Valparaiso

On Thursday, Becky, Janet and I took the public bus to the port city of Valparaiso.

Valparaiso is a tangle of houses and stairs and alleys and streets and "ascensors" (funiculars) that spread from the narrow stretch of flat land along the coast up the steep hills. There are some magnificent stone and wood mansions built by old money, and lots more modest houses covered with corrugated metal and (if recently renovated) painted in a variety of colors. Lots of dogs, lots of graffiti.

The hosts of Janet's and Becky's bed and breakfast recommended a Valparaisan guide named Michael. He is originally from Germany, but has lived in Valparaiso for 3 or 4 years. If ever there was a city where you needed a guide, it is Valparaiso. Michael took us over and around the hills and in and out of buildings and through narrow alley ways and up and down stairs. He took us into the British volunteer fire company, and the German club (where there was a bust of Kaiser Wilhelm!), and into a building that was being renovated and provided a glimpse into the life of a wealthy family in an era long gone, and into a local pub for lunch and dozens of other places, pulling out black and white photographs showing what things looked like 50 or 100 years ago.

Like Punta Arenas, Valparaiso benefited from the California Gold Rush and was hurt badly by the Panama Canal. And like San Francisco, there was an earthquake here in 1906. Today the place is a UNESCO World Heritage site. There has been a lot of development and renovation in the past 12-15 years, and as is not at all surprising, those who have benefited by the tourism and renovation boom are pleased with it, while those who have not don't like it.

The municipal infrastructure was never well built and is showing its age. Michael said that were were house fires (often started by electrical problems) almost every week, and a gas main had exploded in the last few months.

Alas, this was where Becky's camera got stolen by a pair of smooth pick pockets, along with all her trip pictures.

After a long day of tramping the hills of Valparaiso, we headed back to Santiago on the bus and had dinner at a lovely tapas bar/restaurant.

Back to Santiago

We left Puerto Varas early in the morning to drive to the airport in Puerto Montt, which was a good thing because the main road was closed due to a wild fire and we had to take a stop and go alternative route. Apparently there have been a lot of fires lately due to an unusually dry summer.

We said goodbye to our wonderful guide at the airport, then had a leisurely cup of tea as our flight to Santiago was delayed for an hour due to bad weather in the previous stop.

After leaving, we had a stop in Concepcion, so we ended up getting fed twice on two short hops. The first time was tasty butter cookies with orange juice, and the second time was 3 tiny bite-sized sandwiches with toppings, with a truffle for dessert. Airline food is not particularly noteworthy, except that I'm always amused by the contrasts with the $5 box of stale cheese and crackers that you have the option of buying in the States if you aren't on a flight that serves a meal.

We were flying up the coast with the Andes Cordillera on the right and the ocean on the left. The mountains seem to go on forever. Most are "typical" mountains, but there are quite a few distinctive volcano cones scattered about.

It occurred to me as we landed in Concepcion (banking tightly in over the airport and stopping very quickly on what must have been a short runway) that it's probably more "interesting" to be a pilot in this area than in the States.

After landing in Santiago, we headed to our hotels. After settling in, I wandered to a park that had a number of very interesting sculptures and was also used by people of different ages and backgrounds for different purposes. The younger set was there with their mothers and having a grand time climbing trees and playing in sand areas and such. The adolescent set was seriously making out. The older couples were walking and talking. The tourists were taking pictures. Something for everyone.

Santiago has a Mediterranean climate (hot dry summers, cool wet winters) and is tucked in between the mountains and the sea. It's one of the smoggiest cities in the world because the smog gets trapped in front of the mountains. There is enough money to generate a lot of pollution but apparently not enough to do much with catalytic converters and such.

The areas we have visited have gotten progressively more prosperous and "modern" as we have headed north, perhaps partly because of the increasing level of natural resources available. I picked up an interesting book on Patagonian history and read that it took 300 years for successful settlements to start taking root because the land and climate were so harsh. The book also had an interesting comment on Spain and how it used the gold from the new world: "The affluence of gold could also be appreciated in commercial exchanges between countries: for example, Spain purchasing manufactured goods from Holland, France, England and Italy. These countries furnished Spain with all sorts of merchandise, and strengthened their manufacturing industries in exchange for the gold which Spain thought would last forever. Thus, Spain chose good living and luxury while the other countries emphasized their working abilities and production." Wonder how the history of the U.S. and the world will be told a hundred years from now...

Was people watching as I was having dinner. In a land that is supposedly very macho, there are probably more women drivers than men (at least on one street at one hour in Santiago) Very few American cars, and those pretty much all trucks. Mostly small cars.

