We’ve been together for a long time, passed through a few places, been tide-lined by sweat and bleached by sun, retrieved from ditches and accused by police. From the depths of Death Valley to the heights of the Andes, from the verdant French wine country to the self righteous rectitude of a Dutch cycle lane. But now due to an ageing decrepitude, retirement is imminent. The navigator has decreed, suggesting that I should introduce the idea to both It and I. I procrastinate, It goes ‘awol’. Like the rusting car that is due for replacement, that rewards by irreparably terminating on the drive to the trade-in showroom, so It has sensed the redundancy notice, and disappeared. A displacement, that with slow time and long bag searches has become a terminal vanishment.

To placate both our feelings, I had intended a noble retirement, a dignified deliverance. Like the glassy eyes of a shot, trophy stag, taxidermied onto a shield, and thence mounted in a baronial hall, so, I had planned a similar conceit. A stuffed tennis cap on an heraldic platter, hung upon an empty bragging wall. There to be surrounded by engraved bosses detailing two decades of shady exemplary service, campaigns across four continents, a clutch of bald tyres and a lifetime of memories.

It’s only with investigation and interview; that the navigator corrects my calendrical myopia: I lose years. It soon becomes apparent; It’s first outing coincided with our first cycle trip into France. A tour on a Chinese built mountain bike, using the dedicated European Bike Express, at a time when a campground cost twenty francs and summers were warm-dry. Several more fortnightly trips were to follow, before the purgatory of cycle trans-shipment by ’plane became our favoured method of buying traveler’s angst. The years crept around, cycles accumulated, upgrades proliferated, bald tyres were scattered to the globe. Still, It was a nomadic regular, even if now it has been consigned to the dark recesses of a pannier. For the helmet fascists are gaining an ascendancy. Spain, along with others, have enacted a mandatory usage, but with classic Latino logic, allows three exceptions. You don’t need to wear your cabesa; ‘when in town, climbing a hill or on a hot day’. Unfortunately for It, we’re in the middle of winter, out in the open of the Mercian plains, so it’s ’waggy finger’ time from the gringo-bashing Guarda Civil. They claim that it’s for our own protection. They are, of course blinkered, sightless to the peloton of lightless, tabardless, helmetless locals cycling past on their way to work.

Yet it’s not all retrograde. That cap has witnessed a dramatic change in a nation’s and our own personal cycle usage. The proliferation of signed routes, the phenomenon that it is a centre based ‘biking trail’, even to the spawning of acronyms like ‘mamil’. Whilst we have now entered into our second decade, with the freedom from bondage of car ownership, that in large measure has facilitated our extensive cycle touring.

Yet and yet, like much of modern life, It comes with it’s own, personal moral dilemma. A carbon footprint of multiple Atlantean crossings, that I try to greenwash by setting up an audit; balancing flight miles against cycled distance. Sobering equations, as both entries require multiple zeros. ‘It’ the Cap has been both participant and spectator to it all.

‘It’ .The Cotton Tennis Cap’

‘Lost on Active Duty’

‘1993-2013’

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Just as New York is not the USA, and Edinburgh is not Scotland, in spite of the Jock Tammies on the Royal Mile, so Montevideo is not Uruguay. Yet elements in all are emblematic for their respective nations. The working historical museum of grumblng trucks, that have been such a feature of previous visits, are now morphing into eco-friendlier Asiatic lorries. The old buildings, crumbling derelicts, that have survived the ‘age of de-struction and re-cementation’, are emerging reinvented from their tin shrouds. Renovated to an earlier era’s glory. A single neo-classical building, a referee, has split two neo-brutalist towers, a mauled chock prising apart two pugilistic protagonists. Bon motifs like these are scattered liberally throughout the town. Simpler versions throughout the Pampa.

