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.

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

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

ushuaia/el calafate

(note: the more interesting part of this post is the second half, "el calafate", if you don't feel like reading the blow-by-blow)

04.12.2009 ushuaia

at the "museo del presidio", all about the history of the penal colony that was started at ushuaia, we got our passports stamped again with dorky stamps. there was also a lot about the naval history of ushuaia, and lots of model boats. it was one of the more informative museums we have been to. then again, it was in argentina, who knows, maybe museums are better there...

the whole time i had been trying to figure out a way to get to the legendary cape horn, but the only way is a cruise ship that costs a few thousand dollars. we discovered that the glaciar trip we wanted to do in El Calafate did not include actually walking on the glaciar, just around it to the scenic outlooks, so we decided to spring for the more expensive "mini-trekking" instead. we booked our 5 am bus to el calafate and got an unpleasant surprise, it turned out that we would not arrive around 9 pm, as expected and discussed on the previous day, but not until 24:00. however, we had already booked and paid for the glaciar trekking for 7:45 the next morning, so we didn't have a choice, meaning we would be very tired on our glaciar walk.

after getting up at 4, we went to the bus station. the weather was really bad, very windy, cold and rainy. i tried to sleep in the bus as much as i could but that didn't really work. once again we took the ferry across the magellan strait, this time we were even luckier with seeing dolphins. we had to cross the argentine-chilean border twice, because there is no road out of argentine tierra del fuego without crossing the chilean part. we changed busses in Rio Grande, and had to catch a connecting bus in Rio Gallegos. i guess we were fast at the borders, because we were two hours early, meaning we spent 4 hours waiting in the bus station in rio gallegos. we didn't arrive in El Calafate until 1:00 am. of course there were no taxis at that hour, so we walked to our hostel and crashed.

06. 12. el calafate

we got up at 7, breakfast was a banana and a yoghurt drink. then we went to get our bus to the glaciar. first we drove around in the bus picking up people from their fancy hotels. i dozed through most of that. driving into the national park los glaciares offered some spectacular views, but i was too tired to keep my eyes open.

we had great luck with the weather, it was warm and sunny, during lunch we lay around in tank tops soaking up sun while the glaciar was a just a few hundred meters away.

according to what they told us, the glaciar is formed in the "campo de hielo sur" the third-largest expanse of ice in the world, after antarctica and the arctic. there are still parts of the campo de hielo sur which have never been seen by human eyes. there are strong winds travelling from west to east around the lower south part of the globe, where there is not much land, except patagonia, picking up moisture over the oceans. however, the wind gets stuck on the andean mountain chain, where it has to rise up in order to cross the mountains. all the precipitation is left in the campo de hielo sur, which has one of the highest rates of precipitation in the world. therefore the eastern side of the andes, the patagonian steppe, is very windy but quite dry as there is no precipitation left.

so the campo de hielo is like a giant bowl filling up with precipitation in the form of snow, which gets compacted and compacted until it is ice. when the bowl cannot hold anymore it spills out in the form of rivers of ice, glaciars. there are dozens of glaciars in the area. several of them end in lakes.

the perito moreno is one of the few glaciars that are not retreating, in fact it advances up to 60 meters a year. the glaciars can be quite fast, not like the ones in europe, which are essentially frozen in place. the glaciar here enters a warmer climate, the lake or the rock underneath is warmer than the glaciar, so it sort of slides on a film of water. we walked on the side part of the glaciar, where it is stuck up against the rock, and more stable due to the friction. the middle part, in the middle of the lake, is the faster-moving part.

the front face ends in the lake argentino, where it melts or breaks off, occasionally damming the two arms of the lake until the pressure gets too great and the damming part of the glaciar basically explodes. the ice wall rises about 80 meters above the lake, but of course, two-thirds of its mass is actually underwater!

every once in a while, pieces of the glaciar face break off with this awesome loud crunching sound and fall into the water, then bob back as icebergs.

