Week 1: Santiago-Atacama-Lago Pirihueico

We kept a bit of a torrid pace for the first week of this 12ish-week adventure.  Things calm down (we travel less) for a bit now.

(Note to Doug Zullo: Not our hotel)

We landed in Santiago around 10am on Sunday, December 30, and checked into the airport Holiday Inn.  I'm against airport hotels, in general and for a variety of reasons, but this one was fairly nice and suited our situation that Sunday-Monday.  None of us slept much on the plane from Houston (United started dinner service after 11pm and didn't clean up and turn the lights out until past 1am), so we ate some food in the hotel and took a nap.  

After the nap, the boys swam in the hotel pool and then we caught a bus and the subway into the city.  We walked around the Barrio Lastarria area of Chile for a while and then spent too much money on too much food at a too-touristy restaurant that didn't seem too-touristy until we got the food and the bill and realized we need to adjust our tourist trap radar or we'll have no money left at the end of this trip.  

Barrio Lastarria

WTF are those things?  Soda devils?

We did have our first Pisco Sour - Chile's national cocktail - and it was pretty good, so there's that.

Pisco Sour

Interesting fact about Santiago: like Salt Lake City, another place we travel to frequently, it suffers from thermal inversion, which creates very poor air quality throughout the city.

On the 31st, we flew to Calama, one of the northernmost cities in Chile.  The North of Chile is known for its copper mining industry (you'll recall the 33 miners trapped in a mine in 2010 near Copiapo, which is South of Calama).  We drove an hour to San Pedro de Atacama, in the middle of a vast desert.  San Pedro is the principal town used as a base for Chilean and foreign tourists alike to explore the area.  Despite the tourism, it seems to be an incredibly poor town and I admit to not understanding enough about the reasons for that.

We stayed in a simple, clean hostel in a room with two bunk beds and a communal bathroom/shower.  Our host - a 60ish Chileno - was very friendly and drove us around the neighborhood to show us the best places to buy groceries, a relatively new hardcourt soccer/basketball cancha, and then to his favorite, non-touristy spot for dinner.  We were excited about the prospect of some real Chilean food, but it turns out that real Chilean food might not be so good (this has proved true since).  Cam, however, had a hot dog covered in guacamole and  mayonnaise that first night in San Pedro and loved it (we've seen it in other places since - it must be a thing).

To be fair, we had been warned by friends who previously had traveled here that we shouldn't expect to be floored by the native cuisine.  So far - and I realize we've only been here a week - the food definitely is not a highlight.  Our best meal was last night in Netulme (more on that part of the trip later) in a small, family-run restaurant.  The food wasn't amazing, but we were the only customers and the woman who owns and cooks (along with the others working there) was so friendly; it was like we were eating in her home.

Anyway, back to San Pedro.  We tried to all go to sleep by about 10pm on the 31st, even though it was New Year's Eve, but we had jet lag (it's 3 hour's difference from Milwaukee even though I had had it in my mind that it was only one) and the desert heat (no air conditioning - Aimee's dad, Doug, would NOT approve) working against us.  The jet lag, the desert heat, and of course the loud street parties with intense dance beats and large scarecrow fires working against us.

It appears to be a Chilean/South American tradition to construct scarecrows at the end of the year and then set them on fire at midnight on NYE.  The scarecrows represent the bad things that have happened in the previous year and burning them is intended as both a way to put those things behind and scare off any bad portent in the new year.  That's nice and all, but these scarecrows are made of some seriously flammable stuff, and a lot of it (some were burned right along with the whole couch they were sitting on) and were burned right next to the walls of the houses.

So, well, we didn't get much sleep until well after midnight.

On our first full day in the Atacama Desert, we went to the Valle de los Muertos for some hiking and dune climbing.  It's a popular spot for sand-boarding (using snowboards).  The boys and I attempted to climb the highest dune but found it impossible.  At about halfway, the progress was too slow (20 steps advances you about 5 feet) and the sun and sand too hot to keep going.  We all had fun running down, though.

Found anything yet?!

HOT

On the second day, we rose at 4:30am to do the 90 minute drive to the El Tatio geyser field - one of the largest and highest in the world.  This seems to be a good place to mention a couple things about our time in the Atacama Desert.  It's supposed to be (1) one of the driest and sunniest (i.e., cloudless) places on earth and (2) an amazing place to see stars (because of the cloudlessness).  Indeed, it's the location for several international astronomical observatories.  We went there, primarily, for the stars...and we didn't see one.  It also rained.

It was raining when we drove to the geysers and while we were at the geysers and the geysers are basically just little hot tubs in the dirt.  Interesting to see?  Sure.  Worth getting up for at 4:30 and driving the bumpiest dirt road in the world?  Eh.

