Puerto Rico

Almost 2 years late, we arrived at last in Puerto Rico for belated wedding celebrations, interrupted first time round by the catastrophic effects of Hurricane Maria.  Now it is difficult for the stranger to spot the damage wreaked by the storm although the renovation programme continues, scaffolding and teams of painters in evidence although it is hard to know what is wholly new and what restoration.

The capital city, San Juan was unexpected for its sheer size, the old city with its steep cobbled streets and painted buildings inside the hefty remains of defensive city walls abutting the sea and marked by solid forts  more of a fit with pre-imaginings than modern metropolitan streets of business and resort hotels, international shops and office blocks, linked by wide highways.  The pace of life is busy but less frenetic than that environment might suggest - Puerto Ricans work hard, but they play harder and that is the real point of life.

 The island is highly populated, numbers somewhat reduced since the hurricane,  but once out of San Juan there are large areas of not very much.  The landscape encompasses coastal plains including former centres of the sugar industry in the South East, the great ridge of the Cordillera Central running like a spine down the island, miles of beaches and the El Yunque rainforest, the only tropical rainforest in the USA, it's dense vegetation, waterfalls, walking trails, fauna and flora, a short drive from the capital.

On our drive to the rainforest we stopped to eat phenomenal crab stuffed fritters, alcapurrias I think, at the best of a row of roadside stalls, judging by the queues even on a mid-week afternoon.  At weekends this beach area is crammed with people and I imagine you have to start queuing shortly after breakfast.  Fried food of one sort or another is a favourite, fritters from banana/plaintain tostones which are delicious to fish, fowl or meat in the crispiest batters then a lot of rice and bean based dishes with chicken and pork picked up with local hot sauces and begun with a base of sofrito.  Rum is the local drink and the beautifully laid out Bacardi factory had to be on the sightseeing list although the processes described, similar to our local Scottish distilleries, were less interesting than the history of what remains a family owned firm.

In a week too punctuated by parties for serious island exploration we barely scratched the surface of the island, moving west from San Juan to Aguadilla for a weekend of celebrations in adjacent villas overlooking the sea and south to Ponce for the glories of the Museo de Arte de Ponce, stuffed with an extraordinary collection of carefully chosen work from old masters to contemporary work starred with some major treasures.

 The town too, despite its reputation among the San Juan elite who have no time for provincial backwaters, is attractive if apparently strangely depopulated.  The art deco buildings are being restored, whether again from age and natural wear and tear or from Maria, it is hard to know.  There is a slow air abroad in the town streets and air of somnolence, the splendid market building almost deserted on an off day and the streets, aside from the unwanted car in every photograph, largely free of pedestrians.

 Even the dock and the marina areas were empty but perhaps Ponce is a weekend place and certainly the schedule of cruise ships mooring there is available online.In San Juan the cruise ships double the population of the old town for a day at a time with huge mainland Americans in straining clothes wandering the forts or aboard one invalid scooter after another, not obviously enjoying themselves, before heading back to the comfort of massive ships towering above the old buildings and themselves the size of small towns.

Flights to Puerto Rico from Europe generally require a stop on the mainland USA anywhere from New York to Miami or Charlotte, N Carolina, on our own return, a blessed relief after the expectedly grim Miami outward experience.  We stayed in the Condado Plaza Hilton in San Juan, right on the seafront and with some rooms still boarded up as the hotel continues renovations.  It was exactly and entirely as expected including those peculiar habits of American hotels such as not having a bar open almost any time you might want a drink although the diner chain, Denny's, incorporated into the hotel's 2nd tower, adjacent to the swimming pool, was open 24 hours a day with heart stopping dishes loaded with expanding ingredients.  In Ponce we stayed in the charming and old Hotel Melia, also having a rather curious facelift with a line in brightly painted baroque furniture in its lobby and common parts that is eccentric but not disastrous.  To my delight, my daughter, flinging herself on her bed on arrival, discovered, to her shrieking horror, an enormous cockroach hidden in the cover.

South American family travels

And so to Argentina and Chile on an unusual journey for me with both my husband and my mother along for the ride.  I always feel more foreign in South America than anywhere else – I don’t know the continent and while I can just about manage a road sign or a menu I don’t speak Spanish. I understand even less of the various accents of South American countries where the citizens of each are proud of their own and damn that of their nearest neighbour.  Argentineans and Chileans in any case are always ready to traduce each other.  Certainly their capital cities are in remarkable contrast: Buenos Aires wears an air of age and crumbling grandeur overlaid chaotically with contemporary poverty and the poor urban planning of a city growing out of control. It is full of atmosphere and confusion, a seductive combination for the inquisitive traveller until a blatant mugging, my mother had a gold chain snatched in an all too face to face confrontation, outside the great baroque Theatre Colon brings into too sharp a focus the potential for violence in an increasingly bankrupt state with vast gulfs between rich and poor. 