here are the photos from the perito moreno glaciar:
http://chile.marahtyler.com/#37

punta arenas

so we set off for our 2 weeks of vacation, flying to punta arenas.
the hostel we picked out is cute and small, a run-down house with a bunch of bedrooms and a nice atmosphere. there are tents with people camping in the yard. in the kitchen there is a crazy old stove that provides heat for the whole house.
we walked to the shore, which is the strait of magellan, so that we could stick our hands in and take photos. we are a bit disappointed that we can't enter the port to look at the big ships.we book a boat to the penguin island, isla magdalena, for the next day. and we have already noticed that there are germans everywhere here!
in the evening they fire up the grill at the hostel and make anticuchos (shish kebab) but i go to bed early. at the hostel there is this crazy polish guy who is planning on kayaking by himself to ushaia, through the magellan strait. he plans to do the trip in 3 months. previously, he hiked alone in the torres del paine national park in winter, during which most of the park is closed because impassable. he also hiked across the campo de hielo del sur (the third-largest ice field in the world after the arctic and antarctica) on skis, parts of which have never been visited by humans before because there is no reason to go there. his tent and his food as well as he himself were blown away in 200 km winds, but he continued hiking without food for 3 more days.
there was also a 48-year-old american lady with a bike that folds up and comes apart and fits in its own suitcase. when you are using the bike, the suitcase becomes a trailer for your luggage.
the next morning we got a van at 6:50, to get a boat to the isla magdalena, the penguin reserve. there we walked around the island for an hour, taking pictures of thousands of penguins. back on the boat, we were served coffee with a shot of pisco, and then we went to Isla Marta, where we saw a bunch of sea lions and cormorants from afar. there were huge waves on the way back, the boat was slamming up and down and a few people got sick. it was like an amusement park ride.
here are the photos from punta arenas:
http://chile.marahtyler.com/#34.0

and here are the photos from isla magdalena, way more fotos of penguins than are really necessary:
http://chile.marahtyler.com/#35.0

once some american lived on the island for a year as a thesis project to do a complete census of the population and counted almost 200,000.

oh, and the internet at the hogar is broken. the transformer for the router burned out or something. i am sitting in the mall next to a giant plastic christmas tree. they are playing "winter wonderland" and people are walking around in tee shirts and sandals.

punta arenas

flew to punta arenas today, beginning 2 weeks of vacation.

the timing is bad since apparently on friday the tia of the casa azul was fired. so the kids are without a tia, tia betty will be filling in for the next two weeks and then they will hire a new tia for the casa. the kids are kind of freaked out, some of the newer arrivals have never had tia betty as a casa tia before. and now we are leaving too, they were confused and thought we were going forever. so it´s too bad that we are leaving them now without a familiar tia. but i guess firing the tia wasn´t planned much in advance.

anyway. it is cold here. and really windy, 35 knots today. and the weather changes quickly. it hailed twice today, and drizzled. and in between it was really sunny.

we dipped our hands in the strait of magellan...and tomorrow we are going to see a penguin colony!!


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jessica

on sunday night Jessica (11) also threw a huge tantrum. she was here in the office building watching tv in the dining room, which is actually completely forbidden....but everyone makes exceptions for her. she is the deaf/mute girl and its impossible to control her anyway, she basically does what she wants. since she goes to a boarding school during the week, she is only here on the weekends and somehow there is no way to punish her for not doing what she is supposed to. Her center of life is supposed to be her boarding school, and the hogar is just supposed to be a help to the school, but that has been changing, her center of life is the hogar now. partly because her sister is now here, i guess. also, because we've been taking sign courses, she can communicate better with the tias, she is a little bit less of an outsider.

anyway, at 9 pm Tia Flor came to turn off the tv and send her to bed, but she freaked out and locked herself into the Sala de Estudio. So Tia Flor had to get the keys from the director to unlock the room. Jessica then escaped and went outside, where she then wandered around in the pouring rain and tried to test whether she fits through the bars of the fence to escape.

