Wednesday, August 21, 2013

The Changing Geopolitics of Mapping


In the early 1980s, when I was a graduate student researching my M.A. thesis on llama-alpaca herders in Chile’s Parque Nacional Lauca, I was infatuated with maps. In fact, my love of maps was one of the reasons that I entered the Ph.D. program in Geography at Berkeley.

I had been to Lauca before I started grad school but, when I returned on a research grant from the Inter-American Foundation, I found it a little frustrating because of the limited availability of maps in what the Chileans regarded as a strategically significant border area along the Bolivian frontier. In the 19th century, Chile had acquired the area during the War of the Pacific, and it limited access to maps – for the most part, excellent topographic maps were available at a scale of 1:100,000, but areas closest to the border were literally whited out.
The village of Parinacota, in Parque Nacional Lauca
Those maps displayed a grid of the areas in question, but with no landmarks or physical features whatsoever – if you were close to the border, as I was in the Aymara village of Parinacota (pictured above), you could see its namesake 6,438-meter (20,827-ft) volcanic peak (pictured below, at right), but it didn’t appear on the map (the village itself sits at roughly 4,392 meters, roughly 14,409 feet, so the peak is a pretty imposing presence). Those areas were whited out, though, because the agency responsible for mapping was the Instituto Geográfico Militar, which reserved the best maps to themselves for ostensible security reasons.
The snow-capped Payachatas volcanos, Pomerabe and Parinacota, in Parque Nacional Lauca
The reason the IGM whited out those areas was that Bolivia claims the area in question, though in fact it was Peruvian territory at the time of the Chilean takeover. Moreover, Chile’s diversion of the Río Lauca for hydroelectricity is a lingering issue (the river’s source is in Chile, but it drains into Bolivia).
Argentina's Instituto Geográfico Nacional, in Buenos Aires
The military role in cartography is a remnant of a 19th-century attitude toward geopolitics; it's perhaps worth noting that, in General Augusto Pinochet’s textbook on the topic, he apparently confused Washington State and Washington DC. Traditionally, the Argentine military has taken a similar approach but I was surprised, on a recent web search, to learn that Argentina’s own Instituto Geográfico Militar (pictured above, from Creative Commons) no longer exists as such – in 2009, it became the Instituto Geográfico Nacional which, symbolically at least, would suggest a distancing between geographical information and its military applications. That said, the shift may be more rhetorical than real – small print, on the site, makes it clear that the IGN still depends on the Ministerio de Defensa, the Defense Ministry.
Ross Road, Stanley, Falkland Islands
Interestingly, in 1986-7, when I spent 13 months in the Falkland Islands – which Argentina claims as the Malvinas, and invaded and occupied for ten weeks in 1982 – I had my best access ever to official maps. On a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship, I purchased a full set of 1:50,000 topographic maps by the British Ordnance Survey from the local government Secretariat in the capital of Stanley (pictured above).
My rocket launcher tube, salvaged from the British military
In the era of Google Maps, of course, ordinary citizens have access to more and better cartographic information than the official agencies of that time did. Still, given the sensitivity of a conflict that had ended only a few years earlier, it continues to amuse me to look at the salvaged rocket launcher tube I used to ship the maps back to England on the RAF charter flight at the end of my time there.

Sunday, August 18, 2013

A Coastal Road Trip, From Canada to Chile?


Often, on this blog and elsewhere, I’ve pointed out that the west coast of South America is a mirror image of its North American counterpart, with vast deserts comparable to those of Baja California, a Mediterranean heartland resembling California, and mid-latitude forests and fjords in higher latitudes.

One of the comparisons I make, in the course of writing and lecturing, is between British Columbia’s Vancouver Island and Chile’s Isla Grande de Chiloé. Superficially, the comparison is obvious – they’re two large islands slightly separated from the continent, by the Strait of Georgia and the Canal de Chacao, respectively (though Vancouver Island is three times larger).
Both are lush and forested, with temperate rain forests and extensive hiking trails, but they have one thing in common that I learned only recently. My Moon colleague David Stanley, who covers the South Pacific but also overlaps with me in covering Rapa Nui (Easter Island), informs me the village of Lund (pictured above) is (in the words of a local website) “the northern terminus of Highway 101, the Pacific Coastal Highway, a 15,200 km highway along the Pacific Coast extending from Canada to Chile” (photograph courtesy of David Stanley).
I have never been to Lund (named after the Swedish city), though I have been to more southerly parts of Vancouver Island. I have, however, been many times to the port of Quellón (pictured above), the route’s ostensible southern terminus, on the Isla Grande. I had, however, never heard of the “Pacific Coastal Route” as any sort of unified entity – in fact, US 101, which runs through Washington, Oregon and California, often heads inland while California’s State Highway 1 almost invariably sticks to the coast.

