Chileans love car camping

I mean they really really love it. They love to drive up in their cars all the way up to the camp site (even if the site is past a creek, for example). Before they leave their homes, they take out the mattresses from their beds, wrap them in plastic packaging, load them in their pickups and sleep on them in their tents. Along with their TVs, boomboxes, cooking grills, dolphin-shaped body massagers, towels and pòssibly a kitchen sink thrown in there as well, for a good even mix.

And the unofficial quiet hours in all campsites are from 3am - 10am. We discovered this the hard way when we saw people start cooking their dinners at around 10pm. No bueno.



We´re in Pisco, Elqui, which is a couple of hours north of La Serena. We spent the past 2 days camping at a nice little place called El Oasis - which, as the name suggests was an oasis in the middle of the desert. We went on a day long boat trip to Isla Choros and Isla Damas and saw several Humboldt penguins, dolphins, sea lions (when they fight, they are really really loud and aggressive), sea otters, pelicans, cormorants, lizards and then some more critters.

Here are some random photos from La Serena and Pisco.

Dust to dust

We visited the cemetery at Punta Arenas today evening. Apparently, it´s a rather well-known cemetery, being mentioned in the guidebooks and all.

I´ve visited a few cemeteries but this is the first one where I actually saw what looked like coffin-spaces stacked on top of one another. Here´s what it looked like.


I guess the design of such structures was driven more by economic constraints of the deceased´s family, rather than aesthetics, since once you moved past these multistoried coffins, there was a whole another section with palatial coffin spaces - some families even had entire temples dedicated to their lineage.

This being Punta Arenas, it was windy and cold as ever; but it was bright and sunny, even at 6pm (there´s almost 18 hours of sunlight in the summer).

It felt strange to walk through the cemetery. One felt a rather comfortable distance between those under the ground and those above. It was a comfortable distance but it was still rather uncomfortable to be feeling that comfortable, if you know what I mean. Several spaces had photos, memorabilia (one had a wireless microphone and toy models of 4 muscle cars right next to a nativity scene and a photo of the deceased, all encased behind a glass door) and flowers - both natural and artificial.

Wildflowers grew in delicate abandon over the graves and fluttered in the cold breeze. Somewhere in the distance a Church bell rang to announce the time - 6pm. You could hear the waves of the beach also lapping nearby. It was surreal. One couldn´t help but wonder at how time passes and how it takes us in its sway. Wildflowers and weeds take birth and nourishment from our ashes and we complete the cycle by taking birth and cultivating flowers.

If one views death as the cessation of life and of all we know and experience -- rather than the continuation of our existence (albeit in a different form) -- visiting cemeteries can have a rather unsettling effect. (I guess it can have an unsettling effect regardless of how one views death...).

It makes you more attuned to life, more in touch with what matters and what doesn´t. Case in point: we did groceries right after the cemetery visit and the cashier forgot to give me $10 change back. She closed our sale and we had barely walked back from the register when we realized that we were short $10. We communicated to her in broken Spanish that she didn´t give me the $10 back and it took her and her supervisor about 20 minutes to ring up the entire register and tally up the totals with the money in her cash box before finally concluding that she had indeed forgotten to give me the $10 change. During the process, I couldn´t help but wonder at the futility of it all. $10! I started to wonder why I had asked for it in the first place. Over the long run...$10...really? And all those bills and calculators and registers ringing...what for?

a few notes from lisa

south america, who knew??? :)

so here we are. struggling with español and in ecuador, the elevation. finding enough to eat has been challenging everywhere. there are fantastic vegetarian restaurants but then where is the yummy meat?! we have to choose at each meal time. we have eaten many many protein bars and hemp-whey protein shakes.

patagonia has been awesome, incredible blue lakes and glaciers all over. the penguins were certainly one of the highlights as well.

i did, in fact, refuse to go out on the glacier on cotopaxi. ¨glacier¨ should really read ¨verticle wall of ice¨ with pushy, totally comfortable mountain guides who can´t believe that you are afraid of heights, etc. and just gave up on me almost immediately. anyhow...i knew i wouldn´t get to the top but i did think that i would at least learn to use the crampons. maybe next time. i have been impressed with the trail maintenance and signage in both national parks. hurray for maintained trails!

we´ve met some cool other traveling folks. one couple who arrived in argentina and bought a used car and have been car camping all over. brilliant idea!!

Hanging out in the twilight zone

This isn´t directly related to the trip but after 5 days of eating camping food, I started to hallucinate a bit - longing for good warm cooked food.

I was lying in the tent today morning when I thought about how my longing for food varies depending on the time of the day. In the morning - some time between 6 and 9am - I view with sheer disgust all unhealthy food. That would include pizza, (most) north Indian food, beer, decadent desserts etc. I can´t stand the thought of consuming any of those foods in that 6-9ish zone. I get stark visual images in my mind at the mere thought of eating any of that: globs of cheese hanging off pizza slices and getting deposited in the stomach in pretty much the same form and getting converted to oodles of love handles. You get the idea.

This is also the zone where fruits and vegetables reign. They revel in their freshness, in their wholesomeness and their promise of good health.

Then it gets to about 10am and the boundaries of the twilight zone start receding. This is when the aforementioned foods start making their way into my mind and the fruits and veggies are relegated to a cold unworthy crevice at the back of the mind. We all know how things go after that.

And, on that note, I´m about to go gorge myself on some not-so-healthy food. ´Cos it´s 7pm.

Back from Patagonia

It feels strange to be back to civilization after 5 days of being in beautiful (but crowded) wilderness. We just got back from a backpacking trip to the Torres Del Paine National Park in Chile. We did the ´W´ circuit - about 45 miles of hiking through some of the most amazing landscapes I´ve seen: Andean desert, Patagonian steppe, Magellan deciduous forests and glacial lakes.

