Dear all, we have just been spending one week in San Pedro de Atacama (North of Chile) to visit its beautiful surroundings: its salar, its oasis, its valley de la luna and some fantastic places where lakes and volcanoes lay at more than 4000m high. San Pedro, which is located at 2800m high is very famous for its salar, for its desert, the driest in the world, and also for its houses made of either Adobe or volcanic rocks. We have been walking a lot, cycling 50km in the valley de la luna and enjoying the sky at night...the sky is amazing out here and lots of international astronomists have settled here for their work. This stop was very very relaxing and we will now head to Bolivia and Uyuni. As usual all updates are under Chile, Portraits, Foodies and See us.
Dear all,
Agnes and I will leave Santiago de Chile tomorrow morning to head to the North to reach San Pedro de Atacama, to enjoy the salars, the desert, the pink flamingos and the stars. We have been spending our last few days in Santiago with Bessie & her family (see pic below), and we had great times with all of them, especially for Easter and enjoyed some proper food cooked by Bessie (See our Foodies section)!
After San Pedro de Acatama, we will then head to South of Bolivia (Salar de Uyuni) and Titicaca, probably stay there for 2 weeks to hopefully see one of the oldest tribe in South America, the Uru de Chipayas. Titicaca being shared with Peru, we finally decided to go to Cusco and Machu Pichu. From there, we will take a flight to reach Colombia for the last 3 weeks of our trip (end of June). We just added the latest pics of Santiago under Chile, may update the Portraits tonight ;-)....I am telling you this as I will leave my laptop here in Santiago at Bessie's for security purposes. So far we have done very well and have not had any trouble...As many people told us to be careful here, we thus decided to go with less (expensive) equipments... Anyway, we will try to update the blog from time to time in a cyber cafe and will make sure to make it alive.
Anyway, a new adventure is ahead of us....we cannot wait to see all of that....before coming back home end of June/early July! Take care! Agnes & Guillaume
Dear all,
After rougly a week in South Patagonia, Agnes, Yolande (Agnes' Mum) and I headed to the North of its region to reach Puerto Varas, a nice city built near a huge lake where you can feel the German influence from the XIX and early XX centuries, and where huge volcanoes lay. This city is the door to reach Chiloe island which has a strong fishing heritage and is famous for its typical and numerous wooden churches from the XVIII century onwards. So, we enjoyed living on the "Palafitos", houses on stilts, also very colourful and eating nice seafood. Our favourite part is probably the West and North West coasts where we think it is wilder (nice national parks, walks etc...) and where we met lovely people. We namely met a guy who was hitch hiking called Nyi Nyi (see our Portraits section) who is from Myanmar but has lived in South America for years and years and with whom we were stuck in the mud, in the dark, in the middle of nowhere with our car for nearly 4 hours. Meters after meters, we reached a house. 3 nice men helped us to reach our hostel...and at 10.30pm/11pm, Sonja our host, welcomed us with probably the best food we had so far in Chile (all home made, chicken, bread, veggies etc...), some nice heating and warm shower...The following day, we had a nice walk near the ocean, where the 1960 earthquake created a 2m deep gap, that allowed salted water to surround trees and kill them...the landscape was really beautiful. It is over there that we met a lovely Chilean couple, Alfredo and Elena, with whom we spent time walking in the dunes, fishing, eating and drinking....Check out our latest pics on the usual sections such as Chile, Portraits, Foodies etc...By the way, you will also read about our quest to find the grave of a lady called Jeanne Cabanne, a Yolande's friend who passed away in the 90's in Patagonia.
Dear all,
We are now back in Puerto Natales after 4 days trek in Patagonia and more precisely in the "Los Torres" national park. In autumn, this place is usually very rainy, windy and cold but luckily we had a great dry weather with no wind and we could enjoy some nice walks with Agnes' Mum without too much effort. The autumn colors, the birds such as the famous condors, the "Lama like" animals called "Guanaco", the ostriches, the famous "torres" (towers of rocks), the glaciers and the kayaking session near the Lago Grey glacier were absolutely breathtaking. Unfortunately we have not seen any puma which are well present in the park but we saw people who saw one ;-) (waoooooouh!!). Agnes' Mum celebrated a secret birthday (with two digits) a few weeks ago and she made it all along the way with us. Congrats to her! In the next few days, we will leave the South of Patagonia to reach the North part of it, on an island on the Pacific coast called Chiloe. We were just informed about the recent earthquakes which happened in the North and which could lead to a bigger one and tsunamis....we will be careful and may rearrange our second part of our trip here in Chile to avoid the North and maybe go to Bolivia via a safer route. By the way, Chilean are very very nice and their cuisine (especially seafood) is truly amazing! For updates please check our usual sections, Chile, Foodies etc....