Wander the streets of Ciudadvieja, and glance downhill, to seaward and your horizon is a canyon of containers. The name Maersk and Mol, Evergreen and Hapag Loyd emblazon the walls. I look down Calle Mitre and the green prow of MV Marmartin breaks the skyline. Discharging ‘stuff’, which is, I’m told, an industry technical term. Walk a block to Carlos Gomes and a box in the livery of Hamburg Sud swings from a crane out from the midships. Carry on wandering until Ituzaingo, and the superstructure and bridge gleam in the low evening light. All one ship. I move back from the frontage to gain height and perspective. Over three city blocks long, these are the leviathans that you never get close to view, nor to set on any scale.

The next day, I’m wandering further, and glance to seaward again. Where before there had been a sliver of open bay, now there was a six story block of flats. Rows of modern windows wedged between the street’s old facades. Another Calle, another same view. Construction may be fast, but berthing is quicker. MV Golden Princess, with her cargo of blue-rinsed, white cardigan’d grannies has cruised into port. En route from LA to Rio. En route from dockside to leather emporium, the one that just happens to be the sole retail experience open on this New Year’s Day. The gaucho boots are beautiful, so too is the drop tag.

Unusually, this port and this city sit in very close proximity, their boundaries diffused. No torc of industrially blackened brick bonds, or rusting tar embedded rail tracks to isolate or demarcate. A weld mesh fence and a row of expectant Paraguayan articulated lorries are all that separate the two.

The commercial story of city and country is written in this small space. The hides and wool traded through these yards created the wealth that built these city houses. Today it’s the carcass that’s paying for the restoration.

It’s one of my favorite days of the year to wander a city. The world is sleeping off the excesses of the old year. No buses. No taxis. No trucks. No sonic smog. An apocalyptical utopia. The city emasculated, one vital male role removed, like the deprivation of one vital sense. Now add in a sharp morning light, a barrio of diverse architectural delights and you have the ingredients for a very different street-wander. The pavements are still sticky, the smell of yesterday’s brew. So the best place to appreciate these buildings is from the middle of the road. Wandering aimlessly, being distracted easily, we gravitate down to the docks.

Viewing through that mesh wire, there’s the anonymity of modern sea cargo. Gantry cranes, like hunting herons, lunge and extract a packet from the stack. Reach stackers, like predatory cats, pick up the load, as if it were a mouse kill. Straddle carriers, like giant mantis, haul away their prey, sixty-seven cubic metres of metal box. Robots in a humanless world.

Port and Oldtown might not be Uruguay. But one begat the other. For the ghosts of Hereford cattle still walk these streets.

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The shrink wraps of cheap cider are being stacked high behind the impromptu stalls. A lady is setting out her stand of fireworks, her children squandering the profits with demonstrations of bangers and squibs. The TV crews in regulation artist black, are erecting antennas, unfurling cable reels and shouldering cameras. The flames of hell are raging in the asado pits, halved cows lie butchered on marble slabs. Already a pall of reek drifts through the morning, mixing with an air of saturnalian expectation. Yet, it’s only New Year’s Eve…Morning. A car passes and a confetti of paper flies from the sunroof, to be distributed down in the gutter. It will be joined throughout the day by all the other shredded government office calendars of ’13, a ticker-tape of till rolls and the accumulating trickle of cheap cider.

A witness to another nation’s traditions. One to set alongside the lucky colours of the Latino Nuevo Ano; Red Spain, Pink Argentina, Yellow Peru, White Brazil, prosperity promised, by the hue of your new knickers. Or the synchronised grape swallowing, timed to the chimes, in Spain. The advice to eat pork as pigs root forward, but remember no fowls as they scratch backwards. Fact is, superstition, food and money are synonymous for future prosperity; black-eyed beans look like coins and leafy spinach resembles paper money. The last, I can’t help wondering, was a concoction stimulated by an exasperated parent with a chard-phobic child. Now, thanks to the daily paper I’m informed that Scots will have Puritanically swept the hearth and home, before opening their front door at the first strike of midnight. This I can confirm; however the paper asserts as true that “it is obligatory for the English to watch the television programme: ‘hootenanny’, with Jools Holland. As Wikipedia would say….(citation required).

