Pichilemu is a small surfing town about three to four hours south of Santiago by bus. I went a few weeks ago with some startup chile friends and it was beautiful. It was just the break I needed from the heat of Santiago in the middle of the summer. There were huge beaches, big waves, warm sun, great food and interesting people.
We stayed at an awesome hostel, right on the beach, about five minutes walk from the town center called Pichilemu Surf Hostel. The owner is a Dutch guy who bought the land about 20 years ago for $12,000 and built the hostel himself. He had to completely rebuild in the last year after a tsunami wiped out his beach front property after the huge earth quake from a year ago. Many buildings were damaged in Pichilemu and a few were killed, including a few tourists. We saw the evidence on a beach where the only thing that remained of beach front restaurants was the floor.
The seafood was phenomenal and cheap. Fisherman hauled their catch in and came right up onto the beach to sell their catch. They were selling 3 whole fish, cleaned and filleted for $2. They has fresh shrimp, crab, barnacles, conger eel and even a little shark. We stopped for a super fresh white fish ceviche on the beach for about $2 and later that night shared a pastel de jaiba, which is sort of like a crab/cheese casserole. I had fried conger eel, which is really a white fish that tastes sort of like cod. It was truely awesome food.
We watched the sun set over the pacific each day and then drank cheap beer and wine either by a fire or at one of the local bars. We met new friends at bars and everyone went to the beach to drink, play music and have fun until 7am. It was my kind of town and I wish I could have stayed for longer. If you like to cook and go to Pichilemu, rent a cheap cabin with a kitchen and take advantage of the amazing seafood!
Startup Chile is opening up a new round of applications tomorrow with hopes of inviting up to 100 new teams to come to Chile to run their startups. Like our initial group of 23 teams, the new teams will be awarded $40,000 to develop their business in Chile.
If you’ve been following my blog, Startup Chile is a program to turn Chile into the high tech hub of South America. The Chilean government is offering world class startups $40,000 to move to Chile to develop their businesses for a minimum of 6 months. The goal is to import a tech scene to augment the emerging Chile tech scene. There are already some great Chilean companies, entrepreneurs and tech teams and the goal is to inject more teams to make the Chilean tech sector zoom.
Back in November, Jesse and I were the 7th team to come to Chile as part of the program and we both agree that if we had to do it all over again, we would in an instant. We avoided the cold Wisconsin winter, but more importantly, we’ve met amazing entrepreneurs from both Chile and the rest of the world. Our friends from the program are Chilean, Portuguese, Israeli, German, Chinese, Canadian, Irish, South African, British and more (apologies to those I missed). The list goes on.
We also have used the money very wisely. Santiago is a very affordable big city and costs about as much as Madison, WI if you want to live really well. You could live very well here on $1200 a month including housing, less if you share an apartment. Being in Chile and out of our normal routine also helped us concentrate on our business. It allowed us to take a step back and really work on the business, away from distractions in the US. I fully recommend applying for Startup Chile. It’s been a great opportunity for Entrustet as a business and for me as a person.
Books are incredibly expensive in Chile. I’m talking $50-$80 for a new hardcover and $30-60 for a new softcover. Even used books can be $5-15. It’s even more expensive for books in English.
It’s easily 2-5x more expensive here to buy a book, sometimes more. Textbooks are closer to US prices, but that’s still much more expensive when the GDP per capita is around $15,000 and the minimum wage is about $400 per month. These extremely high prices put books out of range for Chile’s poor and even middle class.
I talked to a friend who works in a language school who told me that when she goes back to the US, the school asks her to bring books back because they are so much cheaper there. Every Chilean I’ve talked to about book prices says “oh man, don’t get me started, it’s ridiculous.” It’s a big problem.
Books are fast, simple ways to transmit large amounts of knowledge quickly. They are the the most cost effective way for poor and middle class people to learn. Those without access to the internet still read the printed word, and even those with internet access still buy one of the four published daily newspapers (primero, sengunda, tercera, cuarta) which come out at various times of the day.
I’ve talked to a few people and it seems that the reason they are so expensive is taxes. The government has a tax that amounts to about $3-6, and sometimes more on each book. Also, there seems to be a tax on publishing that gets baked into the cost somehow. All of these costs add up to $80 hard cover books. It makes no sense, when the government ran on a platform of education reform and educating the poor.
Which brings me to the Kindle. The 3g enabled Kindle provides free access to the Amazon store from over 100 countries in the world, including Chile and Argentina. You can be sitting in park, pull out your Kindle and browse for free and Amazon foots the bill. They have made deals with all of the local cellular networks so that you can buy books from anywhere. I can buy just about any book in English for between $1 for classics and $9 for brand new hard covers. The vast majority are $6 and you have the entire Amazon store at your fingertips. Books download in 30 seconds.
The new wifi enabled Kindle costs $139 and the 3g enabled Kindle costs $189 on Amazon. When buying a Kindle costs less than 2 books, it just makes sense to buy, even for those without much money. As the price of Kindles fall below $100, they will begin to be even more attractive to South American readers. Unfortunately, you can only buy a two generation old 3g Kindle in Falabella for 199,000 pesos, or about $400, as the government slaps a tax on imported electronics.
The other problem is that there are hardly any books in Spanish available for purchase. There are classics like The Count of Monte Cristo, Don Quijote and The Three Musketeers, trashy romance novels, a few different versions of the Kama Sutra and believe it or not, lots of books from the “church” of Scientology. There are a few exceptions: you can find a few Isabelle Allende books and other very well known Spanish speaking authors, but there are not many.
