So, our first weekend abroad and in Chile… It would have been nice to be able to include Santiagian night life in this introduction to the “real Chile” but a night out for South Americans does not start until 1am (later in other countries) and we have not yet had the energy to commit to such a night. The real Chile I am talking about here is what we experienced on Saturday when we all piled into this guy’s 4×4 and drove for 2 hours east of Santiago. Santiago is so big that it basically took us 1 hour just to get out of the city, then it was just a matter of pointing the car towards the mountains and driving. After a while we entered the Andes and hit a dirt road; the guy driving turned to us and said “Welcome to the real Chile”. We soon stopped at this small mountain town and set off for a walk.

The destination of the walk was pretty vague, just to walk enough of some track to see the tip of the glacier near(ish) to Santiago (the track which leads to the glacier is really long and tough so you basically need horses to get there). Of course the secondary purpose of the walk was to experience the Andes of central Chile. Both of the these things we did; the glacier, while I’m sure is impressive closer up, was not much to see from probably 80 km away, but the miniscule section of the Andes we saw was amazing. Everything in the Andes is on such a perceptually difficult scale. And I’m not just throwing around weird descriptions to sound artistic and “hip”; it is actually hard to take in the sizes and distances of everything. For a small (not very good) example see the photo below; there is a road running along there with a car on it but it is barely noticeable in the photo. You don’t realise just how colossal these mountains are until you get a point of reference like that.

Reference for mountain

Just for a “Nick, Anna and Sven altitude update”, we were at 2.5km altitude at the end of this walk which is probably the highest all of us have been on land (Mount Kosciuszko – the highest point in Australia- is 2.2km just for reference) and we can look forward to being much higher later on in this trip! (maybe even double!). I thought I may as well throw in a picture of all of us – enjoy!

Us in Los Andes