Chile: Bread & Forests (Day 12)

  

Hay Pan. 

I read that Chile runs on bread, and evidence here supports this. But it’s breads, rather. They are round, squat, you might assume they are XL English Muffins. The outside is hard and leads one to assume staleness, but inside they are soft and fresh, the sort of white flesh that is lacking in any flavor, even salt, but invites a spread of something. Men, women, children almost always seem to be carrying a bag of them somewhere. One of the most frequently seen signs outside houses and businesses is Hay Pan (“there is bread”, pronounce “aye pahn”) sometimes printed but more often written in wide marker or paint, in all-caps font like concentrating really hard to make straight letters but they’re still a little wiggly. 

We walked into a little tienda at 8:30pm (which is still daylight), with soft drinks in coolers, incomprehensible candy under the counter, shampoos on the wall, and a sizeable basket covered cozily with a blue checkered cloth. “Hay pan?” we asked eagerly. The woman turned back the cloth as if revealing a sad secret, and gravely said, “No. Hay. Pan.” It was all so gloomy, we left quickly and quietly. Outside the door, two women sat talking happily. A busting plastic grocery-bag at all angles between them, full of pan. Ah ha! 

Forest Bathing & Buenas Tardes

We’ve had some extremely lovely forest and garden bathing in addition to the biking. The botanic garden at the university in Valdivia had bike racks at the front, and not another human in sight. 

You’ve been seeing all these new plants and you don’t have a book and you have so many questions. And then at a botanic garden there are plants with labels and you can put your head back and go “ohhhh that’s in Fabaceae!!” There was not a speck of English on any signage, but Latin names and learning a few new words on Google Translate can get you far. Who knows when I’ll be able to use the word for “fern” in my day to day travels, though…(“helecho”)

Jen and I decided to split up and move at our own pace. “I feel very reverent here and just need to be in sanctuary by myself,” I told her. We were whispering outside, because that’s what felt correct. 

But it’s good that we split up because I could be found, wide of eye, mumbling to myself like someone who needed a good check-up, in a mixture of butchered Latin and Spanish. Occasionally going “OH” as some piece of plant knowledge connected. Finding a tree that was in the Araucaria genus but a different species than the Monkey Puzzle. Admiring ferns and noting some lobelia species. Many of the classics found in the gardens in Ithaca are also here: blue hydrangeas, dahlias, sunflowers. And roadside weeds like chicory, red clover, St John’s Wart. Trees like pines and poplars also give this place a sense of the northeast, except it’s the equivalent of August here. Wheat harvest is finishing, hydrangeas are starting to fade… 

In addition to the Botanic Garden in Valdivia, we stopped at a waterfall in Huilo

Huilo biological reserve. We’d been admiring the panoramic swaths of trees as we biked past, and it was wonderful to be able to enter them. We paid the small ticket fee, pushed the bikes into the trees by the parking lot, locked them to trunks, and set off on the short stroll-hike to a waterfall. This forest is a temperate rainforest, and huge drapey dripping ferns lined the paths. Little mosses on trunks and logs had us bending down to visit them. Bamboo was everywhere, occasionally growing over the trail like a roof and making a dark tunnel. Bits of chopped leaves were scattered on the trail and I imagined someone coming in with a machete every 4 hours to curtail the bamboo. 

We walked until we reached a wooden platform for admiring a tall blasting waterfall. How peaceful with this view all to ourselves. We set about pocket-knifing an avocado and balancing bread on our laps to construct sandwiches. In the time it took to get to the cheese chapter, a large Chilean family filled the entire platform. Grandma was helped up the stairs, two young boys pointed out some birds, women fluffed their hair and posed for selfies. And then the requisite family necessity at every turistica view point: “foto!” “Rapido!” “Foto!” Much jostling and arranging. 

We were part of the situation, as weird and covered in crumbs as we were. One guy handed us a little fragrant leaf, “tepa!” he announced. We enjoyed its bright citronella fragrance when crushed. Another man apparently had noticed us parking our bikes, because he made the international sign for bikes by paddling his hands around and asking where we rode from. Then he told us about his bike, and his ride on the Carreterra Austral and soon we were being shown a vast array of various photos of his rides. Nobody seemed to mind that we had avocado on our shorts. 

This is how it’s been here. The Chileans have been extremely warm and polite, interested in us but without being demanding. In Mexico, Ecuador, and Colombia it was a constant barrage of “miss, miss, buy mango!”, “taxi?” — people always trying to make you a customer. Here, none of that. I wonder if it’s because Chile has a low poverty rate (actual statistics vary, but it seems just lower than in the states) or is unaccustomed to white tourists (we’ve heard no tourists speaking English anywhere). 

I’ve enjoyed all interactions with the Chileans, even with my awful Spanish. Our host woman at our home stay had a little English, and when we first arrived we were conversing about the town in English and Spanish, and abruptly she said, “would you like to eat, a melon?”  But of course! One time a hotel keeper let me use his personal phone to google how to fix a frozen iPhone, after mine had seized up and I was completely defeated— but he was so generous and the next morning even asked if my phone was still working. Another time, we biked past a group of 4 construction worker guys. You’d usually brace yourself for the expected whistles, hisses. But instead, from them in Spanish, “good afternoon, hello, good afternoon.” Amazing.