Holiday in Chile (2): Santiago
October 19th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
London to Chile is 7,240 miles (11,650 kms) as the crow flies but we are not crows. So the flight from London to Sao Paolo in Brazil – starting on Sunday evening – was almost 11 and a half hours and the flight from Sao Paolo to Santiago in Chile was just over 3 and a half hours.
On Monday morning, we were met at the airport by our guide for the entire tour Valentina Periez and taken to our hotel, the San Francisco, arriving about 1.45 pm local time but 4.45 pm London time (having first taken off at 10.30 pm the previous evening).
The group should have been 12 but somebody lost their passport at Sao Paolo airport and was denied entry at Santiago airport, so a couple had to return to London. There is one married couple and the rest are travelling with a relative or friend or alone. There is another Roger who used to work with my then sister-in-law (it’s a small world). So, including Silvia and me, the group consisted of 10 and, together with our guide, we immediately formed a WhatsApp group for the trip (something that I have not experienced before) which proved really helpful.
We had a welcome drink of pisco sour and a quick briefing from Valentina and then Silvia and I went out for lunch locally before chilling in our hotel room. We made sure then we had a really early night (9 pm in my case).
Our first real day of the tour (Tuesday) was devoted to Santiago.
Founded by Pedro de Valdiva in 1541 and surrounded by the spectacular Andes mountain range, Santiago is not just the capital of the country and its largest city but the dominant part of the country. Some 6M live in the city itself and 8M in the metropolitan region out of a total national population of 18M, so Santiago is home to a third of Chileans. Interestingly, both houses of Congress – the House of Representatives and the Senate – which used to be in Santiago are now located in Valparaiso.
It was 18 October and the third anniversary of the explosion of the 2019–2022 Chilean protests, known Chile as the Estallido Social (literally ‘social outburst’) which were a series of massive demonstrations and severe riots that originated in Santiago and spread to all regions of the country. These protests were in response to a rise in Santiago subway fares, a probity crisis, the rise in the cost of living generally, the impact of privatisation and the prevalent inequality in the country.
Valentina was anxious that we should not become caught up in the expected demonstrations, so we conducted our city tour in the morning before the demos began, but the city was already quiet and full of police. A major destination was the Plaza de Armas where the presidential place is located. Around the square are statues of some of the leading presidents of Chilean history, including Salvador Allende who was president from 1970 to 1973 before the coup led by General Pinochet. Another stop was at the Mall Espacio M where Silvia & I grabbed a coffee.
To be honest, the centre of Santiago is rather drab and almost every wall is covered by political graffiti. This has been the case for the last three years because of the ‘social outburst’ and the municipal authorities are planning a clean-up programme.
Then we drove east to a much smarter part of the city which houses the Gran Torre Santiago which at 300 metres (984 feet)/ is the tallest building in Latin America. On the 61st and 62nd floors of this skyscraper is the Sky Costanera from which we had fabulous 360 degree views of the city. The Andes were rather shrouded in mist but clearly visible. Silvia and I found a cafe to buy some lunch to eat on the coach.
Later we heard that someone had committed suicide by jumping from the fifth floor of the building’s shopping mall onto the interior floor. We wondered if this was a political protest timed to coincide with today’s demonstrations.
Finally we drove out of town to visit a vineyard called Undurrago. This was established in 1885 by a Spanish family of this name who only sold it in 2007. We were shown round by a young woman called Nadia who had excellent English and an astonishing knowledge of wine. The tour finished with the testing of four of the vineyard’s wines and we were given the branded glass from which we had drunk the wines.
We have a very early start tomorrow so we ate dinner at the hotel restaurant in order to have an early night.
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Holiday in Chile (1): introduction
October 16th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
Over the past 16 years, my sister Silvia and I have enjoyed a series of holidays together and we are now about to embark on our 14th such adventure. Following an enjoyable visit to Colombia four years ago, we are now returning to South America to experience Chile with the travel company Cox & Kings.
Now some countries – such as Norway and Sweden – are long and thin, but Chile is unreasonably long and preposterously thin. Sandwiched between the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Andes mountains to the east, it is 4,300 km (almost 2,700 miles) long and averages just 175 km (about 120 miles) wide.
It stretches from the dry heat of the Atacama desert in the north to chilly Patagonia in the south with a temperate region – where most Chileans live – in the centre. Roughly 29% of Chile is preserved in national parks and conservation areas. Over the next two weeks, we will visit each of these regions and the finest national park and will need to take clothing for different climates.
Chile is the southern-most country in the world. The total size of the country is three times that of the UK but the population is only about 18M or twice that of London with a third of the population living in the capital Santiago.
Chile was colonised by the Spanish in the mid 15th century and eventually gained its independence in 1818. Following the War of the Pacific (1879-1884) with Peru and Bolivia, Chile increased its land mass by a third in the north. After a coup led by Augusto Pinochet in 1973, there was a 16 year dictatorship in the country.