 Santiago, Chile, on the other hand, appears, ‘though it is not entirely the case, a tightly controlled city. It is moving forward fast in terms of new buildings and new foreign investors joining the handful of hugely rich Chilean families who have held most of the business strings in Chile for many years. They by and large are seen to have a social conscience and a desire to spend their money well, whether or not this will be the case with foreigners bringing business in and taking the profits out will depend on government and governance.  Meanwhile there is a sense that this small capital is readying itself for a boom and growing both culturally and financially – for now for the tourist, the culture is spare and any older edifices as graffiti decorated on their exteriors as they are in Buenos Aires. 

At the moment an extraordinary exhibition of drawings by Paula Lynch in the Bellas Artes with a surprisingly successful installation of men’s shirts in the main hall by Finnish artist Kaarina Kaikkonen plus a collection of drawings by many of the great surrealists and with more contemporary shows to come should encourage visitors rather more than the permanent collection of decidedly mixed and slightly depressing domestic exhibits. 

Those in search of pre-Colombian art and artefacts at their best should hurry out to the Santa Rita vineyard, an hour or so’s drive outside Santiago to revel in the small Museo Andino  set up by the late owner of Santa Rita to show his personal collection of South American work.  A visit to Santa Rita which is one of the oldest established wineries in Chile and looks more beautiful than most, was part of a Chilean  itinerary devised by my son who is currently working in Santiago.  Knowing his stepfather well, lunch and dinner were well to the fore in the planning and a delicious lunch, plenty of wine of course, in the cool refectory dining room at Santa Rita was followed by a stay at the even more remarkable winery currently being set up by Norwegian born billionaire Alex Vik.

Here in the MIllahue Valley, the wine expert Patrick Vallette is creating something extraordinary; a vast winery with an entirely innovative daylight friendly membrane roof, a staggering acreage of new vines and new wine under the Vik label and a 22 room luxury hotel with spectacular views over the whole area, which will also be a haven for indigenous fauna and flora including the huge spiders my husband was so keen to find.

Thwarted of his ambition to see an armadillo in Patagonia he did manage to find one large black hairy spider at Vik to make up.  Plan South America, Harry Hastings’ travel company based in Buenos Aires and catering largely for the wealthy middle and old aged traveller and well out of my usual sphere had not necessarily bargained for demands of this sort when they organised our Argentinian/Chilean Patagonian travels.  I admitted defeat early on with the planning of this journey knowing that the ‘well we can probably get an overnight bus’ or ‘I don’t know where breakfast will be’ would not play well with an impatient and demanding husband in tow so I succumbed to being middle aged or old if not wealthy.  My Mother of course would probably have managed the overnight buses and lack of feeding entirely successfully but Plan did arrange our travels beautifully and we stayed in places in Patagonia that I doubt we would have reached without them. 

In Buenos Aires we stayed in L’Hotel Palermo, one of the small boutique hotels in Palermo the most villagey district of the city with its cobbled streets, cool bars and small designer shops, luckily filling up with winter collections so not too much temptation there even with our present state of UK permawinter. L’Hotel Palermo is pretty and comfortable although lateish check in times when arriving from a long flight are never perfect even if they are standard.  The Palermo did its best, getting us into one room where my mother and I fought for first shower while my husband slumbered snoringly on the bed until lunch.

Dogs are everywhere in Buenos Aires, in Argentina and Chile altogether. whether the well-trained sheep and cattle dogs, pampered pets being walked in crowds by professional walkers round the precincts of the city and its parks or endless happily well-fed strays.  In Santiago they sleep in the shadow of the Moneda Palace with its presidential offices and uniformed guards; they are streetwise characters, traffic aware and always apparently friendly.  In Buenos Aires apart from the astonishingly well behaved walking groups often beached in specially cordoned park areas, the street dogs walk carefully across pedestrian crossings looking to right and left or wait for a surge of human traffic as a signal that pedestrian signs have turned green.  In villages and cities doggie congregations gather near likely food outlets and restaurants and in small towns one notices water containers on pavements attached by string to a window frame for the convenience of any passing mutt.  In the port town of Valaparaiso in Chile occasional street kennels are graffiti painted to match the current urban decor.

