Uh, yeah, this is what it looks like when God smites something (copyright 2008, Carlos Guitierrez)

From Bariloche, I crossed over the border to Puerto Montt, Chile. Further south, there’s an active volcano named Chaiten which erupted last year, forcing the evacuation of the small town at its base. I was traveling with a Turkish guy and a Canadian I’d met in Bariloche and we’d really hoped to visit the still-abandoned, ash-covered ghost town.

We made inquiries in Puerto Mont and were told that an overland passage was impossible due to volcano damage. There is a ferry service that runs to the empty town (it just serves as a transfer point where passengers can switch boats for other destinations), but the passage takes about 8 hours, and only departs twice a week. We were in Puerto Mont on a Monday, and it would have been possible to catch a late Monday night departure to arrive at Chaiten Tuesday morning around 7 in the morning. But to return, we would have had to wait until Thursday morning around 10 am. We would have been signing up to spend two nights in a virtually abandoned town, without camping gear.

Part of me thinks we should have just gone for it. At worst, we would have been cold, ashy and bored for a few days (well, I guess at worse-worst, the volcano could have gone off again). On the other hand, we were concerned that police or military guards might deny us entry or prevent us from exploring the town. Instead of catching the ferry, we grabbed a minibus out of the industrial Puerto Montt to the much more charming Puerto Varas about 30 minutes north.

There, we stayed at the Casa Azul Hostel, which earns a shoutout for having decent rates, pleasant, unfinished wood aesthetics, and, mostly, a computer running Ubuntu Linux for guests to access the internet with.

We met a Swiss girl, and, in an incident that is surely emblematic of our increasingly globalized society (or at the very least, the setup for a bad joke), the four of us—Swiss, Turkish, Canadian, American—decided to make Mexican food (chicken fajitas) in Chile. Avocados are quite popular in Chile, so we made fresh Guacamole, and the fajitas turned out deliciously.

The Hertz rental office was like this tiny little cubical tucked under the stairs in a largish office building. We went there at around 11 am, and the door was locked, and there was nobody around. We asked the building security guard if the office was open, and he told us, “Oh yeah, definitely. He probably just went to the bathroom or something. Just wait five minutes.”

We waited, 5, 10, minutes, and nobody showed. We inquired with the receptionist at one of the nearby offices, and she told us that, “Well, the Hertz guy probably went to lunch. I’d try back this afternoon.”

So we went to lunch. I should probably say something here about the cuisine of Chile. It’s not good. Their most popular national dish is something called a “completo”. It’s a hot dog, topped with diced tomatoes, sauerkraut, and mayonnaise. Now, I’ve been known to enjoy a hot dog now and again (huge props for Portillo’s!) but these aren’t even good hot dogs. They’re universally boiled, not grilled, and chicken, not beef. Among the completo’s redeeming features are its price (around 1 USD, usually) its easy availability. For a small increase in price, you can also get a “completo italiano” (why it’s supposed to be Italian, I have no idea) that comes topped with guacamole. This is an absolutely essential upgrade, but it still only partially redeems the completo.

I feel like there’s a fortune waiting to be made by the person who introduces actually-good hot dogs to Chile. On the other hand, I’ve met Chileans who claim to quite enjoy completos. Maybe if you grew up with them, you just wouldn’t know what to do with Portillo’s, Pink’s, or a deliciously illegal “heart attack” dog. Anyone feeling enterprising?

Other Chilean food tends towards heavy, greasy meat dishes or sandwiches. You can also get lots of things “a lo pobre” which means it comes topped with a fried egg and a side of French fries. Health food central, this is not. Empenadas are also widely available, but I prefer the Argentinian version, which has a flakier pastry crust and more varieties of fillings available. I have had a few good meals here. I had some delicious, albeit pricey, Chilean sea bass. There’s also a traditional soup called ajaco that I quite enjoy.

In any case, we returned after lunch to find the car rental office still closed, and were told “he should be back any minute” by a couple other office workers. Eventually, after another good hour of killing time, we were finally able to rent a car. The Hertz guy was perfectly helpful, he just doesn’t seem to spend a lot of time actually working.