We head for the nearest town beach, only to find it near deserted. The action isn’t here. Just the power walking grannies, elegant roller skaters and the usual shore fishers ruminating on their Yerba Mate, contemplating a vacant sea. I well know where the ‘action’ is, and we find it soon enough. Rounding the corner of the Plaza Independencia we’re met by a Wall of Brewery. The disgorged offices of Humanity under the influence of old year. A maelstrom of cider spume and beef reek, into which we’re not overly keen to swim. Avoiding the heart of the action, we find small podsof revellers breaking away, yet still armed with fizz. Not so much for the consumption as for it’s quality of podium spray. Any champion would be proud of her skill.

There’s the feel of a party that will last all night, so we offer a body swerve, the intention to head back to that plaza as night is falling. Return. It could be another world. We’ve fallen through a time warp. There’s a pastel pink sunset and an utter and total silence. No evidence. No people. No party. Everybody’s gone to the moon, or the beach we left a short while ago. Gone, cleared, tidied away the detritus of festival, all that is left is a superstition of guttered calendars.

I’m sitting the following morning in the shade of Plaza Matriz, under the spreading plane trees. The bell of the Iglesia strikes midday. Slowly the local populace are emerging, joining the cruise boat trippers who’ve been wandering since the earlier hours. Sitting, collecting my superstition of good luck, drifting money spiders floating in the light breeze.

“Kill a spider, bad luck yours will be, Untill of flies you’ve swatted fifty-three”

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‘The Economist’, ‘a financial’ magazine with a distinctly materialistic outlook, free market thinking, and a penchant for using a ‘pot of puns’, has announced an “Earth’s got Talent’, their nomination for ‘Country of the Year’. As they explain, they could have chosen on the basis of increased GDP, low debt, or surviving financial tribulations, and opted for South Sudan, Estonia or Ireland. Instead they’ve chosen on the basis of virtue and opted for a path-breaker. For a state, that if it’s ‘experimental’ policies on cannabis were replicated across nations, it might result in ostracising and nullifying a major criminal element.

The editors have chosen….Uruguay.

It’s a place that sits off-radar for the Anglo-Saxon chatteratti, only comeing into focus in time for the next football World Cup, or when gay marriage and weed smoking are legalised. Yet it’s a place that has a habit of re-occurring on-radar in our travels. A place; for when then the default button needs resetting, a place for rebooting.

As happens when a new place is visited, as it becomes more familiar, so your internal radar picks up on references. That iconic hempen profile materialises in differing places. It’s shadow replicated in graffiti, on posters and shopping bags. Now as a spoof. The front page of this morning’s paper, ‘La Republica’, carries a story about the unfurling of the new national team’s football strip. Colour nationalism is still important, the shirt is still that recognisable celestial sky blue, the interest lies in the shorts. They’re to be emblazoned with a new logo: the cannabis sativa leaf.

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December the twenty-fifth and my Christmas tree count has yet to reach double figures. The only forests for sale are the split eucalyptus logs in the ‘Lena’ yards – the log stores. Stacked and wrapped, ready to join the steak on the asado tonight. In the mercado, the minimal aisle space devoted to tinsel and baubles is far out lengthed by the wine and beer supply. The municipality painters have spruced up the poles and switched on the lights – the traffic lights. Donald Trump has applied his monicker and visage to the outside of his new tower, and his estate agents are pencil sharpening in expectation. It’s all in anticipation of one day. Saint Stephan’s Day, and the start of The Season. Argentines like to celebrate in their own homes and then leave, en masse, on holiday the following day. They’ll be on their way, roofracks swamped by a paraphernalia of beach.