To the south, Mexico’s Carretera Federal No. 1 runs the length of the Baja California peninsula, but is not always coastal and, where it is coastal, it’s not always on the Pacific. In the rest of Mexico and Central America, the Pan-American Highway often approaches the coast but, in the words of journalist Jake Silverstein, it’s “a system so vast, so incomplete and so incomprehensible it is not so much a road as it is the idea of Pan-Americanism itself.”

There is, of course, no highway through Panama’s Darien Gap, and roads rarely follow the lush tropical lands along the Pacific coasts of Colombia and Ecuador, where most of the people live in the highlands. Peru and northern Chile are a different matter, but in Chile’s Mediterranean heartland and southern lakes region the main highways bypass the shoreline for the central valley.

I’ve never been to Lund and, though I’ll probably revisit Quellón later this year, I’ll still find it hard to think of it as the end point of any unified route – especially since there are several other ferry crossings I’ve not yet mentioned, including one that continues south to Chile’s own Carretera Austral, arguably the best road trip in all of South America.

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

The Chilean Escudo, Before and After


For those of you waiting with bated breath, or simply insufficiently curious to research the answer to last Saturday’s quiz, Chile’s official currency between 1960 and 1975 was the escudo, which takes its name from the country’s coat of arms (the word, however, is not exclusive to Chilean Spanish). In the early independence era, Chile also issued gold escudos.
The escudo replaced an earlier peso after a period of hyper-inflation, and disappeared after another similar period. The image above is the one-half escudo banknote of the time. Before entering the European Union, Portugal and its colonies also used escudo as the name of its currency (the word is identical in Spanish and Portuguese).

In the days since I posted the quiz, I had five correct responses; the second and third were virtual ties, so I’m giving away three books instead of two. Those will go to Jennifer Rose of Morelia, Mexico; Steve Behaegel of Merelbeke, Belgium; and Owen Lipsett of Incheon, Korea (my readers are a little widespread than I had figured on, though Owen is presently visiting his hometown of Scarborough, New York).

The Beer Amendment
Since I finished this piece, an anonymous correspondent (see the comments below) reminded me that I had overlooked another meaning for Escudo - it's one of Chile's most popular beers. I don't feel all that bad about the omission, as it's a pretty generic supermarket beer that can't come close to the craft brews Chile now produces, and my own beer consumption amounts to less than a six pack per annum - I far prefer Chilean wine (and its Argentine and Uruguayan counterparts). Still, in the interest of thorough coverage, I mention it here.

Social Media Update
Meanwhile, I don’t recall whether or not I have mentioned that I now have a Facebook account, which I use primarily for photography; please feel free to visit and to give me a “like” (presuming, of course, that you actually like it). More recently, I have opened a Twitter account (@southernconetrv), which lets me refer readers to items of interest that I don’t have time to explore in greater depth, and to make succinct editorial comments. Please feel free to follow me.

Saturday, August 10, 2013

An Austral Summer in Chile? Win This Book!


As the autumnal equinox approaches – it’s less than six weeks away – I start thinking about South America. At the moment I’m doing a desk update on my National Geographic Traveler guide to Argentina, but from early November I’ll be doing a field update of Moon Handbooks Patagonia. There’ll be more on that, including some novelties, in the near future.
One topic that comes up whenever my travel season is approaching is money and, it appears, southernmost South America could be a little cheaper this year, what with Argentina’s “blue” dollar and lesser declines in the Chilean and Uruguayan pesos, as well as the Brazilian real. That, in turn, caused me to think of other currencies, and the fact that Chile did not always call its currency the peso.
Thus, I’ve decided to award free copies of the new fourth edition of Moon Handbooks Chile to the first two readers who can tell me the name of Chile’s previous currency, which lasted from 1960 until 1975. As a clue, I include an image of the Chilean coat-of-arms, which displays the huemul (Andean deer) and the Andean condor on either side of the lone star (no relation to Texas) and the motto “Por La Fuerza o La Razón” (“By Might or Right” or, translated more gently, “By Strength or Reason”).

Please do not send your answers to the comments box, but rather to my email address, southerncone (at) mac.com. You’ll then have one more tool to plan your holiday in Chile (and southernmost Argentina, as El Calafate and the Argentine side of Tierra del Fuego both appear in the book as well).

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Cruising for Apps - in Central America?


