An autumn weekend in the south

The 1st of May, like in many other places, is a public holiday in Chile, and this year many made a 4-day long weekend of it. We were no exception, although we already left Santiago Tuesday morning having made arrangements for a work trip followed by a few days of fun down south. "Down south" in Chile can refer to anywhere between Santiago and the Straight of Magellan, we headed to the Bio-Bio region, about 500km south of the capital.

The work bit was the relocation of a measurement device from one site to another near the town of Los Ángeles. Not a thing we would do on a regular basis but this time was an exception for reason we don't want to bore anybody with. Let's just say that that everything went nice and smoothly... we had timed this work perfectly, the fields were dry, no vehicle getting stuck in knee-deep mud or anything of this sort. The rain started literally an hour after we had finished around Wednesday early afternoon. Nice to know that we don't have to go back to recover the device in a few weeks time. A contractor will have to deal with the mud because between now and then a lot more rain is likely to go down in this part of Chile... autumn is here!

Tuesday night we pitched our tent near some operational wind turbines. Ok, maybe it is true that our perception of wind turbine noise is a bit biased because of our work and attitudes but we honestly have to say that we slept like babies until about 1am when the wind died down, the turbines stopped spinning and the noise from lorries going past on the nearby road for the rest of the night, as well as dogs barking all over the place, kept waking us up every now and then. But that's us and other peoples' perception may be different.

Anyway, here are a couple of nice photos that give you an idea of what it looked like in the morning:

Having finished our work Wednesday afternoon we headed East towards Laguna del Laja National Park. This is a park which features two volcanoes, Antuco (about 3000m in elevation) and Sierra Velluda - (about 3500m in elevation). The former had a massive eruption in the middle of the 18th century that closed-off an entire valley with a lava stream. As a consequence of this event there is now a very scenic and pretty big lake behind the lava dam.

We have made use of opportunities to climb volcanoes before (last time in October), but this time the weather wasn't on our side, and so we went for a couple of easier walks. On Thursday, we went along the shore of the lake on the eastern side of Antuco. We were at about 1500m, slightly above the snow line on that day, and it was raining. Just like one of those nice day out in the hills in Scotland or Wales we fondly remember (o:

Some of us got a little cold and wet after a while (especially those without high-tech waterproofs) and it took a bit of time to warm up again back at our cabin:

Friday morning it looked like a break in the weather, the rain had stopped and the sun even came out for a bit. And so we embarked on another little trek along the western slopes of Antuco, heading towards Sierra Velluda. The first bit of the hike goes through cypress forests but fairly soon it turns into a treeless landscape formed by cooled-down streams of lava.

Along the way we saw a couple of condors checking us out...

The end of the trek is marked by a couple of waterfalls where in some years ice caves form during the winter and which often survive into the following summer. But apparently that did not happened last year for some reason.

In summary, a successful and memorable trip all around, those who would like to see a few more pictures can click on below slideshow (or this link for higher resolution):