As more books in Spanish get formatted for Kindle and Kindle’s price falls, Chileans will have a much greater access to books at a much lower price. Kindles and other ereaders are poised to change Chile and other South American countries by providing cheap access to knowledge and circumventing the taxation and publishing industry prices. It will be interesting to see if the government tries to extend it’s hand into ebooks, as they have with published books.
Santiago and Mendoza, Argentina are separated by about 120 miles and one huge mountain range. Instead of a 2 hour drive, it’s a 5-6 hour drive through the Andes mountains. You can go by plane in about 40 minutes. Mendoza had been on our list of places to visit and when Mendoza showed up LAN Airlines’ Last Minute specials for about $70, we decided to book a weekend. If you’re traveling in South America, make sure to look at the prices in Spanish, they were 50% cheaper than the ones in English. For more Mendoza tips and tricks, check out my friend Paige’s post on Tripeezy.
Mendoza is a laid back city of Malbec, beef & pasta, olive oil, ice cream and beautiful, wide streets, set at the foot of the Andes mountains. A little over 100k people live in Mendoza proper, but the city sprawls out to include about 850k people in the suburbs and surrounding area. Central Mendoza sort of reminded me of an Argentine Madison in terms of size and pace of life. The city is set out in a grid system emanating from the beautiful, green Plaza de Independencia in the middle. Main streets are wide boulevards with ample pedestrian walkways shaded by large trees. The streets are lined with cafes, restaurants and gelato parlours.
Mendoza is much cheaper than Santiago and clearly less developed. The houses and buildings look a bit older, but it’s still a very well developed city. Argentina has a large Italian influence, so that means pasta and gelato, along with a more sing-songy Spanish. They also pronounce words that have the “LL” as more of a “sh”, although less so than in Buenos Aires. They often say “vos” instead of “tú” and speak slower and more clearly than most Chileans. There also seems to be a higher penetration of English, but that could be because we were in a touristy part of the city and Mendoza is a touristy city.
Nightlife starts even later in Mendoza. We ate dinner at about 10pm and we were pretty much the only people in the restaurant. It filled up by about 1045. We went out to for some drinks about 12/1 and the clubs weren’t even open yet. They start to open at 2am and then close around 6/7am. Mendozans take a siesta, which means just about everything is close for an hour or two in the afternoon. Everything and I mean everything was closed on Sunday.
On Friday, we took the short flight over the Andes and checked into our hostel. It was about $15 per person per night and located close to the city center. We walked around for a few hours, ate some great gelato and then met some friends for lunch on one of Mendoza’s many wide boulevards. We walked to a nice park and then went back to the hostel for a bit of a rest. After awhile, we checked out The Vines of Mendoza, which was started by two guys fro Austin, TX. They had a great selection local wines and you could get a great class for about $2-3. They also had a great cheese and meat plate with some great blue cheese.
Next, we went out for dinner at an Italian restaurant named La Marchigiania that the taxi driver recommended. We shared an amazing caprese salad that included the best balsamic vinegar I’ve ever had. Next, we split two different types of steak and a spinach and pasta dish that were both top notch. Dessert was a chocolate fudge ball, covered in ice cream, then covered in hard chocolate. By about 1230, we had our fill and asked for the bill. For two appetizers, four main courses, three nice bottles of wine and a dessert, our bill came out to about $75 total, or about $19 each, including tip. Needless to say, we were impressed by the quality and price of Argentine food.
Bodega Cavas de Don Arturo
The next day, we got up early and went on a wine tour. The four of us booked a driver and three wineries and spent the day in the beautiful wine country at the foot of the Andes. Our first winery was Cavas de Don Arturo, a small family owned winery that only produces a small amount of wine by hand each year. We tried a few different wines and took at tour of the beautiful winery. Next we went to Septima, which is part of a large Spanish company. It was quite the contrast between a small, handmade winery and a large, commercial operation.
Ruca Mallen
We ended our tour at Ruca Mallen, where we booked lunch. For $50, we had a six course tasting menu, with six wine pairings. The Ruca Mallen outdoor dining area is an amazing place to eat and the meal matched the setting. The highlights were the quinoa lemon & olive oil salad, pumpkin milanesa and the fig crusted steak. All of the food was great. The best wine of the day was a 2002 Cabernet Sauvignon and Malbec blend that was paired with the steak. This $50 meal would have cost $175-200 in the US and the wine alone was probably $75-100 in the US, maybe more. The value for money was top notch.
Steak, photo credit Paige Brown, Tripeezy
That night, we slept off our meal and then checked out some of the nightlife. It was nice and relaxing and after the huge meal and wine, we ended up calling it a night fairly early by Mendoza standards. The next day, we woke up and took a minibus about 45 minutes outside of the city into a canyon with a river flowing through it. There was a public pool which reminded me of a smaller Wisconsin Dells and an upscale spa that was really expensive, so we just joined the other locals and walked down into the canyon and hung out by the river. We had lunch at a small asado restaurant and ate costillar (beef ribs) that had been grilled with real wood about thirty yards away. We spent the rest of the day lounging around and then took the minbus back to the hostel.
We decided to have one more top notch meal and ended up at 1884 for another top notch meal. I had another steak and we all shared appetizers and wine. The highlight was a goat cheese and apple salad with an interesting balsamic. The outdoor setting was beautiful, the food was great and the conversation was even better. While good, I thought the other two meals we had were better values. Although we can’t spend any Startup Chile money on our travels, the weekend was an expense I was willing to pay. We all needed a relaxing break away from Santiago and our businesses.
We watched the sun set over the pacific each day and then drank cheap beer and wine either by a fire or at one of the local bars. We met new friends at bars and everyone went to the beach to drink, play music and have fun until 7am. It was my kind of town and I wish I could have stayed for longer. If you like to cook and go to Pichilemu, rent a cheap cabin with a kitchen and take advantage of the amazing seafood!
