Oso en Tilcara (Bear in Tilcara)

For those of you up-to-date Disovery Channel watchers, yes, I am speaking of the one and only Bear Grills...
Today I had a Bear momment.
We hiked up to a waterfall and found a dribble of water being filtered through the rocks, which in case you didn´t see that episode is perfect drinking water....so we filled up our water bottles with fresh water from the mountains of Tilcara, Argentina.

Faustino, Ricky and Megan chillin on a rock near to la garganta del diablo, the waterfall we hiked to

Fresh water, Bear style

under la garganta del diablo

Christmas in July?

Going on the advice of many travelers we headed to San Pedro de Atacama in the Atacama desert (the driest in the world) after Vina del Mar. It was a 24hr bus ride to Calama and then an hour bus ride to San Pedro. We arrivied in San Pedro (population 5000) around 11pm and started looking for a place to stay. There were two people behind us with packs like ours, so I asked them if they knew where they were staying, they said no and we decided to look together. Their names were Alex (a girl from France) and Serigo (a guy from Mexico), they are both studying in Santiago and traveling together on winter vacation. San Pedro was starting to shut down when we got there and everywhere we asked, no one had any empty rooms. It was frustrating and cold and a bit scary when someone told us this happens a lot and travelers have to sleep on the street for a night. Somehow we found a nice old man with a full hostel who called around to all the other hostels to see if any had an extra room. No one did. Alex, Serigo and I walked around the town until about 1am while Megan and Ricky stayed back with our packs in the reception area of the hostel of the nice man. We had no luck finding anything and by the time 2am rolled around the nice man wanted to go to bed and then did a very Latin American thing, he ¨found¨ us somewhere to stay. It was a storage room with lots of beds and blankets. It wasn´t the nicest place, but boy did that bed feel good after a day of sitting on a bus.

While falling asleep, I thought about Mary and Joseph and no room in the inn...

the best wave

I´m sitting on a four year old´s bed watching as Megan and Ignacia play with a umbrella and scream ¨lluvia!!!!¨(rain). I finish the sentence and the game has ended just as quickly. We have been staying with the Peñas for four days, I found them on couchsurfing.com and it´s been a great experience. Plus we haven´t slept on a couch yet, Megan and I have shared a bed and Ricky has a mattress on the floor. We´ve figured out the bus and subway system of Santiago and seen a lot of the city. We have also been blessed to have another couch surfer stay with the Peñas while we´ve been here. Her name is Emma and she is from Australia and traveling to Rio and then Sao Paulo Brazil where she is going to teach English for a year. We are headed to Viña del Mar tomorrow.

Hasta pronto!!

On the metro, that we have mastered...

JUMP!

Vineyard tour at Concha y Toro with Emma.

The Andes and palm trees in the same photo!

Frequent Flyer

Hola! and thank you.

Thank you for checking in on me, thank you for your prayers and messages over these next six months, because of them this will be a more memorable experience.

Megan, Ricky and I will be leaving 19.7.07 for Santiago, Chile. We will be traveling through Chile, Argentina, Bolivia and Peru until 14.8.07 when they will fly out of Lima for the US and my parents fly into Lima from the US.

The next two weeks I will spend with my parents traveling and hopefully watching as they begin to understand and love the South America I have become addicted to. Then they will fly out of Lima and leave me to the big finale of my journey, studying in Bolivia.

I will spend a little over three months studying with a group of students in Cochabamba, Bolivia. We will not only study, but experience all things Bolivian, including home stays and an independent study project to help us focus on our passions.

More travel is likely to occur after studying in Cochabamba...we shall cross those bridges when they come

Besos