David and Edel

Bamboo in the rain.

While spring was making its way south in Chile we were doing the same. Somewhere along the way, in the Araucaria forests just north of the lake district, we overtook it and stepped back into winter.

From Curico we had made our way further south in Chile to Temuco, spending one rainy day in the small town of Talca on the way. Talca is the kind of place where you’ll find nothing open on a Sunday, particularly a rainy Sunday. Temuco is bigger, the biggest town in southern Chile, but mostly void of sights so we spent just one night before catching a small bus into the countryside towards the mountains in the east. Edel had found a nice Swiss farm-hostel (Suiz-Andina) on the internet, located just between the Malalcahuello-Nalcas and Conguillio national parks, and luckily they had space for us when we showed up at the door. Very cute little place, and with a great chef cooking three-course meals in the evenings – we stayed four days but could easily have made it longer…

Araucaria branch.

The day we arrived we did a short walk near the farm called “Hänsel and Gretel” (it came complete with a “Hexen-haus”), leading through fields of bamboo and trees covered in lichen. When we woke up the next morning it was snowing heavily – nice big fluffy Christmas-card flakes – and everything was covered in white. We had planned to set off on a longer trek into the national park this day, and while we got a bit of conflicting advice from the hostel (one person advising against it as we wouldn’t be able to see any trail-markers, someone else selling us a map) we decided to head off. The El Coloradito trail leads towards the foot of the Lonquimay volcano, the first little bit runs through farm-land before the path climbs up through ancient Araucaria forest towards the mountain. Araucaria is the strange Monkey-puzzle tree, very pre-historic looking and even more spectacular when the whole forest is covered in thick white snow. It kept snowing most of the day, and indeed we didn’t see a single one of the yellow trail-markers on the way – consulting the map and GPS occasionally when the trail was less visible…we lost it completely a couple times and ended up river-hopping or stuck in thick bamboo, but that’s all part of the fun. It took us less than half the amount of hours on the way back actually. Very beautiful forest, and strange to see bamboo in the snow – bent over in big arches over the trail from the weight of the snow.

Araucaria forest.

When we reached the tree-line we turned around – there was nothing but pure white above and the peak of the volcano was hidden in clouds. Lower down on the way back the snow had melted a bit, and we could start to see some of the trail-markers. Everything looked completely different – green and muddy instead of white and fluffy.

Enchanted forest in Malalcahuello.

Hexen haus!

The second morning we rented bikes to go and see a couple waterfalls back along the road to Temuco. There was a lot of downhill on the 13 kilometers to the falls, and we weren’t looking forward to the way back up. The falls, Salto del Indio and Salto de la Princesa, were very impressive with all the snow-melt at the moment. The next day when we woke up to pack our bags everything outside was covered in snow again – we did the short “Hänsel and Gretel” trail once more (which was all our legs were good for after all the uphill biking the day before) before flagging down the bus back to Temuco and keep working our way south.

Snowy branches in Malalcahuello.

From Valparaiso back to Santiago where I went to the dentist to fix a filling I broke on some spectacularly crunchy muesli at the beginning of the trip. I’d been too scared to pop in to one of the “Dr. Smile” roadside clinics we’d seen in India and Nepal…with dirt-floor and a faded sign hanging at an angle outside…so had saved it for a more civilized country. From Santiago afterwards south to Curico, base for the Radal Siete Tazas national park and waterfalls.

Waterfall in the Radal Siete Tazas park.

In Curico we stayed in Hotel Prat – named after a local hero who during the war of the pacific bravely attacked a Peruvian ironclad gunship armed only with a sword, and got himself killed within seconds. Our logistics planning for getting to the national park proved nearly as effective actually… Information had been a bit sketchy – the guidebook saying there’s probably a bus a day this time of the year, and the hostel woman saying there should be one at 7am. Other people we asked in the morning helped point us to the right bus as well, first one to a village called Molina, then another one on from there. The driver said he was going to the park when we got on, but then an hour later he dropped us 30 kilometers away from it out by a field in the middle of nowhere. We had been the only people on the bus for quite a while at this stage and protested a bit when he explained he wasn’t going any further, but he pointed out that he’d said the bus was going “on the road to the park”, not “to the park”. We started walking. The driver also explained that while there is one bus a day that goes the whole way, it leaves at 5pm in the evening and returns at 7am – which is handy for people who want to look at waterfalls in the dark, or for people who want to spend three days visiting a two-hour sight. We tried our luck hitchhiking (Chile is very safe) and got a lift a couple kilometers with a road-worker, then walked for a long time, then got another lift with a nice old man with two dogs – Edel and Teresa in the car and me sitting on a big rock on the back of the pickup with the two dogs… Then more walking – the park seemed to get further away the more we walked. We had passed an 18km sign before the old man picked us up, now 12km later another sign said there was still 13km left! We eventually got a short lift with a bus full of Chilean tourists as far as the park entrance, but this bus wasn’t continuing on to the falls. At the park entrance we signed in with a ranger officer who when learning that Teresa didn’t have her passport with her gave us an incredibly long speech, which did involve Interpol, about park regulations and the importance of paperwork in general. It was probably the only thing he got to do all day, and he was nice in the end and did let us in.

