Universidad Andrés Bello

Food!

Every time I start traveling I also tend to start losing weight. As a direct result I start to spend way more time thinking/dreaming about food. I also noticed I have a mild obsession with taking pictures of food when I am really hungry. I thought I would give a small culinary taste of the world I have seen through the many meals I have overly enjoyed. I will start with this last trip to Pucon where Lisa, Shepherd, Brin and I made a breakfast of epic proportions.

I also have had a lot of local specialties. In Zululand I had a meal with butternut, phutu, beetroot, and salad with lovely native spices.

Some foods I have had are for a special holiday. During the Bicentenario en Chile I had Mote which is dried and then revived peaches in a sugar syrup with roasted barley. Mote can be bought on practically every street in Chile, but especially during the yearly independence festival.

The produce of El Salvador is unworldly. With practically everyone selling produce on the street, its hard even with trying to avoid getting a stomach bug not to enjoy the fresh produce of the small Central American country.

Sometimes just the ambiance is the most important part. Sitting on the beach in Durban looking out at the Indian Ocean rolling in. The day could not get anymore perfect then just a claming day relaxing in the warm sun.

Transantiago

The public transportation of Santiago is excellent. The metros are fast, the micros come often, and you can go anywhere you want in the city via Transantiago. As far as the whole of Santiago goes, I live really close to the center and my University, but still the 50 minute - 1 hour I spend each day in one direction can start to wear a person down. It's mainly because my home is located in a public transportation dead zone, that requires a 25 minute walk or several transfers by bus. The other major down side is that one ride of a Micro/Metro combo costs ruffly one US dollar, and with 4 rides a day everyday it adds up quick. Still this post is not a hatred of Transantiago, but rather a reflection of a life-style. I spend such a massive proportion of my life on the Micros and Metros I can not help but think about it as a part of me. The experience can vary, from the cramped and sweaty morning Metro ride, to the calm afternoon bus ride to Los Dominicos for a futbol game, to being drunkenly molested by some random Chileana coming home from Bella Vista at 5 AM. The buses are a great way to see the ever expanding metropolis and the metros will get you anywhere you need to go quickly. Its amazing that my most used possession is my BIP card and taking the "free" bus always seems like a win.

Little Adventures in Patagonia

First and foremost, the title is fantastic only if you know that Shepherd and I were so short in comparison to the people staying at our hostel. My new found confidence in my height from living in Latin America was once again knocked down by spending any amount of time near Northern Europeans. In the picture below, Mix from Denmark and Nikki from Germany easily made Shepherd and I look like children.

Patagonia is awesome and spending it with passionate and fun other travelers made it even better. This day we hiked the very easy but amazing Cerro Llao Llao near the 100 kilometer long Lago Nahuel Huapi. It was very beautiful. The view from the top was breathtaking.

One cannot help but just see the beauty that the world has to offer while sitting on top of Cerro Llao Llao.

With out getting too redundant I have one more picture from the top just because I cannot choose. Its very difficult when almost every picture you took turned out well by default.

We also went on an amazing around Cerro Catedral. It was cloudy this day, but the hike involved old forest, creeks, mountain faces, and waterfalls. We went with this friendly couple from Sweden that made the trip very fun.

Shepherd being his normal cute self decided to climb this area by a waterfall. Karma bit him on the way down though.

One cannot help but think of a world of elves and trolls in Patagonia. Without even trying you get lost in the world of forest mythology and natural wonder. You half expect a gnome to pop out at some point.

La Isla Embrujada de Chiloe

Chiloe is a group of islands located at the end of Chile's Lake District and along the coastline of Northern Patagonia. It requires a ferry to get to the Isla Grande de Chiloe since the local Chilotes have fought vigorously to stop any plans to build a bridge in fear that their culture would disapear with more traffic. It is still very easy to get to Chiloe and the island cultural remains distant from that of its mainland neighbors.

We went to see penguins, which once again has proven itself to be a lame venture, but the boat ride was very cool. Chiloe is haunted. This was my first tasted of the the eerie island. There are many stories of the haunted nature of Chiloe, including ghost ships filled with brujos, trolls that impregnate young girls in the woods, and mermaid sirens who drag down sailors to the bottom of the ocean.

I also went to some other islands off the main one including Isla Quinchao. It was finally a sunny day in Chiloe and we were able to see the beautiful views of the harbor towns. We had to take ferries from island to island and got a lot of boating experience.

Chiloe is very famous for is all wooden churches that cover the island. They are made entirely out of wood without steel nails. Many of them have become UNESCO World Heritage sites. The incredible part is that the entire island is made out of wood yet it doesn't seem to be rotting with its 300 days of rain a year. The bigger problem with me was that I felt complied to take pictures of every church I saw, so I ended up with a ton of Chiloten church pictures. This one in Achao on Quinchao is one of the least pretty but it is the nicest picture.

From Castro, the Parque Nacional de Chiloe is very accessible. The hikes in the national park, located on the Pacific side of the Island, brought me back to the haunted aspects of the Island. The old forests covered in moss and the foggy empty beaches of the national park made for a fantastic creepy Halloween adventure.

The beach part itself seemed like something out a Scooby-Doo cartoon. I forced Shepherd to take pictures of my on the beach since the lighting and landscape looked so other worldly.

The beach was not empty though. It was full of things living and dead. The cows wandering the beach even made it scarier. But the scariest was the dead seal that lay by its lonesome along the foggy shore.

A Taste of the High Life

This past weekend I had the opportunity to go to a Chilean hot spot in the southern gem of Pucon. Pucon has a reputation for being jam-packed with Chilean tourist during the summer months, but in the early spring the village is much more tranquil and serene. The first day we showed up in Pucon was rainy and messy. We went to bed the first night without even realizing that we were sitting on the base of a massive volcano billowing smoke. The eerie quite and cold of Pucon gave it a somewhat haunted feeling.

Of course no trip is ever complete in the world of Brian until I have mounted a horse. On the same rain day we went on an amazing horse back ride up a muddy wet mountain. The horses were sliding all around and our Mapuche guide took a very laissez faire way of letting us ride the horses. Near the end of it I was able to take off in a full on gallop which let me get my heart racing and my adrenaline pumping.

The next day went to some waterfalls about 15 miles from Pucon called Ojos de Caburgua. The area was amazing. An old growth forest with a pond in the middle where two rivers meet forming a 360 waterfall. The old growth forest and waterfalls felt almost mythical.

This stuff alone could have made this the best weekend so far in Chile, and I haven't even mentioned Volcan Villarica yet. I climbed the most active volcano in Chile. The view from Pucon alone blows my mind.

Climbing this bad-boy is a whole different story. This is not your afternoon jaunt, it is a wake up at 6 in the morning, 3 inch steel spikes on the shoes, ice pike to stay upright, calf-burning, sweating to freezing instantly, slide down on your ass kinda climb.

After 6 hours of only uphill walking we reached the summit. It went from so hot I though I would die to instantly freezing. The massive crater of the volcano and the amazing view where we could even see Argentina from the top all made us do one thing... eat. I would normally rule this picture bad since the bottom corner has my finger in it, but I think it clarifies how extremely cold it was at the top and how I had to wear huge mittens just to take pictures.

I can finally cross climbing a volcano of my bucket list. It was all fun because I got to end this adventure with the longest possible sled ride of my life, off a 2900 meter mountain.