We've had 2 women guides and 1 male guides, and all were non-Chileans - one from Peru, one from Turkey, one from Canada. Cynthia (our main guide) said that there weren't that many young people from this area who could guide and speak English well.

Tomorrow (Thursday), Becky, Janet and I head to Valparaiso on the bus.

Hiking on Volcan Osorno

The Osorno Volcano is an immense, perfect cone shaped mountain rising up from the lake across from our cabanas. The top is snow-covered at this point (early fall), and is part ice field and part glacier. After looking at this behemoth towering over us for 3 days, we finally got a chance to climb up it.

Climb shouldn't be taken too literally, though. We took a van up to a ski resort and then started hiking. It was a short hike (only 3 hours), but we went up about 1500 feet or so, and were high enough to see the ranges of mountains stretching away into the distance. The lake the cabanas were on was covered in fog and clouds, and there were clouds over a lot of the valleys, but the peaks were clear and the sky was blue. Clouds were curling over the top of Osorno in quite a magical way. The last time Osorno erupted was in the 1820's, although it is definitely still active, as are the other 2 volcanoes in the area. The trail, such as it was, was over loose volcanic scree. It was a great chance to get a sense of how mountainous the area is.

After coming back down, we left our cabanas and drove back along the lake to Puerto Varas, about 15 km away. This is another heavily German influenced town. We wandered around the town for a few hours, then had our last dinner together. In the morning we return to Santiago. By chance, 3 of us are staying in the same area in Santiago after the trip. Sounds as if two of the other folks will join me in an expedition to Valparaiso on Thursday.

Sea kayaking on Relonkavi Fjord

The group cooked a fabulous barbecue last night (steak with a wonderful marinade, roasted potatoes, salad, and home-made from scratch brownies). My stomach was still not happy, so I had mostly potatoes, but it was still good. We had a "parrot flyover" while eating dinner, as about 4 green parrots buzzed us while heading into the trees.

Today (Monday) we went sea kayaking on Relonkavi Fjord. It was warm and sunny and calm. We paddled about 15 kilometers in single kayaks, with the tide, with a stop for lunch mid way. As one would expect (given that fjords are carved by glaciers), we were in a steep valley with a series of forested hills and peaks rising on either side. It was amazingly quiet. We could hear roosters crowing up and down the valley, as well as other strange and wonderful birds, and if a car went by on the road you could hear it.

This is a good place for salmon farms (if any place can be said to be a good place for salmon farms, given their environmental impact) because the temperature is apparently ideal. Chile is the number 2 salmon farming country in the world, behind Norway, and will probably overtake Norway in a few years. Also lots of mussel farms, which don't have such a negative impact.

We are now back at our cabins and have started tonight's barbecue. One of our trip members is an amazing cook. We're having brined, marinated, baked, and then roasted chicken, roasted potatoes, a Chilean corn and cheese dish, a raspberry sauce he is making from black raspberries we picked at lunch, and smores. I think there was some salad mentioned too. I'm not completely over my stomach ailment, but am better.

Haven't decided what to do about tomorrow's hike. My right knee is definitely bothering me, but I don't have to decide until tomorrow.

Rafting in Ensenada

Today is Sunday and it's a beautiful sunny day with hardly a cloud in the sky. I'm sitting in my cabin looking out at Osorno Volcano, a perfect cone shaped mountain topped with snow. The cabins are on a large lake called Lago Llanquihue (sounds somewhat like Yankee Way). It's a huge lake -- about 330 square miles. It's the end of the tourist season here, with fall approaching and school starting, so it's quiet, but normally these cabins are packed and there are kids playing soccer on the home made soccer field and swinging on the wooden swings. Temperature today is in the mid to high 60s.

The rest of the group went for a bicycle ride today, but I passed. Wasn't sure whether I'd go because of my knee, although I probably would have started in any case and just switched to the truck that was trailing the group if my knee was too bad. However, I ended up with a rather unhappy stomach last night and it has persisted into today, and I thought I should not stray too far from a bathroom.

Yesterday we flew up from Puerto Arenas to Puerto Montt, then drove to Ensenada. We dropped our things and headed off for our raft trip down the river. First step was the safety briefing. We learned what to do if we got knocked out of the boat and what to do if the boat tipped over. For some reason, the group was very quiet after that. I was wondering if I really wanted to do this. But the trip was actually quite tame. The rapids were theoretically Class 3, but the water level was low and they were barely that, according to someone who had done some rafting before. However, the chance to spend the time on the Petrohue river was wonderful. It was cloudy and misty and the river cut through black volcanic rocky soil of the Vicente Perez Rosales national park, winding through volcanoes and mountains amid a beautiful forest. The rocks on shore were covered with moss in different colors. The tops of the mountains were covered with clouds, and it was a bit like a Japanese wood cut print. The water was gray green glacier water. It was raining/misting, which didn't really matter since we were wearing wet suits, and two of us jumped into the water anyway. All in all it was a wonderful chance to see the countryside.

