Chile Trip!

Hey everyone. Some of you may have gotten this by email already...
So I am moved in at Chico, survived the first week of classes, and finally have time to let you know how the South America Adventure went. Eric and I left the states on Dec. 24th (yep Christmas Eve, luckily mom and papa are used to my crazy schemes). Because we are not loaded, we took the commuter flight sequence to Chile. We left San Francisco, switched planes in San Salvador, El Salvador, in San Jose, Costa Rica, in Lima, Peru, and finally arrived in Santiago early Christmas morning about 26 hours after we left the states. We stayed with my ex-host family in Santiago and cruised around the city for a couple of days seeing the sights, relaxing, and getting used to the time change (not bad, 5 hour difference). Eric hasn't done much international traveling so this trip was a first for him. He found, however, that he could get by on his high school spanish as far as grocery store purchases and ordering meals went. This was good for me because it gave me a break from being the interpreter.
We left Santiago on the 28th(ish) and flew to the very southern tip of chile, Punta Arenas, where we took 6 hours of busses to arrive at Parque Nacional Torres del Paine. We spent about 5.5 days backpacking here. The first day it poured and we set up camp soaking wet after hiking for several hours in the rain. Setting up camp is never fun in the rain but we got it done and there was a refugio at this particular campsite. This meant a warm place to sit and hang out with all the other wet backpackers. We met a cool couple from New York (oxymoron?) there and backpacked the rest of the trip with them, on and off. About 8 that night, the weather finally cleared and Eric and I decided to hike up to the torres which we had been told was incredible. It took us nearly two hours to get up there from our camp. The torres are these 3 rock towers that just stick up in the middle of a ridge and they have this glacial lake beneath them. We also saw a fox while we were up there. Not thinking ahead however, we did not bring a flashlight with us and by the time we got to the top the sun had set. We bailed down the hill as quickly as possible (which was not all that rapidly as it was steep and rocky) and made it back to camp just as it was absolutly pitch black dark. Total mileage: 10-11. That was our New Year celebration.
The next day, which was incredibly gorgeous and hot, we hiked sidehill for about 6 hours through meadows beneath the incredible mastif and finally arrived at the cuernos (horns). This was my hardest day. It just seemed like we were never going to get there. We would crest a ridge and another and another and camp was still nowhere to be seen. We ended hiking about 9 miles that day and it was up and down and up and down. Once we finally got there we found out that part of our stove (the whisperlite international) had been left in the previous nights campsite and our stove was, therefore, not functional. Cooking and repacking in the rain had been an overly hurried affair (apparently). There were stoves for backpacker use at this refugio and we managed to cook and eat dinner.
The third day, we did a 13 mile hike because we had to arrive at a refugio that had cooking facilities to be able to eat dinner. We hiked a couple of miles in the morning, dropped our heavy packs for a day pack, hiked a couple of miles straight up into the Valle Frances (which I have wanted to do since the last time I was here with my parents), hiked back down, picked up our heavy packs again and hiked several more miles sidehill to get to campsite #4. This was Eric's hard day. I am the blister queen and my feet were going to pieces by this point but his were gettting bruised on the bottoms. Luckily, this was our last hard hike and we survived it.
Day 4 we did a day hike up to see the immense Glacier Gray. It was nice because we weren't carrying all of our gear. After the day hike we did some relaxing. We set up a boat tour for day 6 and figured out what ferry we were going to take the next day to get across Lago Pehoe. We crossed the lake the next day and set up camp on the other side where our New York buddies joined us later in the day. The four of us took a Zodiac ride down the Río Seranno through the Fijordo de la Ultima Esperanza (Fijord of Last Hope) to get back to the next town, Puerto Natales.
From Puerto Natales, we returned to Punta Arenas where we went to 2 penguin colonies (I love penguins! Eric wasn't that excited until we got there and then he insisted on imitating a penguin walk several times a day for the next couple of days.) We did some craft fair perusal and went fishing. The fishing trip was a lot of fun. Our guide knew nothing about fly fishing (we had brought our gear from the states) but drove us up to this lagoon. It was a rainy day so we had all kinds of clothing on. Of course fishing is not overly popular amoung women in Chile so getting waders that were my size is a no. I had waders that allowed me to wear all the clothing I owned underneath them and kept me dry up to my armpits. They also did not have shoes to go with the waders so they gave me some new converse tennis shoes. Complimenting the outfit was an addidas ball cap which apparently I had to wear over my wool hat to keep it dry. Needless to say, I was a fashion plate and we have several pictures of that outfit for posterity.
