Traveling Through Chile Without Plans:  Never Again!!

March 10,2012

Who among our friends told us that traveling without hotel reservations and plans is great fun and makes the journey a true pleasure for the mystery of it all??  I want to shoot them!!  Raise your hand, Tom Malone.  Come forward and travel with us for about twenty-four hours, and you too will be glad to make plans ahead of time.  Throwing caution to the wind, we set out in a rented car from Valparaiso, heading south toward Santa Cruz. We were told by our last hostess that it was a cute town with an extensive museum, good restaurants, and only three hours down the road.   For the first couple hours it was a lovely trip, with the windows down and the wind in our hair (sadly the car had no air-conditioning).  It was just miles of good road in front of us and the freedom of knowing we could stop when and where we wanted.  We even had the assurance of hotel reservations at the end of the day. 

I decided that since Santa Cruz was a popular destination for wine connoisseurs, it would be best to have a reservation for just this first night. Then, with the suggestion from our buddy Tom, who told us to, “Just stop when you feel like it, go into a town, find a welcoming bar, order something cold and get the bartender to open up about the town and a good place to stay.”  Tom said “It works for me every time” and he always told the most interesting stories of the places and people he met along the way.  I think Mary said a few negative things behind her husband’s back about how it really worked, but I didn’t hear her too clearly, wanting to believe in the stories he told. I figured it would be an exciting way to see the rest of Chile, and we wanted some interesting stories to tell someday.

Our journey to Santa Cruz, even with a good road map and the knowledge that we did have a place to stay at the end of the road, did not go perfectly well.  The signs along the way are not always plentiful, and when you get off the highway, as we did on country roads, there are few people to ask if we were headed in the correct direction.  It is tough to come to the end of a lonely road and decide should we go right or left.  We had spent all our coins on tolls so we had nothing to toss in the air to help send us in the correct direction…we just shrugged our shoulders, licked our finger to test which way the wind was blowing, and gambled. 

Fortunately many of the turns were correct, but I think we just got lucky a great deal of the time.  Maybe it was less because of luck and more that Michael is good about asking directions.  Trouble is he unnerves me in the frequency that he wants to stop and the type of people he chooses to ask; it just makes me crazy!  If we were in the States, I am sure he would have been arrested many times for pulling up along school children and asking the way.  Then there’s the scruffy guy along the side of the road who looks like he could steal us blind, but that doesn’t stop Michael from stopping and talking to him, oh no, not one bit!  And it is always on “my” side of the car with “my” window rolled down and “my” neck waiting for the guy to grab it and pull a knife or something!  But, mostly his inquiries end in me laughing and frustrated because he comes away with no further information than when he started. 

While Michael’s Spanish has improved daily with the addition of many new words, and his accent is always flawless, he understands very little.  Anyone who hears him speak answers back so fast, thinking that he has a true understanding of the language, and that he understands everything.  But instead of understanding, Michael shakes his head and puts his hands in the air with frustration!  As he drives off I usually say, “So what did he say?” And he comes back with, “I have no idea.”  Sometimes it takes several times of him saying “Mas lento” and “No entiendo nada” for them to get the clue that he is in fact a “Spanish poser” and “they” end up shaking their heads and throwing “their” hands in the air!!  But somehow he finally gets enough direction out of the jumble of words and hand signals, and we are on our way again, still gambling that we are going the right way. On a map, the town of Santa Cruz was about two inches below Valparaiso, and our last hostess told us it should take only three hours to get there.  Given the pit stops, wrong turns and time taken to ask directions, we made it in good time, I thought, just a little over “five” hours!!  The last hour was spent just driving the town of Santa Cruz trying to find the hotel.  Even the smallest of towns have one way streets, and many of the streets have no street signs, so even the locals don’t know where things are.  But eventually, with more frustration than I can describe, we found the hotel, and it was a welcome sight: a diamond in the rough, sitting in a bit of a rundown neighborhood of barking dogs. 

Vendimia, our Santa Cruz digs, is a two story, recently redone, home-like hotel or Inn decorated tastefully with a mixture of just the right amount of antiques and modern fixtures that fit the theme.  All the rooms had been updated with new bathrooms. It had a beautifully re-done concrete stamped floor that gave it an old world feel.  Antiques also filled each of the ten guest rooms.  After four days of lousy beds, I was grateful that our king-sized bed was comfortable and welcoming to my tired, hot, and achy muscles.

