The disappeared

In Chile, having slept off some of the tiredness we had from the flight and a last night that deprived us of much sleep, we walked along “Londres”, the name of the road we are staying on and the Pension we are staying in, and immediately had a reminder that history lives.

Thirty five years ago this month, Gerardo and Ernesto Morales were brought to number 38 of this street, to a “Casa de tortura” of Pinochet’s. They were never seen again. Outside the building, people gave speeches, played music and remembered the half-brothers and the other victims of the murdering tyrant who escaped appropriate justice in this life (friendship with Maggie Thatcher doesn’t count).

Pinochet of course took power in a coup on 11^th September 1973, deposing the democratically elected Socialist Salvador Allende, who died in the process. His reign of terror was such as to alter the English language: the verb “disappear” changed from being solely an intransitive verb (eg The brothers disappeared) into a transitive one too (eg Pinochet’s henchmen disappeared thousands of innocent people). It has since been used in the latter manner in other Latin American countries we will visit in the coming months.

Fool me once...

At two o’clock on Thursday 22nd January, I managed the feat of being in two places at once: I was both at the house where Jun’s friends live in Auckland (on the net) and also in Santiago, Chile (on the bus). Where did the eleven hours I spent travelling between the places go?
Three cheers for the inauguration of President Obama (first act: suspend trials at Guantanamo) and especially to see the back of Bush. Unfortunately I find myself reminded of one his more renowned miscommunications in the events of today. We decided to catch a taxi from the bus terminal to the centre of Santiago.
When we arrived at our destination, the meter read $3400 so I gave the guy a $5000 note which he returned to me saying “banca” because the corner was torn. I think I apologised. I gave him another note, which he returned saying “una mil” – one thousand, I thought I’d given him ten – and finally he shortchanged me from the 10,000 I gave him, apologising when I pointed out the mistake.
Counting the cash in the hotel, I realised I was down $9000 (the swapping of bills happened to me once before, in Honduras, and I didn’t realise then for days) and I also have a note I have to take to the bank now. How did Bush try to put it?
"There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." —President George W. Bush, Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002

Hop connoisseur

As a vegetarian, the range of food I choose to sample abroad is limited and I am unable, perhaps, to get as close as others to an authentic experience of the places I visit. This provides a fairly good excuse for my attempts to drink as many of the local beers as possible (are you buying?). In both Australia and New Zealand, I was given recommendations about tipples and tried those and more but even in China I had gone for variety. My Chinese list is abridged, as it were, by my failure to note properly in Guilin and by the lack of words used to distinguish the varieties each brewery produces.

China:

Harbin (draft & classic)

Tsingtao (black, draft & other)

Yanjing (draft & other)

Australia:

4X (gold & bitter)
Carlton (mid, draught & cold)

Cascade (stout & pale ale)

Cooper

Hahn Lite

James Boag’s Premium

Tooheys (old, new, premium)

Townsville Brewery (stout, red, Digger’s & bitter)

VB (green & gold)

New Zealand:

Dux de Lux (Queenstown brewery) (Black Shag, Hereford Bitter, Alpine Ale)

Lion Red (& Steinlager)

Mac’s (Spring Tide, Sassy Red & Black)

Mangatainoka Dark

Monteiths (Celtic Red, Original Ale, NZ Lager & Radler)

Speights (Golden, Distinction & Old Dark)

Summit beer

Unsurprisingly, the microbreweries in Townsville and Queenstown had the best beers, with the Townsville Red taking my top prize but Monteith’s Radler was an excellent fruity beer from a big(gish) brewery that I’d search out.

Not the mint

My first encounter with a glacier, in this case Franz Josef, named after the Austrian Emperor at the time it was first sighted by a European, summoned an emotion that I think has only just been recognised as one: awe. Despite its dirty terminal face, the sheer scale and presence of the “retreating” ice river created in me a desire to laugh, which I guess is how I express this particular emotion.

The following day (8^th January 2009 – Happy New Year btw) we walked up to the terminal face of Fox Glacier and I broke the rules and jumped over bits of water here and there to get pictures that turned out disappointing because there was no sense of scale: tens of metres could have been a few feet because nothing in the picture put it into perspective. While there, I heard the glacier crack and thought I might get good pics of an ice fall in the rain but got wet waiting and left. Subsequently, we discovered that the part I was photographing collapsed and killed two guys about four hours later. Fox glacier: fatal.