Una Hermosa Tierra de Contradicciones

The pride of the south is the longaniza: a sausage similar to the chorizo and commonly eaten in Chile with bread as a choripan. Chile in fact is like the longaniza; it's long and thin and full of different flavoursome components. It is rich in natural beauty of varying colours and rich in natural history.

So much of Chile seems untouched by humans... until now, as you can see by the highly protested decisions to install more dams and introduce transgenic foods and the powerful mining lobby.

I teach English to the private sector, mostly commercial engineers for that matter, a lot of whom are quite conservative in many regards. During one early bird class, a student of mine questioned why so many Chileans were out in the streets protesting against HidroAysén when none of them recycle. Litter is scattered across the streets and outside the rich business end of Santiago, there aren't any council street cleaners with their large palm leaves to sweep away the mess. A receipt is given to you for every purchase, not matter how minor, and the staff won't let you leave until you have received it. Water is treated as if it were in abundance with old men washing down the public footpath in front of their house and a very small minority of households owning a plug for their sink.

There is definitely the possibility to recycle here though. The shopping centres all have recycle bins in their car parks but if you don't have a car, it's very hard to travel half an hour on public transport with bags weighed down by bottles and cans. They have a great system where you can return your Coca-Cola or Cristal beer plastic bottles for a refill, and if you need ink for your printer, you simply take your ink cartridge to be refilled by sticking in a syringe full of ink.

And yet, at the supermarket a plastic bag is used for each individual item. You can't buy bread, fruit or vegetables without wrapping it in plastic. There is a ridiculous amount of plastic bags in my house, which we use to line the rubbish bin but that hardly makes a dent in the pile. Lider supermarket (owned by Walmart) has introduced environmentally friendly blue bags for a cheap price but it is yet to catch on with the masses.

I'm just waiting for the day that the local municipality decides to integrate recycling into their garbage collection system. But that seems a long way off yet. Chile is still in its economic developmental stage and everything is geared towards economic improvement. Until this is reached, recycling and other such things will be consistently pushed to the back of the agenda, something that is happening in many developing countries. And yet the contradiction lies in the enormous amount of people here who feel some sort of connection to the land in some way or another, whether it is to preserve it or to adventure across it.

Because of Chile's geography, it is full of astonishing natural beauty that most Chileans are proud of and are protesting to protect, and yet life in the city seems to suggest something different. The tree-hugging hippy is still having ridiculously long showers.