Harry suggested a range of restaurants for lunches and dinner in Buenos Airess between visits to the fantastic collections of the National Museum of Fine Arts; a sort of ritual homage to Evita's grave and more extraordinary tombs in Recoleta Cemetery; the Plaza Major with its protest groups and famous pink palace, the Casa Rosado; the uninspiring Cathedral en fete for the new Pope, it's former cardinal archbishop; and the other major sites and wanderings of the city.  We usually got it wrong with lunch when we didn't make it recommended spots due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time but we didn't fall so low as one of the many Macdonalds outlets. 

The restaurant Resto stands out for me although my mother and I got lost in the adjacent streets and thought we might never get to this peaceful and minimal high-ceilinged room tucked away in a building without obvious signs.  It is worth it ‘though and particularly if you are all steaked out on quantities of Argentina’s best beef – I had grilled vegetables which h sounds deadly but in the hands of a chef trained by Ferran Adria was quite spectacularly good.  At least one dinner passed in a blur of too many caipirinhas and too much good wine and it is good in Argentina and Chile – without ruining while possibly unintentionally wrecking yourself you know you will feel positively bouncing with health the next morning.

From BA we flew South on Patagonian winds to El Calafate and an estancia stay at El Galpon de Glaciar off a barren stretch of road following the shore of Lake Argentina about 30 minutes from the town.  Our flight had taken us over mystery mine workings looking like nasca lines in barren country and over rivers winding endlessly through an empty landscape to an unseen goal. Geese, duck and decidedly brainless black headed swans wander the gravelly beaches of the lake below the Estancia, plovers dip and dive on the lawn, hares fool among gorse bushes and sheep in profusion wander the scrubby ground.  Groups of them have their moment in the sun when tourist groups arrive by bus for an exhibition of horsemanship and dog control by gauchos, raffish and romantic  in their berets and boots, followed by a mutton barbecue.  One has a feeling, looking from a distance, that the sheep however notoriously stupid, know what to do as well as the dogs.

 Galpon de Glaciar is plain, no frills comfort with alarmingly hearty food such as a dish of polenta with tomato sauce and cheese that would have fed an average family easily.  Contrast indeed with our glacier viewing boat trip on a Marpatag excursion where quite aside from the excitement of glaciers and icebergs in intervals of unexpected sun, we were fed a perfectly formed 6 course lunch – o and that excluded the minute muffins and pastries that arrived with coffee shortly after we embarked.  Anyone becomes poetic when faced with icebergs, mysterious, stunningly coloured, vast, dangerous, floating on green amethyst water turning to milky turquoise in changing light and followed by the sight of the great walls of glacier ice glowing blue against black valley shores. 

We landed too in a small sunny cove to see an abandoned farm, sad actually by idyllic in these conditions.  Feral bulls of considerable size watched us from the hillside, the National Park has been unable to remove all the cattle that were once farmed here and now, as wild as cats, they continue to munch their way through a protected habitat. The Marpatag tour avoids the best know Perito Moreno glacier where great chunks of ice explode continually from the ice cliff to join the icebergs.  A pity to miss that sight perhaps but totally exclusive views of the Spezzatini and Uppsala glaciers well away from the tourist razzmatazz, condors overhead and that lunch rather more than made up.

From Calafate, a long flat drive over tundra like blackened country, wrap around nothingness for mile upon mile,  to the Chilean border and on to Cerro Guido estancia hard by the Torres del Paine National Park.  Here there are flocks of guanacos, bright coloured lakes, hurtling rivers and waterfalls, majestic and magnificent condors and wealth of other birdlife.  Actually our clearest, nearest, view of condors was by the Chilean border post when one imagines they are opportunistically intent on the build up of cafe rubbish.

No armadillos ‘though – hard to spot I fear scurrying through the undergrowth imagining stalking pumas on their heels. The guanacos in large herds have sentinels ready to give the alarm but seem remarkably unconcerned by the humans who they now see trekking and camping throughout the park.  I have to say not for me a 9 day slog in that wind – it wasn’t blowing very hard one gathered on this, yet another unexpectedly sunny day, but it took my feet from under me without much difficulty.  Crouching to take a photograph meant not being certain whether getting upright again was even possible.

Large areas of the park have been burned in two recent fires when campers encountered exploding gas canisters or attempted to burn rubbish and it is easy to understand how, in this climate, anything more than grass may take decades to re-grow.  As for the teeth of the Torres themselves, they are a constant draw for the camera lens, fading in and out of cloud and always looking slightly better for this shot than the one before – so several dozen identical, slightly clearer or not images later.....Icebergs here too hard by a windswept area of beach and looking from a distance as if they are growing in the gritty sand.  They seem almost anchored in the bay and pieces of ice float into the shore should you have a cocktail shaker handy for an historical pick me up.

