Advertisement
Published: January 12th 2008
Edit Blog Post
The moon from a telescope eyepice
A beautiful shot, one of my fave pictures! Right I am writing this 5 months after I arrived back home. I could not keep up with the blog while I was in South America as I was always on the move due to the fact I was on a guided tour. Thus, my writings from here on in are based on memory which may be a little sketchy re day to day details, however the pictures from South America are some of the best yet so I will finish what I started.
Prior to landing in Santiago I stopped over in Fiji for a week. Fiji was like a holiday within a holiday. I did sod all apart from sun my self and read during the day; gorge on food and party at night. I ended up on one of the little Islands called Beachcomber which was an all inclusive resort for people like my self. You could literally walk round the island in 5 mins and I was there for a week! in hindsight i should have split my time by going to another island for a few days. The island was literally as you would imagine a desert island to be white sand, palm trees and
Awsome scenery
This oasis in the desert bursting with life was such a sharp contrast to the desolation around azure water. All very nice but after some of the places I have visited, and the time it takes to get to Fiji i doubt I will be returning any time soon.
From Fiji I had a lay over for the day in Auckland international airport before flying onto Santiago, Chile. I was apprehensive about South America. For one I knew it could be pretty dangerous and not speaking the language I could not talk my way out of any hostile situations I may have found my self in. For the most part my fears were unfounded, I saw some dodgy things during my six weeks on the continent but no more dodgy than I have seen in my own country. The main issue at first was the language I had four days on my own till I met up with my tour group and my god did I murder the language. Still with a bit of Spanglish and international body language I got by.
Santiago is not a great city in my opinion. Alot of it looks like post ww2 Eastern Europe, downtown especially which is pretty dangerous for westerners to venture alone (woops), looks like a
ghetto. Needless to say my first impressions weren't great. Saying that the second day that I arrived, my birthday went better than I expected seeing as I had just arrived and didn't know anyone. In the morning over breakfast I get chatting to a couple of American girls who were doing a summester at sea, basically they spend a term of uni on a fully equipped uni cruse liner and sail around South America stopping at various places along the way. Were way behind in the education department as my Uni certainly does not have a cruse liner at its disposal! I arranged to visit a winery with them during the day and they even slashed out on a cake for me, how nice! The day after I went out in Santiago with two Brazilian guys, 3 Peruvian girls and another guy from Belarus who were staying at the same hostel as me. The next day I woke up at 4pm so it must have been good.
That night I met my tour group and in the morning we were off to La Serina. La Serina is a costal town with a huge beach. Winter is not really the
time to be sunning and swimming in Chile unfortunately. I got to get to know my group the first couple of nights here and got used to camping which I was to do alot of. The highlight of La Serina was undoubtedly the trip to the observatory, reportedly one of the best sites in the world for astronomy. The view of the stars was un-paralleled and our excellent guide pointed out all of the constellations
and enlightened us with mind blowing facts about the universe. The picture of the moon on my blog speaks for its self!
We spent about 2 nights in La Serina, it would have been better and warmer in summer to visit as its predominantly a sea side town. Breaking camp at 6am was traumatic. There was a layer of ice on the fly sheet of my tent, it must have been -5 when I was wrenched from my warm sleeping bag! We drove all day through the Atacama desert, the driest place on the face of the earth. It seemed utterly devoid of life, all you could see was rocks and dust, it took us 2 days drive to get out of it, just
endless desolation. The first night we camped in the desert which was really cool we were literally in the middle of no where. After another long drive through the endless expanses we made it to the small town of San Pedro in northern Chile which is build around an oasis.
This was a really funky little town, very rural Latin American looking. It was interesting to potter round the town and take in the sights and sound of what South America is all about. We were at altitude here, though I forget what hight. I could certainly feel it on the drive up to San Pedro. Every couple of breaths I would have to inhale deeply as though I had been running as I would suddenly feel very short of breath and that was just sitting on my arse.
The following day we were up at 4am to make the trip to the Geysers for sunrise which were 2 hrs away by bus. I tried to sleep but the road was so dam bumpy! Wen we stepped off the bus it was around 6, just before the sun rose above the hroizon and we were at 4000+ meters.
Not a good time to be out it seems as it was -15 degrees C. I can safely say I have never been so cold in all my life. The Geysers were very impressive however and it did warm up a when the sun came out, even enough for a dip in the thermal pools. After lunch on this action packed day we went on a trek to visit the valley of the moon and death valley. The scenery was jaw dropping, unlike anything I had ever seen. The pictures fail to do it justice. Throughout the whole trek we were all commenting about how utterly spectacular the place was. The sense of scale was really wierd because of the desert and the huge mountains. We could see a volcano that was 400km away, according to our guide, for instance that looked like it may have been 30 miles away.
After that day we were all exhausted so we hit the tents pretty early. The next day we crossed into Argentina, my first country in South America was already done and dusted.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.103s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 17; qc: 63; dbt: 0.0555s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb