What Time Is It? Chile Declines To Reset Its Clocks

In less than a week, the northern hemisphere’s summer solstice will bring the longest day of the year – in Northern California, where I am spending the season, sunrise will occur at 5:47 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time and sunset at 8:34 p.m. A hemisphere away in Chile, though, things will be very different despite the current government’s measure to institute daylight savings time throughout the year – presumably to reduce energy consumption in a country that still imports nearly all of its fossil fuels.

Whether daylight savings time is actually an energy saving measure is debatable, but the general topic is interesting here. Personally, while traveling in Chile, I’ve always preferred daylight savings because I could get breakfast earlier, with more daylight to explore the cities and the countryside (some accommodations will not serve breakfast until 9 a.m.) while researching my books. Also, because of the country’s string-bean geography, it consists of a single time zone (with one notable exception), so that daylight hours vary dramatically in different parts of the country.

Traditionally, daylight savings started in December and ended in March (in time for the new school year), but it’s gradually expanded. Now, with uniform time throughout the year, this morning’s sunrise in the coastal city of Valparaíso – whose landmark clock tower the Reloj Turri appears above – was at 8:46 a.m., with sunset at 6:47 p.m. Valparaíso’s latitude is roughly comparable to that of San Francisco.

Farther north, though, it’s a rather different story because, in subtropical latitudes far closer to the Equator, the length of day varies little throughout the year. Today’s sunrise at the remote settlement of Pisagua – a tiny seaside community that was once a thriving nitrate port – was at 8:11 a.m., with sunset at 7:10 p.m. The structure above is Pisagua’s own historic clock tower, though the clock itself no longer functions.

By contrast, in the southern city of Punta Arenas, this morning’s sunrise did not take place until 9:55 a.m., with sunset at 5:33 p.m. At a latitude comparable to British Columbia’s Moresby Island, Punta Arenas enjoys long summer days but, at this time of year, children are arriving at school well before daybreak. Today, the modest clock outside the city’s Muelle Prat commercial pier is probably covered with snow.

For most visitors, Chile’s time change has one big advantage. I’ve written before on the jetlag issue when traveling to southernmost South America, and this changes things a bit, for the better. Effectively, Argentina and Chile are now in the same time zone – four hours behind GMT or UTC – which will simplify scheduling on trips that require border crossings. It also means that, when most of the United States is on daylight savings time from early March until November, Argentina and Chile will be on the same schedule at the US East Coast. Though it may still be a long overnight flight from anywhere in the US, that eliminates or at least reduces the jetlag problem.

Of course, there remains that one exception I mentioned above. Chile’s Pacific outlier of Easter Island (pictured above) is five hours and two times zones west of the South American mainland.

Gas(oline) Pains in Patagonia?

When I first drove the Santa Cruz province segment of Argentina’s Ruta 40, in 1991, it was all gravel. In four days, my wife, a friend and I saw three other vehicles between El Calafate and the town of Perito Moreno. I vaguely recall we bought some gasoline from an estancia just outside Parque Nacional Perito Moreno, but – perhaps naively – we never worried about running out of fuel.

Today this segment of Ruta 40 is almost completely paved and one might expect that, over the ensuing decades, energy infrastructure would be even more reliable. If so, one would be wrong - having driven the route at least another ten times since then, I have always warned drivers to fill the tank at every opportunity and, even then, carry extra fuel.

So what happened when I failed to follow my own advice? Tuesday morning, I left the town of El Chaltén – Argentina’s self-proclaimed “trekking capital” – with the idea of reaching the town of Cochrane, on Chile’s Carretera Austral – that night. My route would resemble the one I drove in 1991, except for the start and finish points, but the distance would still be comparable.

Leaving El Chaltén, I had more than half a tank of gas and a 20-liter can, so I satisfied myself with photographing YPF’s new, solar-powered container station (pictured at top) on the outskirts of town. I figured to fill the tank at Tres Lagos (pictured immediately above, the last supply in 360 km, where I had always found plenty of fuel on previous trips. I should not have done so because, when I got there, the pumps said “no hay nafta” (no gasoline), though there was diesel.

That was a problem because, even though I had enough fuel to reach the next stop at Bajo Caracoles – where I would turn west toward Chile – that remote station was notorious for running out of gasoline, to the point that, in the recent past, some motorists might wait days for the supply tanker to arrive. Given that reality, I had to divert to the more reliable option of Gobernador Gregores, which involved at least an additional hour’s driving.

