As promised, there has been extensive resting over the last couple of weeks, here in Santiago, La Serena and the Elqui Valley, and I am now fresh and itching to get back on the bike. Although Toops didn't accompany me to La Serena, she too is looking good as new after her visit to the bike shop. Better than new, in fact. I have taken off the cumbersome bar bag and put on new, wider tyres. Only wider by 5mm mind but still wide enough to rub against the mudguards, so off came the mudguards too. At the risk of putting aesthetics before convenience, I have to say that Toops is looking pretty sharp for it too, more like a bike that you'd cross a continent in and less like something you'd cycle to scrabble club to on. Hers is the new found confidence of a girl that's cast off her frumpy dungarees and donned the string bikini ready for a bout of mud-wrestling.
Although I will probably be crossing back into San Pedro de Atacama further on down the road, I feel I should write something of an epilogue about Chile. I think the one thing that I will remember about Chile is the language. Now, I'm no linguistic imperialist and I actually enjoy all the different versions of Spanish that have evolved in Latin America. All but one. I'm not alone either, Chilean themselves admit that their oral communication is sloppy to say the least. If a word ends in a vowel, the last consonant is rarely pronounced, nor is it if it ends in S. No end of slang and idiomatic expressions are used, take for example a sentence from a magazine I read last week: "...anda dando las castañas con manos de gato", which roughly translates as "...he is giving away the chestnuts with cat hands". Answers on the back of a postcard please.
Huevon (an idiot, wanker, bastard etc.) is any Chilean's favourite word par excellence and can cover the entire spectrum of insult severity depending on the context. It has various derivatives, most importantly huevear (to take the piss or tease) and huevada (pronounced huevá, of course, collective noun meaning something akin to malarkey or shit when used in that context).
Then there are the second-person verb tenses, which I was going to try to explain but I'm not sure I understand how it works. I'm not sure many Chileans do, actually, it's a Holy trinity all unto itself.
Regardless, I am sad to be leaving Chile, particularly now that I have just begun to understand people. I will miss its cazuelas and pichangas, hearing the word "poh" in every sentence (don't even get me started), and the way every other foodstuff has enough sugar in it to keep a Cadbury's factory running for a day. Predictably, what I will most of all is the people, and in particular the way they have reacted when I have told them of my trip: half disbelief, half wonder, faces have lit up almost everywhere I have been in a way that will be difficult to forget. Almost as difficult to forget as their bastardised version of the Spanish language.
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