Since March 2022, the president of Chile has been left-winger Gabriel Boric (born 1986) who is the youngest president in the country’s history and the second youngest state leader in the world (Burkina Faso has the youngest). However, in September 2022, a radical new constitution favoured by Boric was defeated in a referendum.
If Chile is a country that at times has swung ideologically from one extreme to another, it is also a nation of economic contrast. On the one hand, it has the highest average household income in the whole of Latin America. On the other hand, it has one of the greatest cases of inequality in the developed or developing world (rivalled only by the United States and Mexico).
So, in terms of climate, politics and economics, Chile is a country of extremes and contrasts.
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A review of the controversial new movie “Blonde”
October 15th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
Both written and directed by Australian Andrew Dominik, he must have known that this would be a controversial work and probably wanted it to be so.Based on Joyce Carol Oates’s fictional biography of American actress and icon Marilyn Monroe, it has been described as a pseudo-biographical psychological drama because, while the film captures many well-known scenes from Monroe’s life with an accuracy that makes them look almost as if they are from contemporary filming, there is so much speculation and interpretation of her complicated life and so much darkness and flashiness in the camerawork that one critic (Mark Kemonde) has described it as less a bio-pic and more a horror movie.
The central performance is outstanding as Cuban actress Ana de Armas looks and sounds so much like Monroe and movingly portrays a rich palette of emotions. Also the work is immensely stylish: most of the film is in black and white and there are shifting aspect ratios and at times deliberate blurring and fuzziness. Unusually for a work released on a streaming service (Netflix), it has the toughest rating because of its graphic sexual content.
So this is not a film for everyone: it is long (almost three hours), it is slow and it is disturbing. It is not a film for devoted fans of Monroe: it invents so much and arguably is exploitative. But, as cinema, it is a tour de force: innovative and powerful.
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World poverty reduction has come to a stop
October 14th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
The UN has identified 54 developing economies with severe debt problems. While accounting for little more than 3% of the global economy, they represent 18% of the world’s population, and more than 50% of people living in extreme poverty.
Some countries are spending more on debt interest payments than on health, education and social protection combined, and that is hindering the fight against poverty.
The UN has a goal of reducing extreme poverty to 3% of the world’s population by 2030, but Indermit Gill, the World Bank’s chief economist, says on current trends the target will be missed. “We are totally off course. Poverty reduction has come to a stop.”
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)
The global cost of covid in lives and illness
October 13th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
Covid has killed almost 6.5 million people and infected more than 600 million.
The WHO estimates that 10% to 20% of survivors have been left with mid- and long-term symptoms such as fatigue, breathlessness and cognitive dysfunction.
Women are more likely to suffer from the condition.
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A review of the new action film “The Woman King”
October 12th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
Imagine a mainstream movie both written and directed by women: respectively American Dana Stevens and African-American Gina Prince-Bythewood. Unusual but not unknown. Imagine a film in which all the leading roles are taken by black women: outstanding African-American Viola Davis in the titular role plus young South African Thuso Mbedu, black British Lashana Lynch and Ugandan Sheila Atim. Now that is really is unusual.Next imagine a story set in the West African state of Dahomey (modern day Benin) in 1823 featuring an all-female unit of warriors who beat the male warriors of the neighbouring Oyo kingdom and free slaves from Portuguese slave traders. Now we’re talking. Well, this is “The Woman King”.
There really was such an all-female force known as the Agojie, but they didn’t achieve quite the success represented in this fictional work which, in its revisioning of history. is a bit like Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” or Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator”.
Shot on location in South Africa with striking costumes and an exciting score, it looks good and it sounds good. So, if this is not history as it was so much as history as we would like it to have been, this is an exciting feel-good movie with plenty of action and a fair amount of violence.
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Why do so many migrants wish to reach Britain?
October 9th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
As I regularly do, I spent the day in Milton Keynes entertaining my two granddaughters. Now the local taxi company that I use in the city is staffed by drivers who normally hail from Pakistan. But not today. This time my driver was from Afghanistan.
There are many ethnic groups in Afghanistan and I was interested to learn that my driver was an Hazara. Hazara speaks Hazaragi which is a dialect of Persian and they practice a branch of Shi’a Islam called the Twelvers which puts them very much at odds with the Taliban which is largely Pashtun and adherents of an extreme form of Sunni Islam. Over the years, there have been many murders and massacres of the Hazara community.
It is no wonder, therefore, that my driver fled Afghanistan and sought refugee status in Europe. He started in Greece but eventually made his home in Italy where he lived for years. There he made a family, obtained a good job and learned Italian. Here he works on three jobs to keep his wife and three children and – as I can avow – he is struggling to learn English.
So why is he is in Britain? He told me that he wishes his three children to be judged on their abilities and nto on the colour of their skin or the identity of their religion and he believes that they will have a fairer chance in this country.
