Valdivia, in far southern Chile, is one of the few South American cities built of wood, even the streets being paved with planks
The eight o’clock express from Santiago sets one down in Valparaiso, one hundred and twenty miles away, at noon. From the Mapocho station the train climbs out of the central valley of Chile, squirming its way through many tunnels and over mountain torrents, with frequent magnificent views of the rich, flat plain which gradually spreads out hundreds of feet below. Then the valley narrowed and we came to Llaillai, the junction of the line up to Los Andes and over into the Argentine. Curving around the higher mountains, the other branch coasts leisurely downward, passing here a long vineyard, there pastures bordered by rows of Lombardy poplars and dotted with cattle, now a great estate belonging to a man living in Paris, the stone mansion of his administrator near at hand, the mountains forming the background of every vista. At Calera the “Longitudinal” sets out into the arid north, the fertile part of Chile quickly coming to an end in this direction and turning into the dreary desert which is at present the country’s chief source of wealth and fame. Then all at once the Pacific I had seen but once since entering South America two years before burst out in full ocean-blue expanse, without even an island to break up the unprotected bay in which the winds often raise havoc. Below Viña del Mar, Chile’s most fashionable watering-place, the precipitous hills come down so close to the sea that there is barely room for the highway, railroad, and tram line to squeeze their way past into the commercial metropolis and second city of the country.
Valparaiso, the greatest port not only of Chile but of the West Coast of South America, is the “Vale of Paradise” only comparatively. Built in layers or strata up the steep sides of the barren, shale coast-hills, it stretches for miles along the amphitheater of low mountains that surround a large semicircular bay, behind which one can see jumbled masses of houses sprawling away over the many ridges until these have climbed out of sight. There is so little shore at Valparaiso that there is room in most places only for two or three narrow streets following the curve of the bay, and for only one the entire length of the town, under the edge of the cliffs, much of it occupied by the dingy, two-story, female-“conducted” street-cars. In the central part of town a small space of flat ground has been filled in across one of the scallops of the bay, and on this made land are cramped the principal business houses and the central Plaza Arturo Prat. It is here that the earthquakes do their most appalling damage. The rest of the city climbs steeply up the shale hills overhanging the business section, in a jumble of buildings which give the town its only picturesque and unique feature. To get “top side,” where the majority of the Vale of Paradise dwellers live, there are escalators, or, more properly, “lifts,” since the majority of the largest foreign colony on the West Coast are English. That is, every little way along the cliff are two cars at opposite ends of a cable, which climb the slopes at precarious angles, though they are level inside, in about two minutes at a cost of ten centavos. For those who lack the requisite two cents, and for cautious persons who will not risk their lives on the escalators, several stairway streets rise in zigzag above row after row of sheet-iron roofs to the upper stories of the town. During this ascent the whole city spreads out below, all the panorama of Valparaiso and its semicircular bay, the latter speckled with hundreds of steamers, “wind-jammers,” and small craft, each far enough from the others to be ready to dash unhampered into the safety of the open sea when the wild southwest gales sweep in upon them. The Chileans formed some time ago the courageous project of having an English company protect this great open roadstead with a huge breakwater; but thousands of mammoth concrete blocks have so far been dropped into the seemingly bottomless harbor, leaving no visible trace, and now there are floated out hollow concrete structures of 150-foot dimensions. Once on top there are other street-cars, and more climbing to do, if one wishes to go anywhere in particular, though nothing as steep as the face of the cliff itself. Here may be seen Viña del Mar, a broad expanse of the Pacific, the aërial best residences of Valparaiso, and a picturesque tangle of poorer houses stringing away up the backs of the many verdureless ridges into the arid, uninhabited country.
The earth, like the sea, casts up on its beaches much human driftwood. Valparaiso is no exception to this rule, and here may be found wanderers, beachcombers, and roustabouts of all nationalities. Primitive landing facilities give its rascally boatmen the whip-hand over arriving or departing travelers. Many languages are spoken, English not the least important among them. Along the docks the roto stevedore works barefoot and bare-legged even in the winter season; over all the town rests a pall of aggressive, rather conscienceless commerce which offsets its scenic beauties. The Chilean is not a particularly pleasant fellow at best; down at his principal seaport he is even below the average in this respect. Impudent and grasping, unpleasantly blasé from his contact with the lower strata of the outside world—but all this one forgets in watching the red sun sink into the Pacific from the impériale of a street-car winding close along the edge of the sea, or when the lights of the town, piled into the lower sky, fade away as the traveler turns inland and climbs back up into the Andes.
From the squalid Alameda Station of Santiago another express sped southward through rows of those slender Lombardy poplars that are a feature of any landscape of lower Chile. The broad central valley, distinct from the arid northern section and growing more and more fertile from the capital southward, with ever more frequent streams pouring down from the range on the east to add to its productiveness, stretches almost floor-flat for more than five hundred miles to where the narrow country breaks up into islands. In this autumn season vineyards and cornfields stood sear and shriveled. The slightly rolling country had an indistinct brown tint under a gray, yet illuminated sky, the valley reaching from the all but invisible Pacific hills to the jagged, snow-capped Andean wall, like an irregular dull-white line painted along the canvas of the sky some little distance above the horizon. San Bernardo, a summer colony, was now a large cluster of closed houses surrounded by brown vineyards touched here and there with a deep red, as of poison ivy. A few bushy trees, some still green, the rest yellow, were half-visible on the left; now and then an evergreen grove broke the prevailing color with the verdant emerald of firs, shading away through all the tints of green to late-autumn saffron, a hazy world spreading away on either hand and rising beyond to the Cordillera lying dim-white under a new fall of snow.