Ensenada seems a bit more prosperous than Punta Arenas or Puerto Natales. Fewer houses badly in need of paint; more houses having a sense of tidiness.

Tonight and tomorrow night we have a barbecue. Tomorrow is the kayak day and it's supposed to be another lovely day.

Torres del Paine National Park

Wow. What an amazing week. Last Sunday our group met in the lobby of the hostel. Four women and one man make up the participants. Our guide is a delightful young woman from Peru.

While I was eating breakfast that morning I started talking to the only other person in the room, a man in his 30s who had just been in Torres del Paine park and was headed down to Tierra del Fuego. Taking the bus and camping. He was from Germany and was taking a month long vacation. Good role model for us Americans, both for taking an entire month of vacation and for hiking and busing.

Anyway, back to the trip. Luis (our driver for the trip to Torres del Paine) pulled up in a van shortly after we gathered and we all piled in to head north to Puerto Natales, the jumping off point for the Torres. We first headed off to the Sego Otway penguin colony. It was about 20 miles along the way to Puerto Natales, then about 15 miles along a dirt road. The countryside is relatively flat and dry, and not exactly what you would think of as penguin territory.

When we arrived to the penguin colony, we walked along a path for half a mile of more dry grass and low brush. We started to see lots of penguin burrows scattered about, and several penguin trails, and one can only imagine the number of short little penguin steps needed to waddle from sea to burrow and back to create these trails. The human path crossed one of the penguin trails on a bridge, and there was a sign saying don't loiter on the bridge since it will keep the penguins from returning to their burrows. Near the beach there was a wooden blind so that we could watch the penguins resting on the beach without disturbing them.

There were only a handful of penguins actually in their burrows, and maybe 30 or 40 on the beach, and the rest were at sea. The ideal time to visit a penguin colony is apparently either at dawn or at dusk, when the penguins are heading out to sea or returning, but that didn't work with our schedule. In any event, it was a treat to see them and I'm inspired to watch The March of the Penguins. This bunch was molting, so they were a bit scruffy and there were feathers all around.

After we left the penguin colony, we spotted lots of other wildlife, including nandu (an ostrich-like bird), guanaco (a wild animal related to the llama and alpaca), fox, flamingos, and skunk.

We got to Puerto Natales late Sunday afternoon. Puerto Natales is on Ultimo Esperanza Sound (Last Hope Sound, named when navigators looking for a passage tried one last sound.) The town was formerly focused on the sheep (mutton) industry and fishing, but now is also a tourist town, serving people visiting the Torres del Paine park and paddling the fjords. It's also the end point of cruises down the coast from Puerto Montt.

After a wonderful dinner of Chilean fare, we headed off to sleep to rest up for our big hike.

In the morning we met our local guide for the mountains, a young man from Turkey. Another wonderful guide, he spoke fluent Spanish and English and was more on top of English literature than I am.

We left everything we didn't need for the hike in the hotel, and the only thing I forgot was the spare battery for my camera, so I was somewhat sparing on pictures on the hike. More sparing than I needed to be, but c'est la vie. I'm sure the group will share.

After arriving in the park at mid morning we finally headed out on the first leg of the "W" hike. The term "W" comes from hiking up 3 valleys. The first day we hiked up to Refugio Chileno where we would spend the night. We dropped our packs in our room, and then headed up to the Torres, three granite spires that rise up out of a lake. (The picture at the top of the post is the Torres.) The final kilometer or so was up a boulder field, which was difficult walking and probably contributed to a very sore right knee by day four, but it was well worth it. We also saw a condor along the way, and he was actually underneath us so we could see the white feathers that are on the top of his wings. The first day's hike was about 14 K.

We learned that this area is not part of the Andes ... it's only about 13 million years old, compared to 50 - 80 million years old for the Andes. As was the case in North America, the whole southern part of South America was covered by glaciers during the last ice age that carved and shaped the terrain.

Day 2 we contoured around Lake Nordenskjol, with the changing lake opening up on our left and the mountain peaks on our right. Our destination was Refugio Los Cuernos, with a total hike of about 13 K. The lake was so big that it was sun dappled, as areas where the sun was shining through the clouds were a different color than where the clouds were hiding the sun. There were at least two levels of clouds ... a constantly moving low level that often scraped the mountain peaks and squeezed through the passes, and a high level that appeared motionless. We saw several local birds thanks to our alert trip members, including a Magellenic woodpecker tapping away on a dead tree. As we neared the end of the hike, we saw Los Cuernos, another amazing set of peaks. These are granite on the bottom with darker sedimentary rock on top, giving them a very distinctive and unique appearance.