The Radal Siete Tazas.

One more hour of walking, then a fourth lift with two locals which did see us at the falls 5-6 hours after we had set off from Curico in the morning. The falls were indeed very nice – several bright-blue drops in a row into big round pools sculpted out of the rock by the turbulent water. We met one other pair of tourists at the falls – a Dutch couple who had arrived with a guide from the bigger town of Talca…not a bad option all things considered…

On the way back we got another lift with a pickup truck halfway to the park entrance, then walked for a couple hours again before getting a lift with a nice builder in a mini-van. We were nearly ecstatic when he told us he was going the whole way to Molina – there were no seats in the back but we sat fine on an old tyre among all the tools. We must have looked pretty knackered after our roughly 30km of walking throughout the day because he even stopped to buy us soft-drinks on the way! In Molina we thanked the man again for saving us from sleeping under the stars, then got a bus back to Curico – our 9th vehicle for the day (tired feet excluded).

From Pisco Elqui to Valparaiso – a town by the ocean west of Santiago, for the next couple nights. Valparaiso is cute in a rundown crumbling kind of way, with colourfully painted houses and flowers and hippie art everywhere on the streets it’s somewhere between Copenhagen’s Christiania and San Francisco’s Haight-Ashborough. There’s plenty of graffiti everywhere, some of it quite artistic and some less so. While the town feels quite nice and relaxed (…very relaxed, one church featured the graffitied slogan “La Ganja es una deidad”!) some areas are a bit dodgy – the guidebook mentions several times where you should and shouldn’t walk around at various hours of the day. One place you do need to go is to use one of the strange antique lifts installed all over town to go up and down the steep hills. These tilted elevators on rails are creaking like an old sail-ship and feel like they’re about to come loose at any second, but apparently they haven’t killed anyone so far.

The Paseo Atkinson esplanade in Valparaiso.

Flowers in Valparaiso.

Graffiti in Valparaiso.

Graffiti in Valparaiso.

The Elqui valley.

After a couple weeks in the desert it was nice with a change of scenery. And less sand – we’d had it in our boots, our clothes, eyes, nose, ears…even the food had been crunchy at times. The bus south from San Pedro de Atacama took us to the town of La Serena, which isn’t exactly filled with sights but we stayed two nights to recover from the 17 hour bus-ride. The hostel we happened to pick was on a rather odour-intensive part of town, right next to a fish market. The town does have a fine museum though, with lots of Diagutia pottery painted with intricate geometric designs and psychedelic sticky-figure style animals and humans. The museum also sported a Moai statue from Easter Island, which the guidebook added had recently been standing in a park covered in graffiti and urinated on by drunks..

The craters of the moon.

From La Serena we wanted to head up the Elqui valley (renamed by Chile as an escalation of the war with Peru over “Pisco” – distilled wine alcohol – considered by both countries to be their own invention). But first we made a stop in Vicuña halfway up the valley for one night, to visit the Mamalluca observatory – one of the smaller space observatories here and one that is open for the public. We saw Jupiter and some of the same things as on the tour from Atacama, plus great view of the moon’s craters. The guide was a very enthusiastic space geek with the date and duration of every supernova in history memorized. We were a pretty big group crowding around the small telescope though, including some crying young children whose parents must have thought they wouldn’t find it a bit boring to wait around in the dark and cold for hours listening to talk of lightyears and redshift way past their bedtime.

The Pisco Elqui central square.

Pisco Elqui the next day – it’s a charming little village – part wine-growing horse-riding cowboy town, and part hippie new-age place with craft shops and meditation classes. There’s actually a true hippie community living a few kilometers up a tributary valley, founded in the 60’s on the belief that “the Age of Aquarius has shifted the Earth’s magnetic center from the Himalayas to the Elqui valley”… Remember, you read it here first! 😀 At least where there’s hippies there’s great food – Pisco Elqui sported some lovely restaurants. Back in Vicuña we’d suffered some fairly unpalatable fare – chicken and french fries with two fried eggs on top, all served with most of the grease they’d been cooked in.

Edel and Teresa horse riding in the Elqui valley.

We stayed three nights in Elqui – visiting a Pisco distillery one day and going horse riding another. The valley sides are pretty steep and we climbed up the desert hills by horse to look down at the green valley below, nearly all of it used for wine growing. Apart from Edel’s horse wanting to take a 65 degree shortcut down the hill it was a relaxing excursion.

After leaving the Elqui valley we headed for the charming and rundown town of Valparaiso.