The next morning, we picked up the car bright and early at 8am, and set off. The combination of cold, rainy weather and substandard Chilean backroads made for pretty miserable driving for the first half of the day. We drove to the Puyehue national park to see the Petrohué waterfalls, which were cool, but looked nothing like this when I saw them. I have some photos on my disposable camera, which I still need to develop. We also drove as far as we could up the Osorno volcano. We got as far as a little lodge at the base of the ski lift, by which point the weather was near white-out conditions.

I really don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere with such strong winds, driving hailstones horizontally through the air. When you tried to get out of the car, the wind would either rip the door out of your hands, or force it shut, depending on which side you were on. We got some coffee and soup at the ski lodge, to seek if the weather would clear for photos or a safer drive down. Inside, the wind was actually forcing water in around the weatherstripping on the windows and everything was cold and damp. The soup was delicious, though.

We drove down carefully, and headed back to the main highway (Ruta 5, which runs north-south through most of the length of Chile), after which the driving improved considerably. In the afternoon, we took a detour to the Aguas Calientes hot springs near Entre Lagos. It was still cold and drizzling, but it was quite pleasant to sit in the thermal pool and get rained on.

The Turkish guy, Baki, and I took turns driving. He’d lived in the USA for 5 or 6 years, and attended university (studying genetics) there. Our rental car was a little Toyota hatchback, and with four passengers plus their luggage, it was a tight fit.

Whoever of us wasn’t driving spent his time flipping endlessly through the Chilean radio stations. The car stereo actually had an aux jack, but none of us had the right cable to connect an mp3 player (Baki:  “Man, Brendan, I was counting on you to be the kind of person who had that”—as if I  really need another cable to carry with me). As far as I can tell, radio stations in Chile come in 3 flavors: mariachi music, latin pop, and a mishmash of 80s and 90s Top-40 hits of various genres.

Our crowning radio-hunting achievement came between Los Lagos and Mafil shortly after sunset. We were treated to, in succession, Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby”, Kriss Kross’s “Jump”, and finally, MC Hammer’s magnum opus, “U Can’t Touch This”.

Baki: Ok, so I thought my English was pretty good. But I really have no idea what this song is about. What is MC Hammer talking about?

Me: Uh… (as I listen, for the first time in my life, to the actual lyrics of U Can’t Touch This) He’s just bragging about his rapping skills. It doesn’t really make a lot of sense.

Baki: But, what exactly, is it that we ‘can’t touch’?

Me: Just like, his flow. His rhymes are untouchable. You will never approach MC Hammer in rapping ability. And he wants you to know it.

Baki: So what you’re saying is that I really shouldn’t worry about it?

Me: Exactly.

Sample MC Hammer lyric:

Pump a little bit and let ‘em know it’s going on
Like that, like that
Cold on a mission so fall them back
Let ‘em know, that you’re too much
And this is a beat, uh, you can’t touch

Later, we shuffled seats and I took a nap in the back. When I woke up, everyone was sort of freaking out. Apparently, with about a quarter tank of gas left, Baki had bypassed a service station, betting on finding one later. Now it was later, and no gas stations were in evidence. We were all kind of pissed at Baki.

The car had a digital gas gauge, and we were down to our last bar. We passed through one tiny town with no gas station. the final bar started to blink. We were already starting to make plans for hitchhiking to the nearest gas station and returning with a can. Baki was suitably apologetic, “Look, I screwed up, so if we run out of gas, I’ll go.” The final bar disappeared and an unpleasant orange light came on. I pointed out that Baki doesn’t really speak Spanish. “I should probably go,” I reluctantly volunteered. Baki shifted into neutral and let us coast down a long hill. “Nobody’s going to pick up random guys alone at night, anyway,” pointed out the Swiss girl, “I’ll go with Baki.”

Then, on the other side of the highway, we saw it: a giant yellow shell station! It was on the opposite side of the divided highway, with no obvious way to exit and cross over. We didn’t have enough gas to screw around getting it wrong, so we pulled over to the shoulder on our side of the highway. “Let’s just go ask them how to get to their gas station,” suggested Baki. He and I set out to cross the highway, trying not to get killed by a truck.

