Last Days

"In the end, everything is a gag."

--Charlie Chaplin

Goodbye to Northern Beaches

I grew up in a small coastal city situated on the Atlantic Ocean and surrounded by marshlands; effectively it was a swamp.  My people are coastal folks, going back as far as I can tell in the States, or their respective countries of origin.  Thus, I was raised with a strong love of the sea and everything that goes along with it.   When I arrived in Chile to teach, I was sent to the one city farthest away from the sea, in a country that is almost entirely coast.  Such a reality depressed me, and as such I strove as often as possible to make it to one of the nearby port towns.  I say nearby, but the closet beach is in Antofagasta which is three hours away.  On top of that, Antofa (as we call it) is ugly and undesirable with el mar being its only true saving grace.  The better choice has always been Iquique, which is unfortunately five hours away.  Ryan and I, over the course of our seven and a half months in Calama, made four trips together to Iquique (he numbered five himself) for the beach, to hang out with other gringos, and most importantly to forget we were in the desert for a few days.

Immediately following the last debate, Ryan and I along with Lorna hopped a late afternoon bus heading north.  Ryan's host-grandparents have a house in Iquqiue, and I was invited to stay there and ride back with Ryan's host family on Monday afternoon.  I technically was supposed to teach Monday, but a simple email informing my teacher's of my absence sufficed to get me out of work.  It's a good thing that I didn't know things were that easy, otherwise I most certainly would have abused the system.  Lorna was staying at Backpackers (my personal favorite hostel in the world) and as such we spent a lot of time hanging out there over the weekend.  It being our fourth time there, we were known and remembered and allowed to do what we liked.  We once again participated in the Saturday night asado where we met two American sisters called Megan and Danielle, a Chilean engineer named Ricardo who lives in Calama, and a French backpacker named Benedicte.  These people became our defacto hostel friends for the weekend.  Ricardo and Benedicte had apparently met each other the week before in San Pedro, and the sisters were fresh from Perú where they had flown into on their way down to Santiago to live and work for a spell.  English was our common tongue.

On Sunday afternoon, after talking about it since our visit visit back in May, we finally went surfing.  Ryan and I woke up, walked over to the hostel were Lorna was already waiting with Lalo, the hostel employee who taught lessons.  We were given wetsuits and boards and led out onto the beach.  Even though I had been on a board before (some six years prior) it was nice to have actual lessons on technique.  After drilling us, Lalo took us individually into the beach break where he helped us get started.  After about two hours, I had the hang of things again.  Ryan took to the waves easily as well, but poor Lorna was not as apt a pupil.  We had a good time for the two and a half hours our ten luca bought us (twenty bucks) while Megan and Danielle watched on from the beach in barely veiled amusement.  After surfing, Lorna took off on a bus back to Anto and Ryan and I went for lunch with his family.  After a considerable amount of napping, we returned to the hostel to hang out with our new multi-ethnic group of friends.  Ricardo was set to leave that night to return to Calama at 2200 hrs, but we made plans to meet up again later that week.  He is learning English and he wanted to take advantage of we gringos being around as much as possible.  When I asked him how he gotten to such a good level conversationally in English, he told me it was from watching TV shows like "Two ina Hauffman."  The owner of the hostel and his friends had another asado that night which they shared with us, claiming the beef they cooked was Argentine.  However, like most things Chilean, it was too salty and ultimately a disappointment (but a free one.)  Present for the asado was a skank of a woman who claimed to be from Argentina, but who spoke with an atrociously forced accent.  All who heard her (English and Spanish speakers alike) agreed that her accent was fake and that she probably wasn't even an native Spanish Speaker to boot.  Before leaving that night to return to our place of lodging, Ryan and I made tentative plans to meet back up with the sisters in Santiago when we arrived there at the end of the month.  Ryan, I don't mind saying, had taken quite a shine to Megan.

Benedicte et moi.

Monday morning, or early afternoon I should say, we woke and returned to the beach.  Benedicte joined us and we spent most of the day becoming sunburnt and talking about Paris.  Eventually, Ryan received a phone call summoning us back to the house.  I bid au revoir to my new French friend, promising to come visit should my travels take me back to France in the future.  Then it was back to the house and into the family's twelve-passenger van.  Not only was Ryan's host family packed in back, but his aunt and her three girls.  That left Ryan, his dad, and myself crammed into the the front seat for a rather uncomfortable five hour ride back into the heart of the desert.  As the image of the sea slowly vanished behind us, I said farewell to Iquique for the last time. 

Goodbye to the Greenhorns

For many months, Ryan and I were practically alone in Calama as the only gringos.  Sure Mary and Hannah were in town, but we hardly saw the one and never saw the other.  Interestingly: Hannah, now after her seven months in Calama dating one of the locals, is engaged to be married.  However, that all changed at the beginning of August when the five and four month volunteers arrived, almost all of which are female (the exception being former college quarterback Matt Dowdell from Pittsburgh.)  We called them the Tourists, and we were happy to have them around.  Whereas the first half of my time in Calama was marked by constant travel, the second half saw more weekends spent in Calama and San Pedro with the white people.  

In the nonsensical way that things work in our program, despite having arrived later the Tourists would be departing first.  Thus, the second weekend of November was the last weekend the five and four-monthers would be spending in Calama (we vets would be around for another weekend following.)  To mark the occasion, Ryan and I brought things full circle and hosted another asado in Parque Loa on Saturday.  The first asado was during "winter" and the only other people in the park were drunk vagrants.  Our capstone asado found us now in "spring", with families frolicking about and giving the park a much more pleasant atmosphere.  We also invited our new Chilean friends, Ricardo, Daniela, and Natalia along to bid farewell to their new gringo friends; too short a friendship, unfortunately. 

We volunteers were set to travel together on the following Wednesday to Antofagsta to participate in an English Festival being put on by the Fundación Minera Escondia.  After that, the Tourists would bugger off to Santiago while we 8-monther would return to Calama for one last weekend, one last hurrah; a victory lap.  Though I've gotten to be fairly good friends with most of the short-timers, I have a feeling that once they are gone I shan't be seeing any of them again.  Such, I fear, is the theme of the next few weeks.