Sleeping Around Read online

  I found an internet cafe easily enough, but much to my frustration I still couldn’t find a couch. I sent out a few more requests as I still had another six nights in Santiago, but I resigned myself to the fact that I was going to be couchless for the first night of my Grand Couch Surfing Tour of the world. It looked like I had to get a hotel—either that or go Park Bench Surfing.

  I passed a couple of hotels, but opted for Hotel Foresta, which was only-just-slightly-rundown (read: cheaper). The hotel overlooked Cerro Santa Lucía, a lavishly landscaped park that looked more suited for mountain goats than people. Crammed into a small city block was an impossibly steep wooded hill full of fountains, curving staircases and intricate stone paths.

  No wonder I wasn’t getting a response to my couch requests. Everyone in Santiago under 30 was canoodling in the park. After checking into my only-just-slightly-rundown room, I decided to take advantage of the balmy late afternoon and climb the park. The steep hill was packed with amorous couples, their arms, legs and lips all entwined. They were sprawled on park benches, lustfully lounging on the grass and there were even parents groping each other while their kids ran around their ankles.

  I hiked up the narrow leafy terraces trying to find a lookout, but every time I stepped into one of the small nooks hanging precariously over the rocky edge, I’d bump into a couple with their tongues down each other’s throats. The final steep ascent took me up to the tiny Caupolicán Plaza and a sweeping view of Santiago. The suburbs of the city really did stretch out to the very base of the Andes and in some places were creeping up the lower reaches as if the mountains were slowly pushing their way into the city.

  ‘It was on this site that Pedro de Valdivia, the conqueror of Chile, founded Santiago in 1541 for the crown of Spain. The hill was originally called Huelén, which in the local mapudungún language means “pain or sadness”. In 1872 . . .’ I couldn’t read the rest of the plaque because a young woman’s bottom was draped across it while her boyfriend fondled it (that’s the bottom he was fondling, not the plaque).

  The streets behind the hotel were a warren of charming little cobbled lanes and passageways that were packed with restaurants and bars. As a parade of beautiful people wandered around happily spinning out the process of deciding where to eat, I randomly picked the first restaurant with outdoor tables and ordered a beer. My first night of my Grand Couch Surfing Tour may have been couchless, but I was still determined to enjoy myself. Or get drunk. Whichever came first. Getting tipsy proved to be quite easy. First of all my beer was served in a huge Alice-in-Wonderland tea cup. Then, when the waiter suggested I should try the Chilean national drink known as ‘pisco sour’, he brought out two large glasses. It was two-for-the-price-of-one Pisco Sour Happy Hour. The drink had more pisco than sour and was basically a glass of strong clear brandy with a squirt of lime and a pinch of sugar in it.

  I tried to soak up the pisco sours with a plate of fried squid and salad, but the combination of lime-flavoured rocket fuel and jet lag (I wasn’t sure if it was 3.30 in the morning or 3.30 in the afternoon in Australia) was definitely affecting my judgement. That’s probably why I dropped into a bar on the way back to the hotel for another drink. Bar Berri looked as if it belonged to a past age with its low ceilings and tiny wood-panelled rooms. When I ordered a beer in my clumsy Spanish, the manager asked where I was from. ‘Ah, Steve Irwin!’ he gushed. ‘Crikey!’ he said as he handed me my beer.

  I’d only been sitting at a table by myself for a few minutes when the manager came over and said, ‘I have a friend you can meet’. His friend was the Spanish ambassador to Chile. ‘Ah, Steve Irwin!’ the ambassador said, shaking my hand. This might work out all right, I thought. My suave new friend would surely have a spare couch. And more than likely it would be a lovely, soft leather one. I soon realised, however, that the ambassador might have other plans for his couch that night. Even as he spoke to me, he was deftly fondling his secretary’s bottom.

  On the way back to the hotel I noticed that the internet cafe was still open, so I shuffled in to check my emails. I was nothing if not persistent.

  ‘YES!’ I blurted out at the top of my rather inebriated voice.