It took 3 people to forceably drag her into the building, then she was kicking and screaming on the floor. She can't talk, but she can make sounds, when she crys she makes a weird moaning/howling sound. They couldn't really move her, so they just held her down on the floor, hoping that she would get tired out and calm down. After about half an hour I didn't hear her anymore, so I guess they had taken her back to the house.
But a few minute later, she was out front again, this time only in her socks, standing in the rain. Then she took off her socks and was running around barefoot. They called an ambulance and got 2 paramedics to take her inside again. They said that her symptoms were typical of a nervous breakdown and took her to the hospital. There they said that it's possible that she has schizophrenia, but didn't want to give her any drugs because of her age. In any case, they need to get her checked out, they have found a neurologist who speaks sign language. Obviously,, her treatment is going to be expensive and the Hogar will have to pay for it. Which is really bad timing because at the moment the Hogar is going through a financial crisis...more on that later.

Last week she was in such a good mood and really well behaved. She had just won a gold medal in some Special Olympics in Santiago, in running, and was super nice to everyone. Generally though, she is badly behaved. You can't yell at her because she can't hear, and if she wants to ignore you she just looks away, then you can't communicate with her at all anymore.

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tantrums

Sometimes I have to do things that I don’t like. For example, a couple weeks ago the Tia was gone, accompanying Ceci to the hospital. I was trying to get all the younger ones bathed. I asked Camila (7) several times to get ready for her shower, but while I was looking for her towel, she put her pajamas on instead. I gave her a chance to take off her pajamas, but she wouldn’t do it, so I had to do it for her. Then she started crying, which eventually turned into a full-on flipout session as I pulled her up the stairs to the bathroom. She was refusing to get in the shower and even once she was in she kept shrieking and fighting with me and flailing her arms around. Carolina had to help me, holding her arms down so that I could shower her and wash her hair. Forceably showering crying little girls is not something I had in mind when I came here.

It happens every once in a while, sometimes she starts crying uncontrollably for really no reason at all and doesn’t calm down for a long time, sometimes hours. Usually at some point she starts screaming for her mother, which is so horrible to hear because her mother is never going to be there for her. Sometimes the older girls yell at her, "Shutup, stupid! Your mom is not here!" Something is going on with her, they were going to take her to a psychologist, but it’s gotten a lot better recently.

The other girls say that Linda (7) also has her tantrums, where she gets violent and starts scratching the tias. I have never seen her in that state though, so I guess she has gotten better as well.

Maria (9) has been acting weird lately, refusing to do her work in study hall. It’s as though she flips a switch. For no reason, she refuses to do anything, goes completely stiff, we can’t even move her because she grabs on to tables and chairs and refuses to let go. If we try to carry her out of the room she starts a crying fit and throws herself on the floor and makes a scene.

hogar

here are a few fotos from recent life in the hogar.

Once we went out to the grassy area by the mall to fly kites…the kites wouldn’t fly, probably because the building was blocking all the wind, but at least the kids had fun anyway, and got some much-needed exercise:

kites

There is an old ping-pong table which we got out of storage and bought some paddles for.

Also the Hogar had a big bazaar to get rid of some of the old clothes.

The other day we had a wellness afternoon where we invited some of the older girls up to our apartment and made peelings and masks with them, and cocktails from fruit juice.

I also posted some pictures out around town in Temuco, so you can get an idea of what it's like.

http://chile.marahtyler.com/#33.0

spendenstand

aktueller spendenstand ist 1489,46 Euro.

this means i'm only 310,54 Euro away from the goal of 1800,00!! if you would like to donate, see the sidebar for options, or send me an email.

and now i am going to plug my friends' photo pages again.

borko in south america: http://kontraband.tumblr.com/

and phil, in nepal: http://www.flickr.com/photos/philinjordan

seminar

i put the fotos from our seminar in santiago/viña del mar/valparaiso online:

http://chile.marahtyler.com/#28.0

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san martin

i´m in san martin de los andes in argentina for the weekend, renewing my visa.