The place was crowded. Teeming. Overflowing. But there were still times when you were given some solitude to marvel at the beauty of it all.

I´ll let a few random pictures speak for the place.

Off for a shower and some warm sit-down food now!

15 cents

That´s how much I put in the tip basket that was being passed around at the 4pm sermon at
the El Carmen de la Ascencion Church in Cuenca. I wasn´t skimping but I just wasn´t sure if I should be putting any money towards it, in the first place. So when the basket came to me, I hastily took out my wallet and dug out the first coins I could find.

It was a beautiful sermon in a wonderful Church. Of course, since it was in Spanish, I probably got about 40 words of the 45 minute sermon, but it was spiritually uplifting to be there as part of a 200-300 strong crowd chanting softly. I was reminded of my childhood days when I used to go to the chapel in my school (Holy Cross high school) with a couple of friends. I used to stay over at a friend´s place sometimes on Christmas Eve and have ginger ale and cake with their family and go out singing carols in the night. It was an innocent, curious, simple and instinctive thing to do, at that time.

I still try to retain that curiosity today but the politicization of religion (all religions) is something that tarnishes my memories of those days and makes it harder for me to reach out for those 15cents.

Chilin´ in Cuenca

Me encanta Cuenca (though the photo above is of Mt. Ruminahui)

Got here yesterday after a 40 minute flight from Quito. The flight attendant left an (unoccupied and untethered) infant car seat right next to us for the entire duration of the flight....not something you see on a US flight.

Cuenca has been good so far: warm and sunny...a far change from chilly and windy Cotopaxi where we spent 3 nights camping/bundled up in the refugio.

We got breakfast at the local market: pork (scraped straight from a whole pig laid flat on the table), hominy, mashed potatoes and orange juice for lulu; granola, pecans, yogurt and mangoes for me. All local and all yummy - a far cry from the Washington apples we bought in a supermercado in Quito a couple of days ago....so much for coming all the way to south america.

Cotopaxi (4 days ago) was rough. We hired a tour guide to take us to climb Cotopaxi (the 4th highest active volcano in the mundo) for $250 per person - it included an "acclimatization" hike to Mt. Ruminahui as well to help us get used to the high elevation of Cotopaxi (which starts at about 17000 ft and goes all the way to 19,600ft. Ruminahui started at about 10,000 ft and the summit was at 15,300, so we thought it would be a good enough warm-up climb.

While the Ruminahui hike was beautiful (miles of Andean paramo with not a person in sight), it was challenging as well - the last 30 minutes were perhaps the toughest I had ever done: it was rock climbing at 19,000 feet. Lulu refused to go to the summit and Pablo (the guide) had to make her a little shelter to sit in and wait while he and I attempted to climb the summit. I was roped to Pablo with a carabiner to hold onto for grip. 30 some cold, slippery, rocky and scary minutes later, we reached the top. The summit was about 2 ft x 3ft wide - barely enough space for one person to comfortably stand. I huddled up in a corner while Pablo was jumping around (literally) in his 1 foot of space so he could get a better cell phone signal to call the taxi to come pick us up at the lagoon at the base.

Quito, which is about 100kms north of the summit was clearly visible in the distance. When you´re this high, the air is unbelievably pure, thin and fresh. And cold.

(Since I don´t have my camera cable with me right now, check out a photo of Ruminahui snagged off the innernet, at the top of this post)

We finally made it to the laguna at about 6.30pm...6 hrs after we started. Cotopaxi was scheduled for the next day, so it was a quick trip to the car, a yummy and warm lentils+quinoa dinner made by lulu and a warm and early awakening on the day of the climb. I didn´t quite feel up for it given that I had never so much as been on a glacier (discounting the 2 hrs of monkeying around Alaska in 2006), let alone climb to the summit of an icy mountain, but we figured it was worth a try. They took us out for a practice climb at the foot of the glacier just to get used to crampons and the ice axe. It was fun - I was loving it. Lulu flat out refused to get on the glacier, though :) I was feeling a bit nauseous though, given that we were at 18,000ft.

After about 2 hours of practice, we came back to the refuge, ate a warm dinner of potato soup and bundled up in the bunk beds at about 7pm (the climb was scheduled to start at midnight). Because it was a weekend, the refuge was really hopping with about 40-50 pumped-up mountaineers all getting antsy and worked-up before the big hike. We, of course, were nauseous and scared. At about midnight when they started waking everyone one, we decided not to go for it...the nausea was only going to get worse with elevation and I wasn´t especially thrilled about the idea of crossing crevasses in the middle of the night.

So much for that. Oh well.

It being Sunday today, pretty much the whole town of Cuenca is shuttered up. Except places like this internet cafe.

Cuenca used to be the 2nd largest Inca town, after Cusco. Until the Spanish came, that is. It´s sad and frustrating how the Spaniards´ dream of the Catholicization of an entire continent came true with the passing of the centuries. Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, reportedly threw the Bible that a Spanish friar offered to him when he found that the Bible didn´t make any sounds. That was apparently, the official justification for the conquest, slavery and decimation of an entire contintent and its peoples.

I can´t stop kicking myself for not getting Eduardo Galeano´s Memory of Fire with me from pdx. That would have been the perfect companion to a S. America trip. I did see a sign for a (closed) libreria selling English books today, so maybe they might have a copy that I can comprar tomorrow.

The plan is to stay in Cuenca for 2 more nights before flying out to Santiago (via Guayaquil) on the 26th. Off to cook some pasta for now. Adios.

ps - Lulu came down with a severe case of quemadura (sunburn). Remedy? go to the local farmers market, get a free stick of aloe from a concerned and helpful farmer lady, cut it open and rub the juice on the face.