leaving

i am in santiago airport right now, waiting to board.
i arrived in santiago last sunday to spend the week here. our last days at the hogar were pretty stressful and hectic. tia Gaby was on her honeymoon and the replacement tia was sort of incompetent. we've been doing a lot of work anyway, basically the work of a real tia, since tia Flor has still not been replaced. with the visiting americans and lack of a tia things were really tough on us, we had sort of been hoping to relax in our last weeks and not take things so seriously, but that didn't really work out. also, school started and we began with the sala de estudios again. also, i took a short weekend trip to the north.
we had several farewell parties. one with our party friends in temuco. then one in the hogar with all the personnel and girls, with a special meal (fish) and a photo slideshow that tia Vivia made for us. and there were several short speeches by various people and some of the girls gave us presents, mainly cards. also, Tia Vivi gave us each scarves and rugs from the Fundacion Chol-Chol, a fair trade organization that works with Mapuche artesans in the region.The next day we had our farewell party with the girls, we made pizza and baked cookies with them, then gave small gifts to everyone. each of the older girls also got a cd of the photos that we had of them. we also gave away several pieces of our clothing that we decided to leave behind for lack of space, those were the most popular and fought-after items. afterwards we watched a movie and everyone stayed up late and we made sure to add all the older girls on facebook so we can stay in touch. steffi and i left the next morning and took a bus to santiago.
we stayed with our friend marcelo, who we met on our trip to futaleufu. he took us to the coast the other day, we went to see pablo neruda's house (one of his houses that we haven't seen yet...he had three) and got to hang out on the beach. we bought some last-minute souvenirs, but are both at the weight limit for our flights, not to mention that nothing else really fits in my backpack....we both bought canvas duffle bags for our backpacks for the flight, since last time steffi's backpack broke. also we went to a canyon, cajon del maipu, outside the city for a short bike ride. yesterday we had planned to go to some museums, but all the ones we wanted to go to are closed for repairs since the earthquake...
oh, i need to go. just realized that the time on my netbook is an hour behind....meaning i don't have all the time i thought, i need to board now!! ack!

futaleufu

ok i feel a bit weird posting about our vacation when there are still apocalyptic images of chile all over the news, but it's really like we are not in chile...things are back to normal here in the hogar. however, the mercado, where we had been planning on buying presents for everyone back home, will be closed for three weeks. sorry :( also, we heard that the mall, our main source of everything, including entertainment, will be closed for a year (!). but yesterday we heard that it might open again today, so we are going to go by and check it out. today there is a huge national telethon going on for people to donate money, and everywhere people are organizing events to collect food and non-perishable donations.

a couple weeks ago we had to cross the border again to renew our visa. we decided to go south, cross the border to argentina, and later cross back over and take a boat to chiloe, an island off the coast of chile. pablo, one of the coordinators from our organisation (experiment e.v.), with whom we had our midterm seminar in vina, was driving south to the same area from santiago so he said he would give us a ride. he brought along a friend of his, marcelo, and we ended up having a fun road trip, although we never made it to chiloe due to a lack of boat transport and time.

we went to several places in argentina, and also to this tiny town in chile called futaleufu, which was totally amazing. we were really lucky to be travelling with pablo because he used to work there every summmer and knew everyone in town. which meant we got to use a bunch of equipment for free and went kayaking, and stayed in his friend's cabin and also we got a discount on white-water rafting, something i've always wanted to do and which was totally awesome. it seems futaleufu river is one of the best rivers in the world for rafting, so if we ever do rafting again somewhere else we will be disappointed. there were a bunch of grade 4 rapids and at the end a little one that we got to get out of the boat and swim down! and at the end there was a big rock that they said we could jump off...looking at it from the boat i thought "hey, no problem, piece of cake". once i got to the top of the rock...it looked different. it was only about four meters high but looking down from the top i had a sensation similar to when i went bungee jumping and needed three false starts to finally step into thin air. your mind is logically saying "ok, yeah let's do this it's perfectly safe, you will not smash against those rocks" and trying to convince your body to run those few steps but your body is like "hell, no" and doesn't move. i jumped and then steffi was standing at the top paralyzed saying "i can't, i can't" with this dazed look on her face. i kept trying to convince her, but rational argument doesn't really help in such a situation. so i told marcelo to jump together with her, and that worked.

