Chile's Highway Hazards

I consider myself a prudent driver and somehow, in Argentina, I’ve managed to avoid any road accidents—an impressive record given the recklessness of so many Argentine motorists, a topic on which I’ve written at some length.

My long-ago confrontation with Buses Don Carlos on the Carretera Austral. At that time, the narrow road had steep edges, so almost everyone drove down the middle.

I’ve been less fortunate in Chile, though I generally consider it a safer place to drive. Once, on the Carretera Austral, I had a blind-curve bus confrontation that effectively demolished my own car and left me with broken ribs. A few years later, on the same route, I rolled a rented SUV when a tire blew on rough gravel (at that time, in 2001, almost the entire route was rough gravel), but I managed to avoid injury.

Not the SUV that I rolled.

Nothing quite so serious has happened since, though I later lost another car when I loaned it to a Santiago friend and an uninsured driver blasted through a stop sign, forcing her into a sidewalk telephone pole. She, fortunately, was uninjured and my own insurance company reimbursed me for the damage. That enabled me to buy my current vehicle, a Suzuki Grand Nomade with far lower mileage, so in that sense I actually came out ahead.

My current car on the southern segment of the Carretera Austral, almost none of which is yet paved.

On my current trip, there’s been nothing to match those occurrences, but other issues have manifested themselves. For one, Chile’s prosperity has meant a burgeoning fleet of modern automobiles—most notably SUVs—apparently owned by people with a great sense of self-entitlement (Yes, my own car’s an SUV, but I like to think I’m more considerate and I have pragmatic reasons for owning it). Many appear to be people from urban areas—probably Santiago—who think they can drive as fast on gravel as they can on a freeway.

That’s significant because a couple weeks, as I drove at a reasonable speed on a remaining gravel stretch of the Carretera Austral, south of Villa Cerro Castillo, one of these jerks passed me at high speed and threw a rock that hit my windshield. At first, the sound seemed worse than the actual damage but, in the following days, a crack appeared that’s now progressed almost all the way across the dash.

The windshield's due for replacement on Monday.

It doesn’t really affect my driving, because the crack does not obstruct my view of the road. When, however, the car next receives its annual revision técnica inspection, it would not pass and, therefore, I’ll now have to replace the windshield in Santiago. This will cost money and time that I’d prefer to devote to other parts of my trip, which ends on April 14th.

Another lesser issue was more easily but oddly solved. One of my tires was clearly losing air and, before leaving Puerto Varas for a nine-hour freeway drive to Talca, we pumped up the pressure (Anecdotally, it’s interesting that, even in these metric countries, the default option for measuring tire pressure is pounds per square inch). I thought a nail or broken glass would be the culprit but, on Thursday, the local Firestone store found no such thing—instead, apparently, air was leaking from a loose seal on the tire. It’s not a big deal like the windshield—remounting the tire cost only about US$5—but it’s a reminder that bad roads (like much of the Carretera Austral) can cause unanticipated problems.

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Setting the World on Fire?

When not on fire, Chile's Mediterranean landscapes resemble California's.

In the last stages of updating Moon Patagonia, I’ve just spent ten days in Puerto Varas, leaving my bedroom/office in a friend’s house mainly to grab lunch or, when possible, enjoy a more leisurely dinner at restaurants like Almendra or Casa Valdés. In the process, I’ve only paid minimal attention to what’s happening in the rest of Chile (and the world), but that’s become unavoidable. As I drove north yesterday, past the city of Chillán on the Panamericana yesterday, the smoke from  Chile’s worst wildlife season ever became a palpable presence.

On the highway north of Chillán, the smoke obscures the landscape

Living in California, whose Mediterranean climate is a mirror image of central Chile’s, I’m more than aware of the wildfire dangers. In October of 1991, the dramatic Oakland firestorm destroyed more than 3,000 homes—some barely a mile from our own rented house—and killed 25 people. That was at the end of a long hot summer.

Red sky at morning: a smoky sunrise at Talca

In Chile, though, summer has barely begun—normally, the warm and dry autumn months of March and April would be the time to worry. It seems, though, that at least some of the fires here are the result of arson. In the meantime, a red sun rose over Talca this morning, and my hosts here tell me that tourist traffic has fallen off in what should be peak season.

A Muslim couple go through routine immigration procedures at Buenos Aires's international airport.

I’ll be in Santiago until Friday night, when I fly back to California to face another disaster: the disgraceful executive order from the occupant of the White House that prohibits Muslims from certain countries—even permanent residents and others with lawful visas—from entering the country. There’s been chaos at US airports and immediate resistance from civil liberties lawyers, who have obtained some injunctions against the measure, but the damage to the country’s credibility will far surpass the fire costs to Chile’s heartland. And the White House fire, we know for certain, is intentional.