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dieciochero

Chile's independance day celebration is September 18th, and it's a huge deal here.

we celebrated with a barbecue and games for the kids. also, there is a lot of cueca dancing going on, chile's national dance.

we were told that everyone had to dress up, so we made this huge effort to find outfits. and felt really stupid wearing them. and it turned out that only the little kids were wearing the dresses, none of the older girls dressed up....

photos at: http://chile.marahtyler.com/#30.0

the end

Breakfast for me is eggs and cheesy toast. I buy a Cosmo for the bus ride, and Steffi gets a newspaper. Yay, finally we are on a Chilean bus once again. Pure luxury! The trip to Santiago takes about 24 hours.

At the airport, we check in and chill in a café, drinking coffee and eating cheesecake. Eventually, it’s time for us to get moving, so we ask for the check. This takes about 20 minutes however, and now we’re really in a hurry to catch our flight. We stand in line for security. I am totally out of it after out bus ride, and not really paying attention. Steffi isn’t either, apparently. I don’t realize that we are in the wrong line until I finally make it to the window after about 15 minutes. The lady takes my passport, looks at my ticket, and tells me that I am in line for international flights, we need to be at domestic departures. Which is of course at the other end of the airport. We hurry across and go straight through security, luckily there is no line. When we arrive at the gate, the plane is still there, with the gangway attached. They begin retracting the gangway. The lady at the gate says we are too late, I can’t believe it. The plane is right there!

And that’s how we missed our flight. We aren’t the only ones: a family of 5 runs up and also want on. She says there is another flight in a couple of hours.

The plane begins rolling away.

She looks at our tickets and says “Steffi, Marah….I’m sorry. The next flight is not until tomorrow!” I really can’t believe it now, the family is pissed off too. I am tired and was so looking forward to being home this evening.

Now we will be spending the night in the airport, in our clothes and without luggage, as neither of us are prepared to shell out for another night in a hostel.

Of course, it turns out that we cannot change our ticket to another day because we booked the cheapest fare. And there are no more flights the same day. The only option left to us at the airport is to buy another flight back, which is not an option. We go back to the bus station and get on the next bus to Temuco. Another 9 hours on the bus…I call Viviana to let her know we will be late and arriving at 1 am.

When we go to pick up our bags (which made the flight) from the airport the next day, Steffi’s backpack is broken: the plastic back support, not just a strap or something.

I am really thinking about getting a canvas bag for mine.

iquique

Once we are back in Iquique, we decide to walk to the beach (although Ignacio warned us that the shore is also a dangerous area) and watch the sunset. There are pelicans, yay! I have been trying to get decent pelican pictures for a while. The sunset turns out to be lame so we walk around Iquique  instead. Which has some pretty cool architecture, like a purple church.

We spent 30 minutes hanging around a kiosk, trying to find a junky magazine for our bus ride the next day. However, it seems that all the magazines that cater to women are about knitting, cooking, babies, or decorating. Oh, and gardening and fashion. My favorite title is “Cocinas y Baños” (kitchens and bathrooms). Most women my age here are married with children, so there are no interesting reads for bored singles. There doesn’t seem to be anything like a Chilean version of “Cosmopolitan” or all those other women’s magazines. Just the South American edition of Cosmo. There are one or two celeb gossip mags, but that’s no fun because we don’t know Chilean celebrities. Of course, we could pick up one of the masculine magazines: cars, guns or women.

In the evening, we went out to a bar on our street.

They have a video screen playing horrible music videos, but with the sound off, there is a jukebox too. Everyone starts cheering and singing along loudly each time a new cheesy romantic song comes on the jukebox. All the patrons are men, and there are a million women working as waitresses. I suspect that there is some other aspect to this bar that we are not catching on to, although it seems innocent enough. I ask for a pisco sour, but all they serve is beer. One of the guys at the table next to us asks to buy us a drink, but we decline, since neither of us can finish off another one of these giant beers without getting drunker than intended. But a few minutes later he asks again, and we agree to share one more beer between us. Turns out he and his little person friend are Peruvians. They ask to take a picture with us on their camera phone…okaaaay.

And they warn us to be careful, that this is a “bad area” at night. (Chileans really love telling us this.)

