One of the best things I accomplished in 2019 was walking from Santiago to the coast of Chile, and I wanted to write a retrospective of that trip to close out last year. Alas, several things have happened since then, and I didn't get around to writing it. However, I am about to close in on the one year anniversary of completing the trip, so I thought I should complete it before then. This then, is my incomplete narrative of a journey that was important to me, although I know it doesn't compete with other people's world travels as far as epicness is concerned.
First: Ruta 78, or Route 78, is a Chilean interstate highway that runs between Santiago, the capital of Chile, and San Antonio, a large port town on the Chilean coast. The historically most important port for Santiago was Valparaiso, which is a beautiful historic old place, but San Antonio, 40 linear miles south of it, has eclipsed it in importance. Ruta 78 starts in the southwest part of Santiago, near the comuna of Maipu, and quickly leaves the city, going through fertile agricultural districts and small cities and towns on its way to the coast. It is 60 miles long, used by both freight and vehicle traffic, usually clogged close to Santiago, while becoming quieter further on. If you can picture a typical freeway in California, it looks like that, only less obtrusive.
Of course, during my trip, I was not walking along the freeway itself, except for one dodgy stretch where I had no other choice. I mostly walked along a regional highway that paralleled it. I did ride it, on buses, as I went from Santiago to whatever town I was walking in that day.
So first, a little prelude to how I got here: when I first reached Chile, I had an unfortunate experience where I was robbed. This made me wary of my surroundings, on top of my normal homesickness and culture shock, and for my first few weeks and months in Chile I lived in a low focal length where the walk to the nearest grocery store was the horizon of my world. But I have always been an explorer, and so I started to walk further and further, and learned that Santiago was not the warzone that I had been told it was. By the end of 2016, I had gone as far as a Petrobras station on the west end of Santiago, surrounded by gigantic warehouses, and looking out at the ocean of chaparral that starts abruptly where the city ends. But after regaining my confidence about navigating my environment, and realizing that Santiago was only a piece in a larger landscape, I stopped travelling quite so much. During 2017, I mostly worked. During 2018, I regained my spirit of adventure and started going around more. And one thing that occurred to me was that I would like to walk from Santiago to the coast, probably over a series of days. In terms of miles, this wasn't too difficult to do: it was 60 miles from Santiago to Valparaiso, along the road I usually took. But that road was a freeway that passed through several tunnels, and bypassing them seemed to be difficult. There was also, I learned later, another route that went northwest of Santiago, through the small town of Til-Til, over the pass to Olmué and on to Villa Alamena and Valparaiso. This road involved taking a high pass. I don't drive and only was visiting these places by buses, so I was trying to figure out a way to route the buses and walks so that I could arrive home easily. And my Spanish was not, and is not, too great. While I could communicate in expected circumstances, I was very afraid of being trapped somewhere and not being able to ask when and where a bus would come.
My answer came to me by serendipity late in 2018 when I took a bus to San Antonio, my first visit there. I don't know why it too me two and a half years in Santiago before going to San Antonio: there were a lot of places to go to, and perhaps I took the warnings of my friends and students too seriously. San Antonio was a port town, grimy and dangerous. But then, one spring day in November I decided to go there. A short ride, an hour or two, a walk around town, and then back to the bus station. Like many places in Chile, it was less violent than I had been told: I did see two people attacking each other with clubs, but that is what you expect to see at Renn Faires. Also, Irish Step Dancers. Every time I was warned about some ultradangerous part of Chile, it was always full of nerds doing the nerdiest things. But it occurred to me on the bus ride back, that the road was flat and even enough here, with the coast range being much more demur than it was on the way to Valparaiso, that this would be a simple enough road to walk. I went on google maps and started planning my route. It looked realistic.