Day 3 was a long hike, about 18 K. We headed up the French Valley to a lookout over a hanging glacier. We saw and heard pieces of the glacier break off and rumble down the mountainside. Then we headed back down the valley and on to Refugio Paine Grande, where we spent the third night of the hike.

We had fabulous weather all 4 days, but midday on day 3 the famous Patagonian winds started to blow. Easily up to 80 kilometers per hour. The wind would pick up the spray off the tops of the waves on the lake and swirl it around, or suddenly slam into a nearby tree. If you didn't want to use trekking poles to walk or to keep your balance crossing streams, there were still almost a necessity in the wind. On a previous trip, someone had actually gotten knocked over by the wind.

Day 4 we were supposed to hike up to Grey Glacier and take a ferry back. Unfortunately, when we were about 3/4 of the way there, we found out (via the guide's radio) that they had canceled the ferry due to the wind. My knee was quite sore by then and I would have been very pleased to take the ferry as opposed to backtracking (the planned 11 K hike turned into 15 K hike in a howling wind), but it all worked out.

The amazing thing about the park was that every direction you looked and every mountain and glacier you saw was different and unique and wonderful. I'm fading tonight, so am not doing this hike justice by any stretch of the imagination. But it's time for bed.

Just to bring things up to date, we got back to Puerto Natales last night. Spent this AM wandering around town (typical hardscrabble tourist town -- lots of hostels and outfitters and cyber cafes and entrepreneurs trying to make a living.) We then caught a public bus back to Punta Arenas, where we stayed in the same hotel. As we were leaving for dinner, the German tourist I had seen last Sunday arrived back at the hotel from Tierra del Fuego. Good to see him. Sounds like that's another great place to go.

Tomorrow we leave at 6:00 in the morning to catch a plane to Puerto Montt. We'll take a bus to our cabins in Ensenada, then go rafting. After that it's a day of biking, then kayaking, then a hike up the Osorno volcano, then back to Santiago on Wednesday.

Sorry for the rushed post; will try to be more coherent with the pictures.

Saturday in Punta Arenas

Today wasn't quite what I'd planned, but then the entire trip hasn't started quite the way I'd planned. I had fantasies of having become far more fluent in Spanish, of having been reading the local news websites (in Spanish, of course), and being far more fit. But, while I hate to paraphrase Rumsfeld, you go on vacation as you are, and it all works out.

Today was a full day on my own in Punta Arenas. I had found a number of websites of local tour companies that offered day trips in the area, and thought that my biggest challenge would be deciding what to do (kayaking, visiting the island with more than 100,000 penguins, going to a national park with different terrain and history than we'll be seeing in Torres Del Paine, and a host of other options.) Most places require a minimum of two people, but I assumed I'd be able to tag along with SOME other group. When I checked earlier this week, there were no groups running. But I thought the public ferry to the penguin island would be a perfectly wonderful fall back option. Unfortunately, they canceled today's ferry trip to the island because it was too windy.

So I spent the day wandering around Punta Arenas. This is a city of about 116,000 on the Strait of Magellen, about 53 or 54 degrees south latitude. It relies on fishing, petroleum, shipping, duty free retail, and tourism. It was founded in the first half of the 19th century, in time to serve as a major shipping point during the California gold rush (as was Valparaiso, which I hope to visit when I'm in Santiago.)

One of the things I've noticed about the city is the dogs. A small thing, perhaps, but the dogs here are extremely self possessed. At home, a dog is on a leash, or in a yard, or, in rare cases, has escaped and seems to be aware of the short duration of his or her grand adventure. The dogs here seem to be full fledged citizens. They go where they wish and hang out where they wish, and to them, we're just another passerby.

I'm also finding myself very aware of what I'm eating and drinking. The travel clinic said "Drink only bottled water!" Active South America and the travel book I have both said that tap water was safe, so I decided to believe them, but it's a little nerve wracking. Getting sick in the mountains isn't appealing. But so far so good.

I met one of the people on the trip this evening. A woman from Boston named Margaret. She seemed to know all the people on the trip -- asked "Are you from Minnesota?" She said there were two other women and a man, for a total of 5 people. We join up tomorrow at 12:30. At that point we head off to a different penguin colony (only 15,000 penquins) and then to Puerto Natales, and Monday morning we start our 4 day hut to hut hike in Torres del Paine national park.