More ghost town

Ghost town

On the way back to Santiago from El Yeso we stopped here -- an abandoned military base beneath the San Francisco glacier.

It was last used during the Pinochet regime, when relations with Argentina were rocky and both sides were apparently considering invasion. (There are still tens of thousands of land mines left in the Andes along the Chilean border.)

Now like most empty buildings there's just litter, graffiti, and the smell of urine, but the doorways and empty windows made for some interesting photos.

Sunday bird blogging

One more sadly not very clear picture from the Andes -- a gray-hooded Sierra finch feasting on one of the cherries from our picnic.

Since we rely on Chilean produce so much during the North American winters, I wasn't surprised that fruits and vegetables in Chile were so abundant and so beautiful. But they definitely keep the best stuff for themselves -- every market was full of enormous, glossy specimens, and I ate bowlsful of delicious fruit every day for breakfast. 

I'll have some pictures from the markets in Valparaiso one of these days.

And still more El Yeso

Here's a picture with some of the group walking along the road and down by the water to give a sense of the scale of this beautiful place. Plus flowers.

More of El Yeso

El Yeso

The sun came and went all day, and the color of the water in El Yeso reservoir shifted with every change in the light, going from steely blue to deep emerald and every shade in between.

After stopping for photos at this lookout, we drove along the very bumpy dirt road you can see on the right to a rocky beach on the far end, where we had a picnic.

El condor pasa

Bonus bird blogging.

Wait, where's the bird? you ask. If you look carefully just above the mountain peak to the right, you will see a small black dash that is in fact a bird in flight.

While I'd love to say that it's a condor, it probably isn't. It's much too far away to see clearly, but condors have a very distinctive shape to their wings and I think this is just an eagle or some other raptor. Still it's obviously a very large bird, since it's visible from such a distance. So if you want to pretend it's a condor, I won't argue.

Exteriors

Really, it was Papa-mania

The TV in the cafe, like every other TV I saw that week, was tuned to non-stop coverage of the Pope's visit.

(The chyron, in case you can't see it, asks Why isn't the Pope going to Argentina?)

Breakfast in the Andes

The restaurant -- maybe cafe is the better word -- at the rest stop. A cheese empanada was included in the tour, and it was hot off the grill and delicious.

I didn't even mind that the coffee was instant Nescafe as it was the first cup I'd had, and after a two hour drive it was manna to my jet-lagged brain. I've mentioned before that this tour had originally been scheduled for the following day, but Papa-mania had forced the tour operator to reschedule. Because Chile is inexplicably two hours ahead of New York, I'd reasoned that a tour leaving at 7:15 am would probably be more enjoyable after I'd been in the country for at least 24 hours and had time to adjust to the change.

But the Pope decided to come to town, and since the only other option was the day I was going to Valparaiso I agreed to go a day earlier.

And not surprisingly, I overslept. The front desk woke me with a phone call at 7:25, telling me that my tour guide was waiting, and I had to throw on some clothes, grab my camera and run downstairs without getting anything to eat.

So I will always remember that empanada and instant coffee as one of the best breakfasts I've ever had. I'd never had a freshly made empanada before and like most variations on the theme of stuffed dough, it was so much better that way. Plus, I was starving.

There's always a line for las mujeres

It didn't really cost five hundred dollars to pee at this rest stop near Cajon del Maipo in the high desert outside Santiago. Chile uses the dollar symbol for its currency, which takes some getting used to since the conversion rate was about 600 pesos to the dollar, making the prices look alarmingly high to an American brain. So the cost was actually 500 pesos, or a little less than one American dollar, which they also accepted.

And neither of which I had, unfortunately -- all of my dollars were back at the hotel, and the smallest bill I had was 20,000 pesos. I'd just flown in the day before, and all I'd bought was a coffee, which I had to pay for with a credit card because the cafe couldn't change 20,000 pesos either.

Fortunately the restaurant at this rest stop could, or it would have been an extremely uncomfortable trip to the cajon.

Sunday bird blogging

Apologies for the crappy photo -- noisy and not very sharp -- but it's a lovely bird who deserves to be posted anyway.

The Google tells me this is probably a rufous-collared sparrow. I saw it back in January, in the yard of the ranch where we took a rest stop on the way to Cajon del Maipo my first full day in Chile.

The Andes from the ground

Here are some of the high peaks, taken from Cajon del Maipo, a beautiful valley about two hours drive east of Santiago.

My laptop may have been resuscitated but it's still barely croaking along on life support, so most pictures will have to wait until I'm back in New York.