“Valdivia is a little city with some big rivers flowing to the Pacific Ocean, not very far away. The riverfront market every day has lots of very fresh fish as well as farm vegetables, and raspberries for about 35 cents a basket. If you buy fish from one of the kind fisher-ladies, she guts them on her wood table and tosses the skin back over her shoulder to happy sea lions who wait in the river below.
We have a nice two-bedroom apartment, to get hot water you need to light the special hotwater heater, but it is really quite modern with a tv, lots of US shows with Spanish subtitles which (I like to think) will improve my Spanish if I watch them.”
That’s from some email I sent in 2001, during a previous visit to Valdivia, in southern Chile. In about an hour, we’re headed there again (three changes of airplane, about 24 hours door to door).
All absolutely worth it to be part of the party celebrating the inauguration of Chile’s wonderful Centro de Estudio Ciéntificos.
Then we head a bit further south, because we’ve been invited to ride around below Tierra del Fuego on a converted Chilean navy ship–a few days there, then another 24-hour trip home, then 24 hours to do all the laundry, and a 24-hour-ish flight to Japan.
If my younger self, who longed to travel the world, could see me now she’d be very satisfied.
