You know a trip is going to be crappy when the first thing you see when you get to your destination is a toilet full of crap! And that was the first thing Meli happened upon when we got to Chiloé.
Chiloé is a small island in the South of Chile. All the guidebooks we read talked about how magical, how enchanting, how frozen in time this beautiful island is. There are palafitos (see pic - houses built in the water on stilts), rolling pastures full of sheep and cows, more fresh seafood than you can possibly imagine, a temperate rainforest, and a population who has woven their native mythology into Christianity to create a unique syncretic religion not found anywhere else in the world. They even have a deer the size of a small dog - this is the illustrious, yet reclusive pudú that is so named in our title. What´s not to love? Well...we found exactly what we were looking for...
I am not one to judge the character of a city at night. In the dark everything seems ominous, dingy, and creepy, as if danger lurks around every corner. But the thing is, that when we awoke the next morning, nothing had changed. Let´s see-damp, dank, dismal, dumpy, dreary, that is Castro, Chiloé. The palafitos, once we found them in drizzling rain, were nothing but glorified houses on stilts-nothing to write home about.
But indeed, it is true that Chiloé is frozen time - in the 1970´s- which we all know was a bad time in every regard. From bad politics, to fashion, to music, to food, to movies, to gas prices, to coke addictions- even the 76 olympics were a disaster. And Chiloé has chosen this glorious epoch to be frozen into. Don´t believe us? There is wood paneling EVERYWHERE! The restaurants, offices, hotels - everywhere! Wood paneling should have been retired a long time ago! Can we just say depressing?
Oh and the temperate rainforest? There is a reason that there is a temperate rainforest there - it never, ever, ever stops raining. Even when, for a brief moment, the sun shines, it´s still raining! Worse yet, was that the rain permeated our beings! You should have seen the two of us, we were miserable, forlorn! You say that the animals might have made us happy? Well the cows and sheep wouldn´t let Meli anywhere near them. And the pudú - there´s a reason they say its reclusive - you can´t find one anywhere!
The seafood though, right? Well, we may have done this to ourselves- The seafood was bangin´. So fresh. The first night we had pulmay, a derivation of curanto- a shellfish dish with sausauge and potatoes, stewed underneath the ground! Pulmay was amazing-so amazing we ate it in 10 min-so amazing we ordered it for lunch the very next day. That night we ate another shellfish stew. The next day we ate another shellfish stew-to the point where Steve has put a indefinite moritorium on shellfish. The last night there we ate a dish full of potatoes and that was it. The mere mention of shellfish makes us both want to go anorexic.
And the lovely, unique religion? Well, have you ever been in a place and just felt like there was some bad juju goin on? Anguloeme anyone (anguleme was an equally soul scary town in France!)? This place was covered with that feeling. Even the cows looked at you funny. I mean, the people were nice, after the standard Chilean fashion, but somethin just...wasn´t right. It was kind of like The Shining.
It was all so terrible that we cut our trip of 4 days short to two, found a different town, and high-tailed it out of Castro, off of Chiloé, and onto the mainland.
And we didn´t even have to go to Cuba to be oppressed by Castro!
Happy out of Castro,
Melissa and Steve!
ps we will post more Chiloe pics, if you are at all interested to see them after this dismal story, after we get down to Puerto Natales