Britain has many problems and our treatment of people of colour is far from perfect, but we tend to forget that, for many people around the world, Britain is still seen as a haven of stability and fairness and a land of genuine opportunity.
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A review of the important book of world history: “Guns, Germs And Steel” by Jared Diamond
October 8th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
Diamond is professor of geography at the University of California Los Angeles and he is a noted polymath who won a Pulitzer Prize for this outstanding work first published in 1997. I read a 20th anniversary edition with a new afterword and by then the book was an established classic.It is a hugely ambitious work as indicated by the sub-title: “A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years”. It attempts to answer a fundamental question of world history: “Why did history unfold differently on different continents?” Or, to put the question in more provocative terms: why did ‘civilisation’ start in Europe and how did Europeans manage to colonise the rest of the world?
Over 500 pages later, the answer to this question can be summarised as follows: “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves”. Diamond rejects utterly any notions of racial superiority.
Diamond argues that nomad hunter-gathers settled down to grow crops and rear animals first in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the so-called Fertile Crescent because the temperate climate provided a greater number of crops (such as wheat, barley, lentil, chickpea and flax) and mammals (notably the goat, sheep, pig, cow and horse)) that could be domesticated compared to any other part of the world.
From then onwards, the key determinant was latitude. It was much easier for the relevant techniques and tools to spread east-west across the massive land mass of Eurasia, where the climate was similar and geographical obstacles surmountable, than it was for this process to occur north-south in the Americas, Africa and Australia.
When Europeans of seven states sailed to the Americas, guns and horses gave them an enormous advantage, but the real killer was the infectious diseases that had evolved from animals in Eurasia to which the indigenous Americans had no resistance: smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles and cholera. As Diamond reminds us, these diseases killed an estimated 95 percent of the pre-Columbian Native American population.
This thesis of the centrality of axis orientation has been called – but not by Jared himself – the “lucky latitudes”. In this trans-disciplinary book, Diamond makes his compelling case by quoting voluminous evidence from the fields of geography, history, archaeology, language and other fields.
He applies all this evidence to a succession of studies of different parts of the world, always drawing the same conclusion: “the striking differences between the long-term histories of peoples of the different continents have been due not to innate differences in the peoples themselves but to differences in their environments”.
“Guns, Germs And Steel” is quite a heavy read with masses of detail and some repetition, but it is a formidable work which has advanced our understanding of both world history and current geopolitics.
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A review of the 1961 classic French film “Last Year In Marienbad”
October 5th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
Marienbad is a spa town in the Czech Republic, but no filming was done there for this thoroughly enigmatic work. The locations used for most of the interiors and gardens were the palaces of Schleissheim and Nymphenburg and other locations in and around Munich. But this is the least of the deceits, or at least doubts, in this radical French work directed by Alain Resnais and written by Alain Robbe-Grillet.Whether anything happened at Marienbad last year or at all cannot be known to the viewer. It might all be a game of imagination – there are lots of games in this film – of the principal character or of the writer and director themselves. Really we know nothing for sure. The characters have no names and no backstory; the woman (played by Delphine Seyrig) may be the wife of one of the men (Sacha Pitoëff) and may have had an affair with one of the other men (Giorgio Albertazzi), but who knows?
What we do know is that the film looks extraordinary: the rooms, corridors, and ceilings of the luxury hotel are spectacularly ornate, the actors are frequently as frozen as the constant focus on statues, the woman’s dresses were designed by Chanel, and the wide-angle photography is stunning. The music by Francis Seyrig adds powerfully to the overall sense of dissonance.
Therefore it is little wonder that, while some critics regard this as one of the best films ever made, others have excoriated it. Personally, if all films were like this one, I would never visit the cinema again but, as a challenging and innovative contribution to the endlessly colourful palette of film-making, I was glad that I viewed it.
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A review of the 1931 classic German film “M”
September 30th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
German cinema in the 1930s gave the world some striking and innovative work and this thriller directed by Austria-born Fritz Lang is one of those classics. It is notable both for the unusual subject matter and the humanistic approach to that subject and for the original use of sound in its storytelling.Loosely inspired by the criminal case of serial child killer Peter Körten, it portrays the attempts by the local police, the criminal underworld and the general public to apprehend a child molester played by Peter Lorre. The presentation is surprisingly modern in not demonising the killer but instead showing how the murderer is himself the victim of uncontrollable forces and – again in modern style – we are offered an ending which is inconclusive and open to some interpretation.
This film was made shortly after the arrival of sound when cinema was still in a state of transition. So the work looks back to the silent era in the somewhat exaggerated acting style of Lorre and the occasional slapstick behaviour of police characters. But it embraces sound in a limited way so that, outside the actual dialogue, there is little of what is called diegetic sound (that is, sound that emanates from the storyworld of the film). Sound also plays a role in identifying the killer since he frequently whistles a tune from Edvard Grieg’s “Hall Of The Mountain King”.
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