Cerro Guido estancia is almost a village, its own local school now a government requirement; an echoing hall of a sheep shearing shed a hundred years old with machinery to match.  A cook house with a black iron range caters for the workers and a mandatory police post seems not to be regularly manned. There are cottages and bothies, small gardens, dogs as always and sheep by the thousand.  The only one apparently safe from the pot the spoilt Clothilde who is thrives and gets fat as a living lawn mower by the main house of the hotel.  A separate dining room, a healthy stroll from the guest house, contains the biggest barbecue for asado on a mega scale with a chimney outlet more crematorium than kitchen.  A young cook produces food here of some finesse including plenty of fish and the best Madeira style cake ever and serves it in a warm wood lined dining room impermeable to the gusting winds but with a pink early morning view towards the Torres that is hard to beat.

Our final destination before a last leg north to Santiago was via a flight from Punta Arenas to Puerto Montt and the lake district of Northern Patagonia.  We stayed at Casa Molino, built originally as a private house on the shores of Lake Llanquihue and with a view across the lake to the Osorno volcano, looking just as a volcano should with its snow capped pointed summit.  Brown hawks pottered about like sparrows on the lawn in the early morning, not the least concerned with any human being doing the same and waiting for the habitual early morning mist to lift from the lake.  In the evening a stage set scene, a pink volcano across a lake turned from navy to aubergine in the setting sun watched from a clover covered lawn with pisco sour in hand. A small winter garden otherwise known as a conservatory allows for the view without the chill and the main suite has a window almost the length of its front wall which occupants seem blissfully unaware provides two way viewing.  Our bathroom was up a wooden staircase from our bedroom right at the top of the house and not possibly ideal for the less agile client.

Our day trip to Chiloe might have been diverted in the absence of the penguin colonies for which the islands are known – they flew south a week or so earlier.  Chiloe has, however, other attractions in its remarkable wooden churches originally established by travelling Jesuit missionaries and later run by Franciscans are now UNESCO World Heritage sites.  Arriving on the main island of the Chiloe archipelago by car ferry, the scenery looks familiar, a combination of Scottish fishing village and Hampshire fields and hedgerows scenically scattered with sheep and cows. There is gorse, small boats and fuchsia bushes, wild lupins in profusion, monkey puzzle trees; indigenous to Patagonia, we had one in the garden in Scotland and it thrived in its ugliness. Even the huge gunnera leaves, nalca here, are familiar as a staple of better dressed garden scheme gardens in the UK. The attractive old larch and cypress shingled wooden houses are something different even if the hardy looking locals might be quite as at home in the Western Isles as here.  Sea lions do what sea lions do on rocks and buoys in the harbours; gulls and less identifiable seabirds wade and fly and away; offshore there are dolphins and whales. 

We drove first to the small town of Dalcahue; Chiloe is much bigger than I had realised and there was no chance in a day of seeing more than a handful of the archipelago’s churches or getting to the capital, Castro.  Our Lady of Sorrows in Dalcahue was quite predictably closed it being a World Heritage site and all. From the outside it is charming, white painted wood but sadly careworn, an image set off nicely by the quartet of vultures perched on the weather vane at the top of the spire.

 On into the market area of the town there are shell fish stalls carrying enormous mussels, cockles and odd barnacly type stuff with red bits that arrived in my lunch to my entire satisfaction. A rather good looking cheese shop sells the local produce which we were assured tastes of not much but works as sandwich filling. The open sided artisan market, for which read tourist but none the less pleasing, is stuffed with coarse knitted jerseys, woolly hats of all shapes and sizes, and balls of deliciously coloured wool which are undoubtedly at their best in a purely ornamental role.  Otherwise baskets, carved wooden bowls and boards and the usual audience of passing dogs. 

In an extraordinary restaurant adjacent to the market and built out over the water,  a wide choice of small busy kitchens vie for trade, each with its own solid looking cook or cooks, all women of a certain age, most with a fondness for particularly lurid eye makeup.  Their cooking is full on fill you up seafood and potatoes in a variety of forms and we tried an assortment.  The most famous Chiloe dish is curanto, a great pile of mixed ham, chicken, shellfish, potatoes and several different potato dumplings helped out with bread or possibly potato bread fried like an unsugared doughnut and quite distressingly good.  Curanto is traditionally layered into a hole in the ground lined and covered with nalca leaves but these days, to its advantage one suspects, it is also cooked in pots.  Its initial aspect is somewhat unprepossessing it must be said but once attacked its individual components prove perfectly delicious.  Beyond that the choice was huge slabs of hake and salmon fried or grilled, all impeccably fresh, this is a major salmon farming area which may be a less good thing in the long run.  Lots more potatoes in every direction and a rather more delicate shellfish broth full of fat shells and those peculiar red bits.

