This last weekend was spent just southeast of Santiago in the Cajon del Maipo. It was an easy trip from Santiago, about an hour on public transportation totaling less than $2 each. We stayed in one of the many tiny towns of the Canyon’s one main road in San Alfonso at a small Hostel/B&B called Los Castaños. The owner, Luciana, was extremely nice and she gave us a private room and bath, a rarity in the Hostel world. We also got breakfast every morning consisting of eggs from the numerous chickens that roamed the property, fresh fruit juice, great coffee, and homemade bread and jam. It was all very luxurious feeling, made even better by the incredible view that the property offered with its many grapevines, fruit trees, and flowers sandwiched between the two mountain ranges making up the valley.
Day 1 was spent exploring the town and sitting by the Maipo river (the fastest and most violent river I have ever seen, the pictures do it no justice), finished with a bottle of wine at home and an excellent dinner at a restaurant in San Alfonso. The restaurant served really good crepes, but the memorable part of going here was meeting the people that ran it. The owner and our server was apparently a famous Chilean rock star in the late 80s who used to play stadiums of up to 60,000 people – this was all told to us by a Chilean woman who lived and worked at the property where the restaurant was who had lived in New York for years and spoke perfect English. He played us some of his music and I have to admit it was pretty good, as it sounded like a Spanish-language Smiths or The Cure and I’m disappointed that I didn’t write down the name. We also found out from the woman that Luciana, our Hostel owner, was this man’s sister (to which we found out more about this man via Luciana that he quit the band after becoming quite a mystic – something reinforced by our experience meeting him). The woman also told us that they were starting a commune on the property and her son (who is an artist and an underground Santiago rapper, which they played us some of his music) was camping in the backyard on one of his many visits to her and the communal family. Interspersed with all this were numerous children and other adults of the commune coming through the place and making it an incredibly interesting and engaging atmosphere. We talked until late and made the moonlit walk back to our hostel.
Day 2 started by trying to catch the bus to other locations in the Canyon when the family that was also staying at the hostel offered to give us a ride in their car to where they were going – a waterfall somewhere in the south. We went with them in a packed car of a husband and a wife, two children, the husband’s mother, and Molly and I. We got to know them well over the next two days and they were exceedingly gracious people. We ended up not making it to the waterfall due to the husband’s decision to turn around (where we saw one waterfall in the distance, but no way to get close to it), but we had a beautiful ride up the mountains instead and a nice stop by the river where people had camped around some natural pools. We eventually made it back and Molly and I were left to our own devices of what to do for the rest of the day.
We walked around asking many of the locals where to go hiking but we never got a complete answer because all the property around us was owned by businesses, residential, or just ‘private property’. This became extremely disappointing as we walked and saw the natural beauty surrounding us, but no easy way to experience it (not even a single hiking trail that we could find) without paying someone to take you there or use their property and/or services. It’s a disappointing fact of the modern world that a price has been put on the experience of nature, based on a past mad rush to buy up land for private use rather than preserve natural spaces for public interest. Because the El Morado National Park was about a two-hour ride away with no easy answer as to how to get there (besides a once-daily bus that we long missed), we decided to trek on and find something.
We finally did find something where we saw groups of people camping beside a stream leading to the Maipo River that went up the eastern mountains beyond view. We decided to walk up it based on a recommendation and it stands as the best part of our trip. The rocky stream eventually runs up into its own small canyon (small in relation to the Maipo Canyon we were in) with multiple waterfalls the higher up you go. In the length of the stream towards the waterfalls (cascadas) were people setting up camp in whatever space they could find between the large boulders and the stream. It was an amazing sight, something to which I know no parallel in the US. As Molly and I made the hike up, we talked to many of the people as to what lay ahead (as we really did not know much about the hike) and the people were very nice in telling us about the place as well as being interested in us. The atmosphere was amazing – you would walk up a steep path around boulders only to find more campsites of people eager to say hi and be friendly to you, giving you the best route of how to make it up the stream, by the many rocks, and follow its ambiguous path toward the beautiful cascadas. It was in this that I realized that people were camping in this area for the simple reason that it was the only public land for miles in a canyon enveloped in a picturesque landscape dotted with ‘private property, no trespassing’ signs on fences and walls. These people were here as an expression that you can’t put a price on nature, that there will always be spaces like this for everyone to enjoy, and that the atmosphere based on the character of the people making it up who realize this freedom makes the experience that much more free and liberating, because there’s simply no price tag to be put on it. Really, why put an impediment on something that we all collectively want to enjoy for free? We eventually made it up the canyon to the second cascada (of a supposed five, but we saw no way of making it further up), in an amazing display of natural beauty that my pictures try to, but never will truly represent. The walls of the canyon were thinly separated by the river rushing over the numerous rocks and boulders breaking up the stream, and here we were standing in it, taking it all in. We made our way back home right before dusk, reeling over what we had just seen over a bottle of Chilean wine.
Day 3, we decided to go rafting down the Maipo before heading back to Santiago. I had never been whitewater rafting before (my closest experience being tubing down the awfully tame Muskegon River, by comparison) and it stands as a great experience. I simply can’t describe what being on a river so fast and so violent in its whitewater rapids feels like other than to recommend you experience it for yourself. To be on the Maipo, to take on its rapids in an inflatable raft with 6 other people, and have all-too-brief glimpses of the variation in the incredible landscape surrounding you at all times is simply too much for words. Molly and I loved it and could barely lift our arms after the workout we unknowingly endured. We got a ride back to Santiago from a nice couple sharing our raft, stopped for some mote con huesillos (a Chilean specialty of peaches, juice, and wheat kernels – bizarre but refreshing, I assure you) that they treated us to, and said our goodbyes after making future plans for travelling to wine festivals at harvest in March. Once again, Chile’s landscape and its people made this experience memorable, and we plan to go back to the area soon to see the El Morado National Park that we missed this time around with its hot springs, glaciers, waterfalls, huge peaks, volcanoes, and, well, everything else that makes nature impossible to ignore.
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