salar de atacama 10.27.04
geysers on top of the world 10.27.04
desolation 10.26.04
observatory number 2 10.21.04
observatory number 1 10.21.04
driving through the desert 10.21.04
round one 10.20.04
and so i'm back, from outer space 10.17.04
por fin 10.07.04
some are up! 10.06.04
girls' night out 10.03.04
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salar de atacama 10.27.04 16:35 yep, more pictures are up, this time from a tour we took that stopped at a canyon, a village, and the salar de atacama, the third largest salt flat in the world (behind those in utah and bolivia). we took this tour the same day as the geysers, so it was a bit of a long day, to say the least. it was awesome though. just seeing a vast expanse of salt, with little lakes dotting it and volcanoes on the horizon, wow. the salt isn't white and smooth like in other places, though; it's kind of lumpy and dirty actually. that's apparently just from contamination it picked up from the minerals floating around underground in the area. not sure, don't remember much of what our guide said. but some of the pictures are pretty neat, hope you enjoy. top |
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geysers on top of the world 10.27.04 00:03 this is just a quick update to say i posted the pictures from our tour to the el tatio geysers. they're really cool. downright cold even. they're the highest-elevation geysers on the planet, and wow, it definitely felt like it. we had tea made from coca leaves with breakfast; it helps with elevation sickness. and plus it's exciting to say i've had something made from coca leaves. anyhow, yeah, we wandered around the geysers, and then hit the hot springs. i don't have any pictures of that but i think everyone else does on their photo album sites. oh! and on the way down, we stopped at a cool little shepherding village, with llamas wandering around everywhere, very pretty. and i tried a piece of llama kabob, with a llama watching me. that's oddly satisfying for a vegetarian on break from vegetarianism for a semester. anyhow yeah, there's not much to say except that the geysers were one of the coolest things i've seen. oh! i almost forgot, people die there every so often, when they fall through the thin mineral-deposit crusts into vats of boiling water. someone died about a month before we were up there. but they're not that scary, as long as you don't get too close. anyhow, off i go. top |
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desolation 10.26.04 22:05 alrighty kids, i'm back from santiago. which was grand, i'll post about it when i post the pictures i took. but right now, i'm posting about a ghost town/concentration camp that we visited on our way to san pedro. i don't remember the name of it; we found out about it from a gas station attendant that we wouldn't have even talked to if we didn't need him to unlock the bathroom for us. but anyway, the place was really neat. it was a nitrate mining town way back in the day (probably started around 1920 or so), that pretty much shut down in the late 30s once synthetic nitrates were invented. so the place sat abandoned for 40 years. then along came pinochet, who from 1973-4 stashed a lot of dissidents there, out in the middle of the desert in a ghost town. then it once again sat abandoned, before being declared a national historic site sometime shortly after the return of democracy in chile. but in the time it's been abandoned, it's basically fallen apart, and has been attacked by kids doing graffiti (on a completely unrelated note, i learned the word for them this weekend--flytis, in case you cared to learn any chilean slang). there's still a lot of barbed wire though, and danger signs up everywhere around the perimeter warning of mines. and it's definitely a neat place still, mostly just for the utter feeling of nothingness it leaves you with, like everything out there in the desert. standing up on the roof of the theater, you can't see anything but dust and mining equipment and crumbling buildings and the thin line of the panamericana. and dust devils, there were a lot of those that day, some of them pretty tall and long-lasting. i had a picture from the roof of the theater with one in it, but i didn't get it back from the developer's; i think that my camera was lying when it said it took it. ah, well. i have enough pictures of the empty desert. oh, and on an administrative note, i had too much text on this page (it offended my aesthetic sensibilities), so i moved the big chunk of it summarizing where we went on our road trip. i didn't archive it chronologically though, so it'd be easier to find if you're just getting here and are a bit behind on reading my no doubt fascinating weblog. you can find it here, and also down in the archives section for consistency's sake. there's still a lot of text here, but, eh, i'll leave it for a while, then archive it good and proper. on another administrative note, i got my last roll of film developed today, with valle de la luna, santiago, and valparaíso. just so you know about coming attractions. oh yes, and you should definitely look at gerald's website, go to the atacama link with the tacky "new" icon next to it. he has a map of where we went, and a bunch of fabulous pictures. not that mine aren't cool...but yeah. anyways. top |
