Friday morning as I was on my way to Curico to teach, I overheard one of my vanmates talking about the miracle of a bridge that had fallen with no one injured. He didn't say where this bridge was located (or if he did, I couldn't understand) but he did say that another bridge had fallen in '95 in the middle of the night after some heavy rains. Some 20 cars speeding along the main north/south highway had plunged into the ravine it formerly spanned before it got light enough for someone to detect its absence from a sufficient distance to stop in time.
As it happens, the particular bridge that collapsed this time was on our route to Chovellen. It was new and apparently suffered from poor construction as there were no rains upon which to blame its demise. We were advised that we had to detour to the south through Parral. This was fine with us as it wasn't much longer and was just as lovely.
We stopped for dinner at a seaside restaurant at around 5:30 or 6. This is a couple of hours earlier than Chileans normally eat, so we had the restaurant all to ourselves. After the waiter took our orders, we watched him walk across the street to a lot there. We couldn't tell what he was doing, but we ultimately learned that he was picking fresh lettuce with which to garnish our plates. Alice Waters lives and breathes in Chile!
On our trip home we decided to take a more northerly route hoping that this would allow us to simultaneously avoid the downed bridge and see some new sights. We got our second wish, but not our first. The northern route, almost all the way to Constitucion along the shore, took us through dense pine forests. At one point as we were driving, I saw a tarantula cross the road in front of us. They are numerous throughout the countryside in Chile (though we hadn't seen any before, and they are not common in Talca). The boys are very excited to have their very own pet tarantula.
As we approached San Javier, which is about 15 minutes from Talca, we discovered that we would not be able to avoid the downed bridge. We were detoured across some dirt roads to a ferry crossing. It looked like there were a lot of cars ahead of us -- indeed, there were 50 or so, so I decided to try to estimate our waiting time. I walked to the front of the line, where I learned that the ferry takes three cars at a time, and that a round trip ride on the ferry takes about 10 minutes. While we felt that the boys would have enjoyed the ride, we would have needed to wait for about 2.5 hours and it was already late. So, we headed south to Chillan over many, many more dirt roads as a really spectacular sunset was underway, replete with golds and purples. The roads took us through areas we had never seen before, with many small vineyards, small houses, small towns, and small farms.
The trip home was in many ways typical of the Chile we have known. Breathtakingly beautiful, frustratingly inefficient, and to borrow my favorite line from Lewis' Babbitt, more romantic than scarlet pagodas on a silver sea.
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