treasure hunt.

I was really lazy that morning. Moreover, I thought I was supposed to spend the whole day by the computer  "doing stuff", and was secretly happy for the ability to have a lazy day off.

It didn't quite turn out like that.

Exactly at 10:00 am on May 29 I received a FB message, telling me to go to the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile (I sighed at the one hour trip ahead), look for the rightmost palm tree by the entrance and a hole in the ground beneath, where a green envelope would wait for me.

Stop. Treasure hunt in the middle of Santiago with instructions sent from Latvia? "It obviously doesn't make any sense, and I just hope I won't be too disappointed," was my only thought until I actually saw that one palm tree with that one hole in the ground. I slowly approached it, and.. The envelope really was there. "So what exactly is going on?" The sheet of paper included the following instructions. It was clear that the Chilean asked to carry this out had no grasp of what Latvian language is, when at one point I just couldn't understand  what I was supposed to look for on the corner of Paris and Londres. Slightly annoyed by the illegible note, the lack of city map and uncertainty of the upcoming events, I set off for the place, when someone tapped my shoulder.

Blackout.

The feeling of somebody (or my brain) having played out this really bad joke made me sick for a moment, before I dared to glance again. "It can't be him!.." But it was! My (es zinu, ka tu mani bakstīsi par apzīmētājiem) amazing boyfriend was standing there, in the middle of Santiago, casually watching me as if wondering what exactly made me so surprised. I mean, if you're off home to Latvia from a trip to Germany, a layover in Santiago de Chile is what every sensible person would do, right?

So after I forced myself to believe that Maksis really was in Chile, my only aim (apart from just having the bestest time ever) was sharing my Chile with him, and I like to believe that I succeeded. 

After spending a rather frustrated first day (after all, acting cool when having somebody on a surprise visit can be difficult at times, especially if that somebody you had programmed to be "missed, far away") in Santiago, we soon set off for Valparaíso & Viña del Mar, which I had wandered around for merely a day some weeks before.

The day of the Spanish challenge, when I let the man arrange everything.. in Spanish! And you did magnificently well, deary.

Walking around the sunny and hot city, having it share its grandeur and bohéme with us really was a blessing. Apart from the already familiar hills and ascensores I had a new perspective on the city by staying in a remote part of Valpo, barrio Artilleria, which has its own plaza, rhythm of life and half-empty home cuisine restaurants.

Viña del Mar. On our way to Concón.

If there was one generally awesome thing about our trip is that no matter how and when we always found the nicest people places, characterizing the trip. Some of them include Elder Farnsworth, a Masson missionary who approached us in a bus to Concón, the gastronomical capital of Chile, just out of Valpo. He could obviously translate our worried looks by going to a random town in the middle of the night helplessly set to look out for a place to eat. This is what he told us while drawing a map on a grid paper: "So you go back this street until there's a white building on one corner, Godfather's Pizza on the second one and  a Methodist's church slightly further. Turn right and you'll see a fancy place where you'll leave 20'000 pesos for a plate. Don't do it. Go straight, turn left, go straight again and turn left once again. Now, just when you're at the point when you thing "where the heck am I", that's when you see Luis' restaurant. Just go in and ask for Luis, he'll take care of you." And we did find the place! Luis was there and promised to say hi to Elder Farnsworth when he would return for empanadas he loves.

We decided to see more of the north of Chile, and La Serena was the next on the list. I'm really trying to keep this as un-cheesy as possible, but from now on I have nothing against 7 h bus drives if there's that one person next to you making it feel like 7 minutes.

La Serena on its own is a regular summer town with a nice city centre and wide sandy beach, making it the top summer destination in Chile. Seeing the town and its fancy apartment building half-empty was at the same frightening and exciting sight, because the sea belonged to no one but us. We also challenged our relaxed and well-fed tummies by going to the nearby town of Coquimbo by bicycles enjoying the bike lane right by the beach. 

We managed to get to its famous cross, built in 2000 as a gift on somebody-very-special's 2000th birthday. Sorry for sarcasm, but I didn't find anything appealing in the 100 m high block of concrete, metal and rust. The whole thing was not only the experience in itself for having to pass some slums of Coquimbo and feeling the locals staring in my back; for the first time I found out what it actually meant to be afraid of height and panicking to tears when getting up the cross. Too good Maksis didn't fell out of the maintenance tunnel (which didn't have anything to stop suicidal fanatics) when the guide took us above the floor available to tourists. He must've mistaken my tears for an expression of some inexplicable excitement and went on telling me the height and the weight of the cross as a response to my "I really am afraid of height". A nice guy, really.

The most exciting part, however, was hidden inland.

I love that hat.

Valle Pisco, a magnificent valley locked by the cordillera, is where the best pisco in Chile comes from. I may have not mentioned it yet, but just like Mexicans extract their tequila from cactus and Russians can make vodka of anything, the spirit of Chile (and Peru, let's be honest) is pisco, which is pretty much distilled wine. It was amazing to see how the clouds by the seaside ended abruptly just as we entered the valley, making the sunny and hot (+20 or more) day a "rather pleasant" one, considering we're in winter. I love travelling in low season, because apart from us, we saw three more tourist couples wondering the usually packed tourist city. For us it was like it should be, a remote haven full of wine in the air.

Because eating cactus is fun!..

...unlike getting rid of the needles.

A fun fact I didn't know about Chile is that around 30% of world's astronomic observatories are located in the north of the country. "Chile, where the stars are the brightest" isn't only a tourist slogan, it really is true, because the clouds are kept away by the cold Pacific stream on the one and the Andes on the other side. San Pedro de Atacama is still on the must-do list, but visiting the Mamalluca observatory really was a treat.

Orion's belt just above the mountains.

None of us had been to an observatory, so seeing the Saturn in the telescope made us return to that childish excitement of having seen a planet. And countless constellations. And just enjoying a rather magic night somewhere between the Earth and the space.

Upon returning to Santiago there was the inevitable melancholy hanging in the air, as the time began running out. We still grasped the moment by trying out the urban student experience (thank you, Pato and Almut, for letting us enjoy it!) along with a crazy movie El Tio (The Uncle) by Ignacio Santa Cruz. He is the main actor and the director of the movie about one of the most controversial figures in Chilean military dictatorship. Even more, he is Jaime Guzman's nephew and, according to Maksis, "that one random guy I met at the airport". Anyway, watching the movie from the exactly the same bed where two guys make love in the first scene (and one of them sitting right next to me) definitely was an experience worth living.

And then came June 10. It was tears along with whispered promises that marked the day when Air France took him away. I can't imagine myself ever forgetting the greatest surprise of my life. Neither can I imagine any other man crossing an ocean and a continent just to see me. If this isn't a tribute to love, I don't know what is. One thing I'm not too sure of, though. What so good have I done in my life to deserve this?

Saule, tu zini. x