Wobbling back to the car on a sea of fish and wine, we set off into the unknown with our driver/guide, Rodrigo not much more clear about our direction than we were.  He had never been to the churches in the NE of the island before.  We managed to get to the three towered, blue fronted church at Tenaun, the charming church of San Juan and perhaps the most appealing of all, the church of Colo in a tiny hamlet hidden away at what really was the end of the road, a scattering of houses, a handful of cattle and, more eccentrically, a very uncoiffed poodle covered in mud from rolling and a pair of spaniels. The churches themselves were built mainly in the 18^th and 19^th centuries using the shopbuilding techniques so familiar to local artisans and often without  nails.

They have been and continue to be restored under UNESCO auspices but still by the local communities in a tradition of community work and have none of the austerity of European gothic stone or the overblown latin baroque.  These are very much churches for people and for communities and they breathe warmth and friendliness even down to the usual well blooded saintly statues that made locally hold none of the austere horror one is more used too – they too one feels are familiar, a part of the community.  Many of the churches have stars painted on their blue arched ceilings and the decor altogether is decidedly cheerful and welcoming.  Unlike in Dalcahue, in the villages someone could be found to open locked doors with enthusiasm and some pride. 

A traffic jam leading to the ferry was our only hiccup making the Chiloe expedition a longish day but one no to be missed – 2 or 3 more or longer could quite easily be spent on the islands although it is possible that the greedy traveller might turn into a fish flavoured potato dumpling without due care and attention.

Safely arrived in Santiago and delivered to the Plaza El Bosque hotel with old fashioned rooms like small apartments and, on the downside, slightly dubious drains, we did the Santiago sightseeing tour and had a barbecue on a 7^th floor apartment balcony which was a first for me.  Our travels, now in charge of a son instead of a travel expert, were equally carefully organised and aside from winery excursions and capital entertainments involved a night in Valparaiso with its painted houses lining the high streets above the port and the system of rickety funicular elevators to carry passengers up and down from areas not ideally made for large modern cars. Valparaiso is another World Heritage Site but it is a hustling port too with massive container ships as well as Chilean naval cruisers constantly on the move.  Beach going Chileans gravitate to the high rises of neighbouring Vina de Mar but the streets of Valparaiso with their fine line in graffiti art can be wandered round for hours, it was known in the past as Little San Francisco, not to mention watching the comings and goings of the port. 

Valparaiso’s long history makes it a city of monuments too; the oldest stock exchange in South America, the longest continually published Spanish language newspaper in the world and various memorials to Chilean heroes of land and sea including Lord Cochrane, commander of the Chilean navy for Bernardo O’Higgins.  The Museo Naval y Maritimo, the neo-classical former naval college overlooking the port has stained glass windows of both red headed national heroes as well as the balding but apparently equally and perhaps less probably red- headed Arturo Prat, hero of the naval battle of Iquique who crops up in street names all over Chile. The museum itself would be a pleasure for the seriously navally inclined but is a delightful building with enough model ships and odd and ends of this and that to keep the less informed tourist entertained for a half hour or so.

We stayed in the gloriously improbable Brighton bed and breakfast which hangs on to the cliff side in the upper town more by willpower and habit than structural underpinning so far as one can tell.  The Brighton prides itself on its Victorian atmosphere which luckily includes working modern bathrooms, a coffee machine and, less importantly, frosties at breakfast. 

Our cheap air tickets on BA/Iberia meant a night flight to Buenos Aires and no pain for one who habitually passes out as soon as she sniffs an aeroplane interior, for at least 8 hours given half an opportunity.  Bearable leg room in an aisle seat and the lure of the chair back film screen and a good book polished off the remaining hour or 4.  On our return on an Iberia flight from Santiago, no screens in the chairs, a huge man next to me who consumed every morsel of the completely unthinkable Iberia food that appeared plus crisps and sweets non-stop to fill the gaps not plugged by gallons of full fat coke.  I just avoided the health lecture and read a whole Bernard Cornwell book on the basis that anything more serious just wasn’t going to work.  I think I might have slept a bit too before we got to Madrid and the change for a London City that was if anything colder than when we left it. So much for spring springing – autumn in Patagonia is definitely more temperate.