Buena. Onda.

I went for a run after work today, up Cerro San Cristobal, which has become my “wilderness” oasis here in the city. It’s the biggest open space park in Santiago with elaborate swimming grottos, Japanese gardens and DIRT trails, whoo hoo. Its about 5 minutes from my house through my funky neighborhood of brightly colored houses in Bellavista. The bad part is its quite dangerous in the evening and infamous for muggings by groups of teenagers that use the maze of trails to ambush oblivious park-goers. As I was running up a long flight of stairs I saw a pack of punk 15-year-old boys blocking my way. I put on a serious face, felt my shoulders tense and braced my self for the typical barrage of crude comments or catcalls. When I approached them, the smallest of the group spread his arms out, pushing his friends to make two lines of boys on either side of me. At the last minute, one boy took off his hat, bent over and made an exaggerated gesture of sweeping dirt out of my way. The rest of the group did a collective bow and gave me a very gentlemanly “Adelante, por favor Senorita” Ha. I thought it was hilarious. I laughed right out loud and gave them a huge smile. Cute.

These last two weeks have been pretty great. I feel like I’m getting into my groove, making some real friends, and getting out from under the poopypantshomesick cloud that had me trapped in January. Friday morning my friend Kristy and I decided to do a backpacking trip to Reserva Siete Tazas (Seven Teacups Reserve) that’s named for a serious of “teacups” and waterfalls on the Rio Clarillo. It was nearly impossible to get any information on campsites or find a map or even bus schedules out there so we decided to chance it and figure it out when we got there. 8 hours and 3 buses later we were standing in front of the Guardaparque hut, trying to get our bearings and to secure a campsite for the night. The park ranger was pretty gruff with me at first, but also visibly amused at the sight of two gringas with huge packs looking for a long walk and a map. I went back to talk to him at the station three times because the camping regulations were confusing and the map that we finally did get was totally bassakwards. He told me each time that they were completely out of sites, we got there way too late for a weekend, that our only option was to leave the park and go to a private campground that was really expensive and also “dangerous”. Great.

However, if I’ve learned anything in Chile it’s that No doesn’t necessarily mean No if you're talking to the right person and happen say the right things.

La Familia Ramirez

20 minutes later we had an invitation to set up our tent in the Ranger's yard for the night and to please join him, his assistant Carlitos, and his family to “tomar onces” the traditional early evening meal of homemade bread, eggs, a garlic tomato salsa and fresh avocados with sweet hot tea to drink. He also handed us three days of camping and park entrance passes but only charged us one day at the student price! It turns out his name is David... David RAMIREZ. Ha! Our common last name and some nice chatting changed everything (and I told him one of my favorite people in the whole world is a David Ramirez!). By the time his daughters showed up from their afternoon at the river, he introduced me as their long lost Tia Kelly all the way from California. Kristy (and both little girls) looked at me with wide eyes and I couldn’t do anything but shrug and smile big. They were the sweetest family and took great care of us, stuffing us full of food, and the girls were card game fanatics. I taught them to play “Anda a Pescar”, Go Fish in Spanish, which they were still playing at the picnic table by lantern when I crawled into the tent, exhausted. The next morning the mom got up with us and made sure we had a warm breakfast and tea and we gave them our chocolate bar as a thank-you. We said goodbye to the Ramirez family with an exchange of addresses, hugs, and besos and headed out for two great days of hiking to a place called Valle del Indio. That night we set up camp near the bright blue headwaters of the Rio Clarillo, within sight of a beautiful cascada, and woke up in the morning to frost and horses outside of the tent.

Rio wildflower

The Siete Tazas

Me and the Lioness mid-traverse

We finally made it to Siete Tazas on Day 3 and climbed down into a lush canyon full of tiny yellow butterflies and wildflowers to the Salto La Leona (Lioness Waterfall). We ended up having to traverse one of the canyon walls – where my Jackson mountain goat skills came in handy – to cross the water and access the park exit because we accidentally got into the canyon through the wrong entrance. Whoops. We ended up missing our bus but finding a stand that sold us cold Coronas and Churipan (the beloved Chilean version of a hotdog). We finally caught a bus back to Santiago at 430 am the next morning. Good little weekend.