apricot jam he had just made on a primus stove, and two spoons.
‘Are you North American?’
‘No, English’.
‘Es mejor, por lo menos
’ (That’s better, at least). I was alwayschastened to remember that ‘at least’.
Pepe took me to a cave on the hillside with a sign outside which said, ‘We villagers pay homage to our ancestors, who gave us their name.’ Inside they had made lifesize models of these ancestors. The cave overlooked a hamlet called Diaguitas, the name of the people who once occupied the valley. Most of the Diaguita, who spoke
Kakan
, farmed territory which is now in north-west Argentina; some of them came over the Andes, but their culture was probably eradicated by the Inca even before the Conquest.
The villagers were working in a large shed, packing bunches of table grapes, and a long row of young women wearing hairnets sat on stools snipping off bad fruit. The men were spraying, and puffs of sulphur rose very slowly into the still air.
We visited friends living on mountains in half-built houses, drinking herbal infusions and generally chilling out in the great Elqui valley tradition. Pepe was a hippy at heart. He didn’t own anything, he didn’t eat any refined foods, he rejected politics on the grounds that all its practitioners were corrupt, and he rejected too the values he had grown up with. His parents, who had been semi-skilled manual workers, were dead; he had two sisters, both married with kids in the city. They complained at him for not having a house or a wife or a full-time job.
At one hippy house in the valley there was a very small slug at the bottom of my tea mug. I didn’t like to say anything; I thought perhaps it was supposed to be there. Our hosts were listening to Pink Floyd on a battery cassette player. (People often mentioned Pink Floyd as soon as they met me. Eventually I realized it was because they wanted to demonstrate the only two English words they knew.)
Before I drove back down to my hotel in La Serena we went to watch the sunset over a glass of wine at the Peralillo socialclub. Peralillo is a ratty little village, but its
club social
was spectacular. We sat on a Raj-style raffia sofa with blue silk cushions on a balcony overlooking the whole valley, as well as the mountains beyond, and a man with unzipped flies brought a wicker flask of local wine.
Pepe and his sister, a feisty woman living in the valley who had told her husband that he was looking after the baby for once, called for me in La Serena early the next morning and we set off on a day trip. It was a plan conceived at the Peralillo social club. Pepe had the idea that we should visit Enchantment Valley (Valle del Encanto) a couple of hours away in the semi-desert.
When we got there a man with no front teeth emerged from a hut. Pepe went in to pay the entrance fee, and when they both came out of the hut the man looked suspiciously at me.
‘Is she foreign?’ he snapped.
He’s going to say only Chileans are allowed in, I thought. Then I realized that being foreign meant I had to sign the visitors’ book. I had already signed getting on for forty visitors’ books, and I wondered if this enthusiastically pursued national obsession reflected their sense of geographical isolation.
The valley was as still as a mausoleum and spread with a deep layer of smooth boulders. Between them spherical fruit blistered from the tips of cacti. Pepe took a great interest in the San Pedro cactus, still used for its hallucinogenic seeds – it was an ideal landscape for hallucinating, too.
As the unusual climatic conditions of the region create the astronomical near-perfection of Tololo, so on the coast to the south they enable a small rainforest to flourish in the semi-desert. We drove on towards the ocean through familiar dry and cactus-spiked terrain, past hopeful vendors waving prawns and fat discs of goat’s cheese, and arriving at the FrayJorge forest was like walking through the looking-glass into another
‘Are you North American?’
‘No, English’.
‘Es mejor, por lo menos
’ (That’s better, at least). I was alwayschastened to remember that ‘at least’.
Pepe took me to a cave on the hillside with a sign outside which said, ‘We villagers pay homage to our ancestors, who gave us their name.’ Inside they had made lifesize models of these ancestors. The cave overlooked a hamlet called Diaguitas, the name of the people who once occupied the valley. Most of the Diaguita, who spoke
Kakan
, farmed territory which is now in north-west Argentina; some of them came over the Andes, but their culture was probably eradicated by the Inca even before the Conquest.
The villagers were working in a large shed, packing bunches of table grapes, and a long row of young women wearing hairnets sat on stools snipping off bad fruit. The men were spraying, and puffs of sulphur rose very slowly into the still air.
We visited friends living on mountains in half-built houses, drinking herbal infusions and generally chilling out in the great Elqui valley tradition. Pepe was a hippy at heart. He didn’t own anything, he didn’t eat any refined foods, he rejected politics on the grounds that all its practitioners were corrupt, and he rejected too the values he had grown up with. His parents, who had been semi-skilled manual workers, were dead; he had two sisters, both married with kids in the city. They complained at him for not having a house or a wife or a full-time job.
At one hippy house in the valley there was a very small slug at the bottom of my tea mug. I didn’t like to say anything; I thought perhaps it was supposed to be there. Our hosts were listening to Pink Floyd on a battery cassette player. (People often mentioned Pink Floyd as soon as they met me. Eventually I realized it was because they wanted to demonstrate the only two English words they knew.)
Before I drove back down to my hotel in La Serena we went to watch the sunset over a glass of wine at the Peralillo socialclub. Peralillo is a ratty little village, but its
club social
was spectacular. We sat on a Raj-style raffia sofa with blue silk cushions on a balcony overlooking the whole valley, as well as the mountains beyond, and a man with unzipped flies brought a wicker flask of local wine.
Pepe and his sister, a feisty woman living in the valley who had told her husband that he was looking after the baby for once, called for me in La Serena early the next morning and we set off on a day trip. It was a plan conceived at the Peralillo social club. Pepe had the idea that we should visit Enchantment Valley (Valle del Encanto) a couple of hours away in the semi-desert.
When we got there a man with no front teeth emerged from a hut. Pepe went in to pay the entrance fee, and when they both came out of the hut the man looked suspiciously at me.
‘Is she foreign?’ he snapped.
He’s going to say only Chileans are allowed in, I thought. Then I realized that being foreign meant I had to sign the visitors’ book. I had already signed getting on for forty visitors’ books, and I wondered if this enthusiastically pursued national obsession reflected their sense of geographical isolation.
The valley was as still as a mausoleum and spread with a deep layer of smooth boulders. Between them spherical fruit blistered from the tips of cacti. Pepe took a great interest in the San Pedro cactus, still used for its hallucinogenic seeds – it was an ideal landscape for hallucinating, too.
As the unusual climatic conditions of the region create the astronomical near-perfection of Tololo, so on the coast to the south they enable a small rainforest to flourish in the semi-desert. We drove on towards the ocean through familiar dry and cactus-spiked terrain, past hopeful vendors waving prawns and fat discs of goat’s cheese, and arriving at the FrayJorge forest was like walking through the looking-glass into another
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