the rafting actually gave me this vague desire to learn to kayak, something i was totally uninterested in before, for the sole reason that then i could go down those rapids anytime i want...except i would have to be really good at kayaking and i generally don't have the patience and dedication necessary to become good at things. :@

also we went to chaiten, which is a town on the coast which was partially destroyed after the volcano next door erupted in 2008 for the first time in 9,000 years. the volcanic mudflow of water and ash caused the the river that the town is situated on to change course. the river cut a new path directly through the town and about a quarter of the town was destroyed. much of the town is still covered in ash, but many people have moved back and cleaned their houses. the town is now a source of political controversy in chile as the government refuses to help and has written chaiten off, wanting the townspeople to relocate. there is no running water, electricity, or gas.

due to various complaints i have received about not knowing what i look like anymore, i took pains to appear in the photos on this trip. see how much i care about my fans? i also have spared you many of the landscape fotos that i took....

anyway, so the trip was a terrible idea because futaleufu was sooo beautiful and now i have another addition to the list of lives i could lead and places i could live. i don't know how i will decide between futaleufu, the atacama, and tierra del fuego... :(

photos: http://chile.marahtyler.com/#44.0

when we got back, the new volunteer, vanessa, had arrived. along with 20 southern baptists from tennessee and north carolina who did lots of renovations and work around the home as well as a lot of fruit canning for the winter. Vanessa will be here for four months and in april another volunteer will arrive, who will stay for a year. we are leaving here on the morning of the 21st, this gives us only two more weeks! eek. then we will spend a week in santiago before flying back to germany.

things are getting back to normal, we have electricity, water, and internet! i've unpacked my emergency backpack. (which i packed when they told us on saturday afternoon that there was going to be another, even stronger earthquake that night and i thought the building was sure to collapse). all we talk about at lunch is our different earthquake stories and what was it like when we woke up and who did what and thought what and reacted how and who thought they were going to die and never see their kids again and blah blah...

here's a link to a news story...there is a group of american missionaries here right now working, renovating the hogar. in fact, it is the same group of missionaries who originally built the building around 15 years ago. (thanks pastor jerry for doing a good job in the construction!!) anyway, two of the women left on friday and have appeared on their local news, because the rest of the group was here during the earthquake. there are one or two fotos of the hogar and the girls:
http://www.fox17.com/newsroom/top_stories/wztv_vid_2923.shtml

tomorrow i will post what i was originally planning to post on the weekend, namely an account of our short trip to the south and argentina two weeks ago, with pretty nature pictures and everything...

here are pictures we took in temuco the next day, all the rubble was already pretty much cleaned up. also the pictures from the water line and from our walk in the town center with the girls:
http://chile.marahtyler.com/#45.0

shower

ok, i'm in the gas station again... it has been out of gas for hours, but is open anyway.
today the water came back on for two hours and we were able to shower! so i feel 100 percent better. they turned the water off again and we heard through word of mouth that it would be off for the next two days so we filled up all our bottles again. apparently the water tower up our street broke. the water is back again now though, we were able to do a load of wash. hopefully they will leave the water on.
our electricity is pretty flaky though, sometimes we have it, sometimes we don't.
the girls were supposed to go back to school during this week, the start of school has been delayed until next monday. somehow i don't think they will start monday, as our whole sector (where the girls go to school) does not have electricity. apparently just about all of the rest of temuco does though. in lots of places, the electricity and water never even went off. so i guess we are just unlucky, and our area is quite poor, so not necessarily high priority...

i only caught some news for a few minutes today while the tv was working this afternoon, so we still don't have much info about the outside world or chile. we heard about a tsunami on the coast, and fires in concepcion. no one here in temuco is looting so far, we heard they were throwing some stones at the supermarket, but all the big supermarkets have opened again.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/03/01/soledad.obrien.haiti.chile/index.html

whoa

i am only just now reading international news online and realizing how major this quake really was. it really didn't seem that big a deal to us at the time....we are realizing how lucky we are. glad we are in chile which has a good infrastructure. my main concern right now is when i will be able to take a shower again...it is 30 degrees out! also, life without electricity is pretty boring once it gets dark. last night we had a romantic candlelight dinner.

but life here is going on as normal. yesterday we walked around in the center a bit, the mood was strange. everyone just standing around with nothing to do, taking pictures. all the stores are closed. we asked at the mall yesterday and they said they won't be open for another three weeks...but they said that the supermarket will probably open in 2 or 3 days.

earthquake

saturday morning, 27.02.

