Chile #6: Pucón, Part 3: Stranded

After a photography post, you know I’ve got to follow it up with a long piece of writing. This is the story of how I was stranded in a small town ten hours south of Santiago—and also the story of how I almost got into trouble with the law.

Our buses back to Santiago were at 9 and 9:30, and it was already dark as we were leaving Parque Nacional Huerquehue. We knew that it was going to be a bit of a scramble, though I was on the second bus, so I had less worries. Thankfully, we were able to clean the rental cars, fill them up with gas, and return them without a hitch. We even had some extra time to goof around with the car wash vaccuum.

As for getting back across the lake to Villarica, where our buses awaited, we were largely fine too. Elena, Carla, and Anna needed to take an Uber to the station, as they were running late for their 9pm bus; the rest of us—Hodei, Mette, Silvia, and I—were able to hop on a local bus from Pucón to make our 9:30. Our drive swerved like a man possessed, speeding past sedans and other buses on the highway to get us to Villarica.

We were the first ones on the 9:30 bus. At last, we could collapse in our bus seats and theoretically, sleep the ten hours back to Santiago. I had even paid a little extra for a salon-cama, the one that reclines further. Luxury was on the menu.

Or, maybe it wasn’t. My seat, next to Hodei, was a semi-cama—the first sign that something was up. I double-checked my ticket, saw that it was right, and accepted the minor L. I began to take out what I would want from my backpack for the journey.

I was in the middle of changing into my pajamas (my things were sprawled all over the place, which I remember because I knew I had to be annoying Hodei) when somebody tapped me on my shoulder.

“You’re in my seat.” It was a guy in probably his mid-forties, who did not look pleased.

“Um… sorry, but this is my seat.”

“No, look,” he said, showing his ticket, which read seat number 36, my seat.

“That’s really weird, because mine is 36 too,” I said.

He turned to get the conductor—at this point there was a line behind him of people who couldn’t pass—and then my heart sank as I noticed. My ticket was for seat number 36—but for the 9 pm bus. The one with Carla, Anna, and Elena. The one that had already left.

I profusely apologized and scrambled to gather my strewn-about things, telling my friends that I would go down and talk to the conductor. Maybe there was a free seat for me to take. Silvia came with me; at this point in the semester her Spanish was way better than mine. To clarify, every one of my interactions in Chile, including those among my friends and I, took place in Spanish; throughout this first month, I was operating at a considerable deficit when it came to communication skills.

I had hardly outlined the situation to the conductor when he shook his head. Todo lleno. The bus was completely full.

It all happened in a blur. I think I said something to Silvia like, I’ll be fine, you guys get home, I’ll figure something out, see you back in Santiago. The only concrete detail I can place was the door closing; we looked at each other with the glass separating us before the bus drove off.

I wandered into the station and explained my situation to the woman working behind the counter. It took a few tries to get every detail correct, but when I was done, she winced and told me that every ticket had been sold. The only hope was to ask conductors of any later buses if anybody had no-showed.

There must have been six or seven buses that night, and every single one of them was filled. Turns out, nobody else made these kinds of mistakes. In fact, the only vacancy on any bus in Chile that night was probably the one that I had left on the 9pm bus.

I had no clue what to do next, so I sat down and ate a bag of Takis from my backpack. Then I asked the woman if she knew of any hostel in the area where I could spend the night. She told me that she would call her friend, who might have a room available.

Ten minutes later, the friend arrived, a man who did not look pleased to be there at 10:30 pm on a Sunday night. He beckoned me to follow him out of the terminal, so I did, stopping to thank the woman on my way out. I gave her a hug, which I remember she thought was funny.

My new savior was named Leo and had just left from a lively asado (a barbecue), which explained his annoyance. I had thought that I would be sleeping in his family home or something, but it turned out that he owned a hostal, a guesthouse with a bunch of rooms, a slightly upgraded version of a hostel. It would be $30 for the night, which was a little steep for this level of accommodation in Chile, but I was in no position to negotiate considering he had just done me a massive solid.

I also, of course, didn’t have any cash, which was decidedly not music to his ears. But after swearing a bit (weon) Leo let me know that he would come by in the morning and take me to the bank. With that, he left to return to the asado.