I plan on getting some of these pictures up on my blogger acct soon and will give you all the address when I do. Right now it is boring.
After leaving Punta Arenas, we went to Puerto Montt and to Isla Chiloe. They have cool houses on stilts in Castro (the capital city of the island) as well as the best crafts fair we saw. From Castro we went on a ferry across the ocean between the island and the mainland. It is nearly impossible to drive from Puerto Montt south to where we were going on the mainland so we took a rather roundabout approach. Our ferry, with a projected travel time of 5 hours, took 8 hours and was rather sketchy. We finally got back to the mainland and found that there were no ATMs that would take Visa (which is all Eric and I carry). I ended up selling them all my cash in American dollars to get enough money to travel to Futalefú where we wanted to go fishing. Our trip to Futa was rather uneventful but difficult if you get carsick. Poor Eric! We did a guided fishing trip on the Rio Espolon but didn't do much good.
We left Futa and went back to Chiten to catch an overnight ferry back to Puerto Montt. We intended to take a Catamaran but I was informed, very technically, that it was "malo," meaning broken. This meant that we had to catch the ferry that night as the next one didn't leave for several days. A fiasco with our hostel owner ended in us getting kicked out of our hostel (we didn't want to pay for a night that we weren't staying because the ferry left at 9 pm and we had to be on board at 8 and she had made us pre-pay. I told her that we wanted half of our money back because we were goint to leave our backpacks there for the afternoon and she refused. An argument ensued in which she gave us our money back and kicked us out) so we wandered around town with all our stuff for a day.
Anyway, we used a different company for the ferry back to Puerto Montt and it was much better. We arrived early in the morning and stayed in PM for a day or so. We went and saw a movie there "Bailamos," (Shall we Dance) and figured out our plans. We went to Parque Nacional Vicente Perez Rosales the next day. It is my favorite national park in chile but they had an outbreak of "tabanos" which are enormous horseflies. It was fun but you could not stop walking or you would get bit. From there, we took a bus to Pucon.
Pucon is probably my favorite town in Chile. It has everything. We went rafting, canopying, hot springing, etc. Canopying, for those of you who don't know, was something I had never heard of either. What it is is a bunch of cables strung across valleys with platforms at the take-off end. You put on a climbing harness connected to a pulley which rolls on top of the cable. You put on heavy gloves, leap off of the platform, and zoom away across the valley. It is pretty fun and not very scary (which is what I was expecting).
By this point in the trip I needed some Tess time and I sent Eric off to do whatever he wanted for a day (he went and checked out Lago Villarica) and I spent a relaxing day reading. The only other bad day of weather we had on the entire trip occured on our last day in Pucon and we spent it hiding out in our hostal. It rained humboldt style for 6 or 8 hours!
After Pucon, we headed back to Santiago to pick up the stuff we left in the city and relax for a day before our marathon plan flight home. We arrived back in SFO on the 24th of January where Megan met us at the airport in the middle of the night, thank god, and took us to my truck which we had parked at her school during the trip. That night we had to drive all the way to Chico, Ca so I could make my classes on time the next morning. Needless to say, Eric drove and I slept.
Now I am enrolled, as a grad student, in Chico doing the prerequisites for their credential program. It is the best state school for education and I am in over my head a bit but, hey, what's new? I changed credential programs after the first week of school therby putting myself a week behind in two classes which I am still trying to make up. I am also trying to simultaneously apply for their credential program and get cleared to teach in the state of california and to work in the school systems here all of which require essays, fingerprints, TB tests, paperwork and more paperwork. It is busy but I am taking 2.5 days off this weekend to go home and see my parents and Eric. (He is back at work with the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Tulelake, Ca.)
I am also torn about going to Japan for a year starting this July. I haven't technically had the offer to go yet but I have an interview in SFO the third week of Feb. I would be going to teach English for a year. I have lots of pros and cons on both sides but my main delimmas are whether I am just going to prove that I don't have to settle down and get a real job or am I going for another exciting year abroad? It would be difficult to do another long distance relationship stint with Eric which, of course, is a consideration. It will be interesting to see how I decide. I oscillate daily.
Anyway, this is a suuuuuuuuuuper long post to catch you up on what is going on here. Email back if you want with feedback, questions, comments, etc. Love to you all and take care, Tess