world—a lush and verdant one, blossoming with tiny purple and yellow flowers and clammy creepers which clung around our ankles. Fray Jorge is a rainforest in a zone where annual rainfall may be as low as three inches. Sea-mist, produced by warm river water discharging nearby into a cold ocean, provides the equivalent of between twenty-four and thirty-six inches of rain a year, sustaining its own private tropical forest.
All three of us were hungry, so we stopped at Tongoy, a popular resort village impressively devoid of character. Past the densely peopled beaches and rows of Coca-Cola and burger shops Pepe found a quieter beach at the poor end of town. Even the sand was inferior. But there was a shellfish market, and a restaurant where we ate
paila marina
, a crabby bouillabaisse which was to become my favourite Chilean food, with a mound of tiny lemons and a bottle of cold white wine. Shifty individuals sidled in to sell wet handkerchiefs’ full of illegally caught
locos
, a Chilean mollusc with no common name in English but usually referred to as abalone, which it resembles.
Locos
are so sought after that capture is illegal during the breeding season, and confiscated catches are reported in the papers as if they were cocaine hauls.
The road back to La Serena was clogged with refugees from the beach. It was one of the most developed strips in the country, burgeoning with holiday apartments, villas, pizzerias and beach bars. At a place called Peñueles a particularly disfiguring welter of construction was occupied mainly by holidaying Argentinians (we could tell by the number plates of the cars parked outside). Pepe had it in for Argentinian drivers. He had it in for Argentinians in general, in fact, an attitude shared, as far as I could see, by the entire Chilean nation.
*
Pepe and I decided to go north for a week or two; this constituted my sneak back up in that direction, a one-off deviation from my steady progress southwards. He was good company, exceptionally well-informed on anything to do with the countryside, and his well-developed and dry sense of humour made him a very congenial companion. He enjoyed travelling as much as I did, so it seemed natural that we should do it together.
We borrowed a tent and a gas cooker, bought supplies, found a cool-box in his sister’s shed, procured foam mats, checked Rocky’s tyres, stocked up on
chirimoyas
(the pears-and-honey fruit, which an old woman in Peralillo sold from a box in a windowless room at the end of a passage) and went over route maps at the social club. I was sure that I wouldn’t regret the decision to travel with Pepe.
Besides papayas, the stalls on the highway out of La Serena were touting papaya honey, syrup, juice, sweets, cakes, bars and peeled papayas suspended in jars of sugar syrup. There was clearly nothing which could not be made out of a papaya. We bought some juice and travelled north until Pepe spotted a sandy track to a village called Choros, where everyone sat on their front step and stared at us. We stopped for directions to the headland at a ‘soda fountain’ where a man with braces holding up trousers several sizes too big served us a soft drink – warm, as usual – in a small dance hall with immaculately clean floorboards, bunting across the corrugated roof, nude calendars from the 1970s and pennants advertising the Choros football team.
We followed a set of tyre tracks in the sand to a small, windblown memorial fenced off in the scrubby semi-desert. There was a large cross behind it, and in front someone had put a bunch of fresh flowers in a tarnished silver vase. A fisherman told me later that the memorial had been erected tohonour the dead of the
Itata
, which sank in the bay in 1922. Seventy crewmen made it to shore, but they died later, of dehydration. Nothing grew on that arid peninsula. At the windy coast skull-and-crossbone flags flapped from one or two antediluvian shacks. When I asked a crone sitting on the sand sewing
All three of us were hungry, so we stopped at Tongoy, a popular resort village impressively devoid of character. Past the densely peopled beaches and rows of Coca-Cola and burger shops Pepe found a quieter beach at the poor end of town. Even the sand was inferior. But there was a shellfish market, and a restaurant where we ate
paila marina
, a crabby bouillabaisse which was to become my favourite Chilean food, with a mound of tiny lemons and a bottle of cold white wine. Shifty individuals sidled in to sell wet handkerchiefs’ full of illegally caught
locos
, a Chilean mollusc with no common name in English but usually referred to as abalone, which it resembles.
Locos
are so sought after that capture is illegal during the breeding season, and confiscated catches are reported in the papers as if they were cocaine hauls.
The road back to La Serena was clogged with refugees from the beach. It was one of the most developed strips in the country, burgeoning with holiday apartments, villas, pizzerias and beach bars. At a place called Peñueles a particularly disfiguring welter of construction was occupied mainly by holidaying Argentinians (we could tell by the number plates of the cars parked outside). Pepe had it in for Argentinian drivers. He had it in for Argentinians in general, in fact, an attitude shared, as far as I could see, by the entire Chilean nation.
*
Pepe and I decided to go north for a week or two; this constituted my sneak back up in that direction, a one-off deviation from my steady progress southwards. He was good company, exceptionally well-informed on anything to do with the countryside, and his well-developed and dry sense of humour made him a very congenial companion. He enjoyed travelling as much as I did, so it seemed natural that we should do it together.
We borrowed a tent and a gas cooker, bought supplies, found a cool-box in his sister’s shed, procured foam mats, checked Rocky’s tyres, stocked up on
chirimoyas
(the pears-and-honey fruit, which an old woman in Peralillo sold from a box in a windowless room at the end of a passage) and went over route maps at the social club. I was sure that I wouldn’t regret the decision to travel with Pepe.
Besides papayas, the stalls on the highway out of La Serena were touting papaya honey, syrup, juice, sweets, cakes, bars and peeled papayas suspended in jars of sugar syrup. There was clearly nothing which could not be made out of a papaya. We bought some juice and travelled north until Pepe spotted a sandy track to a village called Choros, where everyone sat on their front step and stared at us. We stopped for directions to the headland at a ‘soda fountain’ where a man with braces holding up trousers several sizes too big served us a soft drink – warm, as usual – in a small dance hall with immaculately clean floorboards, bunting across the corrugated roof, nude calendars from the 1970s and pennants advertising the Choros football team.
We followed a set of tyre tracks in the sand to a small, windblown memorial fenced off in the scrubby semi-desert. There was a large cross behind it, and in front someone had put a bunch of fresh flowers in a tarnished silver vase. A fisherman told me later that the memorial had been erected tohonour the dead of the
Itata
, which sank in the bay in 1922. Seventy crewmen made it to shore, but they died later, of dehydration. Nothing grew on that arid peninsula. At the windy coast skull-and-crossbone flags flapped from one or two antediluvian shacks. When I asked a crone sitting on the sand sewing
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