Quellon, Chile

The Myths and Magic of Chiloe

April 4, 2008

- Bruce Springsteen

I arrived in Puerto Montt on Monday afternoon, almost an entire week before my ferry was set to leave for Puerto Natales. This was rather unfortunate because there is absolutely nothing to do in Puerto Montt. About the most exciting thing to do is go to the two big shopping malls. The newer mall is quite nice and is complete with a cinema, food court, and very modern stores, but besides that, there isn´t much of interest in the sprawling disordered city. I decided to escape to the island of Chiloé, just to the south, until the weekend. I caught one of the numerous buses to Ancud, a city on the north part of the island and was glad to leave Puerto Montt behind.

The bus drove for about forty-five minutes before we arrived at the end of land and continued right onto a mini-ferry and sailed to Chiloe. Once across the water it was another forty-five minutes until we reached Ancud. Since it was already April, the tourist season had already ended so things were a lot quieter than normal. There were countless houses advertising rooms to rent, but most of these were closed at this time of year due to a lack of tourists. I spent the afternoon walking around the town, visiting the remains of Fuerte San Antonio guarding the entrance to the channel, a small beach on the north edge of town, and admiring the old wooden houses perched on the hillsides.

Many of these houses are neglectfully crumbling into pieces but there are others that have been newly constructed in similar styles. The older ones all exhibit intricate wooden siding made from individual shingles, almost like roof shingles. The town was actually quite charming despite its disrepair. One of the highlights was certainly the excellent quality of the seafood, particularly the shellfish. It was probably the best mussels, clams, and other mollusks that I have ever had, and there is a particular kind of clam, machas or razor clams, that were the most outstanding. There was a nice little museum on the history of the island, the indigenous people, the Spanish conquest, and some of the island mythology. For some reason there were all these crazy stories of ghosts and other mythical creatures that inhabit the island, such as Invuche, created by the sorcerers to guard the caves, he is part human and part animal and is only permitted to leave the caves to feed on his diet of milk from black cats and human flesh stolen from the cemeteries. No, I´m not making this up.

Many of the buildings on the island were destroyed in an earthquake in 1960 that produced a 50-foot tsunami and further devastated Ancud. I wanted to go to Chepu to see the forest of the drowned trees that was produced by this tsunami but since it was the off-season there was no transportation there and my only option for getting there was to walk 14km each way without lodgings of any sort.

From Ancud I took a bus south to Castro, the capital of Chiloe with a population of about 30,000 people and the transportation hub of the island. The main streets were busy and bustling and the waterfront was home to more artisans and some small seafood restaurants. Distinctive to Castro are the presence of row houses built on stilts that protrude out over the water and are painted in numerous shades of bright colors, known as palafitos. Some of these are old and dilapidated and appear as if they will fall into the water from the slightest gust of wind. There is also yet another museum here, although this one is smaller and less entertaining than the one in Ancud. After spending the night in Castro I took a bus to Cucao, a small town on the west coast of the island next to Parque Nacional Chiloe. The town was pretty much deserted with almost nothing open save for one good but overpriced restaurant and one other little place. I rode the bus all the way until it reached a bridge that was too narrow to cross, at which point I got out and walked along the road for another hour until it began to parallel the coast. On either side of the road were these giant plants with some bizarre flower type buds and the only things to be heard were the rushing of the pounding surf, the blowing wind, and occasional bird calls.

The windswept beach was totally deserted and the river from the inland lakes crossed the sand and petered out into the ocean with no witnesses. Heading back into town I had to walk along the road through a construction zone as they were actually working to pave this isolated road for some reason. I hadn´t eaten breakfast yet so I enjoyed the opportunity to feast on the wild blackberries that were growing in abundance on the sides of the road. Back in Cucao I ate a proper meal and then had to wait a few hours for the return bus back to the other side of the island. The bus finally came and I took it to Chonchi, a small fishing village about 25km south of Castro. There wasn´t much in the town except for some impressive old wooden mansions perched precariously on the steep hills overlooking the harbor and the brightly painted wooden church.

With nothing else to do and essentially no prospects of any cheap place to spend the night I hopped on a bus going south to Quellón, the southernmost city on the island. I thought that I had enough time to get there before dark and then find a place to stay for the night, which I was finding was not such an easy task when you are on a budget in the off-season on Chiloé. Then there was an accident on the road, the only road going south, and we sat there on the bus for almost two hours waiting for the tow truck to come and clear away the wreckage. By the time the bus arrived it was almost 9pm and very dark outside. I wandered around the deserted waterfront and asked around about places to stay before finding one for less than 10,000 pesos, since most of the cheaper places were shuttered for the season. I spent the next morning walking around town and after finding nothing of interest save for an inexplicably brightly painted pink church with DirecTV I ate some more seafood for lunch and took the next bus back to Puerto Montt. A very long six hours, and one bus change later due to a faulty bus that could only manage 11km/h uphill, and I was back in Puerto Montt with two days to spare before the ferry sailed. I managed to find an Internet cafe amidst heavy winds and sideways rain with no prospects for watching the college basketball Final Four on TV, as there was a Colo Colo game scheduled for the evening.