Our hostel is across the street though, so we make it back without incident.

Iquique fotos: http://chile.marahtyler.com/#29.0

iquique/humberstone

Iquique is a coastal town sandwiched between the ocean and the hills of the desert. We arrived there at about 7 in the morning. The bus driver did not bother to announce where we were, even though half the bus was asleep. So we missed our chance to get off at the bus station. He threw us out at the next and final stop, somewhere in Iquique, with the warning to “be careful, this is a bad area.” Great, thanks for dropping us off here, buddy. Once we figured out where we were on the map, it wasn’t so bad, since we were actually quite close to the hostel we were looking for.

View from our hostel window.

There are a bunch of juice bars here. The one we get breakfast at is called “El Mango Alegre”, the happy mango, and I am going to steal that name for the milkshake bar/restaurant/café that I may someday open. 

We took a colectivo (fixed-rate/fixed-route taxi) to Humberstone, an abandoned nitrate town. On the way we get a better overview of Iquique, which is much bigger than I thought. We also see that Iquique has this crazily huge, random sand dune in the middle of the city! Which you can maybe see a bit on this picture:

 

There used to be a saltpeter mine at Humberstone but it was abandoned and now the town is a ghost town.

It is a UNESCO world heritage site, and a tourist attraction.

We wandered around Humberstone for several hours. When we want to go back to Iquique, the concerned old man in the office tells us that a taxi comes by at least once an hour. Yay. We stand out by the road, he says we can take the tour bus which is coming, but it seems to be full and doesn’t stop. We decide to hitch, although this may give the old man a heart attack. We are picked up right away, by Ignacio in a jeep. He works at a plant close by and drives us all the way to our hostel (warning us that it’s a bad area). Along the way he asked the usual questions…. "Don't you miss your families? Do you have boyfriends? Your parents let you come all the way out here? I would never let my kid go so far away.”

Humberstone fotos: http://chile.marahtyler.com/#27.0

leaving putre

After packing up we went out to dinner, then caught the ride we arranged to “Putre Alto”, the highway intersection where our bus is supposed to pick us up.

We arrive there around 8 pm and wait under a street lamp. The night before we were dropped off by the bus around 8:45, we figure things at customs should go faster today, so we show up early, in defiance of all the lessons we have learned about Bolivian time. After 5 minutes I am already bored of waiting and make a rock pile. (We have seen many rock piles, I still don’t know what they mean though)

In the distance, we can see the lights of trucks creeping down the mountain, coming from Chile. We can tell by the length and light placement whether there is a bus coming or not. We begin a discussion on truck length and wheel-count. How many wheels do trucks have? What exactly is an 18-wheeler? Are there 18-wheelers in Chile? Where do the wheels have to be and how many sets does it need to be an 18-wheeler? Do they have double or triple sets of tires? I begin counting the wheels on all the trucks going by (there was not a single 18-wheeler), there are a lot, they are all getting in their border-crossing before customs closes at 9:30 pm. Many of them flash their lights, meaning they would be willing to pick us up, so we are assured of hitchhiking possibilities. After an hour, we are starting to think that our bus was actually on time/early, and that we missed it. I have not yet given up hope, since everything in Bolivia was late, it’s safe to assume that our bus is late, not early. We begin debating the pros and cons of hitching.

At 9:15 we give up and agree to hitch on the first thing that stops and get as far as we can. We are freezing and tired. But! There’s a miracle! The next thing that comes is our bus! And it actually stops for us too.

Unfortunately, this is another one of those buses without heating, and there is only one blanket left, so we have to share it. It takes me hours to warm up.

Word of advice: never take a Bolivian overnight bus if you can help it. Other than that, Bolivia  is great.

more putre

Putre is located in the Lauca National Park, which according to my guidebook is a “don’t miss”, most spectacular national park in Chile, blah blah. We have one day.