The room turned out to be quite comfortable, with a kitchen, a TV, a bathroom, and a queen bed. I couldn’t fall asleep until 3AM; I drifted in and out of consciousness as a bizarre Chilean reality show played on the TV like a fever dream.

I wish I could say that the next day, I got up early and explored a ton of Villarica, or that I was super productive and wrote a new blog post. The reality is that I was a little bit burnt out, and outside of the morning errand where Leo took me to the bank, I didn’t leave the room until the afternoon and largely just scrolled on my phone. Though I did get to drink a few cups of tea and eat empanadas, so it wasn’t all bad.

What was bad, though, was that I had to email my professor that I would miss yet another section of his Monday class. For various reasons (various reasons will be my PR spin on my truancy) I had yet to attend his class, so now with my Villarica escapade, I was three weeks into the semester without even meeting my professor.

What was worse, but fun in a Type 2 way, was the shower, which didn’t have soap or hot water.

At around 3, the realization that I’d never be here again overtook the laziness that had set in, so I decided to go out and look around. Villarica turned out to be a lovely town, lively with panaderías and people clutching bags of fruit and a street guitarist absolutely rocking a cover of “Come As You Are” by Nirvana.

I tried my first Chilean burger, which was an utter disappointment, though probably my own fault for ordering one in the first place. However, I got to eat it lakeside, which was not terrible at all, and I soaked in yet another vista, this one more tranquil than glorious. I sat on a wall by the water, with only the geese and a couple lightsaber dueling with sticks on the grass to keep me company.

I felt weird. It was my first time ever solo traveling, and it only had happened by accident, but after seeing so many Reels of solo travelers having a magical time and meeting tons of people, I wasn’t expecting the reality of exploring on your own: it’s great, but sometimes it can be lonely. You’re not magically going to strike up conversations with everybody you see unless you initiate them yourself.

I figured I should try just that, but my first attempt, at a roadside stand with a mom and her son selling chocolate-filled churros that tragically appeared better than they tasted, was unsuccessful. After asking how their days had gone, the conversation sputtered and died, them not interested enough to continue, and me not confident enough in my Spanish to know what to say next.

Leaving with a disappointment part gastronomical and part social, I wandered back up the street to the Centro Cultural Mapuche, which I had expected to be a big museum but turned out to be a preserved ruka, a traditional Mapuche dwelling. There was nobody there at all, so I strayed in but didn’t stay long, feeling vaguely like a trespasser. It was a small exhibit but beautiful, with wooden sculptures and a Mapuche flag hanging from a bamboo pole.

Another block back, the guitar guy was now shredding “Beat It,” and I stopped in at the Unimarc to buy snacks, more out of feeling like I needed to do something than out of hunger. It was here in these aisles, as I selected an Inca Kola, a yellow Peruvian bubble-gum flavored soda, that a mission for the day found me in the form of a call from my friend Hodei.

Here was the situation: Hodei had left his estuche, a personal bag with his toiletries, in the rental car. The office was in the hotel back on the other side of the lake in Pucón, thirty minutes away. Would I have time to get it? It was currently around 6; my bus was at 9:30, for real this time, and I had no intentions of missing it. I crunched the numbers and ordered an Uber.

My driver was a friendly, overweight guy in his fifties named Hernán, a pastor who claimed to not speak English but could translate any word I needed when my Spanish was lacking. Naturally, we got to talking about God. I told him that I didn’t believe, not out of any anti-religion sentiment but because I had never felt the need to, and he told me that even if you don’t believe you can’t deny that there’s something out there, something that makes the world as beautiful as it is. He explained to me that he saw God in his son, who played some sort of musical instrument for the church, and in his daughter, who was just starting high school and had no idea what she wanted to do afterward, and that he was worried for her but was excited for the woman she was starting to become.

I told him that I shared his love of family, and I told him about my parents and my siblings and that I wanted to be a writer.

He asked me which state I was from—he knew I was a gringo from the moment I was in the car—and so I told him about Rhode Island. He replied that he had family in the U.S, and that he was supposed to visit them last February and go to Disneyland but that his tourist visa had gotten revoked last-minute.

Not for the first time in Chile, I apologized for the new administration and for Trump.

“Ah, no te preocupes,” he told me, laughing. “I actually think what Trump is doing with all the deportations is great.”

