In this hemisphere, it actually does get colder the farther south you go. And if you take a 10 hour bus ride due south from Santiago, you end up in Valdivia, a cold but awesome city in the Lakes Region. It rains a lot here, fishermen are everywhere, and the region’s specialty is chocolate. Better yet, Valdivia is home to the Kruntzmann cervezería…a brewery!!! It reminded me of the Guiness factory in Dublin, which inspired the Ireland comparison, but there’s a lot more to it. Take these photos for example:
I visited the first castle this weekend in Valdivia, and took the picture on the bottom in Northern Ireland in 2006. Oddly similar aren’t they? Same stone. Same green landscape. Different ocean, but you get the idea.
Rain makes this place as green as it is, and it can really strike at any moment. After we visited the castle, our group of 10 painfully obvious foreigners decided to take a hike around the island. Unfortunately, the sky decided this was a golden opportunity to see who remembered to bring a raincoat, and a torrential downpour began. We didn’t all pass the raincoat test, and I ended up giving my extra jacket to a friend and sharing my oversize shell with another. We draped it over ourselves like a tarp and walked back toward town trying to hold it in place over our heads. It was a funny moment, actually. There we were, on a remote island, in a foreign country, walking through a storm with not enough jackets to go around. “Hey,” I said. “Let’s tell some bad jokes.”
We told a lot of them, and thankfully we made it back to the mainland and the Kruntzmann cervezería. This place was tacky and German themed (amazing bad joke material), but they made up for it by serving “columnas.” These looked like giant chemistry beekers, and they were filled with Kruntzmann honey flavored cerveza. I wish I had more pictures to help describe this, but trust me– it was best thing we could have come across after being caught in a storm.
After we warmed up and refueled, our group spent most of our time telling stories. Not bad jokes, but annecdotes, embarrassing moments, random things about each other’s lives. Truly open conversations can be rare when we’re all preoccupied with normal life, but down here near the bottom of the world they were surprisingly easy. I had a long conversation with a guy I hadn’t had a chance to talk to before, and the whole group had a high quality heart to heart back at our hostel. It must have been the Irish influence– we were great storytellers that night.
2 Comments
October 22, 2008 at 12:55 am
[...] was the strangest thing. I LOST all my photos from Valdivia when my camera mysteriously deleted all but 6 of them. I was devastated. My friend had taught me [...]
December 11, 2008 at 12:49 am
[...] “How about Chilean beer?” “Oh it’s pretty good. I tried some miel beer in Valdivia.” “And rum?” my host father reminds me. I am not sure why this is so important. [...]