Paralleling the railroad were good highways, sometimes with high banks, more often lined with hedges, which added a suggestion of England to the general atmosphere of California in November. Along these roads were many ox-carts, the drivers walking ahead and punching back over their shoulders at the animals with sharp goads. There was color in the ponchos, often in the other clothing of the lower classes here, especially among the huasos, as the gaucho is known in Chile, and this color seemed to be in exact ratio to the Indian blood, not of the individual, but of a given locality. Dust was everywhere. We passed numerous large corrals bearing the sign “Ferias Rejionales,” some with cattle in them, all surrounded by an elevated promenade from which prospective buyers could examine the stock. Horses and cattle shipped north in freight trains all had pasted on their rumps a paper bearing their destination. Towns were frequent and sometimes large, and there was much freight as well as passenger traffic, no doubt because Chile is like Egypt in that there is but one route up and down the country, here following the elevated central valley between the Andes and the sea.
At every station of any size groups of women and girls offered for sale fruit, bread, sweetmeats, and the like. They were particularly well stocked with grapes; native apples were plentiful, Chile being the only land in South America which grows them; not a few sold the pretty red copihüe, the national flower of Chile, a long bell-shaped blossom growing on a climbing plant of deep roots. The movements of these women were lively and vivacious compared with those of the higher Andes of more northern west-coast countries. Each wore a white dressing-gown over many layers of dark clothes, and most of them were decorated with earrings or necklaces of the red-and-black beans called guayruros with which I had grown familiar in tropical Bolivia. These berries are supposed to bring luck, or at least a man, and the Chilean woman of the ignorant class will sell her only possession for a few of them. Apple and cherry orchards flanked the track here and there, many of them bordered by blackberry hedges stripped now of their fruit. Rather drab farmhouses, hung with withered rose vines, alternated with curiously un-American wheat or straw stacks. Gradually cultivation and villages decreased, and an Arizona-like country wormed its way into the plain in arid patches. Here grapes were still offered for sale, but one might easily have mistaken them for raisins.
We passed several branch lines leading off toward the Pacific, and a few shorter ones climbing a little way up the flanks of the Andes. I dropped off at the fourth of these junctions, in Talca, a large town with far too many churches and the concomitant squalor, poverty, and ignorance. The plaster was beginning to peel off in places from the adobe façade of the big, ostensibly cut-stone building facing the central plaza. Here, as in all Chile, one was struck again by society’s waste of its resources,—robust men in the prime of life scurrying about with baskets of fruit or newspapers for sale, much potential energy frittering away its time for want of occupation. “Los Boi Escouts” of Talca were announcing a benefit performance that evening, but as this did not promise sufficient interest to make up for spending a night in so dismal a place, I went on to the considerable town of Chillan. Here it had been raining and the unpaved streets were full of miniature ponds through which I picked my way to a hotel where I paid three dollars for a bed—and not much of a bed at that.
In stories I had heard Chile was noted for its low prices. If ever it had that particular charm it has now disappeared, at least for the traveler. The hard little apples sold at the stations cost as much as good ones in New York; diminutive loaves of bread were nearly as high as a whole loaf at home. Establishments masquerading under the name of “hotels” are plentiful: if there were one-fourth as many clean, honest, and well conducted it would be a decided improvement. To pay an average of twenty pesos a day in the squalor of most Chilean hotels would be mishap enough; the doctoring to which one’s bill is invariably subjected makes the experience all the more painful. Though the daily rate purports to cover all service, morning coffee and rolls are always charged for as an extra. So also is fruit, at twenty times what it sells for in the market around the corner. Baths, which are so slow in being prepared as to wear out the patience of most foreign guests, cost several pesos each time they are ordered, whether they are taken or not. The crowning trick is to make out the bill by separate items, if one has had the audacity to ask for the daily rate in advance, thus doubling it; or, if one protests against this system, the next one is to contend that the day begins at a certain fixed hour, which is always on the opposite side of the clock from that at which the traveler arrives, and that the first and last meal each constitute a full day, with the result that the man who is continually traveling pays for sixty days a month in hotels even though he spends some half of his time on trains.
It was wet and sloppy and all the world was drowned in a dense fog when I set off again at dawn. Everyone who owned them wore heavy overcoats and neck-scarfs, keeping even their noses covered. One would have fancied a demand that trains be heated would be in order in such a climate, but if the lack of artificial heat is at times unpleasant it is healthful, and the traveler in South America is likely to return with a prejudice against it. At San Rosendo I caught a branch line along the shining Bio-Bio, the largest river of Chile, and followed it northwestward to the coast, the sun at last breaking through and suddenly flooding all the scene as the train took to rounding many rolling hills covered with scrub growth. The huaso was everywhere busy with his fall plowing, his ox-drawn wooden implement as primitive as those of Peru, except for its iron point. Here there was considerable eucalyptus, the foster child of the Andean tree world, though the poplar was more in evidence and the weeping willow frequent.