Santiago and Patagonia! (or at least the northern bits of Patagonia)

After a night of drinking and catching up, Matt and I wandered around Santiago a bit. I kinda liked Santiago, the centre has a bunch of pretty shit to see.

The ridiculously huge flag in front of the Palacio de la Moneda (Coin Palace?), the seat of the president. 

There was also a rather large procession of people walking past the palace, which I initially thought would've been protesting the Chilean education system as there was a bunch of those in other cities. Turns out they wanted to legalise weed.

Museum of Beautiful Art. Didn't go inside though...

Across the crappy river/canal thing from the Museum above, there was an entire neighbourhood full of street art, and it happened to be between us and the mountain we were thinking of going up.

When we got to the hill we were pretty tired and decided to revisit the following day and try and catch the sunset. On the way back to the hostel we walked through the weed march. Seemed a lot bigger than it actually was. We thought there must be like 100,000 people there, but it turns out there was only 15,000. Still kinda cool.

The next day we went back to the hill to catch the cable car to the top, which sounded like it'd have a pretty nice view.

ehh, not really the most interesting city from above, and hard to tell if it's covered in fog, or smog...

 \ 

There was a nice big statue of the virgin of whatever though.

We spent a while trying to work out what to do after Santiago, and wanting to get out of the city. Matt brought over all his snowboarding stuff and a bunch of mine, so we were pretty keen for that. To that end, we got a bus to the south, to Chile's lakes district, which sounded really beautiful even if we couldn't go to the snow.

A few hours on a bus later, we arrived at Puerto Varas, a nice little half-German town next to one of the aforementioned lakes. We found a hostel and discovered that the skifield around the corner was open, but they were still clearing rocks from the recent volcanic eruption, so they weren't hiring out gear.

So, the next day we hired a car and went for a drive to some of the other lakes (and to check out the skifield).

Cool hotel we could see from the hostel.

We went up the road to the skifield as far as we could before it was icy and there was barely enough traction, then went for a little walk called something to do with pumas. The ground everywhere was covered with ash from the volcano.

The weather in Puerto Varas was always something like this.

  

We then carried on towards another lake, which supposedly had a nice walk around it for an hour or two. Probably wouldn't've been that nice anyway due to the weather, but we were told that we couldn't drive to the trailhead because of the condition of the road. Someone the kindly offered us a half-hour excursion on the lake in his boat. Wasn't too expensive, so we went with him.

On the way to the lake we stopped by this rager. On the way back we had a picnic there ^^

Hints of the spectacular-ness of the lake when the weather isn't shit (don't visit this place in June, it's already not sunny and you can't ski).

The volcano with the skifield on it.

This miniature house was built by some people as a playhouse for their grandkids. Too cool.

After the lake with the boatride, we started driving to another lake that might've been nice, but decided when we were passing by a third lake that we couldn't be bothered driving anymore, and turned around after taking a couple photos.

Another view of the skifield, from the edge of the lake by Puerto Varas.

After a bit more indecision, we caught a bus to Bariloche, just across the border in Argentina. For most of the drive it was too cloudy to see more than a few metres out of the windows, but a little after we crossed the border there was sun, and it was quite nice:

We toyed with hiring a car and walking up this guy, but decided it'd be too much effort. Also it's fucking cold in Bariloche.

First view of Bariloche, with the not-very-snowy mountains behind. No skiing here either :(

When we arrived in Bariloche we wandered around trying to find a cheap hostel, thinking in the official conversion rate. If you're traveling in Argentina and rely on the official exchange rate, everything is stupidly fucking expensive compared to the rest of Latin America. If you bring cash you can change it on the street for a much better rate, in which case Argentina is rather cheap.

In the end we found some place, and walked around in the city for a little bit before bed. The next day we went to check out the lake and wanted to visit the paleontology museum, which is supposedly pretty good. More on that later...

The lake was really nice, even though it was hella windy and freezing and there was a lot of cloud.

A photo of the paleontology museum, which only opened at 4pm anyway, so I can't give an impression of the inside. Not too impressive from the outside though...

In the evening we watched a disappointing game of the Copa America (FIFA's "world cup" of Latin America), then went to Jurassic World, which was pretty awesome.

The next morning Matt left to go back to Chile and head north, either to snowboard or visit Atacama (in the end there was actually fucking nowhere to ski, so he went to Atacama), and I got a bus to Buenos Aires with João, a friend I'd been traveling with since I got to Chile (and who therefore gained the dubious honour of being my second-longest traveling companion, go João!).

Got a cool surprise for the next post.

The driest desert and the biggest open pit in the world

The day after I arrived in San Pedro, I went on a tour to the El Tatio geyser field, which started on time to watch the sunrise. Was really expecting some actual geysers, rather than 80ish team spouts...

One of the several failed attempts to generate power from the geyser field.

Best view of the sunrise was to the south...

After the geysers we went to a hot pool, which was about 90% tepid and 10% way too hot. Didn't stay in there very long...

We stopped a few times on the way back to San Pedro for photos. I hate tours.

Hawk-eyed bus driver noticed this guy on the side of the road.

After a while we stopped at a little old village.

Andean seagulls?

