Gay chat in Chile

Flying over the Andes this afternoon, en route to Santiago in Chile, the mountains underneath the plane look very impressive. The original plan was to meet boyfriend number 2 in Santiago around lunchtime, but unfortunately he's been delayed so I'm going to have to make the most of it until his flight arrives tomorrow morning. But what on earth can a gay guy do in a strange city without any of his boyfriends to keep him company?

Once I'm in the hotel and everything is unpacked, curiosity gets the better of me. I can remember that early last year a reader from Chile had emailed me his gay.com and gaydar profile names, so I find myself wondering how many gay guys there'll be in the gay.com and gaydar chat rooms. I try both, however the Chilean chat rooms are completely empty, which seems very strange because I can't believe that all the guys in Chile are straight! Indeed not, because with the help of google I find the chatgay.cl web page, and soon I've located a Santiago gay chat room at gaychile.com which has over 200 guys in it. But I don't speak Spanish :-(. I decide to give myself the chat name of "English tourist" with a bio line starting "No hablo español, Santiago hotel, ..." and which goes on to divulge my age.

No sooner have I entered the room when 4 guys all contact me at once. Wow, I think, this is going to be easy :-). Silly me! In spite of my lack of Spanish, when I look in detail at their chat names and bio lines I can immediately tell that 3 of them are escorts :-(. However, the fourth turns out to be a friendly 25 year old bisexual guy from the Maipú region so I get chatting to him. But it's a difficult conversation. Although his English is much better than my Spanish, his English still isn't very good.

Over the course of the next half hour or so I probably get contacted by 20+ guys, which is much more interest that I get back in the UK these days! However, I guess it's clear that I'm a little out of the ordinary here, so presumably that encourages guys to contact me :-). None the less, I still get the impression that the younger guys here are much less ageist than back home. One question that kept coming up was "do you have MSN?" so presumably guys meet in the chat room but then move to MSN to continue chatting, exchange pics, and perhaps use webcams. However, none of the guys speak particularly good English so communication is difficult for me.

Living in the Europe, and especially the UK, it's very easy to think that most people in the world speak English. But Latin America is probably one of the best places to remind oneself how untrue that is, because Latin America has a thriving culture all of its own. Indeed, one gets the impression that the majority of the people living here would barely notice if the whole English speaking world suddenly ceased to exist. Coming here is certainly a good antidote to Western culture :-).

Even though I get lots of interest from guys in the chat room, I decide early on that I'm just there to chat. If I was feeling lonely on a business trip, I wouldn't think twice about having a guy back to my hotel room, but boyfriend number 2 will be sharing this room with me tomorrow so it doesn't seem right to do that. So when the guys ask me "activo o pasivo", I reply "no sex, chat only" and unfortunately that usually kills the conversation. It's clear that the gaychile.com chat rooms are just as sex oriented as the gaydar ones back in the UK. Although a lot of things in Latin America are very different to the UK, I guess some things are the same the world over!