One problem that arises when I talk about these things is that unless I am very specific, pictures can start forming in people's mind that might not fit what I want to describe. If I say I passed through a "small town", that can mean different things to different people. Some people might think of nothing more than a cluster of homes by the side of the road, some people might think of somewhere large enough to have a store, some people might think of an exurb large enough to have a shopping mall. I would pass through things of all of these descriptions. The comuna of Talagante, in the southwest of Santiago, has a population of around 60,000 people. Melipilla, half way from Santiago to the coast, has a population of over 120,000 people, only a small town in comparison to Santiago's millions. But numbers like this can be deceptive: this is for a comuna, a county-equivalent, and many of those people did indeed live in villages, a few dozen house clustered around an ubiquitous mini-market. What the terrain looks like, what exactly those homes and fields and surrounding hills looked like, and felt like, is something that I can only give a hint of.
In any case, one day in early March, I went to Estacion Central, up the the big loading bays where buses from dozens of different companies waited, and found a bus going southwestward. By this point, I was pretty familiar with the setup of taking these "buses rural", although there was always a few mysteries to solve. Long distance buses in Chile, ones that went between cities, would usually have a terminal where you bought a ticket and selected a seat from a computer terminal. The rural buses, even though they went almost as far, had a less involved set-up: you hopped on, gave the driver some money, and he handed you a little paper ticket. You then sat down, as the bus pulled out of the station, and took off through the industrial area of Santiago, heading for the Autopista del Sol. Usually on the ramp outwards, a street vendor would come on, offering cold drinks and candy bars. I usually packed a lunch: diet Coke (called Coke Lite in Chile), ramitas, a Super Ocho bar, and some maraquetta bread, all purchased at the OK Mart a few blocks from my apartment. And then we were on the freeway, leaving the city. The first few times I did this, in my first year in Chile, it was a moment full of excitement and trepidation, leaving the somewhat-familiar terrain of Santiago for the unknown parts around it. By this point, the transition was smooth and I felt as comfortable in the fields outside of Santiago as inside it.
From Talagante, the southwestern suburb that had previously been my high-water mark, it is 75 km to the coast. This divides neatly into 5 walks of 15 kilometers. At an easy pace of 6 kilometers an hour, that would only take me 2.5 hours per leg. I have never been good at early rising, so this gave me time to leave the house at a leisurely pace, get to my destination, and then spend three hours walking, before repeating the process in reverse, coming back to Santiago in the late afternoon. As the summer turned to autumn, those late afternoons became early evenings. The first leg of my journey, back in March, I went further than I thought I would. Starting out in Talagante, I walked westward to El Monte, where I had been planning on turning around. But so taken was I with the spirit of adventure, I pressed on another hour or so to El Paico. I waited for a bus, unaware of the bus schedule, unaware if the buses even had schedules, until I found a bus that would take me slowly, back to the terminal in Santiago.
From there, it accelerated. Although I was still only doing these walks once a week, over the course of a month. The next step was backwards: I took a bus to Melipilla and then walked backwards, until I reached that bus stop in El Paico, as the dusk fell nervously over a small highway town. Was I sure of the schedules? Would a bus really stop for me, so many dozens of miles from home? What would I do if it didn't? But that thought didn't bother me until the end. For most of the day I was just walking down a country road, with a wide shoulder. I remember that day, Instagram had inexplicably failed. I thought it was a problem with my own phone, and that I lacked connection. I was nervous at not being connected to the internet. I was used to having every nook and cranny of my daily life shared, and perhaps impressing people with the exotic nature of my travels. To people back in the Pacific Northwest, the town names probably seem exotic. But as I was walking down that road, I was impressed by how much like The Willamette Valley everything around me looked. Although at the same latitude as Los Angeles, the climate in Santiago is much cooler, and at time, looking at a wall of Himalayan Blackberry, I could imagine I was back walking around Salem, Oregon---except for the presence of citrus farms.