Our experiences of an Uruguayan Christmas is noticeable for it’s lack of societally imposed stresses. No panic buying. No manic consumption. No Xmas card angst. No frozen or fresh debate. No Toblerone. No ‘sprouts. However there are some small hints. It’s imminent arrival is heralded by the itinerant firework stalls by the roadside and the shelf space given over to the festively dressed boxes of ‘pan dulce’. The imported whiskies of dubious provenance and festive price inflation. So in the absence of any Yuletide prompts, I press the wireless into service, log on to a Christmas themed station. By the time they’ve played ‘Feliz Navidad’ by three differing artistes, three consecutive times, allowed Jonah Louie to ‘stop the cavalry’, Bing to ‘let it snow’ and Noddy Holder to utter the indubitably prophetic line; ‘look to the future everybody, it’s just begun”, I know that it must be Christmas Time.

However, this is South America, and an event, no matter what event, would not be complete without Noise. The sun is three feet above the horizon, and yet a war zone has erupted. The machine gun rattle of fire crackers, the sniper fire of squibs, that’s overlaid by the sporadic crump of heavy ordnance. The bombardment has begun, family parties have started, and will continue. The dogs now reduced to a frenetic baying, but even they are drowned out as midnight passes and the full offensive is unleashed. An uncoordinated bedlam of pyrotechnics. A continuous cacophony of sonics. A preamble for the next Event. New Year.

Do hounds get hoarse? Do cows vote for Christmas? Some do. Most don’t. Do I know that it’s Christmas?

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So who owns Santa Claus? A museum, a government, a corporation? The heritage of the red-coated, soda-swilling, pot-bellied, jovial gent would appear to be open for debate. It’s the third week of December, so he’s the man of the moment.

It starts with a proposal by a German museum to have Father Christmas listed by UNESCO as an endangered institution; is followed by the declaration of the Canadian government that his official residence sits on their continental shelf that extends under the North Pole; and is temporarily concluded by the urban myth that Coca-Cola is responsible for the whole mess.

He wasn’t always that ubiquitous character plucked from central casting. His lineage is long and contorted. Two roots and several branchlets have grown to create the present persona. Odin is the pagan root, the apocryphal precursor; his eight legged flying horse, Sleipner, being transmuted into reindeer and sleigh roos. Yet early representations are variable. In some he’s young, in others he’s gaunt, others downright menacing. By the latter eighteenth century, artists are depicting both Norse Odin and Old Santa with interchangeable props and features. The grey beard, the luxurious whiskers, the portly belly, a stemmed pipe, a blue coat.

The second root, one only marginally younger, is the Christian anchor. The fourth century Greek Bishop of Myra, who, amongst other activities, is attributed with donating and distributing the dowries for three destitute daughters whose potential future would have been prostitution, by dropping bags of coins down their chimneys and into a drying sock on the eve of their coming of age. Later, he’s sanctified as Saint Nicolas.

Then in the mid thirties, Cola Santa materialises in his latest and present incarnation, spearheading an advertising campaign. Gone the blue coat, the grey beard and the tobacco pipe. Now hirsute in snow-white whiskers and clutching his ‘find in the dark’ bottle’. It’s this very product penetration that has prompted the Germans to request a preservation order. They claim Father Christmas as Theirs. Whereas the Canadians want his zip code before he plants a ‘nodding donkey’ in his own backyard and starts pumping hydrocarbons. Despite all these political and corporate machinations, our man is busy down the street offering ‘audiences’ at the local chemist’s shop, where he’s dispensing dispensations in the form of a red and white pixie hat, branded on the furry brim with that all too recognisable patented script.

That brand, that can be measured in the trillions of dollars, but can’t prevent the occasional glitch. The jolly rotund gent, is now so entrenched in the psyche of the populace that when the oxymoronic ‘Milton Keynes Winter Wonderland’ employed two skinny youths to entertain their toddlers in a grotty grotto, the parents raised a riot and the event had to close. So much for traditional reenactment and historical accuracy.

For Sale: To the Highest Bidder…..”Santa Claus – The Brand”. Asking Price: $1.6 trn.

