Greetings to all our blog readers! A glorious rainbow has just sent us back to the north. Now, we are back home on San Juan Island after a long, long series of flights from Temuco to Santiago to Mexico City to Los Angles and finally (30 hours!) to Seattle. We have had such varied and […]
We expected Buenos Aires to be cool and clammy – but no, our stay has been lovely and sunny and comfortable for walking some of the shady parks and the rabbit warren of busy streets in the central part of this giant city. It was laid out with Parisian-wide boulevards, now clotted with traffic, and narrow […]
The past week has been filled with many unexpected events, including one today, in which we learned that we were grounded from taking off from the Temuco Airport by winds gusting to 50km/hr. As we left Helen’s house this morning, Leslie jokingly noted that the strong winds raging outside her house might prevent us from […]
We are now in the northern part of this long skinny country, though we won’t make it all the way to the Peruvian border. San Pedro de Atacama has been our base for digging into what makes this region tick. The geography here is truly staggering. Think of Nevada with its deserts, Utah with its […]
For the past five days or so we have been traveling and transitioning north from Temuco. We’ve had long days of driving many kilometers, but we are now finally through Norte Chico, or Chile’s Little North, and into the true northern part of this latitudinally-vast country. Located south of the Atacama Desert, this region starts […]
After two weeks happily homebound at Helen’s home 10 km east of Temuco, we decided we had much to celebrate and so we took off for the cordierra 100 km to the east. We have been tending Helen’s house, dogs and garden for the past two weeks while Helen’s daughters, Mahani and Teamai, plus Teamai’s […]
Imagine – fair weather for almost a whole week, with no winds to ruffle our feathers! It was even calm enough to camp on a beach last night after taking one of the very efficient ferries (WA state take notice – there is a 10 minute wait at most…) from the mainland to Chiloe. Our […]
Mud. Puddles. Road equipment of all types moving huge quantities of sodden soil. That’s what we witnessed as we arrived by bus in Punta Arenas from Puerto Natales in Chile. We were witnessing the damage from a recent flood when Rio de las Minas overflowed its banks after an incredible and unusual deluge (the same […]
We have just spent 3 days in Parque Nacional Torres del Paine, a park that some guidebooks call the best national park in South America. We arrived on the Navimag steamer in drenching rain and wind and wandered the streets in Puerto Natales until we found our hostal, Quatro Elementos (http://www.4elementos.cl/english/index.htm). Rodrigo runs this hostal […]
The past four days we traveled south from Puerto Montt. The Navimag ship carried many trucks, shipping containers and autos, plus numerous animals and about 100 human travelers. We wandered from deck to deck, viewing passing mountains and waterfalls and wildlife. We tried to stay out of wind directions which might remind us […]
We have left Chiloe to explore parts of Patagonia. We spent over a week doing preliminary research on the wind farm project, interviewing local people about the project, and doing several site visits to Playa Mar Brava (including camping there one very windy night). Unfortunately we were not able to get out to sea to make […]
After the Festival: Exploring Moai and Experiencing Curanto and Hoards of Horses on Easter Island In creating the second part of our Easter Island blog, Leslie asked Helen if she’d write a few paragraphs on moai. Helen, a past tour guide on Rapa Nui, graciously accepted. Her discussion follows, and is accompanied by numerous photos […]
We arrived on Easter Island (Rapa Nui or Isla de Pascua) after a 5 hour flight west from Santiago. The jet spots a dot on the ocean, swoops over the entire island in a fraction of a minute and then turns and lands on a runway that goes from the surf on one side to […]
Hi Tennessee!! (and any nature-lovers out there as well) Here are lots of photos of animals that we have seen in our two months of travel in Chile. This first gallery is of birds that we have photographed. This second gallery is of lots of other non-bird animals.
What a unique adventure we have had for the past ten days as we slowly worked our way south to the last remnant of the Panamerican Highway on the southern tip of the island of Chiloe! We’d been drawn to the island from glorious reports by our San Juan friends, Lumi and Pedro, and from […]
Heading south about a week ago in our new (used) Suzuki Gran Vitara 4-wheel drive vehicle, we recounted many of the ways in which our new friend, Helen Williams (daughter of dear friends in Colorado Springs, Ric and Dorry Bradley) has made our transition from the U.S. to Chile relatively easy. She has introduced us to her […]
We have had two terrific weekend trips these past two weeks. Javier and Sandra invited Helen and us to visit their mountain home near Villarica, and Claudia and Marcos invited the three of us the following weekend to visit the region around their family get-away in Conaripe. (Click on any image to see full size […]
We took a little bus west to the coast of Chile from Valdivia. Then we took a little boat to a pensula called Corral where there is an old Spanish fort. We watched a re-inactment of an 1820 battle that took place here. The troops under the Spanish were holding down the fort and did […]
Un Viaje a Parque Nacional Conguillío, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve On Jan. 9th, we left Helen’s comfortable home east of Temuco on foot with our ‘camping’ gear in a duffle bag and with a small backpack with the all-too-heavy telephoto lens and some bits of food. The sky threatened rain. We walked a mile or […]
Valdivia, Chile, sits at the junction of two large rivers. The region contains a very large nature sanctuary along the Rio Cruces. Some years ago a large pulp mill was sited upstream from the sanctuary and soon problems appeared. The sanctuary had been the home of thousands of black-necked swans. Our hostess (with the […]
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