Movin' on to a place a bit less Chile.

After we got back, we spent a few days hanging out in Puerto Natales again. We may have eaten pizza two nights in a row. How Chilean. I know. There was also a lot of sleeping involved and NOT wearing my hiking boots.

Hanging out

Hello friends,

This will be my life for the next couple weeks. I decided it's finally time to refresh on the proper way to speak a language, so I'm taking some classes and also volunteering at a hospital here. With babies. 

Sucre is a really gorgeous city that's a lot warmer than La Paz. And lower altitude. We have had awesome thunder storms both nights I have been here so far. It's a chill city that apparently has some dinosaur footprints I can go visit in my time off! 

I'd love to take this time to catch you all up on my blog, but I've yet to find a internet connection that can handle loading pictures. So you're out of luck. Instead I'll be doing homework and practicing verb conjugations. Sorry guys. 

The Q - Part 2

Day 6: Seron to Dickson
We thought we had a super long day ahead of us (which my feet were not looking forward to), but it turns out there's a typo on the map they give out at the park entrance. A typo that means we had about two hours less walking to do. Hooray!!

Gotta love those reflection pics.

Torres del Paine - The Q

The bus to take us into the park left at 730am on the 26th. We were still packing at 1am the night before. As I looked around at all the food and clothes we were going to be carrying around with us, I wasn't even sure it would all fit in our bags. What the crap did we just decide to do. But by 2am it was all packed and neither of our bags weighed much more that 35lbs. So that wasn't so bad.

730am at the bus stop and feeling great

The bottom of the world

Before heading to the south of Chile, I was meeting up with Ellen in Santiago to play tourist for a couple of days. She came in on a night bus, and instead of wanting to sleep all morning she came out with me and we checked out the seafood and produce markets in Santiago. While the seafood market didn't smell all that great, it had tons of things I didn't recognize. Massive fish and eels, weird stuff in shells, big squids, you name it. I stopped at a restaurant on the second floor of the produce market and got ceviche. It was more fish than I could have eaten in two meals. Phew. For those of you that don't know what ceviche is, its chunks of raw fish that are covered in lemon juice. The acidity essentially cooks the fish and its served tossed with slices of onion. 

Van para el paradiso!

I knew that my bus ride back down to central Chile would be long, but I didn't anticipate the two hours we would spend sitting because the highway was closed for a massive accident. Or for the fact that I was next to a heater that blasted all night. I seem to always get these seats. It happened on the busses in Vietnam a few times too. Ahhh. Always better to show up roasted, sweaty, tired and hungry in your destination city. Especially when one of the kids working on the bus (taking tickets and luggage etc) chooses to sit down next to you at 1am to ask why youre traveling alone and where your boyfriend is in the quietest, fastest mumbled spanish ever. Even better when you write down the address of your hostel wrong but know its only a couple blocks from the bus stop. And in the middle of a market. No worries, you can just wander down each street that's both a couple blocks from the bus station and in the middle of the market. That doesn't get weird looks from people with you're two backpacks. 

Flamingos volcanos and salt

After I left Arica, I took a night bus to Calama. It's the larger city where you transfer buses and take a quick one over the San Pedro de Atacama. This is the small town that provides access to the Atacama Desert. The Atacama Desert is 49,000 sq mi of salt flats, lakes, sand and lava. Its just to the west of the Andes and still has a couple active volcanos. The average rainfall in this area is about a half an inch per year aka not very much at all, making it the driest non-polar desert in the world. And one of the oldest!