i woke up shortly before 4 am, my bed was shaking and there was a deep, loud rumbling noise. i was fully awake but not rationally thinking as somehow the shaking made perfect sense to me and did not seem dangerous at all. i had this idea that i was in a house that was sliding down a hill and that everything was fine because it was not going to break and would stop soon. i must have been dreaming, and integrated my dream into my waking brain and just sat in my bed, holding on and waiting. i did not realize it was an earthquake! i could not make sense of what was going on. my analysis of the sliding house seemed crazy to me but it was the only logical conclusion i could come up with. i could hear someone screaming hysterically, but it just confused me because i was convinced that everything was normal and perfectly safe.

the shaking got stronger and the noise got louder, although my dream brain told me that my house should have stopped moving by now, that's when i started getting worried. and then i realized it was eli, the oldest girl, screaming outside, and then i got scared. around that point i realized where i was and that it was actually an earthquake and started thinking about what to do and whether i should go stand in the doorway. i looked out the window at the two houses to see how the girls were doing and why eli was screaming, and they were all coming outside. i remember thinking that they were standing way too close to our building and the giant pine tree, and then i realized that maybe i should go outside too, that was better than standing in the doorframe. i banged on steffi's door and went looking for vanessa, the other new volunteer from germany who just got here a week ago. the electricity was out and it was totally dark and i couldn't find her so i figured she was already out and then i went groping around my room to find my shoes. the quake was only a couple minutes long and by the time we got downstairs, it was already over.

no one was hurt and there was no real damage to any of our buildings, a few things fell out of shelves and stuff broke, and part of the garden wall broke, but that was it. eli had been screaming out of panic, there was no tia sleeping in the casa azul and as the eldest i think she felt responsible and freaked out. she was taking the kids out through the window, as the houses are locked at night. because there were no lights, the tia took forever to find the key to the door. a few of the younger kids didn't even wake up!
there were over 10 more weak tremors that night, i don't think anyone slept very much. there were only one or two that were somewhat stronger, but they stopped almost immediately. the girls were very scared. however we have already heard from all of their families and everyone is alright.
we found out the next day that the quake was 7,5 on the richter scale, which really surprised me. i had guessed maybe a 4 or 5, it's a good thing no one told me it was a 7 that night or i would have been a lot more scared. in the epicenter in concepcion, 300 km away, it was 8,8. it hit in almost the center of chile and affected a large part of the country. older buildings and taller buildings in the center of temuco were affected.

steffi and i had been planning to go out dancing friday night with some friends and we are now really relieved that we had decided to postpone it to saturday. i can't imagine the panic in the disco...two girls died.

we have no electricity (=no internet), no water, and the phone lines are usually too busy to get through, so we had no way of contacting germany, my international phone card is not working either. i am sitting in a gas station which has wifi. water trucks come around handing out water. we don't know yet when we will have water and electricity again. we don't have tv, so we hardly get any news other than the paper. according to today's paper, around 300 people died in all of chile, 11 of them in our region.

here are some pictures from the center of temuco and from the water line. more later when we have internet again.

marcela and rebeca

we are region IX

our wheelbarrow

weekend trips

on the weekends we've been taking short trips to some of the destinations nearby that we've been missing.

a couple weeks ago, we went to puerto saavedra, a small town on the coast. there we ate crab directly out of the shell and laid on the beach, watching the waves of the atlantic. we saw a bunch of weird bright blue jellyfish washed up on shore, which unfortunately i didn't photograph.


also, we went to pucon again, to finally climb the volcano! villarrica volcano is 2,847 meters high and one of the most active volcanoes in south america. approxiately 200 people go up it every day. sometimes it is not possible to reach the top, due to the poisonous fumes the volcano emits.

the day we went, it was really windy, which was unfortunate. it meant we could not take the chair lift (there is skiing here during the winter) for the first part of the climb, meaning climbing on scree. but once we got a bit higher, to the part of the mountain that is still covered in snow, things got even tougher. we went up in single file, zigzagging across, and always with our ice picks anchored in the snow. it was slow going, but we were one of the fastest groups. it was even more difficult because of the altitude, i developed this awful-sounding cough on the way up, which quickly disappeared once we were back at sea level.

once we were almost at the top, it was unclear whether we would go all the way up. the volcano was smoking a lot, there were a lot of fumes, and the wind was blowing the wrong way. we kept getting drafts of biting sulphur fumes, which burn the throat and nose.
for the most part, we could just follow in the footsteps that were already there. but our guide decided to go a bit sideways rather than the usual route, due to the fumes, which meant more work, namely striking a path. at the top the snow was a bit icy, too. it was a bit scary, because the volcano was quite steep, if you would fall you would just keep on rolling down the snow for quite a while....