  As far as couch surfing goes, I’d hit paydirt. I’d been invited to stay at a ski lodge up in the Andes for two days. Miguel Angel Chacana lived in Valparaíso, but according to his profile he ‘wasn’t home too much’. Miguel worked as a guide and cook on horse riding tours in the wilds of Patagonia in the summer and ‘cooked in a ski lodge when it was busy’ in the winter. Miguel was in Santiago for the night and he said in his email that if I wanted to join him I needed to call him before eleven o’clock because he was leaving early in the morning for the 90-minute drive up to the lodge. I looked at my watch. It was five to eleven.

  2

  ‘Skiing is the sport I like the most in winter and sleeping later from time to time.’

  Miguel Angel Chacana, 45, Valparaíso, Chile

  CouchSurfing.com

  Miguel looked nothing like Miguel.

  ‘Brian?’ he asked as he stepped out of his car in front of the hotel. In the photo of Miguel on his profile, he had a shaved head. This Miguel had a wild crop of grey hair and was at least ten years older.

  ‘Hola, nice to meet you,’ I said, reaching for Miguel’s hand.

  Miguel grunted a quick ‘Hola’ then grabbed my pack and threw it into the boot of the car.

  ‘Now we go,’ Miguel said with an evil grin. Okay, possibly I was being a little paranoid, but it all seemed a little odd. Miguel didn’t appear to speak much English yet his CouchSurfing profile was written in perfect English. As we drove away I began to feel a tremor of foreboding. In Miguel’s profile he sounded nice enough, but I really knew nothing about him. Why, for example, had he previously shaved his head? Or was he wearing a wig? Then it hit me. No one at home knew where I was or who I was with. If Miguel took me up to a secret hideout in the mountains to torture me, no one would ever know. Maybe that was it. Maybe Miguel was part of some Chilean Freedom Fighter group and he was about to hold me to ransom. Even more worryingly, none of my friends or family have lots of money, so Miguel and his Freedom Fighters would have to kill me to prove a point. Maybe this couch-surfing thing wasn’t such a good idea after all.

  I looked Miguel up and down to try and figure out where he kept his gun. He looked normal enough. Ah, but that’s why he was the perfect choice to lure innocent and naïve couch surfers onto his ‘couch’.

  ‘So Miguel,’ I stammered, ‘. . . are you a good skier?’

  ‘I’m not Miguel,’ he said, staring at the road ahead.

  Oh dear.

  I was right. I was being kidnapped.

  ‘We pick up Miguel on way,’ the man who wasn’t Miguel said cheerfully—almost too cheerfully.

  I see. In case I tried to put up a fight, there would be two of them to hold me down. Maybe I could jump out of the moving car. There was hardly any traffic, however, and we were moving quite quickly. Still, a few grazes and a broken arm or two would be a darn sight better than getting hung up by my testicles.

  When I’d told friends that I was going to be staying with complete strangers in cities I’d never been to before, at least half of them had said, ‘But they might be axe murderers!’ (Not just plain old murderers, mind you, always axe murderers.) One friend had been right, though. He’d predicted that I’d be kidnapped by freedom fighters.

  Just as I was contemplating jumping out of the car, we pulled up in front of a neat line of apartment blocks and a bald-headed man wearing a bright red fleece skipped out and jumped into the back seat.

  ‘Hola Brian, welcome to Chile!’ the real Miguel said, with a warm handshake and a beaming smile. After ten minutes in Miguel’s company, I was pretty sure he wasn’t a freedom fighter (although his surly friend Roberto with the evil grin could still have possibly been an axe murderer). Miguel may have been a stranger, but he seemed truly welcoming and genuine.

  I was certainly in for a welcoming
surprise when I got to the lodge. I wasn’t sleeping on a couch. I had a bed. And not just one bed, I had 28 beds to choose from. It was the end of the ski season and the lodge was empty. Miguel’s best friend and fellow guide Jorge was the manager of the lodge and Miguel, who cooked at the lodge during peak ski season, was coming back to help clean up the place.

  ‘I almost didn’t make it up to the mountains this winter,’ Miguel said.

  ‘Why is that?’ I asked.

  ‘I almost got eaten by a puma.’

  Miguel went on to tell me that at the end of the summer, the guides help lead more than one hundred horses across the breadth of the country to winter pastures, and each night someone has to guard the horses from pumas who like to ‘eat their ears’.

  ‘A puma tried to get into my tent,’ Miguel explained casually.