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I can hear his sales pitch, long before I see him, “Chipa, chipa, chipa”, lost somewhere through the forest of swaying passengers. “Chipa, chipa, chipa..”. It’s the gingham cloth-covered wicker basket of manioc bread, weaving through the tangle of rail hung arms that appears first, followed by his unLatino height.

I’ve watched these circus acts before. In Asuncion they bus-hop the never stopping collectivos. Maybe our Chipa man honed his skills there, for he has complete hands free control, even when the train judders and jolts its way out of San Fernando station. Strangely we don’t purchase. His basket is near empty, which suggests that his wares are ageing. Chipas need to be eaten fresh and warm. A few hours old and they offer excellent jaw exercise as they assume the texture and the tooth squeak of rubber.

We’re riding the commuter train up to the Delta. A Saturday morning in early summer, the goods carriage filled with traders’ trolleys and cycles festooned in carrier bags. The aisle a trip hazard of cardboard crates and plastic coolers, water carriers and tool boxes. Downtown Portenos are off for the weekend to their chosen retreats up on the Rio Parana. We’re off to purchase ferry tickets and to sit dockside and people-watch.

Organised chaos. Like a manic taxi rank, only on water. The distinctive wooden collectivo launches surge up the narrow channel that is the Rio Tigre, turn on half their length, side slip, shunting into the kerb, double, treble, multiply parked, and start to take on the next cargo of passengers. The dispatcher at the top of the gangway controlling the apparent chaos, the loaders stacking up the baggage on the roof. The clip-boarded, uniformed member of security wanders through the swirling throng. A taxi hoot, the launch sidling out into the river, negotiating around the sunbathing octogenarian in a rowing boat, a class of canoeists and the racing scullers. A throated growl, a whiff of reek, a surge of power as they take off into the twist of narrow canals that create the delta system. It’s a busy hectic scene, full of colour and story.

Returning on the train, our bread selling circus act has been replaced by a lady vending ‘Kirby grips’ and ‘Alice bands’, competing for carriage space with a gent flogging home-pirated music. Stay on the train to the terminus and you’re just as likely to be offered religious tracts and alfajores, serenaded by guitar and lectured on poverty. Just another trip on the Mitre Line.

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Classical Waste Disposal Operatives

The strains of the Minuetto Alegretto drift through the barrio, strengthening as we make our way to the outer reaches of town. In time we catch up with the source. An amplified bin lorry. The looped tape that’s going to be today’s ‘ear verm’, the calling card of the scaff wagon, the call to bring out your rubbish.

The first time that we encountered this, was in Potosí. A man decked from head to toe in black oilskins with a gas mask, sou’wester and a hand held maroon, walked up the middle of the street. I was perplexed. Was it a street act? The quack-man doctor, or a Darth Vader look alike? Unlikely in Bolivia, more like a re-enactment of the Black Death, the night time tolling bell, the call to bring out your dead. Some have anticipated the collection; mainly the feral dogs. Shredded bags are re-cycled and then left to drift into the road, there to be rendered down by the passing tyre.

Basura, residuos, rubbish, litter. It becomes very immediate to a slow moving traveller and an amateur anthropologist. Those iced lolly sticks that held my attention for the better part of a day, that were Santa Clause’s distributions; the styrofoam swan that blew off yesterday’s bridal car, the empty bottled water and food cartons as you enter the spheres of gringo trail. Inconsequential discards that tell a story. The shell middens of modern man. Each portion of our differing trips seem to acquire an emblematic piece of trash. For the southern confederate states, it was a light blue beer tin, that flowed from gulf to coast. In Australia it was the brown glazed shards of stubbies, a colour contrast to a Scottish west coast canal towpath’s green glass splinters of Bucky. On the altiplano it’s not the detritus of alcohol, but dud batteries that once played the transistor, and the black plastic compact disc box, with it’s silvered content.

