Pucon

The almost 1,000 kilometre journey from Pichilemu back via Santiago and down to Pucon on the Patagonian border comes to a bit of a standstill. Turbus misses the online ticket I bought the day before. Two hours of walking and complaining to the ticket centre don’t help. I have to buy a new ticket and take the last night bus after nine hours. At least a friend from Pichilemu has enough time to bring my forgotten neoboats to Santiago. Thank you!

The night eats up the kilometres. In the morning, I wake up in a different world. Everything is green, every tree in the cloud forest is at least 100 years old and the sheep look as fat as if they’re going to burst any second because of the lush grass.

Pucon calls itself the centre of southern Chile. Unfortunately, it doesn’t realise that it’s completely ruining its charm with massive new giant bunkers in the style of French ski resorts. There are still some creative little wooden buildings full of restaurants and artists in the centre, but they are all on the red list.

I bunker my 42kg in the less hip Princesa Insolente Hostel, post my requests for a second driver for the Carretera Austral in 20 other hostels and then jump straight into the first rafting boat on the lower Rio Trancura. In the light rain, grades III-IV are just right. Eddie Vedder sings “Long Night”.

A third of all Pucon residents have German ancestors. BMWs and Audis stop at zebra crossings instead of running you over as they usually do in the north. The prices for everything are rather Swiss, especially tours, accommodation and food are really expensive. Chile supposedly has 68% of the cost of living in Germany. Rubbish! With an average of 60% for Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, the same statistic is correct. However, Chile is on a par with Germany almost everywhere, and significantly higher in supermarkets and restaurants.

An Israeli woman wants to hear opinions from well-travelled people. It’s a bit like an American asking you for haute cuisine recipes. So I unpack with a smile and then, after a dozen discussions with Israelis around the world that have so far come to nothing – and once almost ended in gin and blood on sand – I happily turn my attention to the Palestinian issue.

Right at the beginning of the conversation, my “discussion” partner qualifies herself for the unabashed use of big guns. I can’t think of the name of Hamas, Fatah’s political opponent, for a moment. I ask for help. The Israeli’s answer is “Jihad”.

As expected, she doesn’t recognise my discreetly bluffed compliment that, thanks to the misdeeds of our German Nazi grandfathers, Jews are now simply the best Nazis in the world when it comes to Palestine.

We chat a bit more about the flexibility of prejudices and plate edges. She doesn’t realise that either. I bid her farewell with the lullingly sad pictures of Jewish deposit bottle collectors actually observed in Israel this summer. That makes her world right again, and mine highly amused.