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Published: October 28th 2009
Photo 13
One of my favorite pictures!
Tatio Geysers and SunriseDay 4 was an early one! We got a wake up call at 4 a.m. I yelled at Catie to answer it since it was by her bed. She was just going to ignore it. She answered it but then struggle to hang up the phone. It was entertaining. It was too early for hotel breakfast so I just ate a banana that I had. I had some Coca tea while we were waiting in the lobby for the bus so I wouldn´t get altitude sickness. I sat by Christina on the bus. It was a long, extremely bumpy, off-road ride. I slept for a while. It was hard to sleep for me because I was by the heater and it was cranked up. I was so warm! I think we arrived sometime between 7 and 8 a.m. We got a safety talk once we got off the bus. Three people have died there. The water is 85 degrees Celsius (really hot! 185F). The geysers aren´t like old faithful so you can´t just expect them to go off on cue. There are hundreds of geysers, all different sizes. There is a path you can walk on but you are allowed to
Photo 2
Tatio Geysers explore freely so you need to watch your step!
The outside temperature in the desert in the morning is freezing so we had to wear lots of layers and bundle up. I think it was around -6 degrees Celsius when we went. When we got off the bus, a big geyser erupted very close to us. We just sat and watched it and the tour guide talked some. There were little baby geysers that just looked like boiling puddles. It was really cold outside but I was entertained by the geysers and the rising sun. It was beautiful. We were all getting pretty hungry since we hadn´t eaten breakfast. The hotel had sent food with us but our bus company also had breakfast for us. The bus driver warmed up milk, literally, in one of the geysers. There was cheese, bread, jam, tea, cocoa and coffee waiting for us on a table by the bus.
Once we had our bellies full we boarded the bus and headed to the termas. Termas are natural hot springs that you can swim in. We have been to the ones in Chillan that are from the volcano. The ones we went to were a
lot cleaner than the ones in Chillan. We had to walk down a big hill to get to them. I guess the termas we went to are at the highest elevation than any other termas. There were 6 or 8 different termas we could go in. It was a really pretty place. Catie forgot her suit but I borrowed her shorts and a sports bra to wear. That´s me, I always have extra clothes. It is just the track mentality I guess! I feel the need to pack extra everything. We arrived at the termas around 9 or 9:30 and stayed until about 11:30. I had fun exploring all the different termas and the water was very nice. When we were finished we changed and then ate the breakfast the hotel had sent for us. We had ham and cheese sandwiches, yogurt, mandarin oranges, cookies and juice. It was yummy. We walked back up the big hill and boarded the bus to go back to the hotel.
Back at the hotel, I was ready for a nap. I only ended up sleeping for about 30 minutes. I wrote in my journal for awhile and then my roomies started to wake
up. I went to have tea with Christina. After tea I showered and lounged around waiting for everyone else to get ready. A bunch of us decided to go out to eat. We passed a little shop on the way and we decided to go in. We spent a long time there waiting for Hayley to pick out some new skirts. They were all so pretty. I liked a lot of the clothes but it was a bit too pricey for me. Hayley bought 2 new skirts and I ended up buying some new Lapis Azul earrings for about $16. I really like them.
We were all pretty hungry by this time so we went to the next closest place. It turned out that the 7 of us that went out to eat were the 7 of us going to Peru in a few weeks. We chose a little pizza place/restaurant. I had chicken and rice. It was delicious. Some of the other girls got pizza and it looked really yummy. We watched soccer on t.v. It was our university, UDEC, versus the University of Chile in Santiago. We ended up winning. It was a fun time.
We went back
Photo 5
Our guide, standing basically in a geyser to the hotel. We spent the rest of the night relaxing and chatting. We didn´t have to get up the next day so we stayed up way to late and had way too much fun. Our neighbors and many of the guests at the hotel were not so happy with our volume and we paid for it the next day. We were staying at a pretty fancy place and it was not the ideal place for 20 college age students to be since there was no where for us to hang out and have fun. We were even too loud outside. We were not very considerate of the other guests at the hotel since I´m sure they were all getting up to sight see and so the next day the hotel moved us all into the main building so we could be together easier and disturb less people. They probably should have done that in the first place but hindsight is 20/20!
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