A truly unexpected response. Yet it made sense. The dominant theme of the domestic election cycle that year was the presence of Venezuelan immigrants in Chile. It’s a complex issue, but suffice it to say for this post that they were unpopular. Sure enough, Hernán launched into a rant about delinquency and how nowhere in Santiago was safe anymore. Blissfully, we arrived at the hotel soon thereafter. I started to say goodbye, but he told me he would wait for me and take me back if I paid him cash. Somehow, I still didn’t have any efectivo on me, even after getting some that morning, but he said we could make a stop on the way back, so it was settled.

I entered the familiar hotel lobby at 6:45. The rental car office was supposed to close at 7pm, so it was perfect timing. According to Google, anyway, but in la vida real the rental car desk greeted me only with a “Closed” sign.

Across the lobby, the hotel receptionist told me there was nothing that could be done. The rental car workers had left for the night, and I would have to come back tomorrow.

I didn’t have tomorrow. The events of the last twenty-something hours replayed in my mind: I had missed my bus, I had laid around in bed all morning, and I had eaten a bad cheeseburger. Now I had come all the way across the lake for nothing, and suddenly, I resolved that there was no way I was leaving empty-handed.

I called Hodei to let him know that I was about to try and find the estuche myself.

Glancing over my shoulder to see if anybody was watching, I jumped over the desk and began to rifle through the drawers. Laughably, I found it in the very first drawer. It had been too easy, and as I sauntered out of the hotel I told Hodei over the phone that I had done it.

And then behind me, I heard: “Qué estaí haciendo?” What are you doing.

Oh shit. I turned and saw a security guard approaching me, mouth to his walkie-talkie.

“Uhh.” I put down my phone. “I wanted to get my bag.“

He wasn’t buying it. “You need to wait here for the police,” he told me.

My heart sank. I had made a huge mistake.

Within thirty seconds, there were more security guards surrounding me, and they began to question me on who I was, and why I was robbing the hotel.

The pressure of the situation flipped a switch in me, and pure adrenaline took over. For the first time in Chile, I was completely fluent in Spanish. In a flow state, I outlined the story: how we had rented a car the days before, that I had missed my bus, that my friend had left a bag behind, that I was retrieving it for him. That nobody was here, and I had made the probably foolish decision of trying to take it anyway. That I was really sorry but just frustrated that I couldn’t help Hodei out.

Over the course of ten minutes, I continued being cross-examined, feeling terrible for Hernán out there waiting. The security guards were skeptical—they needed confirmation of the fact that it belonged to Hodei, and of course when I tried to get him back on the phone my WhatsApp wasn’t working. Finally, we reached a conclusion: I wouldn’t get to keep the estuche, but they would send it in the mail to Hodei when he confirmed it was his; more importantly, they wouldn’t call the police. Despite the end result being literally the same as if I had done nothing at all, I considered it a massive win.

Back in the Uber, I told Hernán the story, and he thought it was hilarious and decided to buy me an empanada. We stopped at a grocery store on the way back, and I went to go get cash from the nearby ATM. For one heart-stopping moment (everything had a flair for the dramatic that evening) my debit card got swallowed up by the machine, and I very nearly rage-quit. Only after a minute’s delay did I get it back.

Hernán was nowhere to found, and I had to wait another five minutes before he reappeared with an empanada. It turned out he had made a lengthy detour to the bathroom.

We talked the whole half-hour back, and while I can’t remember the specifics of this conversation, the tantalizing feeling of joy at connecting with a stranger on a non-superficial level in Spanish remains.

We arrived at the hostal at 8pm, where we bid each other farewell. I was greeted by Leo, and to my surprise, he too struck up a conversation with me, asking about my day. When I told him that I had seen a Mapuche ruka, he smiled. “I’m Mapuche,” he told me. “I have the flag in my kitchen, I want to show you it.”

I waited as he went to retrieve it, but he returned empty-handed. “It’s too big,” he said. “I can show it to you before you leave. Stop by before you go.”

I had no idea why this mattered, but with my current level of Spanish, I decided it was easier to accept it as fact than to question the specifics. But some twenty minutes later, when I knocked on his door on the way out, Leo was gone. It was a disappointment, but it seemed to fit with the vibe of my first official day of solo travel.

I made my bus that night, though not without yet another near miss when I transferred in Temuco some hours later. Finally, I could relax in my semi-cama—that is, until my 8AM class the next morning.