On the Road Again? Southbound from Santiago

After a frustrating time in Santiago, where an overpowering virus of some kind kept me confined to a friend’s house – I don’t think she expected to spend nearly two weeks as my nurse – I was finally able to hit the road on Sunday, though I only made it as far as Talca, about 250 km south of the Chilean capital. The best thing was that I was able to spend a night at Casa Chueca, one of my favorite accommodations in the entire country – occupying a former vineyard, it’s spread over a park-like environment of seven hectares that was a welcome respite from the red-hot streets of Santiago.

Then, yesterday, I continued to Pucón – a longer drive but, the farther south I got, the weather continued to cool, though it was still very summerish. From my window at Hostería ¡École!, I have an obstructed view of Volcán Villarrica, which is presently closed to climbers, but barely any wisps of smoke are visible around the crater.

I’m only passing through here, en route to Puerto Montt to catch the Navimag ferry to Puerto Natales on Friday, with a brief stopover at Puerto Octay. For the moment, though, I’m going to post some observations on driving in Chile from the roughly 750 km I’ve driven in the past couple days. Some of this is anecdotal, so bear with me if I sometimes oversimplify.

1) Compared to Argentine drivers, many of whom are very aggressive, Chilean drivers are relatively sedate, but that can have its downside. Where there are three lanes on the freeway, the slowest drivers often occupy the middle lane, which means that faster drivers go around them on both sides. Where there are two lanes, they sometimes choose the fast lane; this is not something I adapt to easily, so I can’t afford even a short lapse in attention.

2) At this time of year, many young Chileans take to the road, but not many of them have cars – instead, they are hitchhiking, often in very dangerous spots alongside the highway. Given that I have hitchhiked these roads myself, longer ago than I care to admit, I sympathize with them but I rarely give anybody a lift now. They often travel in groups of three or even more, and think that I have plenty of room in my SUV, but I don’t – it’s full of books, papers, baggage and tools, or at least that’s my rationalization.

3) Some time ago, I wrote about the irony that, in Chile’s roadside servicentros, WiFi was usually free but they charged to use the bathrooms – usually a nominal fee, but there was always a person to collect before you could enter to relieve yourself. Fortunately, that appears to have ended; presumably, Copec, Shell and Petrobras have decided that their gasoline sales and concessions now pay well enough to subsidize the cost of cleaning the baños, and that people will make additional stops for convenience. That’s a win-win, in my opinion.

4) This has been a tough fire season, not unusual in the Chilean summer, but it was most notable in the Araucania region just north of the regional capital of Temuco. Near the town of Mulchén, where the native Mapuche have long been vocal about land claims and there have been instances of arson in the past, large stands of eucalyptus and Monterey pine – non-native commercial timber species – were virtually denuded. The eucalyptus have a chance to resprout, but the pines are likely to be a total loss.

Background-Plus on Chile's Latest Earthquakes

A few weeks ago, as I sat at my desk outside the central Chilean city of Talca, a low rumble passed through the ground – in area that suffered dramatic damage in the monumental earthquake of 2010. It was brief and, as a resident of Northern California, this tremor didn’t especially disturb me. Over the next couple weeks, though, I read about frequent seismic activity in northernmost Chile, in and around the port city of Iquique (pictured below) and, last Tuesday, a big one struck.

According to the US Geological Survey, the April 1 event measured 8.2 on the Richter scale, with its epicenter 59 km northwest of Iquique. This would put it almost directly opposite the semi-ghost town of Pisagua (pictured below), an erstwhile nitrate port that also, infamously, served as a de facto prison camp in the early days of the Pinochet dictatorship. Both Pisagua and Iquique occupy wave-cut terraces that are vulnerable to seismic seawaves, and reports say that a two-meter tsunami hit Iquique’s harbor, destroying numerous small fishing boats.

There are also cracked pavement on local streets and landslides in desert canyons that have blocked roads, but only a handful of deaths – the Atacama desert, unlike the Chilean heartland south of Santiago, is thinly populated and the quality of construction is relatively high. There are few adobe buildings in Iquique, as much of its historic downtown (pictured below) consists of wooden structures built of Douglas fir imported from the United States in the 19th century. Those structures are often more flexible than adobes, though they’re more vulnerable to fires.

I haven’t visited the area for almost two years but, given my long experience there, I expect the recovery to be much quicker than that of the 2010 event. Aftershocks continue, including a powerful 7.6 on Tuesday that was closer to Iquique.  Still, as the photograph below of the 1868 tsunami that struck the more northerly city of Arica shows, it could have been a lot worse.