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observatory number 2 10.21.04 20:45 my, i'm in a posting frenzy today. just want to wash my hands of all these pictures, i suppose. still got another roll to go, though. *deep sigh* anyhow this is probably the last of them for this week, because i'm going to santiago for the weekend, leaving tonight on a 1:15 am bus. hot stuff. anyhow, so yes. the new pictures are from cerro paranal, the site of the european southern observatory's very large telescope. which is actually several telescopes. i explained a lot of it in the captions of the pictures, so i won't repeat myself here, but i'll add that this was a day trip we took out of antofagasta, the day after the desert pictures i posted were taken. cerro paranal was about 2 or 3 hours from antofagasta, most of which was spent bumping down a heinous mining road. ah, well. it was entertaining trying to sing along with a song that kept skipping, at least. anyhow. NO MORE POSTING FOR ME TODAY! or until tuesday! *runs away as fast as she can* top |
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observatory number 1 10.21.04 14:23 alas, how careless i have been, i've messed up the chronological order here. i forgot that the first day of our trip, we visited the las campanas observatory, more specifically the 6.5m twin magellan telescopes. so now i've posted my few pictures from that excursion, hope you enjoy. las campanas was nice...they're a private observatory, and sort of the country club of such operations. apparently there's a hot tub some visiting rich guy donated to them, though we didn't see it. that'd be pretty nice to relax in under the stars at the end of a hard night's observing. and the food was fabulous, they gave us fruit and yogurt parfaits in a fancy-schmancy ski-lodge looking building. we thought this was insane and wonderful (compared to the dining facilities at soar, which are still very tasty, don't get me wrong), but then we went to la silla and the vlt. ohhh just you wait for the pictures from that. top |
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driving through the desert 10.21.04 02:47 so now up are a few pictures from the atacama, from the drive the day after bahía inglesa. we spent all day on the road and didn't pass more than one or two towns all day, until we pulled into antofagasta, one of chile's largest cities, probably the largest in the north. which is a neat city, and i think i have pictures of it somewhere further down the line. those might be on the roll i haven't developed yet though. anyhow, point being, the desert. is utterly empty. i can't quite describe the feeling it leaves you, to be standing there looking out across it, and not see life. insanity, plain and simple. it's one of the coolest experiences of my life, being in a desert like that. i wrote a cool essay trying to describe it for spanish class, but i won't pester you with such things (also i'm too lazy to type it out). so anyhow. we stopped once for gas, food, and water, then didn't pass another place to stop for such things until antofagasta. our second stop was for la mano del desierto, literally hand of the desert, which is a huge sculpture of a hand on the side of the highway. check out the pictures, it was a crazy thing to see. and...i'm tired. and leaving for santiago tomorrow. so i'm going to quit here for now. top |
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a night on the beach 10.20.04 21:26 i just posted a handful of pictures from bahía inglesa, the town where we stayed our first night on the road (and also our last, but i didn't take any pictures that time). all the pics i have are from the beach--it's a small beach resort town-- where we all went to frolic after being in the car all day long. we were going to swim, but once we got out there we decided it was way too cold for that and that we wouldn't want to swim at a beach that reeked of sewage anyhow. probably a good call. anyhow, it was cool to wander around and not be in the car at least. we had an interesting dinner experience...13 people (jane hadn't joined us yet) always make for an interesting dinner experience. what ended up happening was four of us getting fed up and leaving the hotel restaurant our professors'd picked out and going to this little quirky place. where i had the most amazing seafood gumbo, and for dessert, panqueques con manjar. manjar goes on the list of things i'm going to miss when i come home, for sure. it was a really neat, crowded place, had a great atmosphere, but we paid dearly for it. hah, it cost as much as a meal in the states would've. coming home back through bahía inglesa, we cooked our own dinner (spaghetti), and went to that place for dessert. we had a really chill evening, making a bonfire on the beach, hanging around, and a few of us played bridge. very cool. and the sun was out that time, which helped make the smell on the beach a bit more bearable. anyhow, so that's the story of bahía inglesa, more still to come. top |
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round one 10.20.04 02:23 so i slaved away tonight scanning and cropping pictures, 90 in all, but you don't get to see any atacama ones yet. sorry. what i've posted tonight is the rest of the pictures from the girls' trip to the hurtado valley, hope you enjoy. and i apologize for the fact that i was too lazy to a) attend properly to the scans and make them perfect and b) size them all perfectly on the thumbnails. since they're scans, they vary in dimensions slightly, so that's why a lot have ugly pixelly thingies. if it annoys you, just look at the real image. sorry. that'll no doubt hold true for the atacama pics once i get them up here. maybe one day i'll stop being lazy. but that day is a long ways away. until then, i hope you enjoy what's up here. buenas noches, todos. top |