Trip 3, westward out of Melipilla, was the only one of these trips where I brought along another person. I had told my friend John, an Australian, about this adventure, and he wanted to come along. Most of my compatriots, Chileno and gringo, thought the entire idea quizzical: Melipilla itself was just a name on a map, and the small towns around it were not even names. Also, at this point, I was just guessing at the existence of bus routes. I would go on Google Maps streetview and scan along, and every few hundred meters, there would be a bus shelter by the side of the road, so I inferred that there would be buses as well. But how often and in what hours did they run? What did they cost? I didn't know, so I sat out and hoped that it would be easy enough to figure out. On that day, still early autumn, I forgot what John and I talked about as we walked along. Probably random nerd talk, as we left Melipilla, and out along the highway, walking for several miles, until finally in the town of Puangue (several dozen homes and a school) we waited for the bus back home. The next step after that was the most complicated: while mostly I had been walking along normal roads, where the freeway crossed the border between the Santiago Region and the Valparaiso Region, there was a small gap where the frontage roads disappeared, and I would have to walk along the freeway for several hundred feet. I was nervous, worried on the off chance that the carabineroes should see me trespassing on the side of the freeway, and detain me. I ran over various scenarios for doing a gringo smash in case this happened. Spoiler: it did not. And in fact, when I got to the small ridge that separated Region V from the Region Metropolitan, I found a shrine complex to a figure called the "Deceased Correa", a folk saint in Argentina who died with a baby on her breast, and was found several days later with it still nursing. For this reason, truck drivers pile up water bottles in an animita to her. Messy and environmentally dangerous, but it would certainly give me a reason to be there. Other than that brief pretended anxiety, the fourth walk was just as easy. The fifth voyage was the final one, and would involve leaving the main course of the highway. Instead, I would be taking a smaller road that would dip between the coastal hills, going by vast vineyards and coastal forests. And very few towns: I would be off the road, such as it was. For the first part of my journey, the road had marks not just for every kilometer, but for every 100 meters, regular marks of my regular progress, the soft boredom of a well-regulated journey enveloping me. Eventually the road left the hills and entered the forests, and then I descended downwards, going through little towns before reaching the coast. This last leg was also the only one where I had a conversation, a man who seemed to have some form of mild developmental disability ran up next to me and asked me where I was from. He was a bit obnoxious, as he asked me a number of questions, but from the loud greetings he gave to passing motorists, I guessed this was just a normal part of life in the town. He left me when I left the town, a few miles from San Antonio. When I finally reached my destination, I was at the long bridge over the Maipo River, right at the mouth. The sun was reaching the western horizon, and I was considering whether I could make it to the sandy beaches that were the "ocean ocean". Instead I walked down the embankment by the bridge, and touched my foot to the marshy waters of its estuary. More or less the ocean, I thought, even if it wasn't a sandy beach. It was getting late, so I declared victory, found a local bus going the few miles to the San Antonio bus terminal, and realizing I had completed a mission, set out back to Santiago. The date was April 22, 2019: less than two months later, I would be on a plane out of Chile, and now a year later, the circumstances of when I could return look uncertain, to say the least.
It was hard for me to write this, because while the journey was a meaningful thing that transformed my relationship to the landscape, it is hard to write about the details that might make it feel meaningful to a reader. How do I explain the exact feeling of being there? Chile is in many ways a prosaic country, and these walks were in many cases uneventful: mile after mile melting away as I walked along well-maintained sidewalks, eating convenience store snack food, waiting for buses that ran with regularity to well-maintained shelters. Just outside of this were ditches and hills filled with weeds, small towns that had been inhabited for thousands of years, people I couldn't talk to, and Chile's entire uncertain history, and the invisible, simmering tensions that would lead up to the protest movement just six months later. I can give you no reason why it was a transformational experience, how the exact feeling of munching on ramitas while walking along a dusty frontage road made me feel something. And perhaps that is the only thing I can really conclude: even a "plain" experience can mean a lot, when you are experiencing it.