up, up and out of the smog.

I was happy as a clam sitting in starbucks on a Monday morning with my friends Lydia and Carly, drinking a peppermint white mocha and being thankful that starbucks is consistently good [even in places where Nescafe is the only other coffee to be found] and that I woke up to snowcapped mountains surrounding the city when Lydia expressed her desire to go to the mountains. I want to take a train or a bus and then go to the mountains and just hike. To escape the smog, the cabs zipping down the street, the business people chattering spanish into their earpieces... So right then and there we started searching for where Tuesday's fresh air adventure would take us. Quickly we found directions to a trail we could hike to get to a waterfall. Three to five hours. lots of downhill. perfect. We started on our way early on Tuesday morning and arrived at the national park entrance around 8:30. because we were pointed in the wrong direction, we wandered aimlessly for about an hour before finding a the trailhead that we presumed would take us toward a waterfall. It was about 2 and a half hours of uphill hiking later, that we realized we weren't headed to any sort of waterfall, but to the summit of this mountain. In awe of the panoramic view of snowcapped mountains and seemingly tiny, silent city of Santiago, we kept going upward. Climbing on all fours for the last stretch, we made it to the top of a mountain (still unsure of which one). We ate the best turkey sandwiches for lunch, put on the swimsuits we'd brought for the waterfall just to say that we had, shivered a lot and then started the trek back down. "Butt-sliding" was the preferred method of descent, since there was really no way we could walk down the first little bit. It was entertaining, to say the least. It was actually my very favorite part of the day. The hike took about 6 hours total, and we went straight to starbucks for a warm Christmasy (it is winter here, after all) drink and comfy seat before heading to the always ridiculous latin dance class. I didn't take very many pictures... boo for clouds.

View of Santiago from way high up.


On another fine day, we headed to the Ocoa Valley in Campana National Park to hike to another waterfall (which turned out to be a tiny drip due to the current drought). The park protects the majority of palms in Chile, and lets just say the 800 year old trees were HUGE.