Every market, irrespective of size, will have at least one stall with a vast array of recorded music on offer. To judge by what we hear from the transistor radios carried by the mattocking squads on the terraced hillsides, it’s not the expected panpipes of Rose Street busker theme. It’s a thin, whiny songstress, which on first encounter suggested we had tapped into a Hong Kong radio station. I assume that the lyrics vary, but the note rhythms I hear are consistently reiterated, a recurring alliteration. Subsequent encounters haven’t corrected that perception. There’s two assumptions to be made. First, that they’re popular, to judge by their quantity, and that the quality of production, and subsequent repetitive reproduction, is impoverished, as judged by the discards Frisbee’d from car windows, that roll into the roadside verges. Profligacy is not an Andean trait, whereas dumping is.

Cross any bridge and glance down, the bed will be strewn with shattered plastic bags, disgorging a residue of rubbish, awaiting the next deluge to flush away, out of sight and mind. Rotting mangoes, withering corn husks, gravid dirty diapers. The last, the conclusion of yet another rubbish mystery. This riddle started with concrete ditches chocked by a grey slush of assumed snow and our congratulations that we had missed another violent storm. Continued, with roadside heaps that we presumed had fallen from wheel arches, and concluded when those piles wouldn’t thaw, down in the jungle. Enlightenment comes with a shop window advert for ‘super sec Huggies’. Our slush gorged storm drains, turn out to be the entrails of dumped nappies, our snow, to be swollen moisture retaining granules.

The storm has broken loose on the high ground, the dry river beds are flushed south. The Rio Urubamba, the sacred river of the Inca’s nation, is a chowder of Styrofoam. Tin cans are held captive by bouldered eddies, plastic bottles dance in the standing waves, poly bags snag on the low slung branches. The effluvial flow sweeps down to the ocean, there to continually feed the construction of that floating pop bottle continent. We meticulously collect all our wrappings, I even, on occasions Womble around a camp ground, litter-picking. Consigning them to a bin: Out of sight, out of mind. Not my problem any more. Proper little ‘Holy Willies’, our consciences are now lightly burnished.

What happens to that oats wrapper next? We should care, for I suspect I could have cut out the middleman, the waste retrieval operative, with his repetitive classical ditty, and couped it straight into that ditch.

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Orthopods and agroplods, they have much in common if the handiwork exhibited in the Navigator’s X-rays are to be believed. A couple of nails hammered in at angles, held by a bit of twisted wire. Might hold the gate on a pen of bullocks for tonight, but it will require a proper job tomorrow. At least they don’t use baler string.

They’ve sprung the Navigator from her five star, fifth floor ocean view. Had they not, I suspect she was ready to jump. Especially if jelly had appeared on the food tray again. For breakfast, lunch and tea, the only three servings she’s had in thirty years. Her first request after escape was coffee and something with less salt and more taste. One of the consequences of cycle travel is the necessity to eat. To eat a lot. A symptom that seems to be exacerbated when the time comes to stop, and the regular drip dosages of endorphins are put on restriction. The brain goes into panic drive, demanding ever more fuel. It’s the famine response. Feast today, for tomorrow might be hard tack time.

Escaped, having settled the bill, but requiring a translation service; not a linguist one, but one that can decipher surgeon scrawl. Armed with the souvenir photos, a clutch of dockets and a card with aftercare instructions. At least that is what can be deduced from the spider’s script. Painkillers and sling use are decipherable, the rest is in crypto medico.

Escaped to consider the options. Which quickly narrow down to a retreat over the hill, back to the flat in BsAs. A bus ride half the length of Chile, to be followed by another across a continent. Two thousand eight hundred kilometres. It would appear we chose to start a new adventure at the furthest reach from a chosen refuge. We’re both resigned to the change of plans, looking forward to a new challenge. That was until the bus left town and headed back into the Atacama. Simple stunning countryside. A landscape striped to it’s bare bones, leaving naked colours and shadowed textures. Leaving unfinished business with a stark reminder. The national flags on the roadside shrines, the politico banners on the house gables are ripped taut The walking dunes march out across the gritscape, the drifts tell the tale, the prevailing winds are sou’westers. Next time we ride with the wind.

