Travel... In addition to the initial week in Santiago and then exploring Valparaíso and Viña, we've gone to Isla Negra, Rabuco, Temuco, and Pucon with the CIEE program, and to Chiloe and Cerro La Campana on our own.
I went to Chiloe with Martha, Steph, and Carrie during the first week of April, which was Semana Nevata/ Semana Mechona (freshman week in which classes are suspended in favor of parties and hazing-like activities aimed at the first year students). Funny story (not really, actually), but since the Pope died on the Friday we left, they decided on Monday to suspend the weeks activities and... reinstate classes. I missed the logic on that one, especially since the following week they suspended classes for the "actual" Semana Novata. As of now, the logic employed by the Catholic universities evades me.
Regardless of the non-vacation status of our trip, it was a lot of fun. Chiloe is an archipelago about 16 hours south of Valparaiso by bus. We spent our first two days in Dalcauhue, a town on the coast of the main island. Besides wandering around, we also went to the Sunday market, where venders come from all over Chiloe to sell jewelry; hand-made wool blankets, ponchos, scarves, hats, gloves, etc.; cheese; and random touristy souveneirs, such as miniature wooden churches, hand painted chess boards, and books about Chilote folkore. From Dalcauhue, we visited Achao on one of the smaller islands for a day. We went to see a really old wooden church that was actually closed, but the very nice French priest who lived next door opened it for us and told us about the history of the church (possibly the oldest entirely wooden church in the world). It then started pouring rain, so we went to a restaurant to wait out the weather (and have delicious seafood soup), and almost got stranded in Achau. When we crossed to Achao on the ferry, the ferrymen said that the ferry would be running until 11:30 at night and we assumed that that meant it would also be possible to GET to the ferry at that time. After finishing our food, we asked our waitress where we could find a micro to return to the ferry and she told us that they were a block away, but that they stopped running at 7 pm. We looked at our watches to discover that it was already 7:30, so we started to get a bit worried. The owner of the restauraunt told us that we could not hitchhike back because (1) no one would be driving at this time and (2) it is too dangerous for a group of women to do that. Instead, she called her husband from the country to come to drive us 27 km to the ferry. She did this for four foreign students that just happened to land in her restauraunt. Of course we paid gas money, but we were amazed by and very greatful for the assistance. I can't really picture that kind of behaviour in larger cities...
We also spent time in Castro, the large, inland city on the main island, Cucau, in the eastern end of the main island, Chonchi, towards the south, and Puerto Montt, a large city on the mainland to the north of Chiloe. The highlight of Castro was probably the hostal that we stayed at - Hostal Cordillera, in case any of you students go to visit Castro - the owners were extremely friendly and sweet, and the other students there were interesting. Since we stayed for a few nights, we met various groups that were also staying there - a group of students from Israel the first night, who were unfortunately not easy to communicate with, since only one of them spoke Spanish, and they didn't speak English well enough to converse. The second night, we met a French couple (who spoke Spanish), who we ran into in Cucau and with whom we ended up travelling to Puerto Montt (by accident, but it helped for scoping out bargains in hostals), and the third night, we met a nice Swedish couple (who did not speak Spanish, but spoke perfect English). They were really quiet, so I think we may have traumatized them with our loud Americanness, but they claimed that this was not the case. In Cucau, we spent a couple days exploring the national park along the coast, which was beautiful although we were soaking wet by the end of it. We stayed in Hotel Zimmer (definitely our splurge of the trip, but another suggestion for anyone who goes to Cucao), a small Hostal owned by a really sweet German lady. She and her husband talked to us a lot about the national park and showed us pictures from their trips in the area. We were the only people staying there, so whenever we were in the main eating area (like after our trip to the national park, when Martha and Stephanie and Carrie were soaked and had to dry all their clothes by sitting near the furnace), she would come out and talk to us and give us hot chocolate and kuchen. She also had a really contagious laugh, and seemed to find us amusing, so we laughed a lot for our two days there.
A couple weeks ago Martha and I went to Cerro La Campana, a "hill" (I would say small mountain, but to each his own) about two hours or so away by train or micro. We woke up at 7:00 in the morning on Saturday to catch the 7:30 train to Limache and started hiking at about 9:45 in the morning. The trail itself is 7 km long to the top, with an average grade of 20%, and it was a beautiful sunny day, so there were other hikers there as well. The entire hike (to the sort of top and back, since we lost the actual trail at the top in the giant expanse of loose rocks) took about 6 1/2 hours and we didn't get back into Valparaiso until about 10 pm. The hike was absolutely gorgeous, though. For the lower part, there were many trees, most of which were starting to change colors (because it's fall here), and the leaves were falling onto the trail and the sky was a bright, clear blue and it was just beautiful. There were parts that were exposed, dry, and rocky between the tree-covered portions, as well as some small caves (with foxes!) and lizards. Towards the top, the trees started to thin out and we could see the other cerros as well as the valley towards the coast, and in the uppermost parts of the hike we could see across the other hills to the (snow-covered) Andes. The pictures, I'm sorry to say, do not do justice the the beautiful views that we had on this hike, so you'll just have to believe me that it was absolutely amazing. The top of the hike was also the most difficult, as the trail became ambiguous and we had to basically scramble over a bunch of loose rocks while trying to figure out where exactly we were supposed to be going. Of course, on the way back down, it was easy to see which parts would be easiest to pass over and where the trail should be. Go figure.
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