Dirt Hot Tub

After the geysers, we stopped at thermal pools on the way back to San Pedro.  I would poo-poo these as an over-hyped, over-crowded, over-expensive tourist trap, but the boys absolutely loved them.  Despite the torrid start to this trip (two planes to Santiago, one to Calama, two from Calama to Puerto Montt, five hours stuck in the Puerto Montt airport waiting for luggage that never came, and then a four hour drive from Puerto Montt to Lago Pirihueico in the middle of the night) they have been excellent.  We certainly may find that the trip ends up wearing on them (and us) at times, but they have been excellent.

We decided to cut our visit to San Pedro short by a night and stay in an air conditioned hotel in Calama before our early morning flight to Santiago (and then on to Puerto Montt).  Best laid plans.  The first room we were given in the highest rated hotel in Calama did not have hot water.  The second room did not have air conditioning, the one thing we had come for.  Despite the lack of air conditioning (which we didn't realize until it was just too late and too much to switch rooms again), we slept better than in San Pedro and woke rested for our flight.  Good thing, because it was a long day.

The Santiago airport is nice.  But they apparently have some infrastructure issues.  We flew from Calama to Santiago on a separate booking than our subsequent flight from Santiago to Puerto Montt, so we had to retrieve our baggage and re-check it.  The line for check in was long when we arrived with our luggage, but not nearly as long as it was about to be.  The belt that moves checked bags from the check in counters to the recesses of airport luggage processing stopped working.  We were close enough to the front of the line that they checked us in and took our bags, but they simply joined a pile of tagged luggage behind the desk.  The belt started moving again right as we left to find our gate, but by then our flight already was boarding and we knew we'd be lucky if our bags met us in Puerto Montt.

They didn't.  We landed at 3:30pm in Puerto Montt and our bags did not.  Nor did they arrive on the next flight at 6:30pm or the one after that at 8:30pm.  We decided to decline the offer of a hotel voucher and instead asked that the airline deliver our bags to our hotel on Lago Pirihueico (four hours away) instead.  We left the airport at 9:30pm (still light out, by the way) and arrived at the hotel at 1:30am.

Perhaps it's the novelty and excitement of embarking on this adventure or a subconscious determination to get off on a good start no matter what, but neither the various mishaps we've had so far have not affected our spirits they way they may have on a regular family trip.

One thing that I'm fairly certain helped to lift our spirits - or at least mine - was getting out of the desert and moving to the Northern Patagonia climate.  On January 3, we left the 90 degree desert and landed in 65 degree afternoon in a port town at the foot of a snow-capped Volcano on a bay that opens to the Pacific Ocean.  Chile is an amazingly vast and geographically diverse country and I'm glad I saw the desert in the North, but I know which part I'll visit again.

And there's something about warm evening drives on windy country roads that always gets me.  When you drive a country road with the windows down as the sun is setting on a warm summer day, there is nothing else.  There's no stress or worry.  You almost forget where you're going.  There's just the warm sun, the fields and trees passing, and the wind from the open windows.

Before Thursday night, there were two of these drives that will always stay with me.  The first, which I've done and will do many times, is from the Northway to Silver Lake in the Adirondacks.  Somehow, the timing of our arrival always means we get off the Northway needing to race the sunset to the lake.  The second was a one-timer, a drive from Sault to Pernes-les-Fountains in the South of France.

The countryside outside of Puerto Montt airport reminded me of the South of France, the drive was similarly spectacular, and I will always remember it.  The route takes you along a country road for about 20 miles before you join the highway North and it's lined with trees and small farms.  The only difference was that instead of the hills of the South of France, there was a gigantic Volcano.  There seem to be no regular mountains in Chile, only Volcanoes.  Most are dormant.

Our drive took us to Lago Pirihueico, where we stayed in a small hotel overlooking (our balcony actually was overhanging) the spot where the lake emptied into the Rio Fuy.  This part of Chile - the Lakes/Rivers region - reminds us of Bavaria.  Or maybe just of the Alps in general except without the overpopulation. 

View from our hotel room over Rio Fuy

The hotel was a somewhat separate part of the Huilo Huilo biological reserve which includes a resort that looks like it was inspired by the villages on Endor or Kashyyyk (yup).  The resort is multiple, connected hotels that all are built around living trees and entirely of wood.  I don't know how it doesn't collapse but we weren't staying there so not our problem.

Hotel at Huilo Huilo

We hiked along the river and kayaked the lake.  We saw endangered deer (huge and amazing and 10 feet away) and wild boar (small and disgusting and 10 feet away).  We got sucked into the lunch buffet at the resort (damn tourist trap radar).

You can't hear it in this photo, but Aimee's yelling at Cam for not paddling correctly.

Does not stop talking.  Yes, that's a volcano.

We left Lago Pirihueico behind today and drove 2 hours to Pucon where we will stay until Friday.  I'll leave Pucon for the next blog entry, but I'll tell you now that so far Pucon seems a bit like a bigger, lower-end Crested Butte, Colorado.  Also it's on a lake in the shadow of a huge volcano.  And this one is active.

During the drive to Pucon.