaza Art is happening, painters selling copies of every painting known to classically-educated man.             
            Artists sit on high stools, painting from photographs, the paintwork getting thicker with every iteration.  Diego Rivera?  Pay by the lily. A Venus by Botticelli? Or only her left breast?  Any way you like her – on canvas and driftwood and even wire netting, if you want it that way.
            Choosing serenity over art, however worthy, we walked into the Cathedral.  It's quite a building. To quote my father every time he passes - “Such an Ugly Cathedral!  What an ugly cathedral!”
            I don’t think it’s nearly as bad as he seems to think. Granted, it has no great aesthetic appeal, with the all grace and soaring elegance of a tool shed.  But it’s not ugly. It’s just nondescript. The acres of marble facing are painted onto the stone and the paint needs a good scrub. The columns are lumpy and graceless, the frescoes are chipped,  the gold leaf is covered in cobwebs, and a century or more of smog and dust and city grit has tinted everything a dull, matte shade of faceless grey.
            And the tinkly cut glass lighting fixtures on every column have got to go.
            But it’s not that bad.  Give it a good scrub, take out the altars and as Dad has pointed out, it would make a great dance hall. 

The Cool Change Cometh!

In Santiago weather is taking a turn for the BETTER. Yes, I open with weather-speak, but it's been so terribly hot and dry lately that any change toward cool and damp is a BIG GOOD THING. It's sort of overcast outside and very cool inside and ooooh - I unravel in damp weather. 

The first day of change is like putting down a load that you didn't even know you'd been carrying all through the heat until it disappeared. I feel obliged - truly obliged and incumbent and duty bound - to spend that first day lying flat on a rug with my pores open wide and soaking up the damp. 

It's that good.

That day was two days ago -Sunday.  We purred and basked till mid-afternoon and then we took the subway into the city center and spent the afternoon wandering around the Plaza de Armas and out of it, through the inner-city streets.  In the cool of the late evening we sat down at a table in the shade of a tree outside a little restaurant on a quiet street and had a long, slow meal of random little things - and were serenaded by street musicians.  Three shifts of them.

First we were played at by a young man with a guitar, long hair and a set of pan-pipes.  He couldn't play the pan-pipes, and on the guitar he knew exactly three chords, only middling well,  but his hair blew WONDERFULLY in the breeze.

After he'd played the three songs he knew and walked round the tables, collecting our spare change and wandered off around the corner,  we were approached by a second man who didn't have pan-pipes and DID know how to play his guitar (lovely flamenco stuff)  But on the negative side, he couldn't sing.  Not a note.

He was terribly enthusiastic, however.  Determined to give it his very best shot.

And while he collected the rest of our pocket change and ambled offstage, his place was taken by an entire band -  three young men with electrical guitars, battery-fed amplifiers and an entire drum kit.  And those kids could really PLAY.  Lined up against the stone wall of the restaurant, they played the best of the old stuff until the municipal security patrol car drew up in the street beside us and sent them on their way.

Santiago is great for street music.  The streets are full of sound. Street sellers with whistles and hurdy-gurdy players and old men with flutes and guitars - too old to have been able to take advantage of Pinochet's reform of the pension system, and playing to supplement their keep.

In our immediate neighborhood we have a group of six opera students from a conservatory who often perform under a covered arcade next to the metro station.  The roof does amazing things with the acoustics and its shade lets you stand and listen right through the summer sun.

And this summer, we've had a school holidays treat.  A group of music students  have staked out a spot right in front of our local supermarket.  Ten violinists, a young man with a cello and a girl with a cornet will walk out of the crowd, make a circle against a wall and play all afternoon.  The lead violin raises his bow and drops his head - and music breaks the air open and fills the sky with a WALL of sound.

Bright red and brown and golden noise - the shopping streets slow, and mouths open, men and women walk into each other and still- even the local beat police on their horses stop to listen, their reins slack and their faces still.

I put down my bags and lean against a stone pillar. The music plays up and down the walls - and under my hands stones are dancing, ringing back and forth under the great weight of sound.

Two little girls stop dead in the middle of the open space in front of the musicians.  You can see the music crashing over them like a wave.  One stands stock still - her arms spread and her mouth open and the other stretches her hands up to the ceiling and spins around and around and around -

A conversation

A conversation:

In my kitchen, pouring chamomile tea, two ladies of  a certain age and robust constitution are comparing travel dodges.  

 Specifically -Toronto Pearsons International Airport, and its several miles of horrible corridor passages.  When you get off of a 12 hour flight they're either just the thing for a good solid leg stretch (while humping 16 lbs of hand-carry) or you despair.

            "Take a wheelchair" one lady advises knowingly.

A tsk of indecision.

            "Really!  Everyone says they're never going to do it, and then they try it once and they never do anything else ever again!"

A head shakes slowly - "But I've heard - they don't take CARE of you.  They take you off somewhere and then they dump you in a corner and they walk away."

            "So bring a book!"  (exasperated.)

            "Eh?"

            "You're going to spend an age walking down those passages anyway - there's no point being in a rush in PEARSONS. Take a good book along and let them do all the work for you!"

THAT's strategy.

Maitencillo

This weekend, we drove down to the small resort town of Maitencillo on the coast east of Santiago.

Where we found that most of Santiago had gotten there before us.  February is the official season for summer holidays in Chile - the cities empty and beach resorts fill up: every hotel room, hostel dormitory, caravan, camping space and roosting space under the highway overpasses is booked solid for the entire month. 

Which is why we were making a day trip instead of a weekend of it - we'd foolishly underestimated the sheer NUMBER of people down there - those hostelries who didn't outright laugh at us or simply hang up on us made it clear that we'd be welcome some time mid-march - if we were willing to commit to a fortnight or so.

So we spent just the day instead.

The coast at Maitencillo is very VERY pretty.  It is rocky and grand and ragged and cove-ish, rather than the sort of sweeping stretches of sand that we have in Australia.  And the water is COLD - swimming at a Chilean beach is SERIOUSLY heroic - the Humboldt current sweeps up the coast of Chile bringing water from Antarctica all the way up past the Tropic of Capricorn. 

One dips, rather than swims.  One paddles and stays close the shoreline.  But even icy waters are heaven on a hot summer day and every single stretch of sand was mobbed.  And the rockpools, where the water was marginally warmer had to share their sea urchins and sea anemones with human swimmers.