Santa Lucia

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Whenever I plan to rise early on a free day somehow the alarm keeps moving on a little later until it's not so early. Saturday was no exception. Once I got going, I found myself on a route I had travelled before with a choppy boat ride to Santiago followed by a pick-up to San Lucas. From here some inprecise pronunciation on my part (or too many names beginning with San) meant the next journey was a short (but free) one on discover of the misunderstanding.
By this point I was stuck at one of those nothingy places where roads meet and subsquently a Pepsi stand emerges, some kids sell fruit and people wait around with stacks of wood and bundles of grass. If the roads are major enough, whole towns appear, which are normally scruffy, uninteresting places. By their very nature it's not a place your in for long time because there are always plenty of vehicles looking to cram more people on. I found one of these vehicles in the form of a Chicken bus going to Santa Lucia.

The odd glimpses of landscape I could see showed flat farmland, an unusual sight after plenty of time around the lake. Some crazy guy on the bus kept trying to talk to me, I couldn't understand much of what he was saying and what I did was too bizarre to warrant a response.

On getting off the bus the heat hit me like the opening of an oven door as did the realization of how varied the climate can be here.
After finding an economic place to stay I cautiously placed faith in the instructions of my guide book. I wondered aimlessly through sugar-cane fields looking for the stones of Bilboa. Eventually, I came to a road, which wasn't meant to be there, at which point I decided to use the amazingly more reliable verbal form of instruction.
People were staring at me once I reached a t-junction as it became apparent this wasn't really a tourist town. I walked for ten minutes more with only loaded motorbikes and trucks passing me. Shortly afterwards I managed to hitch a ride. We arrived at a large factory, a guy with a shotgun approached and ask my name, at this point I thought a little confusion had taken place but his smile suggested otherwise.
I found the bizarrely situated stones shortly afterwards and signed the guest book. Scrolling down the list the odd foreigner had passed this way before but with no great frequency. The stones were attractively laid out next to an unattractive factory. The choice of location seemed a little unusual but the ancient calvings were interesting and mostly in reasonable condition. Another security guard came up to me smiling, obviously pleased to have a visitor. Shortly afterwards a guy in a hard hat came up and offered to show me around. We jumped into his Jeep and he expained to me how the whole site was planned to be a large eco-tourist complex with historical information on all sorts. Most of the place looked a dump and with the large factory in the centre it hardly seemed the ideal place to start an eco-project. He took me to a small hydroelectric plant and two random prison cells before driving me back to town. The generosity pleasantly suprised me.

Having criticised attitudes towards tourists in previous blogs, here I was experiencing the opposite of people going out of their way to help me. As I mentioned before, this is normal in many places where tourists are few, the negative things are nearly always a culture which develops once the tourists flood. Fortunately the number of friendly and helpful people tend to outnumber the opposite sort, unless you stick to really touristy areas and subsquently I left satisfied and happy with after an interesting day.

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