Several years ago, in the southern Chilean city of Coyhaique, I encountered an elderly Englishwoman shuffling across the pentagonal Plaza de Armas. After I remarked that it was unusual to find someone of her age on her own in Patagonia, she informed me that she had come from a round-the-Horn cruise ship, recently docked at Puerto Chacabuco, and that it was her only option for traveling at this stage of her life. While she hadn’t lost her passion for seeing the world, she had come to terms with the fact that she needed support services – such as an on-board physician – if she were to continue to explore the planet.
As long as I have been involved in travel and tourism, my experience with the cruise ship industry has been limited. Most notably, I have sailed on the scenic Navimag ferry from Puerto Montt to Puerto Natales numerous times (though that’s not exactly a cruise), enjoyed the luxury Cruceros Australis expedition shuttles between Punta Arenas and Ushuaia several times, and once spent a week seeing the South Shetland Islands with Antártica XII. On Guatemala’s Lago Izabal and Río Dulce, I passed several days aboard an otherwise comfortable yacht whose sleeping quarters were best described as “tapered at the foot end.”

Despite my own skepticism of mega-cruise ships, such as those that discharge thousands of passengers that briefly overrun the Falkland Islands every austral summer, I’ve grown to appreciate that not everyone aboard them is an incurious sybarite (though it does bewilder me that, as so often happens, some passengers do not even bother going ashore in exciting ports such as Buenos Aires or Stanley).
Still, in following up my recent comments on Amazonia, I was intrigued to spend a recent flight to Denver poring through Ray Rychnovsky’s new iTunes app on Cruise Ports of Central America (also available in Android), though it has some shortcomings – in the first instance, the name is a little misleading, as it also covers Pacific Mexico and the southern Caribbean. I also found some unfortunate errors – consistently misspelling “Colombia,’ for instance - but I also learned a lot about the excursions that cruise ship passengers can enjoy out of towns like Ensenada, Puerto Quetzal (Guatemala) and my own personal favorite of Cartagena (Colombia, pictured above; I’ve never visited Cartagena as a cruise ship passenger, however).

In my opinion, Rychnovsky often errs on the side of caution, but he does stress that destinations like Ensenada, Antigua Guatemala and especially Cartagena are safe to visit. When they’re not – such as Acapulco – he’s candid even as he’s hopeful that cruise ship lines will eventually return in force there. I’m not quite ready to consign myself to the cossetted clients of cruise ship lines yet but, should I ever have to do so, I hope I’ll still have the courage of that Englishwoman in Coyhaique, and that the resources to help me do so – such as this app – will continue to improve.

Saturday, August 3, 2013

Chile Burns Money? On Subsidizing the Vatican


Valparaíso is, by my reckoning, Chile’s most distinctive city, its hills neighborhoods linked to the historic center – a UNESCO World Heritage Site - by picturesque funiculars. For 19th-century sailors, their first glimpse of the city came from the bell tower of the Iglesia San Francisco, which gave it the name of “Pancho” (a diminutive of “Francisco”). That’s no longer true, though, since a fire, whose causes are still under investigation, virtually destroyed the landmark church yesterday (as the Spanish-language video below shows).
I’m not a religious person, though I do appreciate the architecture and historical significance of structures such as this landmark church on Cerro Barón (pictured above before the fire). What I find bewildering is that, with so many other necessities, the Chilean government would prioritize the reconstruction of a church (dating from 1845) that had already suffered major fires in 1983 and 2013. At the time of the fire, it was close to being re-inaugurated by outgoing President Sebastián Piñera.
As a symbol of the city, the church is a designated national historical monument and, if it all possible, it would be nice to see its reconstruction, but there are problems here. The government contributed to the recent reconstruction and, on the video, officials seem to suggest that will again be the case. As a non-Chilean, I don’t have any direct say in the matter, but subsidizing a wealthy institution like the Catholic Church seems like a poor choice of priorities when topics like funding for university education are on the docket for the next president, whoever she is. Doesn’t the church itself have fire insurance to cover this? (Despite the brick facade, much of the interior consists of wood).
This is far from the first time the Church has leaned on government for assistance in restoring its real estate, but it hasn’t always been successful. In 1985, Santiago’s Basílica del Salvador suffered major earthquake damage but, despite repeated requests from the church, there was little progress until the massive 2010 earthquake accelerated the damage. Now fenced off, the building may not be an immediate danger to surrounding buildings but, realistically speaking, this is a building that should be demolished.
Nevertheless, two years ago, the Ministerio de Obras Públicas (Public Works Ministry) announced that it would accept bids for a temporary support structure, in order to evaluate a possible future reconstruction. Surely, though, if the Catholic hierarchy thought this was a building worth saving, they would have invested some of their own funds in last 28 years.

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