Covering 30 Jan 2019 – 4 Feb 2019
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| a good old-fashioned bandstand in Talca |
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| typical twin level luxury coach |
Our journeys have almost all been by coach but Newt
realised that at least one could be by train so for a change that’s what we
did. Across the aisle from us was a
Chilean boy of 11 called Maximillian travelling with his grandmother and he
started asking Heather questions to practice his English. She ended up in a part Spanish, part English
conversation for the nearly two hour trip.
The pair of them covered a diverse range of topics including which were
Heather’s favourite super-heroes among others but unfortunately Max had never
heard of Michael Palin-man. She was
quite relieved and tired when we alighted at Talca.
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the birthday boy, now recalibrating birthdays in centigrade
finds out that he's only 21 |
Moving towards the equator by hundreds of miles in a
few days, the temperatures were getting noticeable hotter. Talca is away from the coast and in the time
we spent here temperatures were daily in the high 30s C (90s F). This was a location chosen so that we could
visit the Maule Valley, noted for vineyards and to ride down to the coast on a
narrow gauge railway. We had an unlikely
hotel in that it was only four or five blocks from the centre of town, the
inevitable Plaza de Armas but it was a collection of single storey wooden buildings. It was set at the end of a cul-de-sac so it
was quiet and it was only a ten minute walk from a big supermarket. The hotel had a pleasant garden, we had a
kitchen to use and there was a small swimming pool. In practice, it was a cooling off pool. The whole was a set up that we would have
expected out of town and it suited us admirably.
The Buscarril narrow gauge railway ran from Talca to
Constitucion on the coast, running along the roadless last thirty miles or so
of the River Maule valley. The train
runs only once a day to the coast and back and is slower than getting a local
bus so we chose to go only one way to give us a choice of return times. We’d been to the station to buy tickets in
advance and were told to arrive by 7.00 am the following day instead. So we dutifully turned up at 6.45 to find two
people barring the entrance to the ticket office and a sign on the door saying
it was sold out. Heather explained what
we’d been told and was told that we should have been there by 4.00 am ! and
that the spaces left were for locals along the line. In an unexpected fluency generated by
annoyance and frustration Heather did vent some Spanish spleen, ending by
pretending to bang her head on a wall (usually my reaction to bureaucratic
idiocy). The woman at the door, moved by
this outpouring of grief was moved to make a phone call, then handed over four
vouchers for tickets. Result !
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the whole Buscarril ensemble
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| with a high-tech command module |
The locomotive was a worn old diesel we were told
dated from 1940 which seemed a bit early to me.
There were two coaches also very worn and being a narrow gauge we rocked
along quite vigorously. We seemed to be
the only non-locals on board. I timed our
progress against kilometre posts on the route and found that we were belting
along at about 30 kph (just under 20mph).
As we travelled to the sea the river valley was very attractive, the
water looked fairly shallow, a
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| the Maule Valley |
hundred yards or so wide with gentle curves and
gravel banks. There had clearly been a
big fire not so long ago and we saw some damaged trees and a lot of new growth. There were some tiny halts and a couple of
more substantial stations. Stopping at
one of these for about fifteen minutes, everyone got off and bought food and
drink from the various stalls and then we set off again. We’d read that the journey time is variable
depending on whether it stops for fifteen minutes or nearer an hour. There was no rush because this was our day
out, the journey not the destination as they say. Just as well really, Constitucion was nothing
special except that there seemed to be no tourists like us around.
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| the selection of tickets on a local bus |
The beach was black volcanic sand and we watched
pelicans diving for fish, looking very much like Gannets but diving from much
nearer the water. The only activity we
were interested in was eating lunch, then it was a walk back for the bus with a
diversion for the obligatory ice-cream before the bus station.
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| black volcanic sand at Constitucion |
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the not-for-sale vintage investment wine
- kept behind a locked gate
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As you would expect in a wine growing region there
were lots of wine tours on offer but once we looked at what we would get for
our money they seemed expensive. A whole
day tour worked out to about $100 (£80) per person and as non-connoisseurs
there was a limit to what we would get out of it and that limit was a lot less
than $100. For $400 we could have bought
some excellent whole bottles of wine to try by ourselves but we opted for a
do-it-yourself tour. We had passed a
vineyard with tours on offer in the bus coming back from the coast so we caught
a bus back out from Talca the following day taking about half an hour and
walked in. For 8,000 pesos ($12/£10) we
got the tour and four tastings of about a third of a glass for each wine. It was quite enough for before lunch and was
a good tour in that it told us what we wanted to know in a relatively short
time. The vineyards have a bit of a
conundrum if you think about it. They
have to let you sample decent wine but have to balance that against the cost of
wine that’s too good. As it happened we
all thought the four we tasted were very good.
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| wine storage containers in use |
This area was close to the epicentre of the 2010
earthquake and on the ground next to the 20 foot high steel wine storage tanks
was one lying on the floor. Full of
wine, it had toppled in the quake and lay there just like a huge beer can
crushed by a giant hand. One of the
other nearby vineyards had lost the equivalent of 80,000 bottles of wine.
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| and after an earthquake |
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