At the tourist office they give us a tip for a 5 hour walk where we can see some ancient, pre-Incan cave paintings. It sounds interesting, but I am still a bit sick, my voice is still gone (I have been croaking for days) and not sure about the whole thing. We go anyway, figuring we can always turn around. She tells us it is easy to get lost as there are several forks in the road, and gives us an extremely poor black-and-white satellite map.

Of course, we get lost. At each fork in the path we are unsure…the map is no big help. We walk directly into a military training exercise and sort of stand in the middle of it, discussing which way to go. (There is a military base in Putre - you know, close to the Bolivian border and all).

The whole area is sandy, with a few bushes, and the military has driven all over in their jeeps, meaning it all looks like it could be a “road” like the one on our map.

We are asked to move because we are in the way of some pictures a military dude is taking. He keeps shouting numbers, and one group of soldiers is setting up a tent, but most of them don’t seem to be doing anything.

We ask one group if they have heard of the “Sendero de las Pinturas” (trail of the paintings), but they just look at each other and laugh. One in-command guy (I can tell that he must be an officer because he is nonchalantly yet authoritatively chewing on a piece of straw) has a look at our “map” and tells us where we are….much further than we thought. He says to go back to the big eucalyptus tree and behind it is the road we are looking for.

When we arrive at the eucalyptus tree, there is a road passing in front of it, and one behind it, so we take the one behind it, since that’s what he told us. However, we still have our doubts, and when we run into a lady on a horse she says we are going the wrong way. “Do you see that eucalyptus tree? Next to it is the path you want.”

We cut across fields of oregano (?!?!) instead of doubling back, and manage to intersect the correct path. At first the scenery continues in the same vein: boring, sandy, rocky, oregano... But then we walk right along a spectacular ravine, cross it, and continue along the other side on a very narrow path with great views and an excitingly dangerous drop-off.

We almost miss the paintings, even though they are on a gigantic rock. They have been vandalized by generations of idiots.

 

On our way back, we keep running into soldiers, they are everywhere. They shout things like “I love you” at us as soon as we get far away from them. Cowards. Back in Putre, we chill in the sun and knock off our clothes, causing a mini dust cloud…from the knees down I am the chalky color of the trail.

Putre fotos: http://chile.marahtyler.com/#26.0

putre

Next stop: Putre

In the afternoon we took a bus from La Paz to Chile, to Putre. We had worked out our whole trip all the way to Iquique with a Bolivian bus company because they are so much cheaper than the Chilean ones. We had arranged to be dropped off in Putre, close to the border, then picked up from there the next day with the same bus.

We were supposed to arrive in Putre at 6 pm, but at that time we were still at the border. We spent 2 hours at Customs, due to some guy on our bus who had a suitcase full of porcelain. Also, once again the bus company had lied to us about having heating…

The bus driver dropped us off at the side of the highway around 9 pm. He said, “Putre’s down there” and drove off. OK, great. We were thinking, “what the hell?” There were no signs of civilization, it was dark, all we could see were one or two street lights in the distance, which we assumed to be Putre. No one had told us that the bus doesn’t actually stop IN Putre.

We began walking down the highway, although we had the impression that Putre was in the other direction. It was cold and we had no idea how far we would have to walk. Walking at this altitude (3500m), with a giant backpack, is not easy.

It looked like a long walk, we suspected that the road looped all around the valley and back to Putre, which is at the bottom. Later, we figured out that it is 6 or 7 kilometers. Luckily, I had my hand-powered flashlight along (thanks, Dale!) to ensure that we would be seen by drivers and not run over. Not that there were any drivers. Putre is in a National Park in the middle of nowhere and no cars were passing. At least the moon was very bright that night. Bright enough for us to see the snow-covered volcano in the distance and the deep gorge to our left.

We got a ride in a mini-van, the second car that passed. A rabbit ran into the headlights and our driver chased it for a while which sort of creeped me out. He asked where we need to go, which place we are staying at, and I told him. He dropped us off at a different place, saying it’s good. The room is over our budget, but when we see it, we take it anyway. After Bolivia, it’s very nice. Everything is brand new, the hotel must have just been built. We have our own bathroom and breakfast is included.