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.