Boats of Chiloé

The town of Dalcahue on the island of Chiloé, Chile has a wonderful harbor and the curanto is served on a restaurant with stilts. We hitchhiked and ferried around the islands of Chiloé last February and in Dalcahue we camped out in someone's backyard where other tents had been set up.

Our 'neighbors' included a group of stoner-hippies who were pretty friendly except one really, really annoying faux-rasta from the North of Chile, blonde dreadlocks and the whole nine yards, seething with nationalistic hatred, I'd met my match apparently; we were talking about language and learning Spanish and the first thing that pops outta rasta's mouth was 'North American's don't speak real English'. It was the way he said it, and the way he looked at me, so they came out practically like fightin' words.

I was offended, but didn't show it, gently trying to unveil the erroneousness of his theory by de-bunking the notion that Chilean Spanish is "bad". Short attention spans made it hard to keep a conversational thread going for too long so all I got out was that Chilean Spanish is "bad". And, prolly assuming I was one of the common self-anointed experts on the subject, he "acceded", and then ventured an amusing theory of his own.

Yeah, it's because Chileans don't read as much, therefore they speak a poorer dialect to people in Bolivia and Colombia.

Excuse me, Bolivia? You really think they read more in Bolivia?

Well, no, he mumbled. But Colombia...

Never fuck with a Language Studies major. That loser got schooled. He could have chosen any any other topic, like, I dunno, varieties of cannabis sativa vs indica and the relative merits of descending gradations, and we could have sparred for a while, he might have even won. But that dumbfuck chose a battle he couldn't even win.

Top that off he got all competitive about where in the world I'd traveled and when I mentioned I'd been to Israel he busted out a sentence in hebrew and then looked at me challengingly.

Then I recited some Hungarian poetry, hit my chest and said, take that, bitchy-batchi!...I wish. I didn't get that far. The whole thing was so absurd.

Especially if you consider someone so prejudicially anti-US as he turned out to be, to go and recite hebrew? Talk about the enemy! Does he have any idea what Israel did for the Chilean military junta?

Through other comments that rasta revealed himself to be typically and prejudicially anti-US dumbfuck. But for the record, I'd never felt so much like I was in a dumb conversation with stoners in the US than with him. He's such a rip-off of the commodified "rasta" image being sold by the pound on college campuses throughout the US. Anything less authentic would be hard to find.

Anyway, the harbor was lovely, we watched the boats:



Talked to a couple young fishermen who were setting up their nets. They go out for days at a time and up and down the coast of Chile.



...and we even saw a rainbow!



and grave with a dog house or something and an old haunted boat.



More rainbow!



That rasta dude sure was dumb...