When I finally got to Bajo Caracoles (pictured above, from an earlier trip), there was fuel but I had no way of knowing that in advance. It was also getting late in the afternoon, and I had to decide whether to tackle the rugged westbound road toward Cochrane (where the border would soon close) or follow the paved road north to Perito Moreno and then west to the border towns of Los Antiguos (Argentina) and Chile Chico (Chile).

Reluctantly, I decided on the latter and took advantage of the changed route to pay a brief visit to an ailing and elderly friend in Perito Moreno. I then continued to Los Antiguos only to discover that there was no gasoline on the Argentine side, where the price is about half what it is in Chile. If I had only filled up in Perito, 53 km east, I would have saved a significant chunk of change.

Interestingly, there are two significant slogans on the side of the YPF container at El Chaltén. The shorter one translates as "Social Supply Module," while the longer one says "Wherever an Argentine needs energy, we're there." Of course, I'm not an Argentine, so maybe I don't count - but the car that pulled up behind me at Tres Lagos was.

The moral of this story could be that, if you don’t follow your own advice, you get what you deserve.

The Heat Wave Abates? Plus, An ATM Alert

Last month, when I arrived in Santiago, I went from California's approaching winter to Chile's arriving summer, with temperatures in the high eighties to low nineties (around 35° C). Even as I headed south into higher latitudes, the heat wave didn’t dissipate much until, just a couple days ago, it rained on the outskirts of Puerto Octay, where I’m staying at the Swiss-Chilean guesthouse Zapato Amarillo (pictured above).

Today, at Octay, the forecast high is a comfortable 72° F (22° C), the symmetrical snow-covered cone of Volcán Osorno is already visible, and it promises to be an agreeable day. That’s not necessarily the case across the Andes, or at least in Buenos Aires, where temperatures are rising: yesterday’s high reached 44.4° C (112° F) in the Argentine capital’s warmest December in 43 years.

Temperatures are also rising, politically, because of rolling blackouts that have left people without power for days at a time, and the government  of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner suggests they should be happy because state-set electricity rates are low. For someone who often flies the presidential jet to Patagonia when things get tough, this might qualify as a “Let them eat cake” moment.

While I prefer the weather in Puerto Octay, I’ve managed to tolerate the summer heat in Buenos Aires even though our apartment doesn’t have air-conditioning – to this point, our large ceiling fans have provided sufficient cooling even if I’ve sometimes slept atop the sheets instead of under them. If I were in BA at present, I might feel differently but, even if I managed to get the a/c installed, we might not have the power to operate it.

AN ATM ALERT

ATMs are widespread in Argentina and Chile but, unlike the newer US machines where your card never leaves your hand, both countries still have the kind that swallows your card and then, presumably, spits it out after finishing your transaction (the one pictured below is from Hanga Roa, on Easter Island). A few weeks ago in Santiago, though, I neglected to retrieve my card and only, after dinner, did I realize it was missing. I returned to the ATM in the slim hope someone had left it there but I was wrong, so I had to cancel it and request a replacement.

That’s one lesson to be learned while traveling here – I had never done such a thing before – but there’s another that’s perhaps even more important. In Chile, I was able to have my bank FedEx a replacement to my friends at Pucón’s TravelAid, where I picked it up a week ago. That’s not necessarily an option in Argentina, where opaque import and customs requirements now require most if not all courier packages to be picked up at Aduana (customs) at the international airport at Ezeiza. That’s a nuisance, at best, if you’re in Buenos Aires; if you’re elsewhere in the country, best of luck, though registered mail (rather than a courier service) may result in direct delivery.

Of course, if you’re using ATMs in Argentina instead of the “blue dollar,” you’re already low on luck. When my Zapato Amarillo friends went to Bariloche last month, they were getting upwards of nine pesos per dollar instead of the ATM’s official rate (6.47 as of today).

China Dam(n)s Argentine Patagonia?

For some years now, there’s been controversy over the ecological impact of several new dams planned for Chilean Patagonia, and concern over the deforestation required to build transmission towers through thousands of kilometers an almost roadless area. That’s still unsettled but, in the interim, plans for similar hydroelectric projects in Argentine Patagonia have gone almost unnoticed outside the country’s borders.

Environmentally, the parallels are imperfect. On the well-watered Chilean side, exposed to Pacific storms, the dense native forests are vulnerable and erosion could be severe; on the Argentine side, the Río Santa Cruz meanders through seemingly endless steppe. In April of 1834, according to Charles Darwin, Captain Robert FitzRoy of the HMS Beagle organized an excursion up the broad Río Santa Cruz, around the site of present-day town of Piedra Buena (the bridge pictured above crosses the river just south of town), but the strong current forced the crews of three whaleboats to pull the vessels upstream from shore.

