Second Semester Santiago

Cuando la mas bonita mujer en todo el mundo vino a Sudamerica

The most beautiful woman I know, my mother, came and visited me in South America for 10 days. Together we spent time in Santiago, Valparaiso, and Mendoza, Argentina. Our first location was Valparaiso; we spent time exploring the cerros and looking through the many art opportunities in Valparaiso. We stayed in a hostel that itself was a cool, if not disorganized, art community.

We started in the Plaza Sotomayor near the port and continued up through Cerro Concepcion y Cerro Alegre. The hills are covered in artwork and the we spent a lot of time walking and chilling among the paintings and cafes.

The Ocean is what makes Valparaiso. Chile's largest port and its first city, Valparaiso became Chile's most important city and its cultural center during Century XIX. Like most port cities in Chile (Punta Arenas, Puerto Montt, or Antofagasta) Valparaiso was hit hard by the opening of the Panama Canal. These cities now-a-days all seem like shells of their former selves, Valparaiso has been able to hold on to what made it unique. Declared a World Heritage Site in 2003, Valpo itself is a work of art.

The second part of our trip involved crossing the Andes into Mendoza. Mendoza: the land of wine and steak. Mom had the opportunity to take part in both. Our first day there we went on a long horseback riding trip that ended in an asado with the all so famous Argentinian beef. During this trip we rode through the foot hills of the Andes outside the confines of the city limits.

On the second day in Mendoza, we did the bodega tours. We saw the wine bodegas, cavas, and viñas. On the trip we got to see the famous and ancient process of making Argentina's famous wines in person, and of course we tried a little too.

Finis Tierra

This last week, I completed a 5 day 93 kilometer (58 mile) hike through Torres del Paine national park in Southern Patagonia. The park is the most visited in South America and the hike I completed is its most famous one. Called the 'W' the hike literally resembles a W and has 3 unique branches.

The first branch of the W went towards a massive glacier on the edge of Lago Grey. Glacier Grey is a massive ice sheet taking up large portions of the park. Staying at the Refugio Grey, the mirador next door one could see the edge of the advancing glacier looking like someone had put Styrofoam under a microscope.

The next section of the W is the Valle del Frances. This part was the roughest trail and the highest point of elevation of all the trails in Torres del Paine. In this section, the trail leads to a mirador within the valley created by the crescent shaped mountains and the parks most notable river Rio del Frances flows out of this valley.

The coolest, but hardest part of Torres del Paine is carrying everything on your back. I carried all the camping equipment for Sydney and I (although she did lug around all the food). We shared my tiny two person tent with the additional bags of Douglas and Archil since their tent looked like something not made to be taken out of the backyard by people under the age of 10. Our little tent become home in the freezing nights though.

Finally, the last stop on the W is the parks most famous attraction. Giving the park its name, the towers of stone loom over the park's mountains. By camping at the base and making a 45 minute hike in the dark up a way too steep mountainside, one can watch the sunrise over the towers as the change from shimmering in the dark to glowing red.

That's when things started heading South

The last stop on my Bolivian adventure was the world largest and highest salt flats in Uyuni. The landscape is other worldly, like a sea of white stretching in every direction. Without sun glasses a person could go blind in a matter of no time. Also a person's skin could fall off at the elevation that the salt flats are at. Once a massive interior sea in the highs of the Andes, now Uyuni is an other worldly site to see.

The salt flats are a world heritage site and the Bolivian government has recognized their extreme importance to the tourism and development of this out of reach area of Southwestern Bolivia. While that may seem amazing, there is always something there to ruin it. The worlds largest untapped lithium reserves lie under the salt flats. With the growing demand for heavy metals to charge the batteries we all seem to need, lithium prices have flown through the roof. It is now only a matter of time until the salt flats are torn up to mine the valuable lithium below.

There is more to the Southwest circuit then just the salt flats. The area contains volcanoes, rock formations, sand dunes, lagoons full of flamingos, wildlife, and geysers. In order to see all of these areas one must go on one of the many tours that do this circuit. A lot of the trip is spent doing normal road trip things in the end.

Of course there is the wildlife as well. Vacuñas, Flamingos, and Foxes.

The landscape of the Southwest is amazing. The high elevation desert creates a type of landscape I would imagine dinosaurs wandering around. Its amazing to see rocks that have been carved out only by the wind and sand through millions of years.