A trip to Chile: Puerto Montt and Puerto Varas

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Puerto Varas, motorcyclist, oil on card, 23.5 x 23.7 cm unavailable

Puerto Montt and Puerto Varas

Puerto Montt is a ghastly place: quite filthy, with abominable architecture. It straggles round a bay then crawls over some hills behind. The place reminded me of Brazil in its crappiness but it has colder weather. The shops are full of rubbish and everything is covered in graffiti. Unhealthy young men hover along the sea promenade like so many stray dogs.

The buildings of most interest- the unusual wooden neoclassical cathedral, and the Gothic church above the town- are both inaccessible: the first because it has been boarded up to avoid damage from the ongoing protests (as have almost all the major buildings, giving a wartime atmosphere to the place); the second because it is in the grounds of a private school and, no, the porter does not have a key to allow access. There is also a colourful theatre, but it was closed.

In the town square was a rock band making a brutish noise. I couldn't find anywhere trustworthy to eat so I went to the Macdonalds. Yes, I appreciate that some might find irony in that sentence.  The windows had, of course, been boarded up, so it was like sitting in the hold of a ship. There were a few black people there and I thought that the town had many more black people than I had seen in other places in Chile. 

Later that evening I went to small concert in the art centre which was nicely performed by some hippies, including a pretty singer with a prominent overbite. I wondered how such people could live in Puerto Montt, they seemed so refined with their cellos and mandolins . There were eight people in the band and eight in the audience, including me.

It was dark after the concert and I was worried about getting robbed- like many ports the town has this underlying atmosphere of violence. Besides, protesters, masked and dressed in black, had begun burning stuff in the town square- a filthy smoke drifted about. 

To get around the town you can use shared taxis which you flag down in the street, and I took one back to my bed and breakfast.which was in a slummy area above the town, an area desolate with rubbish strewn here and there and where some stunted trees suffered ceaselessly under a continual wind. My bed and breakfast was run by a couple who were at first solicitous and friendly, then over-solicitous and over friendly, to the point where I began to feel oppressed at breakfast. Anyway, these taxis feel more intimate than buses, and stop where the passengers ask, so you end up sensing this closeness with the others in the car as you hear their voices softly give instructions to the driver and discover where they live. 

Somewhat disturbed by Puerto Montt, I chose to spend the next day in Puerto Varas, a much smaller and considerably more upmarket town on a lake just to the north. I went by bus, as did an evangelical preacher who stood at the front of the bus preaching the entire fifty minute journey.

Well, Puerto Varas is not especially interesting for more than an hour. And all the restaurants there are extortionate. In one of them I ordered an extremely expensive sandwich from a pimpled adolescent with an apathetic manner.  But the lake views in Puerto Varas are pleasant, and I did a good painting and spoke to some Danish people.

I know it sounds weird but I must confess that although I found Puerto Montt vile in many ways and wouldn't recommend it to anyone, it did impact me in a peculiar way akin to affection. I am drawn to shabby awful places, I don't know why. 

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