  I’d only just met Miguel, so I didn’t think it was appropriate to tell him that maybe it was because his extraordinarily large ears did look rather tasty.

  Besides having to keep large felines out of his sleeping bag, Miguel certainly had a fun-packed working life. He spent six months of the year in Patagonia leading and cooking for small groups of cashed-up Americans on twelve-day horse treks. The treks were very la-di-da indeed, with the staff often outnumbering the guests. Six packhorses were needed to carry tents, food and spare chaps. Miguel then worked for three months cooking at the ski lodge. He spent the rest of the time in Valparaíso where he liked ‘sleeping late from time to time’.

  ‘Would you like to go skiing?’ Miguel asked.

  ‘Yeah, that’d be great!’ I said with a huge grin.

  ‘We can hire some skis here,’ Miguel said as we pulled into the car park of a McDonalds. The ski-hire shop was in a tiny shack next to the drive-thru.

  Not long after picking up my skis, we were leaving the suburbs and climbing steadily up the edge of a steep gorge past stone and wooden houses balanced precariously on stilts. As we drove higher into the Andes, the trees disappeared and we started to cross the archetypal South American prairie—albeit on a 45-degree angle. Ahead and above us the washed-out brown mountains were covered with patches of orange and yellow desert flowers and dotted with 2-metre high cacti. To make the prairie picture complete, as we rounded a bend, a cowboy on horseback (or a huaso as Miguel corrected me) trotted across the road.

  I couldn’t see much of the village we were staying in. Farellones was shrouded in a swirling fog, while horizontal sleet splattered against the windscreen. It didn’t look at all promising. Particularly when the ski run, which dropped down into the backdoor of the village, didn’t have a dollop of snow on it. Maybe I should have hired grass skis. In fact the only snow around was the small piles of grey sludge collected at the base of the village buildings and the wet excuse for snow dribbling down the car windows.

  ‘Where do you, um . . . ski?’ I asked.

  Miguel pointed up into the clouds. ‘Up there!’ he said reassuringly.

  Up there somewhere were apparently three ski resorts: La Parva, El Colorado and Valle Nevada. Farellones was only 2500 metres high (which is still higher than any mountain in Australia), while the main skiing area was up around the 3700-metre mark.

  ‘There are over one hundred kilometres of ski runs and more than fifty ski lifts,’ Miguel added proudly.

  The village was mostly made up of small but attractive stone and wood holiday homes and lodges. With no people or cars on the dirt roads, though, the whole place looked deserted and a bit eerie in the smoky clouds. But I did shriek with delight when we pulled up in front of Refugio Alemán. We didn’t quite have the lodge to ourselves: In the front garden was a small corral housing three very dopey-looking llamas.

  The inside of the lodge was very rustic—which is a polite way of saying a little bit the worse for wear. We found Jorge sprawled out on the couch in front of a blazing fire watching a TV soap on a small worse-for-wear television. The main communal area was a long space with a cramped lounge section, a scattering of pine dining tables and, at the far end of the room, a bar and pool table.

  ‘You like?’ Miguel said with a wink, motioning towards the bar.

  Hanging across the top of the bar was a large Australian flag. Australians are like dogs. Wherever venturesome and patriotic Aussies roam on this planet, they have to mark their newly conquered territory.

  The lodge may have had 28 beds, but they were all jammed into tiny rooms. Miguel gave me the smallest room with one bunk bed in it because ‘it will be much warmer for you’. The room was so small that there wasn’t enough space on the floor to put my backpack. I must have looked a little disappointed because Miguel said, ‘Yes, but you have four bathrooms to choose from’.

  Jorge dragged out a cardboard box full of odd bits of skiing apparel that guests had left behind. I grabbed a pair of hot pink women’s gloves and a pair of ski pants that were too small around the waist (yes, okay, or my waist was too large). There were no hats in the box, so Jorge shrugged, then tugged the rainbow-coloured knitted hat off his own head and plonked it on mine. Miguel and Jorge weren’t joining me for a ski. They mumbled something about ‘cleaning the lodge’, but Jorge looked to me as if he was set for some serious TV watching.