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and so i'm back, from outer space 10.17.04 19:53 and that's really what it feels like. we arrived back home in la serena (it's strange to catch myself speaking of coming home to la serena) a couple hours ago and i've been downloading my 60+ emails and trying to unpack and do laundry since. that and eating food that's not from some little roadside restaurant or gas station, ugggh i've eaten so much of that on this trip. so the trip. it was incredible, the trip of a lifetime for sure. i took probably upwards of 75 pictures, 60 of them before i dropped my camera, we'll hope that the rest come out ok still. i'll get them developed and posted slowly over the course of this week, as per usual. and i think the way to do this updating thing is going to be one phase at a time--i'll tell the story of whatever part of the trip the new pictures are from at the same time as i post them. so for now here comes a quick summary of my trip to the desert: saturday oct. 9--we left at an ungodly hour in the morning, in two rented vans driving north on the panamericana (gerald and wayne, our professors, drove the whole way). visited the las campanas observatory (operated by the carnegie institute), the highlight of which was the 6.5m twin magellan telescopes. and also the food. we crashed for the night in rented beach cabins in bahia inglesa, a coastal fishing/resort town. had a nice dinner, played frisbee on the dirty beach. apparently, chile went on daylight savings time, which we didn't find out until the next day. so i'm an hour ahead of all you east coast people now, and it'll be two in a couple weeks when y'all go off of dst. just fyi. sunday oct. 10--hit the road pretty early again, drove straight through the desert to antofagasta, where we spent the night. didn't do much of interest really. the desert's insane, we went hours without seeing a plant. antofagasta was cool, it's a fairly large port city, nitrate shipping mostly. monday oct. 11--visted the vlt! that's the very large telescope if you're not an astronomy nerd; it's run by european southern observatory at cerro paranal, and is basically the premiere observatory in the world. that's because it's got 4 8.2m telescopes, and some smaller ones too, but more importantly, because it has the vlti, which i think may be the world's only optical interferometer. not sure. anyways, it rocked. we stayed in antofagasta again. tuesday oct. 12--drove out to san pedro de atacama. it's a cool, if touristy village, and when we got there half of us went to check out the archaeological museum, a pretty neat place with some very famous mummies (not the egyptian kind, the natural desert kind) and lots of displays that were all in spanish, so my reading comprehension skills got a good workout. and... think that's it. we ate a nice dinner, stayed at a cheap hostel. wednesday oct. 13--woke up at 4 a.m. for a trip to the el tatio geysers, the highest geysers in the world, at an altitude of 4300m. san pedro itself is at about 2500m, about the height of cerro pachon i think, if you want some context. it was insanely cold and very neat, there were hot springs there as well as geysers. i got the chance to try llama meat. that afternoon, went on a tour where we saw a neat village, a canyon, and the third largest salt flat in the world, salar de atacama. in the lakes on the flat, there's a flock of flamingos! how awesome. stayed in san pedro again. thursday oct. 14--rahhr! went biking with carrie and tracy out to valle de la luna, a cool spot near san pedro. spent basically all day doing that, understandably...it was more than 20 km, through the atacama desert, at an elevation of 2500m...so yeah. and there were hills. i felt like a superhero when i made it back without dying, or really suffering anything more than the worst sunburn of my life (confined to my legs though, where i forgot to apply sunscreen) and a really sore rear from the bike seat on bumpy roads. there were salt caves too that we went exploring in. awesome. had the best dinner i've had in chile that night, atmosphere-wise. friday oct. 15--hopped in the car early and headed back to antofagasta again. got there in early afternoon, so i spent the day exploring and writing in the plaza and shopping...started off as window shopping, but heh, that didn't last too long. got a neat cd (two, actually) that's a tribute to pablo neruda. it's his poetry set to music and/or made into songs. pretty cool stuff. we ate out at a chinese restaurant, oddly enough. saturday oct. 16--drove back to bahia inglesa. it was a gorgeous day when we arrived, and we cooked spaghetti for dinner and sat out on the deck eating it and having a grand old time. i learned how to play bridge, and we made a bonfire on the beach before going out to a neat restaurant for dessert. sunday oct. 17--drove back to la serena after sleeping in (sort of). had a fun car ride, inasmuch as these things can be fun. alrighty so there's a summary, more detail to follow as i get pictures to illustrate with. but i felt i owed my devoted weblog-reading fans an inkling of what i'd been up to the past week and a half, hope you enjoy. for now, signing off. top |
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por fin 10.07.04 02:31 ok so i've just put up the last of this roll's pictures. just in time to run out and get another developed! heh, not yet. soon though, no doubt. and when i get back from the atacama i bet i'll have my work cut out for me. and maybe later this week i'll get around to thumnailifying my older picture pages, but that's less important. now it's definitely time for some sleep. felices sueños a todos ustedes. top |
