An Andean Haze

There´s this great thing that happens when a plane lands in Chile; the sky starts to bleed orange just as the Andes begin to come into view over the left wing. They´re jagged edges rise up to impossible points, their brown slopes becoming lost in the fog and haze of pre-dawn Santiago light. No one claps when a plane lands in Chile, rather there´s a hushed sort of anticipation, as if the passengers simultaneously take in a collective breath as they gaze out their windows, awed by the misty morning air. Nothing looks real.

I read several books in preparationg for this trip, one of which was titled News From the End of the Earth, and that´s exactly what it felt like as we were descending into this jagged haze of rock and sky--like we our plane was about to topple over the edge of all known existence if we banked too far to the right. It was unreal.

So the trip was dreadfully long, but I´ve now become nicely acquainted with airport wheel chair service--you don´t have to tip in Chile. Everyone´s been super nice to me and I´ve had my luggage shuttled around by several smiling chilenos. Turns out the Chilean accent isn´t a myth--I could barely understand the guy wheeling me through immigration, much less the immigration official who relieved me of a lovely stack of imortant documents that took me months to amass. Right now we´re in Olmue, a small village in a national park between Valpo and Santiago. It´s much warmer today than I was expecting and everything´s beautiful. I´d describe the bus ride here, but I was mostly asleep. It´s a different ordeal than that I went through to get to Mexico. We´ll be here for a few days for orientation before moving on to Valpo to meet our host families. The schedule they gave us says something about a nightly dance--I´ll have to see how my salsa skills can translate to my newly booted form (by the way, my Dad took the honors of naming my boot--a time-honored tradition of all medical accuterments in my family--it´s now known as Billy Bob Boot). Oh, and I welcomed Coca Light back into my life during today´s comida--there´s just no beating Latin diet Coke.