Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [57]
Southern Chile, with its abundant verdure, seemed to fit the bill. We decided to start in Chiloé, a rugged archipelago off the southern coast that someone had dubbed the “Ireland of South America.” Guidebooks and tourist literature also called it “The Magic Isle.” Darwin and the Beagle had visited after passing through Tierra del Fuego for the last time and proceeding north up the west coast. Chiloé was not their intended destination—FitzRoy wanted to skip most of Chile and head to the northern desert—but a series of gales forced him into port. “On leaving Tierra del Fuego,” Darwin noted wryly, “we congratulated ourselves too soon in having escaped the usual course of its storms.”
Chile is a remarkably thin country, with one major international airport in Santiago, tucked between the Andes and the coastal mountains. We plotted to leave quickly for Chiloé soon after landing; although it’s clean and safe, Santiago is one of the least-interesting cities in South America, lacking the culture and food of Buenos Aires and the frenetic energy and distinct geology of Rio de Janeiro. “Of the town itself there is little to be said,” Darwin wrote in his journal.
On our first day, as we adjusted to the jet lag and the rapid-fire syllable-dropping Chilean Spanish, I prepped Josh for our trip to the south. After forcing him to try a pisco sour, the national drink made from pisco and raw egg, and dragging him up the highest hill in Santiago, I pronounced him fit for Darwin travel.
At 10 P.M. the next night, we waited in the pouring rain at the Santiago bus terminal. Overnight buses in South America resemble giant insects, with antennae-like mirrors hanging over lit headlight eyes and smiling grilles, and as our bus pulled up, rain swirling in every direction, I felt we’d entered a hive in some prehistoric swamp, a swamp from the time sixty-foot wasps ruled the earth. We boarded without incident but when we woke up the next morning, somewhere outside the town of Puerto Montt, the bus television was showing scenes of traffic carnage and severe flooding in the middle regions of Chile. Residents fleeing their houses in boats, cars stalled as water flowed around their bumpers, yellow-suited men in waders riding around in helicopters.
Where we were headed, we imagined, had to be worse. “I do not suppose any part of the world is so rainy,” Darwin wrote, “as the island of Chiloé.” He complained in a letter home that “Chiloé, from its climate is a miserable hole.” FitzRoy called surveying the archipelago just south of Chiloé “the survey of another Tierra del Fuego, a place swampy with rain, tormented by storms.” The ship’s Lieutenant Sulivan, less bothered or less literary than the other two, simply wrote in a letter, “It rained every day but one for six weeks, and most of the days never ceased raining.”
Early in the morning we arrived at the ferry that would take our bus across to the island. The weather had cleared up and stabilized. It was a beautiful ferry ride—half an hour across placid gray water—and we stood on the deck and looked out at the island’s dark green hills, dotted with white specks of houses, all of it delightfully pastoral and tranquil. So far, Josh seemed to be handling the culture shock well. He claimed to enjoy the food—hot dogs were the national dish—and other than a habit of smiling and blinking every time he tried to say thank you to someone, he was doing OK with the Spanish-for-non -Spanish-speakers. And as long as one of us spoke moderately well, most people reacted politely to our gringo-ness. Plus, Josh was genuinely excited about Chiloé. The island had a deep,