Around The World 2005

We "were" traveling around the world and we want to share part of this adventure with you on this blog. The updates have been quite late but we will put the trip until the end, so check once in a while. Some cities have an hiperlink to a .kmz file. That is a Google Earth location file. If you have Google Earth installed it will take you to the city when you click on its name.

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Back to Chile heading to Patagonia

10/17/05
Although Huaraz had many more adventures to offer we could not stay any longer. We had to follow up with our master plan and head south. The itinerary was long, from Huaraz to Lima by bus, then a flight from Lima to Santiago and then another flight from Santiago to Balmaceda, the goal? to reach Patagonia.

Well, first things first. The part Huaraz-Lima was ok. We left Huaraz around 1 p.m. and arrived in Lima after eight hours of mountain traveling. There was a religious celebration going on half way to Lima; South America is very catholic and you can't help but noticing it. But that was it, no other surprises to tell.



In Lima we took a cab to the airport and arrived well in advance from our flight schedule, the plane left only at 12:20 a.m.

10/18/05
A couple of hours later we were landing in Santiago. At 8:30 a.m. we boarded again, this time to Balmaceda. The surprise here was that half of the plane was taken by Brazilians tourists. I'm not kidding, they were more than fifty and all part of a single huge group; to make it more clear, the whole airplane was a big mess.

Before we hit Balmaceda the airplane made a stop in Puerto Montt to drop the Brazilian troop. Another half hour later we landed safe and sound in Balmaceda but this little town in the south of Chile didn't offer much to explore, indeed we were told right away in the airport to head to Coyaique, another little town one hour north. The former, as opposed to the later, had some tour agencies where we could get more info on where to go and how.

The trip to Coyaique was a good way to see a little bit of the landscape which surprisingly resembled the north of New Zealand with grassy hills; it was only missing the sheep. It was raining and the sky was clouded and grey.

In Coyaique we found a place to stay and spoke to a tour agency where we found that there are actually nice things to do around here like hiking and mountaineering, but because of the weather we preferred to move south to visit the National Park Los Glaciares, in Argentina and then follow up to the National Park Torres del Paine, back into Chile.

Once all that was decided we bought a bus ticket, for the following day, to go to Chile Chico, the Chilean town at the boarder with Argentina.