Day of chillin, then a couple of others in the hostel and I hired bikes to ride to the Valle de la Luna (The Valley of the Moon). The road there had pretty good views of the surrounding area; you can't really see anything from San Pedro except San Pedro. Nice little ride, except for the bit where I thought I'd forgotten my memory card.

Just inside the entrance to the valley, there was a little system of salt caves, which were pretty cool for a wee wander.

Overheard from random guide talking to his group: the valley's only called the moon valley because of its moon-like appearance. Not because it has the same mineral content as the moon or something. As noone ever would've ever thought.

A couple of ks down the road from the caves there was a huge sand dune, which you aren't allowed to walk up, but there's a trail around the side (and a bunch of footprints in the sand anyway).

There was a couple of dogs at the top of the dune. Not sure if they live there off whatever tourists give them or if they have a home, but the home would be far...

Natural amphitheatre. Can't go in it though :(

We wanted to hang around and watch some of the sunset, so we decided to press on to the Tres Marias, which was supposed to be really nice. Was more like 2.5 Marias.

So we went back up the dune and drank some chamomile liquor (surprisingly good! and hella cheap) to wait for the sunset. Wasn't too impressed with it to the west, but the mountains in the east looked nice.

And the full moon which prevented us from going stargazing. There was a few agencies still running stargazing trips, but the more reputable ones weren't, so it seemed a bit disingenuous for the others to say it'd be worthwhile.

Red chemtrails?! Must be mind control drugs.

After another day off, I left for Calama to see one of the biggest open-cast mines in the world, Chuquicamata, with a few others from the hostel to whom it sounded interesting. We got an early bus to Calama, not really sure what to do after the mine, and really hoping we could go that day, as the only information about it we could find said to book it in advance. A cab to the mine company's tourist office and a few minutes later, and we were booked for the tour in the afternoon, which was quite conveniently free. I guess the biggest company in the country can afford a couple hundred dollars a day to send tourists to see their biggest cash-cow.

The mine was a few ks from Calama, and the first thing we saw was the city of Chuquicamata, which used to be home to 25,000, miners and everyone else needed to support such a city. In 2009 or so they finished relocating all the residents to Calama, as it was deemed unhealthy to live so close to such a huge dust producer. These days it's a big ghost town.

We stopped next to what used to be the town's main square, and the guide took us into an old book shop to explain the goings-on of the mine. The area's been mined for copper for centuries, but it didn't really kick off until about 100 years ago, when a new copper-refining technique was developed. The mine passed through various sets of foreign hands, until Chile nationalised all their copper in the 60s and 70s, and the mine passed into the control of Codelco, a state-owned company.

Nowadays Codelco is the largest copper-producing company in the world, and also controls the largest known copper reserves in the world. I believe Chuqui alone produces around 500,000 tons of copper a year, exported as 99.9% pure plates, mostly to China. Chile's also one of the world's largest producers of molybdenum, and the revenue from the molybdenum funds operations at the mine, making all the copper profit.

I'm not sure how they actually make the hole (dynamite, probably?), but the ore's loaded either onto a conveyor belt, or onto the biggest trucks you've ever seen (each one can carry around 350 tons, and burns 3L fuel/minute) to be taken away for milling, to the tune of 150,000 tons of ore/day. Apparently only 1 in 4 trucks actually has ore in it, all the rest is spoil. Of those that contain ore, the average amount of copper is 3%, so fuck-all.

The ore gets milled to 0.3mm, and then goes through some sort of funky flotation tank to get the purity up to 30ish%. After drying, the copper goes through a foundry and some other kind of oven, resulting in plates of 99.7% purity. Finally, these plates are purified to the final level by electrolysis. I understand about half of these things...

After having all this explained, we were free to roam around the square a bit, before continuing to the actual mine. I loved this place, a huge ghost-town overtopped and being overrun by mountains of mine spoil, a direct result of its reason for existence. There was also a bigger main square than most much bigger cities I've been to in Latin America. I suppose they had a lot of space.

"Live better. Department of Wellbeing."

Workingmen's club.

Theatre on the left and bank on the right.

Plenty of room for some good old-fashioned Latin protests.

Gazebo and a statue of Bernardo O'Higgins, one of Chile's national heroes.

The hospital's buried under there somewhere.

   
After a little drive past arcane-looking processing equipment, we got to the mine itself, which was rather impressive:

 

Control room for the trucks, which're all tracked by GPS. Considering they cost US$5m each, they probably don't want many crashes. 

The wheels of those things are almost as tall as a bus. Would've been nice if there was a better photo op, but as the guide pointed out, having one idle just for the tourists who don't pay anything would be a rather ridiculous expense.

One of the many smaller mines dotted around the main Chuqui pit, on the way back to Calama.

Our plan was to carry on to Antofagasta, one of Chile's biggest cities, before heading down to Santiago, but it didn't seem like there was any hostels there and the cheapest accommodation we could find online was stupid expensive. So we stayed in Calama, city of nothing, drinking the afternoon away. In the morning we got a bus to Iquique, another city on the coast where 2 of my friends wanted to drop in on their way north to Peru.

The bus to Iquique passed through copious amounts of desert, aside from this little bit of green around the one river we saw.

I was pretty keen for a swim in the ocean for the first time in a few months, but it was always cloudy while we were in Iquique, so I didn't bother. A couple of days after arriving, I got on the nice 24 hour bus to meet my brother in Santiago.