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some are up! 10.06.04 13:33 ok so i need to run out the door to spanish class, but before i do, i'd like to announce that the first round of pictures has been posted at right, from our camping trip. there are more of those, but i haven't gotten them developed yet, because i haven't finished the roll. there will also be more pictures up soon from this roll, i promise, i've finally gotten my act together. oh! and now i stopped being lazy and made them into thumbnails. hopefully i'll go back and do that to the other picture pages too. enjoy. *disappears* top |
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girls' night out 10.03.04 20:11 so this weekend i broke in my camping gear! hurrah! finally got to sleep outside under the amazing chilean sky. five of us girls (lissa spent the weekend in santiago with jane, our ta i guess) went to this place way out in the middle of nowhere where there happened to be a rather pretty hostel sort of place with horseback riding expeditions and lots of trails, but more importantly, a campsite next to the rio hurtado that we had entirely to ourselves for most of the night. well ok, really late, a random german lady showed up, so i s'pose we weren't completely alone, but we were already winding down by the time she arrived and she was still sleeping when we got up this morning. so anyhow, camping. yes. wait. the best place to start this story is with the trip out there. now this was south america proper. we strapped our packs on our backs, caught a crowded micro bus to ovalle (the short bus!), a town remarkably similar in size to la serena that's a little over an hour south and a tad bit inland, and then found ourselves in the plaza de armas with no idea of where to go next. we knew that there were buses headed out towards hurtado, that would take us where we were headed, but where these might be located was anyone's guess. with a bit of luck and help from some friendly chileans, we made our way to la feria, a giant farmer's market place, where, out back, a half a dozen buses or so were headed "al campo"--to the country, that is. so we asked around and found one headed to hurtado, killed a couple hours in the market, then hopped on. so the bus ride. wow. this bus was a relic from a much earlier, much more art-deco age, complete with shredded red leather seats and moldy curtains on the windows. the driver tied our packs to the roof and took off flying down the highway, which started out paved and two lanes (though the driver didn't much respect the center line), then dropped to paved and one lane, before finally becoming a single lane dirt road. we're talking a dusty goat trail of a road here, no guardrails, mud brick buildings on the side every now and then, herds of livestock wandering up and down the mountainsides--wow. like i said, south america proper. the driver would veer around these curves, honking his horn to alert other traffic, but we passed more people on horses or on foot than we did in cars. by far. so this road was absolutely terrifying to navigate in a bus, but absolutely amazing. we were miles and miles from anything approximating civilization, and the whole way we had spectacular views of the rio hurtado down below us. the river valleys here are still so strange to me. of course, right near the river, there's a lot of vegetation, trees, grass, and most of the farms/vineyards...but then all the greenery just stops, and the desert begins. so on one side of the road there's a nice view of verdant fields down below, and on the other side, there's cacti and rocks and barren sand. insanity, i tell you. so anyhow, this bus ride was really neat, and then we finally arrived at hacienda los andes. the bus dropped us on the side of the road, and we took off towards the hacienda, feeling very rustic indeed. we got there and were greeted by a black-clad chain-smoking german lady with perfectly unaccented english, who showed us on a map where the campsite was, and gave us matches and toilet paper (the two things we forgot). and then we were there. hurrah! the campsite was really nice, shaded, right by the river (which was really a creek by nc standards), and we didn't have a tent so we slept out under the stars. we could see the magellanic clouds, and about half a dozen shooting stars before we fell asleep. and oh! there was an earthquake. haha, i survived my second earthquake (there was a 4.5 during spanish class a few weeks ago). this one was a lot scarier though, not because it was any stronger, but because we heard it coming, a really strange rumbling noise, and we had enough time to wonder what it was before the ground started shaking a little bit. and then everything went really quiet, and we were utterly alone out in the dark in the middle of the andes. kinda creepy. but neat. i'm a dork for liking these earthquake things. so hmmm, what else? we went hiking, of course, seeing as we were in the andes and the paisaje is INSANELY BEAUTIFUL out there (here). played with cacti, wandered up and down this sort of gully thing, where the rocks were all smooth from water rushing down them...dunno what water, but i suppose it existed there years and years ago. certainly not now. it was some really neat, really rugged hiking though. an amazing trip. pictures of course exist, but only on my film right now, soon to be printed, and later to be scanned and posted. hopefully this week, though, because saturday the whole group of us is leaving for the north. the driest place in the world! the desert's supposed to be flowering up there this year, too, which i've heard is an amazing sight. i can't wait. the official purpose is to be astronomy sightseers, hitting up some important observatories, like eso and alma and the vlt (the vlt! *happy dance* ok i'm done with my moment of astronomy dorkiness now). so stay tuned, don't miss next week's exciting episode. top |
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