Even though the hotel was beautiful, it was the people who charmed us so much we ended up staying an extra night.  Upon arrival we were greeting with fresh, icy cold water to drink.  Our strawberries, purchased at a roadside stand, were taken to the refrigerator to wait for us to request them, and when we did, we were asked how many we wanted.  In minutes, they were presented to us in a lovely dish, freshly washed, and sweeter than any we have ever tasted.  Those small favors would have been enough to write touching paragraphs to Trip Advisor extolling their virtues, but when we met the daughter-manager of the inn, we immediately fell in love. 

Carla Daniela is a petite twenty-four year old beauty who spoke a mixture of broken English and Spanish so slowly that Michael could understand nearly everything she said and so could I.  She was obviously proud of the inn and showed us around as if we were family.  We were told that the inn was the passion of her mother, a very young and beautiful woman who is only forty-one years old (yes, do the math; she had Carla very young).  However, what took us by surprise the most was being told that many of the paintings that adorn the walls were done by her mother.  When we finally met Carla’s mother, I saw that she was very shy about her accomplishments and told us that she had never exhibited her works beyond the hotel.   As you will see from the photos, she is very talented.  To top everything else this inn had to offer, every morning we were served a delicious breakfast amongst the antiques, at a long dining table overlooking a small backyard patio and pool.  If I had I known how stressful the next few days would be I would have begged to stay there several more days. 

But we were off to find our next adventure.  As our newest daughter/innkeeper ran out to give us a hug and say goodbye, I felt a sense of foreboding come over me.  But why? We had a goal.  We had a town to drive to.  Our car was healthy.  We were well fed and well rested, and yet I didn’t want to leave!!  I guess it was because this time we headed south with absolutely no idea of where we would stay for the night. It was a challenge that I’d made with my normally organized self, “You can do this, just relax and let the trip happen!”  It wasn’t long however, before I began to feel like we were contestants in the “Great Race”, just waiting for the next clue, and if we were lucky, a pot of gold at the end.  I found out that “we” do not do well at crunch time, especially when “we” are both hot, tired and in need of a comfortable bed and food.  Chile is not like the US in many ways, but the biggest difference is that there are none of the expected roadside motels that you can find along most of our well-traveled highways.  So I simply pointed to what I thought might be the biggest town, did some preplanning of listing possible hotels in that town and hoped one might suit us and have a room for the night. But Michael, like a petulant kid kept asking, “Aren’t we there yet??

On the map, Chillan looks like a big town.  However, it was a small and a very busy town about four hours south of Santa Cruz.  It was a straight shot down Route 5, no country roads and we still got lost for a half an hour. Also, Chillan was not at all what I’d hoped to find.  I expected that the further south we went the colder it would get, with more lakes and mountains to cool the air.  Not so! This was just a large, dirty town with the usual town square but with none of the charm.  I wanted redwoods, mountain streams and wildlife.  All I saw was graffiti and skateboarders using the O’ Higgins monument, in the center of the town square. as a jumping off point to do fancy tricks.   In Chillan there was just one bad, rundown hotel after another!  The only decent hotel cost more money than we were used to paying. But seeing me hot, tired, and windblown, the wonderful man behind the hotel desk gave us a discount, a card with two free drinks, and sent us to the bar!  Fortunately, the bed was good, the place was clean and we soon settled in for the night. 

Having a good person planning everything makes for a great trip for the people who are just along for the ride. Unfortunately, that person planning is usually me!   This time I insisted that before we moved one inch from our current location we needed to make a plan. I wanted scenic but Michael had no interest in finding those redwoods or rivers. He wanted to head north, back toward our ultimate goal, Valparaiso, where we’d rented the car.   So I scoured the internet for the next “two hours” looking for reservations somewhere north.  I wanted to be no more than two hours away from our next preplanned reservation, one by the sea, that Carla had set up for us.  But there were no hotels along Route 5! Not even one!  I was already at the end of my rope and we had yet to leave the hotel!  When I finally found something off the beaten path, with a lot of fear and frustration, I just hit the keys on the computer and booked the place for two nights. 

