Because I seem to have given up on the website...
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| Overland Vicuna to Hurtado |
In this first one, Gwen and I took advantage of a day without plans but with a rental car. We had been foiled in our attempts to see the Topado glacier, and started out a bit... pissy. We got over the pissy by the time we ate our lunch on Cerro Mamalluca, and then we consulted our crappy map to see if there were other roads that would let us go high. The road to Tololo observatory is private, with a big locked gate and guards. No go Tololo. But the road to Hurtado was public. Driving it required me to overcome my fear of narrow, gravelly roads sin guardrails. Also, it required a bit of a more aggressive treatment of the manual transmission that I'd advocate on my own car. Let's just say that I'm really glad I've been driving a manual transmission for 20 years now, because I had enough other things to worry about.
We felt pretty damn proud of ourselves when we checked in with the carabineros in Hurtado. I think we would not have thought a parade in honour of the gringas negotiating that road, complete with its many goats, would have been out of place. What we didn't know that it was still many many miles of gravelly roads with buses hurtling at breakneck speeds around switchbacks before we would see pavement. And now - gulp - it was dark.
When we got back to La Serena, many beers were consumed with great gusto. And then some fried fish. And pisco sours. And wine. 'twas a good day, even without a glacier.
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| pinguino |
Darrell had a contact with a fisherman named Guido, and thus we turned our noses up at the organized penguin-watching tours. Our biggest challenge in setting this one up was to figure out how to call Guido from our cell phone - I ended up handing both the phone and Guido's card to Cesar, who did the dialling. From there, it was smooth sailing. Our tour was the best, ever, even if we had to say gracias to the senor all the time. The senor was smiling on us, though, because he sent us a dolphin escort. Our tour lasted twice as long as the organized on, and was way more fun. So there. Gracias Darrell is more likely.
Posted by Johanna at July 6, 2007 12:17 PM