It was still raining, and I had a tricky time scrambling up the side of a muddy drainage ditch wearing the flip flops I’d put on at the hot springs. At the gas station, the attendants told us that, no, it wasn’t actually possible to get to their station from the northbound side of the expressway. But, they suggested, if we just kept going to the next town, there was a gas station there.
“How far?”
“Not far at all. Ten, maybe twenty kilometers.”
I was in agreement with Baki that it was unlikely our car had another 20 km worth of gas in the tank.
“Uh, do you have something we could put gas in to take back to our car?” (I don’t know how to say ‘gas can’ in Spanish)
“No, sorry. We don’t have anything like that.”
“Well, if we got our own things, (‘botella’ was probably the word I was looking for here) would you put gas in them?”
“Yeah, why not?”
The answer, of course, is that in the States, “it is unlawful and dangerous to dispense gasoline into unapproved containers.” Then again, in the States, a gas station would probably have gas cans.

So Baki and I went into the convenience store part of the gas station, and bought two 1-liter plastic water bottles. I chugged a bit, then dumped the rest out on the already rain-slick pavement. The gas station attendants thoughtfully swished a bit of gas around in the bottles, and dumped it, to remove stray water droplets. Then they filled them.

Laden with precious petroleum distillate, we crossed back across the highway, poured it into the tank and set out again. At the next town, we stopped and filled the tank.

We returned the car in Pucón and spent the night there. Apparently, there was natural stuff to see near Pucón but I was sick to death of cold rainy weather, so the following night I caught a long distance bus bound for Santiago.

Um...what?

So, here in the hostel book exchange, I found not one, but TWO copies of a book in an Asian language featuring a photo of Adolf Hitler, and his loopy, rightward-leaning signature.

A little bit of internet searching (Thank you, Gordon Foster/Arabic numerals/the Internet, for adding detail to my confusion) reveals that the book (both of them!) is indeed the Japanese translation of Mein Kampf.

Honestly, every scenario I construct in my head to explain the presence of multiple copies of Hitler’s book, in Japanese, in a hostel in Chile, winds up seeming implausible. I know a lot of Nazis fled to South America after WWII. Perhaps some of the aging Nazis are engaged in efforts to leave Mein Kampf in hotels and hostels, like evil, fascist Gideons? But why Japanese? Why not Spanish, or English, or, hell, German? Perhaps a visiting Japanese tourist was reading a copy, for whatever reason, and just exchanged it for another book here? But then why the hell are there two copies? Who carries two copies of Mein Kampf as their travel reading?

Perhaps the only explanation that comes even close to being reasonable—”reasonable”—is this: Japan is insane. On some level, it makes perfect sense that there are two copies of Mein Kampf in Japanese here. I mean, why not? In the grand scheme of Japanese weirdness, this probably doesn’t even crack the top 10,000.

Other peripheral questions to consider: why is the title in red on one copy of the book, and black on the other? Their ISBN’s differ by the final digit (4-04-322402-8 for the black, 4-04-322402-X for the red). And, have I Godwin’s Law-ed myself by even writing this post?

You might think that 4 years in the LA area would have conditioned me to accept a little bit of grit with my oxygen, but you’d be mistaken. Los Angeles, the United States’ smoggiest city, clocks in with with a measly 34 μg of particulates per m³ of air. Santiago boasts a robust 60 μg/m³, but still doesn’t come anywhere close to the big leagues of “developing” [lung cancer] cities. Cairo puts them all (or, really, itself) to shame with a whopping 169 μg/m³, nearly 5 times the level in Los Angeles.

Breathe deep, son!

I’ve been nursing an irritating cough and intermittent headache for two or three days now, and really would not be surprised if the air here were at least partially to blame. To be fair to Santiago, they have taken steps to implement pollution controls. Apparently, the situation has improved significantly since the 1990s (although not much in the last 9 years). They’re also in the process of replacing their fleet of diesel public transit buses with newer, natural gas-powered models.

