Travelling with my father the transportation engineer you learn to expect certain things. Along with an evaluation of every road design, traffic planning flaw and general city setup, you also end up with random pictures of transportation things. The 3 million pictures of the crosswalk designs didn't make it to digital, but we did end up with several pictures of the subway system, and while its a pretty nice subway, I wouldn't necessarily have chosen to waste film on it.
The subway in Santiago is almost as cheap as the busses, and has three lines. We spent most of our time on line 1.
Santiago's subway, like Montreal and Paris has rubber wheeled trains. For some reason my father found this fascinating.
On one of our last days in Santiago we borrowed Ivonne's car and drove south and east out of the city into the mountains. Though only an hour away it was a different world. Our guidebook kept telling us this was a lovely area with many beautiful hikes but we couldn't seem to find them. We just drove through this rural plateau in the Andes looking for something to clue us into the location of these beautiful hikes in the general direction of where we knew there was a national park, until we hit a police roadblock.
Somehow we managed to convey through the communication barrier where we were trying to go. The man took one look at our car and said no, we would need a four wheel drive to navigate the roads to the park. So we turned around and started back.
Just when we were about to give up hope we saw signs for Las Cascadas de las Animas the Cascades of the Souls. Figuring what the hell we headed down the dirt road. What we found was one of the most beautiful areas we had seen in our entire trip.
So at first glance do you see the bridge in this picture? It was the most stable of the three we had to cross on this hike.
The area around Santiago is semi-arid and mountainous. This hike took us only a couple hundred feet below the snowline. In this picture we're still down at the bottom.
After a bit of hiking we reached this waterfall. We said "Oh Pretty Waterfall," snapped a few pictures and then said "Hey the trail keeps going, lets go see where it leads." So we did.
Where it led was to the bottom of another waterfall. We snapped a few more pictures and continued on.
The terrain reminded me a little of a hike I went on in the Rockies a few years ago. The air is very dry and you can just feel the difference in it as you approach water.
Many of the people who live in Santiago never venture even this far into thier own backyards. It struck me as such a waste. They live in the middle of a crowded dirty city, where everyday the view of the mountains through their windows are obstructed by smog, and here less than an hour away, accessable by bus 3 times a day is this beautiful landscape with clean air and no smog. It was almost a different world. Santiago, like New York City, has very little green. Everything is concrete and stone. Here there was no sign that man had ever been there. With the exception of a few bridges you could almost believe that civilization had never approached this place.
So we kept walking and came upon one more waterfall, the biggest of the three. It came as a surprise. We were climbing and climbing. We rounded a bend and there it was! We never saw it coming.
Now what happens when you get two engineers on a hike like this. We come along on this
beautiful waterfall and we start arguing about how tall it is. We end up standing there
using our arms to measure the angle, and then counting the strides to the edge of the falls.
The result, I can say that the falls are approximately 150 ft high.
It's not Niagara Falls, but its still pretty impressive!
Everywhere on this hike we passed these little orange flowers. We have no idea what they were, but they were just coming into bloom while we were there.
You can see all three falls in this picture. The bottom one is just on the right, the middle up and slightly to the left, and the top falls is about 3/4 of the way up on the left.
Hi Karen!
Skiing in the Andes was definately an experience. This was one of the smaller resorts. I later went to the big one, but I don't have any pictures from that. The disposable camera had already gone home.
Very few Chileans seem to ski. Even at the store where we rented our equipment and bought our snow taxi tickets most of the employees were foreigners. For the Chileans that do ski the preferred method seems to be to hitch their way into the mountains with equipment, ski (or snowboard) down the side of the mountain to the bottom of the snow line, and hitch the rest of the way home. Why bother with those pesky resorts and lift lines when you have an entire mountain range at your disposal!
What most Chileans seem to use the resorts for is for the experience of "Going up to the snow." While some of the best skiing on earth is less than an hour away from the city, Santiago itself sees snow about as much as Florida, once every 10 years or so. (You should see the excitement a regular old thunderstorm caused while I was there. Imagine what actual snow must do.) What seems to happen is that every few years or so families will take a trip up to one of the ski resorts, eat lunch at one of thier restaurants, and introduce the children to snow. The general response seems to be "I don't like it, its cold".
The view from the other resort was even better! Try skiing some time at 4000 meters. Its a definate experience, the air is thin, the sky is blue and the snow is amazing! The only problem is when you start skiing down into the clouds!
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