Chillan - Valle Las Trancas

Chile, another week, another public holiday! Yay, so we decided this time to head south from Santiago, to a lovely part of Chile called Valle Las Trancas - a valley at the foot of the Andean cordillera between the city of Chillan, and the Volcan Chillan, a live volcano which heats some of the most famous thermal spas in Chile, and hosts the largest and most famous ski resort in Chile.

Again, bus is the only way to go, but we ended up waiting at the local bus station for our second bus slightly longer than we had hoped.

Anna in the Terminal Rural in Chillan

Shortly after the photo above was taken we were approached by a tramp who stood in front of us, giggled, then pointed at his eyes and said "ojos azules" - "blue eyes". We then had a rather one-sided conversation with him, based around his blue eyes and the fact that he knew all about our blue eyes. He was very proud, and rightly so as there aren't many blue eyed chilenos.

Microbuses - sponsored by coca-cola

We were staying at a hostel at the far end of Valle Las Trancas about 12 km from the ski resort and thermal spa. We had some trouble booking the hostel and learnt a potentially tough lesson for the future the relatively easy way. We had booked the room by email and had confirmation that a room was available, but when we called a couple of days before to find out the bank details (we had to pay a deposit) they told us that a larger group had called shortly after us and if they confirmed there wouldn't be space for us!

To cut a longer story short in the end the group didn't confirm so our room remained ours. We had obviously sent a suitably outraged email back but all this did was elicit an apology. They still said "of course you understand the problem? We had to take the group if they confirmed."

We don't understand it, we usually assume that when we receive an email saying that we can have a room then, y'know, we can have a room. Anyway it was fine, but a lesson well learned - things are different here in Chile.

We're really glad we were able to stay there as it was fab, an alpine log cabin with large rooms, a restaurant, and a cosy living room.

the mezzanine - that's why they were trying to resell our room from under us!

Anna cosy by the roaring fire in the hostel living room!

We settled by the fire with pizza a la piedra from a wood-fired oven, a bottle of red and a sneaky bottle of a local ale - Las Trancas Pale Ale - for aperitif. This beer was excellent - it came in two types: "Brown" and "Pale Ale". The latter is pronounced by Chilenos as "pali-ali"

Anna by that fire again - with the flash...

We got up bright and early on sunday to head off on a walk into the cordillera, or at least we thought we did. The hostel was run almost singlehandedly by a super chilean guy who is probably not much older than us - when we arrived he was making the bed, he then went outside to chop wood, then appeared in the kitchen... He asked us on saturday night what time we would want breakfast - presumably hoping he could have a lie in. We said 8/8:30 and got up accordingly.

As we were leaving for our walk after breakfast we double checked directions with him and he innocently asked us what time it was - turns out the clocks had changed and we'd actually gone for breakfast at 9:30. Very embarrassing, we felt bad that he'd got up unnecessarily early...

We headed up to a part of the cordillera known locally, and appropriately, as Shangri-La.

Our hike started, in bright hot sunshine, along the path off the main road.

ecobox andino - old shipping containers converted into holiday cabins!

It really struck us that this area is very alpine, there's something about mountains anywhere in the world which seems familiar, in a really good way.

an alpine lodge

in the shadow of the cordillera

another fab house

As we got higher the dusty path became patchy with snow.

And then we reached a tranquil wood.

chilean bamboo

We kept going through the wood, higher, as the snow started to deepen and completely cover the ground.

Then the trees thinned out and we started to get some fantastic views of what was to come...

Anna on the move

the view back towards the wood we had come through

Because this is all volcanic rock there is the most amazing contrast between the black rock, white snow, and blue sky. We went at the perfect time of year as any earlier and it may have been too snowy to walk as far as we did, any later and the snow may have melted.

Eventually we came across this spooky derelict building. Some chilenos had camped next to it the previous night. That's fairly brave, because it's definitely spooky, and also because it must have been cold at night. It was roasting hot for us because of the sun - in fact walking on the snow cooled us down through our boots thankfully - but the temperature must have plummeted at night. 

 Next to the building was a snow melt stream running through the other end of the wood. 