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On the map, Hospicio looks like a suburb of the town. The cartographers have even given it the same bold graphics as the parent, which might suggest a conflict for supremacy or superiority. Could be a story here. The first views as we come over the Cordillera Litoral, the coastal hills, suggest an industrial town rather than the advertised resort, even if the far edge is etched by a distant heat hazed sea. It appears, as the usual commercial belts start to girdle the pueblo. The tyre repair and oil changers, the alojamiento camiones and dubious moteles, literally lorry hotels and love rooms’. Queued out gas stations and out of-town mercados. All with their loyalty cards, the support industry for copper-town. Our road held in place by crash crumpled barriers and a berm of predatory drifting grit mixed through with societal effluvia. An unprepossessing spectacle for what the guide book says is a premier destination. Through this we tread, waiting for the seashore to materialise, craving the novelty of salt water after two months of high mountain and dry pampa.

The road swings through another bend, and there, below, is Toy Town; the Lilliputian parent-burb of Iquique. Only between here and there is one single sand dune and two thousand, six hundred feet of drop. Perched, like the swirling litter of gyrating vultures that float around us, their spirographing shadows rolling across the hillside, we too launch over the edge. In much the same way that the parapenters do, only we stay true to the reality of terra firma. Then I’m over taken by a child on a mountain bike and a Lycra-clad on a racer. Still, I remain true to the reality of rim brakes. Feels like we could be heading down into an adrenaline zone.

However, what is intriguing me, as my fingers cramp on the brake levers, is the disproportion in the ascending to descending traffic. People are leaving the coast; this on a Sunday, begging the question: what have we missed behind us? A fiesta, a parade or dinner with Granny? Then remembering that this a prime tsunami shore line. A fact that is emphasised as we cross the first intersection at the bottom of the hill. A large yellow warning sign pointing the way we’ve just come.

If Potosi was the source of all the wealth that financed the Spanish empire, and as a consequence spurred the other European states into expansionist exploration, then Iquique is the source of the raw material that facilitated one of the major expansions in Western agriculture. Bagged nitrogen. The magic jab that could turn a field to verdant green, treble output and send the peasant serf into the fetid slums of the industrial city.

This city started life as a mere indigenous fishing village, gaining a silver mine in 1730, growing with guano extraction, until it became the largest per capita consumer of Champagne in the world. The hedonistic days of the ‘Chilean Nitrate’ boom, that saw the barons build their mansions and swallow the plonk. The fact that these edifices are available for restoration, and not swamped by ‘quake tides or condominiums, is surprising. That one street of these part-restored buildings is pedestrianised, along which no car ever travels, is a testament to civic pride. An history story that I would not have found had I not been forced into an extended stay, predicated by a cycle crash.

Having shuttled the bikes back from the accident site, I’ve selected an hostel one block from the hospital. Chosen for it’s proximity of course, and not it’s prominent position in the “shoestring guide”. That’s a given, a tiger can’t change it’s stripes. It’s in the old home of the immigrant Italian Cuneo family, shop traders from the ‘nitrate era’. It’s a bit worn around the edges, but still retains some individuality, that is part travelers lodge, part old folks home. It’s a base for visit duty and city wandering. A bed to be woken from at four in the morning by the maroon going off. Tsunami warning or adrenal testing?

A city of split personalities. The industrial dirty secret looming on top of the dune, spliced by that dune to the tinted glaze of a financial quarter, then down the historical corridor, by the port to the oceanside. Fuel tankfarms, colonnaded mansions, fishmeal stink, baked flesh.

As happens so often, this is an example of a place that, at first encounter, seemed to lack any personal interest, just another seaside town of adrenaline sports, that with a little time, provided rewards. But not the ‘rush’ we would have voluntarily chosen.

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