but we made it all the way up to the crater, we were the second group that day to reach it. we only hung around for about ten minutes, then our guide made us leave. once we were back out of the stinky fume-y area, we got to the really fun part: sledding all the way back down! we had been given plastic butt-sleds and there were already luges in the snow from the sleds. so we just had to sit down and go, using our ice picks as breaks.
at the first one i was really scared, as it was really steep. but it turned out to be really really awesome. in total we covered about 1,500 meters altitude difference on the sleds. we were soaked through by the time we reached the bottom, despite all our waterproof gear. but it was hot and sunny, and once we got back to pucon, me and steffi hit the beach.

although that way up was incredibly difficult, it was totally worth it for the view, the crater, and the sledding!

here are the pictures:

-puerto saavedra
-pucon

google map: trip south

View trip south in a larger map

puerto natales/torres del paine

09.12.
awake at 6 due to my two israeli roommates getting up early to leave. we made an omelette for breakfast and caught a bus to puerto natales. we crossed the border to chile again, so we had to throw out all remaining fresh food that we had. our hostel in puerto natales was a totally run-down ramschackle house, but kind of awesome.

10.12.

departure for the national park torres del paine. we had been planning on staying in a "refugio" there but it turned out they were booked out so we had to camp. ugh. i was not overjoyed about that. we had to rent camping gear in puerto natales. after arriving in the park we took a boat to our campsite, set up our tent, and started off on our hike, to a scenic viewpoint of the grey glaciar. the hike was okay, but it was really, really windy, to the point where sometimes it felt we would get blown off the trail into the water.

11.12.

we took a bus/hiked to a different campsite where we spent the night. we met some cool isrealis there who were just stopping for coffee on their way further up the trail. (the whole park was full of little groups of young israelis). the next morning we got up a before the crack of dawn to do the obligatory "las torres at sunrise", where with the right light and no clouds, the torres are supposed to turn red, like this:

obviously, the whole getting-up-early-and-hiking-in-the-dark-on-an-unknown-trail-in-order-to-see-some-dumb-rocks-at-sunrise was not my idea. but i did it anyway. my flashlight was not nearly strong enough to be useful and gave up the ghost soon anyway, so we were mainly walking in the dark. it was difficult, the trail was short but quite steep, i don't remember how many meters altitude difference. it took us a couple hours. when we arrived at the outlook point to the torres (we were the last to show up, of course, since we left much later than everyone else, haha) there were a bunch of other tourists there, including the israelis from the evening before. it quickly became apparent that it was not going to clear up enough for the sunrise to be worth it. it was really cold, even more so as my clothes were literally soaked with sweat from the hike. i wasn't interested in hanging around in the cold and we were the only losers without thermoses of hot tea and stuff, so we left fairly quickly. back at the campsite i went back to bed. later i got up and treated myself to a real actual breakfast at the refugio, with eggs and coffee, where eventually the same group of israelis showed up on their way back down:

at some point i got around to asking them why there were so many israelis travelling in patagonia. they said it is customary to travel after their 3 years of military service. they travel for several months, like 5 or 6. so apparently there are huge concentrations of israelis travelling in south america and in asia, where you can travel for long periods of time, switching countries, and not run into visa problems.

anyway, so we took a bus back to puerto natales and the next day caught our flight back to temuco from punta arenas...

the end.

photos:

puerto natales

torres del paine

el calafate

okay so i haven't been spending too much time online since we changed our working hours and also have been taking day trips on the weekend. i am going to try and finally get through the rest of the fotos from our trip south so that i will be up to date and you can see the most recent photos

08.12.

here are my fotos from el calafate, where we spent the day after the glaciar trek. we slept in and made omelette for breakfast. then sat around in a cafe in the sun for a long time. it was really hot and sunny. we walked to the laguna nimez, which is a bird reserve. its free, you can just walk in...first i smeared a bunch of sunblock in my eye though, which really stung badly and meant i was half-blind for 30 minutes while my eye watered. after that i finally got to see flamingos! we walked around the lake, trying to get closer to the flamingos, but they kept moving away from the shore as soon as we got close. stupid birds. it would have been the perfect opportunity to use the telefoto lens i wanted to buy on ebay before leaving berlin. behind the reserve, the fence was down and we walked directly up the the Lago Argentino, largest lake in Argentina, straddling the border with Chile. it was really shallow and there were more flamingos too.