A Plush Bus, Pablo Neruda and a Volcano

Plotnik wishes he could show the photo he didn't take of the main bus station in Santiago last night, but to take that picture he would have had to reach onto his belt to get his camera out and this was just not going to happen, with at least 10,000 people running in every direction to catch their bus, probably 9,000 who knew what gate they were looking for, or even where the gates were, but that left the other thousand, including Plotnik and Ducknik, with their packs on their backs and wheeling their stupidly heavy roller bags, carrying their ave con palta sandwiches (chicken and avocado), who did not know where they were going and had just realized that the kid cab driver had dropped them not at the terminal where the Tur-Bus long distance coaches left from, but at the OTHER terminal a block or two away, with twenty minutes until the bus was scheduled to leave and a large river of humans with wheeled weapons in the way.

So no time for a picture, and barely time to get to the bus. But, they made it.

And the bus was the most comfortable conveyance ever. The Chileans have long distance bus service down pat. The Plotniks bought the semi-cama, which means their really wide and plush seats reclined more than half way down, and they were downstairs with only seven or eight other people. It costs double -- $80+ bucks for a trip just about equal in distance from Saint Plotniko to San Diego, but it was money well spent, and probably 1/2 to 1/3 of an airline ticket.

Plot kept waking up and looking out the window -- in the blackness there wasn't much to see but early this morning the countryside had turned green, and the cattle had come out to graze. At 9am, the conductor tapped Duck on the shoulder and said: "Puerto Varas." The bus pulled into the small, wooden Puerto Varas station on exact schedule and Plot and Duck got their suitcases and did the usual stand around. What do we do do now?

There was one cab out front. Duck had to use the rest room. Plot saw that cab waiting and thought about Duck in the rest room. By the time she came out, the cab had been grabbed by a group of Brazilians. The town has two cabs. So Plot and Duck decided to walk to town, which they thought they could see, or at least they could see the lake on which the town was supposed to be, down at the end of the road a few blocks away.

But as Pablo Neruda would have said, had he been standing with them: "All life is an illusion. Only my love for you is true, Dear." Or something like that. Pablo Neruda discovered that writing and selling romantic love poems could buy you a lot of houses and probably counteract being fat and bald.

But Neruda did know how to live. He had three houses and three women that he wrote poems about. Plot and Duck saw his second house yesterday in Santiago and it is just as cool as cool gets. But when the military took over they sacked it. Why? Because Neruda was a communist, like all his artist friends -- Diego Rivera, Pablo Picasso, all of 'em. The military never gets it.

Why is Plotnik telling you this? Because he was walking down the road thinking about Neruda's second house when the SECOND town cabbie saw the Plotniks! He spun around to give them a lift and Dios Bendiga a Pablo Neruda.

It's cold in the Lake Country of Puerto Varas. Lakes, see. And lots of wind. The Plots drove by the lake, which looks a little like a huge Lake Arrowhead surrounded by German villas. A few minutes later they rolled up in front of Casa Kalfu, and Señor Horacio Bovolo, who Plotnik had been writing to on the internet, was waiting with open arms.

With breakfast! With whole wheat bread! "Ah ha! We made it to Hippie Country!" said Plotnik, happy as a weevil in a bin of granola.

And they've got these volcanoes here.