As Darwin described it, the river (pictured above) “runs in a winding course through a valley, which extends in a direct line westward. This valley varies from five to ten miles in breadth; it is bounded by step-formed terraces, which rise in most parts, one above the other, to the height of five hundred feet, and have on the opposite sides a remarkable correspondence.” Over three weeks, the expedition managed to ascend roughly 140 miles and came within sight of the snow-covered Andes before turning back; an ascent that took them nearly six days of hard labor took just one to return to the Beagle, anchored on the Atlantic coast.

Given the terrain that Darwin describes, the hydroelectric potential is obvious and, in fact, there are two dams planned at sites downstream from the popular tourist town of El Calafate. The more westerly of the two will be named for the late president Néstor Kirchner, husband of current president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, while the more easterly will take its name from Jorge Cepernic, a former governor of Santa Cruz province.

While the ecological consequences of flooding parts of the sprawling Argentine steppe may not be quite so dire as deforesting the Chilean side and submerging its rushing whitewater, the project is not without controversy. First proposed in 2007, it failed to find adequate funding and then, three years later, a Buenos Aires-based consortium took it over. That lasted only briefly, though, after a dispute between the province and the federal government, followed by a new contract with a different group and the Chinese  construction company Gezhouba, which built the controversial Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze.  The cost, though, will be nearly US$1 billion greater than the previous bid, raising questions as to where all that extra money will go.

¿Adios Hugo?

Normally, in this blog, I don’t venture outside the Southern Cone countries, but the week’s biggest event has taken place in the only South American country I have never visited – Venezuela, where the charismatic president Hugo Chávez died on Tuesday. Some Venezuelans might disagree that I have never set foot in the country, because I have visited parts of neighboring Guyana over which Venezuela has an irredentist claim, but I can assert that I’ve never had a Venezuelan stamp in my passport.

Chávez, of course, was a controversial and polemical figure. Like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, he was a military golpista (coupmonger) although, unlike Pinochet, his attempt to overthrow Venezuela’s constitutional government failed. When he finally did ascend to the presidency, through legitimate elections, he went about concentrating power through patronage politics, largely financed by oil revenues. Despite his ability to communicate with his country’s dispossessed, Chávez did them a great disservice – with his hyper-personalized politics and short attention span toward policy, he undermined the country’s institutions. Though he was not personally murderous (unlike Pinochet), his de facto neglect helped make Venezuela one of the world’s most violent countries – the capital of Caracas averages two homicides per hour.

In a recent edition of The New Yorker, journalist Jon Lee Anderson (biographer of Che Guevara) described Chávez as the “Slumlord of Caracas” in an article that would discourage just about anyone else thinking of visiting the city. On Tuesday, Anderson published an incisive post-mortem follow-up that characterized the former colonel as one of the world’s “most flamboyantly provocative leaders.” Anderson’s nuanced assessment of Chávez avoids demonizing him, but does point out his contradictions and weaknesses; the late Christopher Hitchens was not so generous in writing about his own personal encounter with the Venezuelan caudillo.

Chávez is gone, but will Chavismo survive? Oddly, the Caracas caretaker government prohibited mourners from snapping photographs of the autocrat in his open casket but, according to his designated successor Nicolás Maduro (pending elections), Venezuela will mummify the corpse for public display in a monument worthy of Lenin or Mao. This would make a great supplementary chapter for Heather Pringle’s remarkable study The Mummy Congress, but the Venezuelans could look for precedents closer to home – the Chinchorro mummies of Chile, for instance, or Evita Perón in Recoleta (though Evita’s cadaver is not on public view, the crypt is).

None of Chávez’s strongest ideological allies, most notably Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Evo Morales of Bolivia, and Cristina Fernández of Argentina, has the charisma to assume his role on the global or even the regional stage. More than that, none of them has the petro-dollars that Chávez used to buy his way onto the scene (Ecuador is an oil exporter, and OPEC member, but a relatively small one). President Fernández, for her part, believes just as strongly in patronage politics but has even fewer options – not only has she had to undertake emergency measures to keep dollars from fleeing the country, but she was also in hock to Hugo – as the conspicuous presence of his "Bolivarian" PDVSA, in the Buenos Aires barrio of Retiro, would indicate. Not so long ago, Argentina was self-sufficient in oil but, after decades of mismanagement, it now has to import.