Our first festive days in Santiago!

Feliz Año Nuevo and greetings from Santiago!

It is HOT here! But we have trekked through the heat and had a wonderful time exploring Santiago's political and cultural richness, including an amazing all-night New Year's celebration hosted by our newfound Chilean friends and their gracious family.

We have also made the most of exploring Santiago's urban geology, including a visit to (at least the exterior of) Chile's Seismological Institute at Cerro Santa Lucía, which sits atop a hill of very well-expressed columnar basalt and provides magnificent views of the city and the surrounding Andes.

Here are some pictures courtesy of our resident blog photographer John Niles that I think best represent our adventure so far:


This is Meow, the resident cat at Hostal de Sammy, sitting in the hostel's back patio.


A guard watching the side entrance at the Palacio de La Moneda.


John's well-partitioned beef stew.


Santiago's very own Los Angeles River, also known as Rio Mapocho.


Basalt columns overlooking downtown Santiago.


A view from above Cerro Santa Lucía looking across to the Parque Metropolitano, where we took the Funicular (you can see the vertical line on the hill where the Funicular tracks are) up to an even better view of the city!


Karen delivering a fiery sermon on Santiago's regional geology atop Cerro Santa Lucía.


¡Feliz Año Nuevo!

We have arrived!

Just a quick note to say - WE MADE IT!

After a very long day of plane travel we arrived in Santiago at around 9:35 am, which was about 4:30 am to our tired West Coast bodies. We traveled by taxivan to Hostal de Sammy, and killed a few hours waiting for our rooms to be ready. The girls are staying in a 8-person and a 3-person dorm room, and the boys are in a 6-person dorm room. We explored for food this afternoon, finding a large supermarket and some smaller stores as well. I was incredibly tired and totally not used to the heat (it's a sunny 85-90F) so I hung out at the hostel with a couple folks and made dinner, while other folks went Downtown. Everyone is slowly acclimating to the summer climate, but we're all still tired. During Suzanne's presentation on climate change this evening it was funny to look around at the sea of tired faces.

The most exciting point of the day was an encounter that Gina had with a would-be camera snatcher. (This is a condensation of her narration to me - I wasn't there!) She was walking down the street with her small camera around her wrist, and a guy came out of nowhere and grabbed her camera, then took off! Gina started yelling at the top of her lungs and chased the guy, running at full clip, still yelling. Meanwhile two guys she didn't know started chasing the camera-snatcher as well! Eventually he dropped the camera and Gina retrieved it. Clearly he wasn't used to having his exploits challenged like that, and Gina can be quite fierce when she needs to be, I would probably have been intimidated too! All in all, a good cautionary tale about keeping your belongings close to you, and a funny anecdote because of the happy ending.

Tomorrow we head out to explore Santiago a little more, we're taking the old-style Funicular up the hill to view what Karen says are some of the most spectacular columnar basalts she's seen. Yay!

There probably won't be pictures uploaded to this blog until we return stateside, as I forgot my camera cable and Jon's camera is on the blink. But if anything changes, you'll see it here.

:)

The lead-up to travel

In 2006 I spent 6 months living in Chile as a Fulbright Scholar. I worked in the geology department at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago and was also able to travel throughout the country. For geologists, it's an amazing place and I wanted to share it with students from San Francisco State. I'm jazzed that 18 SFSUers have decided to accompany me to South America to explore the Andes. I'm looking forward to spending three weeks with them and hope we can share some of the excitement via this blog.

Last Minute Everything!

Just wanted to stick my two cents in before we leave! Big thanks to Jon for setting this blog up, hopefully we'll have lots of chances to post while we're on the road. I hear there's internet cafes in quite a lot of the towns, which would be awesome.

I'm still running around doing last-minute things, haven't left the country in 10 years, so I'd forgotten how much there is to think about. I'm pretty sure everyone else is doing their own final preparations today, and tomorrow will be extremely exciting as we all gather at SFO to leave. We fly through Atlanta, and then have an overnight flight to Santiago.

Perhaps the next time I sit down at a computer will be in Chile!

Departure < 24 hours!

We depart tomorrow, and after celebrating New Year's in Santiago, we will begin our ascent over the Andes toward Mendoza in Argentina! And hopefully we will post our own pictures of Aconcagua (the highest peak at 6,962 metres (22,841 ft), at least according to wikipedia).