Animal, Vegetable and Mineral

Just a few reflections on the trip so far, before I get to ‘What Two Did Next’.

Animal; Travelling in Argentina and Chile I really haven’t felt so out of place – there are redheads around! Perhaps from the influx of Celtic type immigrants. It seemed quite  reasonable, in a big, cosmopolitan city like Buenos Aires, to come across every ethnic type going, but we freckled ones have popped up on our route across Argentina and were certainly in Valparaiso; a little less so in this part of Chile – which is now the Norte Chico. I suppose the Scots and the Irish got everywhere – indeed there is this icon whose bust appears in many a square and in front of Government buildings – called Bernardo O’Higgins; he liberated Chile from the Spanish (his father was Spanish/Irish) The name survives…it’s quite interesting that you can book your coach ticket from O’Higgins Travel…

There are dogs everywhere; wandering the streets and beaches. Actually rather less threatening than I thought they’d be. They get on with their life and you get on with yours – they don’t seem to go in for that sniffing about that even the nicest English, domestic pet is prone to indulge in. On the beach at Coquimbo, I couldn’t get a small puppy to detach from my presence but he was very polite – all he really wanted was my shade, not to get up close and personal.

Vegetable

There are so many of them, grown in such abundance across Mendoza, Argentina and now in the fertile valleys of Chile – and the vegetable markets are magnets for us. We’ve bought things to cook up in our hostel kitchens and I’ve been very happy snapping the tableaux of shapes and colours. 

Mineral

The parts we’ve traversed are/or have been rich in them. We watched a nodding-donkey extracting oil from under the fields near the Mendoza wineries. In Chile, nitrates were the great source of revenue until synthesising was discovered. Crystals are ‘big’. In Miravalle Lesley and I looked forward with anticipation to being shown ‘the crystal beds’ – imagining this seam of shining white quartz. What we saw were literally two wooden beds in a hut, with a layer of quartz chippings for a mattress; you could get a massage on top of them for their ‘energy’. Ooh….

And yesterday here in Vicuna I saw Lapis Lazuli – its dense blue was prized as an expensive pigment by Renaissance painters. The major mineral of this Chilean trip has been carbon – as manifested in the breathtaking night stars….but more of that anon.