Santiago, like many other smog-plagued cities, also suffers from unfortunate geography. The nearby (and usually invisible) mountains tend to trap in the smog. According to people who live here, winter is typically the worst season for smog, because thermal inversion holds it near the ground.

The photo above was taken on a recent hiking trip up Cerro Pochoco on the outskirts of the city near the affluent Las Condes neighborhood. It was a pretty steep climb, but once we reached the top, the view was almost as striking for what you couldn’t see as what you could. On the plus side, it rained a whole bunch today, so tomorrow should be clear and beautiful.

Here’s some photos from Cerro Santa Lucía, a park on a hill in central Santiago. It’s a really interesting place, with dozens of different levels, narrow passageways, crumbling stone stairways, fountains, statues, a cannon, a church, and lots of secluded corners where Chilean couples go to make out (PDA is huge in this country). The whole place has kind of a Love in the Time of Cholera feel, there’s lots of shady courtyards with ice cream stands, and it’s probably my favorite place in Santiago to hang out and read a book.


There’s a bunch of entrances to the park, but my preferred one is this elevator. Both for the number of stairs it saves me, and for the friendly old elevator operator who runs it.

This is a photo taken inside the Baquedano metro station in Santiago. It’s a little library kiosk, where commuters can pick up books to read on their subway ride. I saw them at several of the larger metro stations in Santiago. It seemed like a really smart idea to me, putting libraries in places where people can access them easily. There’s probably many people who would never go out of their way to visit a library, but who’d be happy to pick up something to read on their way to work. Judging from the books they had on display in the window, it wasn’t all Dan Brown’s airport bookstore fare either. They stocked quite a bit of more serious literature (both Spanish-native and translations) as well.

Tuesday, there was an afterparty at a Cuban bar, with similar open bar. Wednesday, I went out for drinks with the conference organizers, I recorded a brief interview I’ll try to type up later.  Thursday, I got drinks (again) with a really cool Brazilian hacker/security researcher guy. So basically, my liver probably hates me (I took Friday night off), but I’ve been having an awesome time.

I’ve done kind of a poor job of writing about things as they happened, so there’s a bunch of stuff in Chile that I should try to go back and cover. Apologies if that makes this kind of hard to follow. One cool thing a Chilean hacker showed me is actually less of a hack, and more of just a “why would they make it like that?” security failure.

Unlike Buenos Aires, where every bus line is a separate company competing against each other and fighting tooth-and-nail against a unified payment system, Santiago has a very convenient contactless smartcard system (called the “bip!”—”beep!” in Spanish—card) for both buses and metro lines. However, for reasons that are totally beyond me, the Santiago transit system has decided to make all the information about the movements of anyone using their bip card accessible to anyone who cares to see it.

If you go to this website, and then click on “Saldo y Movemientos” you can enter my Bip card number (08969210) in the field for “Ingrese su Nº Tarjeta bip!”, choose to see the last 90 days, and click “Acceptar” to see every place that I added money to the card or took a bus or metro during my time in Santiago.

To be fair, I paid cash for the card, so my bip number isn’t actually personally identifying information (or it wasn’t until I wrote this blog post, anyway). But for university students in Santiago, their student ID card doubles as a bip pass, and that student ID number IS personally identifiable. Plus, I’m sure many people pay for their bip card with a credit card, or tie their bip card to a credit account so it will automatically debit to recharge.

Furthermore, if you really just wanted to creep on a random stranger, the bip card number is printed on the receipt you get for adding value to the card. As you’d expect, most of these receipts are immediately abandoned in garbage cans or on the floor of the metro station. It would be trivial to retrieve one and then monitor that person’s movement.

I don’t have any objection to a city transit agency tracking its ridership, especially when done in a way that’s more-or-less anonymous. Obviously, it helps them to see which lines are busy, where they need to add buses, trains, and so forth. What I don’t understand is why they decided to make this information available the way they do.

What could the possible advantage to riders be? I guess it might theoretically be convenient to check the balance on your card from the internet. But surely you already know the places you’ve gone, right? Making that data accessible to the public with no authentication is only a minor security vulnerability, but it’s also a completely unnecessary one.