  The modern ski village of El Colorado—and I’m talking about that French housing-commission-flats-in-the-snow style of modern—was a 15-minute drive up a steep narrow road with 180-degree switchbacks. As we reached the top of one long section I looked back; a car at the bottom of the switchback looked as tiny as cars do when you look at them out of an aeroplane window. The snow had stopped falling by the time we reached the ticket office, but the mountains were still under the clouds’ tender embrace. At least I would be warm. I was wearing almost the entire contents of my backpack.

  I wasn’t quite expecting donkey-drawn rope lifts, but I was pleasantly surprised to jump on a brand-new detachable high-speed triple chairlift. The greatest surprise, however, came near the top of the lift. Well, there were two actually: First of all there was a good cover of snow on the runs under the chair and then, just when I was thinking that I could almost see patches of blue sky through the clouds, we (the chairlift and I) suddenly burst out into bright sunshine across an enormous blue sky.

  I stood at the top of the lift for some time. One of my greatest joys when travelling is that on every trip there is something new to see that leaves me totally awed. The mountains that encircled me were dark brutal hulks iced with wisps of cloud wreathed like suspended smoke across their distant summits. I almost crashed on my first few runs because I couldn’t keep my eyes off the growing army of majestic peaks that were revealed as higher clouds drifted in and out. At least there wasn’t much chance of crashing into anyone. I just about had the mountain to myself.

  I had an unforgettable day. I spent the morning on my own personal ski lift, then skiing back down on soft spring snow. I lunched in the sun on a huge terrace with only four other diners, then spent the afternoon weaving through steep fields past gargantuan boulders. Towards the end of the day the extraordinary views got even better as the clouds slid down the mountains to reveal an overpowering vista of brown rocky valleys and still more jagged peaks.

  When Miguel came to pick me up, we adjourned for a drink at the El Alambique pub in the main base building. Over large mugs of Crystal beer I found out more about Miguel’s life. Miguel and Jorge had been working for Blue Green Adventures in Torres del Paine National Park in Patagonia for ten years. It seems Miguel had spent most of his life on the go. Before being a guide he was a taxi driver in Valparaíso and before that he was in the Chilean navy. ‘The navy was the only way to see the world,’ Miguel said. ‘No Chileans were allowed to leave the country when Pinochet was in charge, but with the navy I got to go to Argentina, Peru and Uruguay.’

  Miguel has an ex-wife and two teenage children (I didn’t ask when he actually found the time to conceive) who still live in Valparaíso. I imagined he caught up with his kids when he wasn’t sleeping late from time to time.
r />   When I went to the bar to get us another beer, I noticed a couple of computers set up for internet use. I couldn’t help myself. I had to have a quick surf to see if I had a couch to surf for the rest of my stay in Chile.

  Triple Bingo. I had three offers, including one from a fellow called José who said: ‘I would like to take you out drinking and dancing.’ I now faced a dilemma that was the opposite of not having a couch: too many couches and a bloke asking for a hot date. I emailed them all back accepting all three offers. After my time in the mountains, I had three nights left in Chile—which would now be three one-night stands. I would go out drinking and dancing with 35-year-old engineer José, then I’d head out to the suburbs to stay a night with 28-year-old graphic designer Juan and finally catch a bus to Valparaíso to stay with 24-year-old journalist Mariano.

  Miguel offered to buy another round, but I declined. Not that I didn’t want another beer, it was just that I didn’t fancy being in the same car as Miguel with three large beers in him as he drove down a narrow, steep, icy road in the dark.

  On the way out we picked up a tall, gorgeous girl called Claudia. I wasn’t the only bunk-bed surfer staying at Refugio Alemán. Miguel and Jorge’s friend Claudia, who had been filling in at the tourist information counter at El Colorado, was crashing in one of the dorm rooms. Claudia was a ski instructor, but when her season had ended two weeks earlier so had her tenure in the ski instructor’s apartments.

  ‘I have a ski bum,’ Claudia said to me in the car.

  I swivelled around and inspected her bottom.

  Just as I was about to comment that I wasn’t sure what a ski bum actually looked like, but that she had a nice one nevertheless, it clicked . . .

  ‘Ah, you are a ski bum!’

  ‘Yes. For the past four years I have been moving from South to North America working and skiing.’

  I imagine many of Claudia’s ski-school students fall hopelessly in love with her. Claudia was in her late twenties with long black hair, smooth sun-kissed skin, huge brown eyes and, I might add, a very nice ski bum.