Having inhaled several pancakes with Nutella for breakfast, there's little choice but to go exploring today. Our destination is Isla Negra, the favourite of Pablo Neruda's three houses (the other two being here in Valparaíso and in Santiago). Neruda is Chile's favoured Nobel-prize-winning poet (there are many others; Gabriela Mistral, Cesar Vallejo and Nicanor Parra being just three worthy of mentioning). The house was named Isla Negra by Neruda, isla for his feeling of isolation, and negra for the black rocks sitting mere metres away on the seafront.
To get there we take the streetcar back to the bus station, and hand over $3300 each for a one-way ticket, 90 minutes away by bus. We have just enough time to call into an excellent ex-military outfitters, where I resist the strong temptation to replace my entire travelling wardrobe with fatigues. We also get a few photos of the new Mercado.
Time to go buy our tickets to La Serena for tomorrow, then go to Isla Negra.
This is pretty much what the whole trip looked like.
We get dumped on a main road beside a car park. Hopefully the museum is ummmmm this way...
Ah, seems we on the right path.
Sure enough here was the museum, a single house hidden behind a big wooden fence. At $4000 entrance fee was it worth it? Absolutely.
The view from the cafe is pretty good, probably worth the fee alone.
Neruda had a love of the sea, and the house was assembled over a number of years when there were no roads nor bridges here. It started as a stone room, and gradually turned into a house like a ship like a train. You are not permitted to take photos inside the house, presumably because its a small space and you would have people standing everywhere taking photos of everything (and there's a lot of stuff to take photos of).
The house is a haven for pruck. Neruda's pruck is that of a man collecting specific items that reminded him of things, most often his childhood (one room features a life size paper mache horse that Neruda had admired outside a shop in Temuco as a young boy). One corridor is tiny ships in bottles arranged to look like they are afloat on the magnificent backdrop of the sea. Another room is Neruda's impressive collection of sea shells. All his books have been moved to the house in Santiago to avoid water damage, but there is enough here to absorb you. The English guided tour on headset is entertaining too.
Neruda would ring this bell when he arrived back at this house to alert his friends and neighbours to his arrival. The boat was a gift from a friend, but despite his love of the sea, Neruda was not an avid sailor, and the most use this boat had was when the poet and his friends climbed aboard for a drink.
His house obviously has its own bar. The names of his friends are carved into the beams in the ceiling so they can always be there, and with the bedroom directly above, Neruda explained 'it meant he could always sleep near to them'.
One of the best stories relates to a solid-looking desk in Neruda's study, his private room when he did most of his work. The story goes that Neruda was sitting in the room in the morning and spotted a lump of wood adrift on the sea. "Mathilda!" he cried to his third wife, "I see our new table", at which point the two of them headed down to the shore. One version has it they waited all day for the boards to finally make their way aground, but the better version has Mathilda storm into the sea in her clothes and pull the wood out herself. The cabin door they rescued was turned into a fine desk upon which Neruda wrote some of his later works.
It took until 1992 for Neruda's body to be returned to Isla Negra, in line with his wishes. As a well-known left-winger and diplomat to France under Allende, Neruda would have been a thorn in the side of Pinochet's military junta after the overthrow of Allende. However the news drove the poet to his bed; four days later he was taken to hospital in Santiago, and he died five days after that. He is buried here with Mathilda, presumably he has had no desire to 'change wives' since then, as the audio guide so delicately puts his divorce from Wife Number Two.
Pablo gets to keep watch over the ocean he loved so much. The sea is wild here, it comes in with incredible force and throws itself against the rocks.
The whole experience was exactly what my soul had needed. Seeing the environment the poet created around him, the simple things that inspired him, made the transience of my current existence seem misguided. Building up a home that is a projection of yourself seems an admirable and desirable goal. There is a very fine line between a house full of physical memories and a house full of pruck, however. Maybe it is simply a matter of taste. Nevertheless, I couldn't leave without a new notebook. It's time I started to write again.
Even the bus stop was brightly coloured. We met an artist-of-sorts on our way back to the bus stop who informed us he had been in Ireland ten years previously to paint. We tend to meet them.
We ease back to Valparaíso, back to the hostel, with empty tummies, in spite of our ham and cheese sandwiches on the bus. For dinner its a hotchpotch of pasta and sauce, bread, beer, and other scraps that need used up before we travel the next day to La Serena. We make chat with Germans and Aussies, and our plan to grab a quick last-minute pint in Bar Inglés falls flat (described in Lonely Planet as 'Back in the day hustlers would use the back door to sneak out with the cash of gullible santiaguinos who paid advances for contraband', which was always going to be a winner for me).
Valparaíso finished much as it started, as a pleasant stop outside the lifeless hulk of Santiago. Good little eateries at decent prices (so long as you don't order the excellent seafood stew, which will set you back $18000 or so), some nice wee pubs, and plenty of good walking space. Feels pretty safe too, for the most part, although any city with this number of buildings falling into disrepair always feels a bit edgy. Having said that, there might be enough here to justify a return visit, if only with the comfy resort of Viña Del Mar up the coast, and Isla Negra a short trip south again.
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