I can now see why there were no hotels in our path north; it is just pure farm land, hills and scrub brush.  There are several modern gas stations, antique and craft stores but not one hotel that we could see.  It took about four hours to get to the point where we were to get off the highway.  This time we had a map made by the guy in the hotel who got directions directly from our next innkeeper, so how bad could it be???  Bad enough!   

It took another three more hours of wrong turns in crowded little cities with narrow one ways streets and people shaking their heads when we asked directions as if the place we wanted didn’t exist.  At one point, the list of my frustrations grew so large that when Michael pulled the car to the side of the road and asked me for the tenth time “Now what do you want me to do?”, I threw the directions to the floor, stomped my feet, put my hands in the air and said, “I give up, I can’t do this anymore, it isn’t fun, I want to go home, I want my bed, my neighbors, my cities where we are certain we can find a hotel.  I want to sit in my front yard and have a cold glass of wine and listen to Shelley tell me her stories or beg for Ed to talk about his latest script.  I could even watch the 9^th street kids play and scream.  Anything has to be better than this craziness, anything!”  Noticing my frustration, and being a dear, kind, sweet guy, he responded with, “That’s fine, but what do we do now?”  We were in the game of the “Great Race” and losing.  Thank God the cameras weren’t rolling.  I was about to kill the guy who cooked up this ridiculous trip!

Of course Michael’s next move is always to ask directions. His first stop was definitely in the poor side of town. Imagine a sleazy neighborhood.  This was his first choice to stop.  One toothless guy came out from his house and told us (with a worried look and hand signals) that we were really out of the way. He mentioned something about going to Route 5, Santiago, and starting over. I think it was that point I lost it          `.  We were a good hour off the highway.  No way did I want to go back and start over.  “Start over and go where” I yelled!!    Sensing my frustration and fearing my demise or his, Michael stopped and asked the way from group of guys at a gas station. They confirmed we were a long way from our goal, but somehow Michael made out what they said and we were off again.  While I waited in the car and watched Michael get directions, or should I say watched him shake his head a lot and look in my direction, I closed my eyes tight and tried to beam myself home again, but when I opened them I realized we were no closer to home than we were to our hotel.

I wish I could tell you that finding the place was an “adventure” and a breeze after that, but it wasn’t.  After what seemed like endless wrong turns, school children pointing in the opposite directions, and us turning around in busy streets, accepting the wrath of other drivers honking at us, we finally made it.  This place is indeed off the beaten path-- it is off the map!!  It is more of a country restaurant that has a few rooms than a hotel that has a few tables for people to have a meal.  Casa Calma Rita (ironically named) is charming in its own way, and I knew I loved it as soon as I stepped beyond the opened door and the sound of Nat King Cole’s voice could be heard inside.  The innkeeper, seeing the distress in my eyes, asked if he could get me anything.  A glass of cold wine please, and soon he was handing me a whole bottle and showing me the way to the patio and pool.

You will see by the pictures that this is an unusual place.  The inn is so far into the countryside that even the sound of dogs barking gets lost in the cool mountain air.  We met some people here that make any of our “getting lost” stories pale in comparison.  Our new friends from Long Island told us over the bottle of Chardonnay that they rented a car in Chile so that they could make the most of the two short weeks they had to explore the area.  They had booked many wine tours, and one of them was in Mendoza, Argentina.  They knew it was a several hour ride through the Andes, but didn’t think anything of it until four hours into the trip.  When they got to the border, they weren’t allowed to cross.  It seems that they needed papers from the rental agency to allow them to take the car into another country.  They would have to turn around and go back.  After an hour and a half of waiting for papers to be faxed giving them the okay to proceed, they got word that the agency would not allow them to go any further.  Thus they had to turn around and drive four hours back the way they had come. Luckily they were able to secure the last two seats on the last bus out of Santiago to Mendoza!  No thanks! 

I am much calmer now, with several hours of sleep, a lot of good wine and gourmet food prepared here at the inn.  Much of it is made by our host who, like I said, is more of a restaurant owner than an innkeeper.  He had fifty diners requiring his attention today. Unlike other places we have stayed, we got none of his attention until we sat down to eat. We have a room with a window that opens directly into the dining room, and the smell of the food and good jazz coming from his private CD collection is relaxing. We just have to keep the curtains closed so we don’t undress with an audience.  Fortunately, we can forget about getting directions to the next place for one more night!