  

Anna crossing the stream

 

Walking through the snow was good fun, but the sun was causing it become unstable in places. On quite a few occasions we came across places were people had gone clean through. Below you can just make out the tree roots under the snow but what you can't see is the snow melt stream under there too - someone must have had very wet feet... 

Anna treading carefully around a pool fed by the under snow stream

Anna heading up into Mordor...

the wood again from higher up

shiny volcanic rock up close, see the smooth

looking down from a ridge

Our descent was great fun, sliding down the hills!

Struan trying to ski without skis

pleased with himself

We knew it had to happen, Anna's foot and leg goes all the way through...

On the way back down we saw the Chilean campers again, who had passed us while we spent time getting lost on the way down. A truck had tried to be too ambitious so they were helping push it out.

They then got a lift in the back for their efforts. We didn't accept the offer seeing as we hadn't helped, just taken photos...

Back in the valley we had a late lunch of crepes at another hotel/ hostel not far from ours. Both this one and ours are owned by French ex-pats, who obviously feel at home in this Alpine style region.

Diesel - the 2 year old pup living at the hotel, look at those eyes

the James Bond-esque "Mission Impossible Lodge"

two more dogs/ bears from MI Lodge

Sunday night was another night of relaxing on our hostel terrace and in the living room. We met this sort of fox-dog on the terrace - she looks like she has dipped her snout in a pot of black paint!

give us a kiss

On saturday night we had the living room almost to ourselves, but on sunday there were a few more people around. Among them was this guy from Colorado below, who has been skiing every day for the last 7 years! He started out intending to match his local club's honorary members who have all skied 6 million vertical feet in one season - to do that you have to ski a certain amount every day. Basically he hit that and kept going, and is still going - when he stops he will hold the new world record for "Accumulated Vertical Descent in Consecutive Days on Telemark Gear".

He's a very pleasant chap, and gave us an autographed print of him in action. As of 10/10/2010 he had skied 83,500,000 vertical feet of descent over 2536 consecutive days - that's every day since 1 November 2003. He was also perfectly sane so best of luck to him.

Struan and Rainer Hertrich

On monday it was then time for a quick look around Chillan before heading back to Santiago.

cannot get enough of these beautiful old houses

Chillan has been repeatedly levelled by earthquakes so has been largely rebuilt several times. An interesting demonstration of this is the cathedral, which was rebuilt in the 1940's after a huge earthquake in 1939 which killed thousands of people. The cathedral is designed to be earthquake resistant based on a series of arches which must conduct and spread the force of any quake.

Chillan cathedral

from the side - see the arches

We headed to the markets in the centre of the city. Before getting there we went past this shop - tarot and other things like this are very popular here, we'll have to do a post on it one day.

the solution to your problems of love, work, business...

The markets in Chillan are great, it was all we could do not to buy a full huaso (Chilean cowboy) outfit. We have ponchos, but it's going to be impossible to get through our time here without getting some more...

spit and sawdust... piss and sawdust

Pigs heads, for less than £1.50 you can take one home...

Chillan has a few local specialties which you don't really find elsewhere. We went for the Longaniza, a huge seasoned pork sausage. Another option was chupe de guatitas - literally "soup of guts" so not really an option... It took ages to decide which little market cafe to go into as they all have women in aprons who come out and try to beckon you in, which is great but prevents you from making rational decisions. Anyway, after circling for a while we found one which turned out to be great.

yum, bangers and mash chillan style

Finally, we feel very privileged to have been in Chile during the week when the 33 miners were rescued. It's an event that has grabbed the world's attention, and it has been fascinating to be here to see the reaction which is frankly humbling. The rescue has been handled with incredible commitment and dignity. The Chilean government is now talking about improving safety standards in various industries and the company that ran this particular mine has long since gone bust.

The media here has managed to achieve something approaching saturation but there seems to be appetite for more coverage - even repeated strange slow motion sequences of rescuers and families etc set to hollywood style rousing string music. Here's a link to one of the articles from the English language Santiago newspaper for something a little different - knowing that some but not all will become for a time at least, media stars they've agreed to share equally any money they make. For that and other obvious reasons we can only agree that these are quite incredible people.

chao!