Baños Morales - Pictures part2

In the last post I mentioned how green the slopes were on the way to the second glacier.
We walked up a very dry slope to reach a ridge populated by lizards and short shrubs. After walking for another hour we reached a lush high valley.
I turned to Maho "Rohan!"
She didn´t get the reference, but my Viggo impression was flawless.

She then went on to find a freezing cold bog all by herself. She´s grimacing in this shot because melt water has just flowed into her shoes. Continuing with the whole Rohan feel there actually were horses pasturing here.

See? More vegetation.

Baños Morales - Photos. yes, Pip, Glaciers

The pretty little mountain village of Baños Morales. Most of the town had shut for the season, so we relocated to Los Chicos Malos. After season, Carlo and Jeanette run this Cabañas and meal stop for the benefit of the calcium carbonate mine across the river. The mine runs 24hours a day with two shifts of fifty men. The mine shuts for five months in winter, when it gets covered by up to nine metres of snow. It is, after all, at the base of some extremely steep and tall peaks. The village got more than three metres of snow last winter. A friendly explosives engineer called Emilio was petitioned by Jeanette to give us a lift back to STGO. We talked quite a lot about mining and life in general on the way back. He was quite happy to practise his English. He good-heartedly complained about being married for four months, and explained how he still raced trailbikes. He has a good friend from Australia who stayed with him last year. The Aussie, whose name I forget, is a trailbiking commando who lives in Sydney.

The main street of Baños Morales. It has a crystal clear stream burbling beside it that meets the main river outside the town.

Mind you, the main street also has a small stream running down it...

The glacier from the horse ride. The lake is brown due to suspended sediment ground out by the glacier. The slopes for the entire ride were as desolate as in this photo - quite in contrast to the abundant vegetation on the slopes on the way to the second glacier.

Dramatic evidence of tectonic deformation: vertical stratigraphy. Many of the refugios in town have a small collection of fossils on display for interest sakes. I also saw four isolated houses on the road in that were advertising fossils for sale. They were mostly amonites or amnomites, but also some bivalves. Anomites?

The white at the bottom of the slope is most of the calcium calcite mine.

Talking to the guide in the office, twenty years ago all this ground was covered by the glacier. You can see the valley floor is a jumble of dropped rock from the melt, with furrows cut by vast volumes of water and, presumably, morains. I took this photo of what I thought was a water carved stone bridge on the way to the glacier. You can make it out by the shadow.

After seeing the glacier I went back to the "stone bridge" and found it was an ice bridge - the last remnant of the glacier´s former glory. This isolated piece would have been about one kilometre from the foot of the glacier. The span is five metres wide.

The second glacier. You can make out the tall ice plug sitting above the sloping icefield. At the bottom right you can make out the two ice tunnels. I went up the left one (you can only just make it out in this shot). You can see why I was surprised to find that all that rock was sitting on ice.

The ice tunnel under the glacier. The whole inside was scalloped as in the photo of the isolated bridge. The floor is dropped stone. You can make out the small stream. Where I´m standing the tunnel is about five foot six, but I have no idea how long the tunnel is navigable. The Morales of the story (!): bring a torch when you visit glaciers.

Chile Baños Morales description therein etc my eyes

After one night in Baño Morales (a night of pain and cursing Maho for her girlish and drippy love of all things horsey), the proprietress needed to go to Santiago, thus we had to find an"otre refugio". This took a while to communicate. bless her socks she went and grabbed Carlo from up the road and persuaded him to accept us at his better establishment at her pricing.
We packed up and went with Carlo to "Los Chicos Malos" The Naughty Boys, and met his wife Jeanette. They discussed our room: matrimonial.
I was about to protest, as I had at the other place when we were paying.
"In Chile, the men always pay."
"She is not girlfriend. We friends." I replied, then pointing at Maho "Individuale!" To much laughter.
Aha, there was a double bed and single bunks. As a bonus it was my turn for the double.
Baños Morales is a Summer weekend retreat village 93kms from Santiago. The surrounding peaks of the Andean foothills are 3ks high or so. half the houses are weekenders, and thus locked up. Most of the rest are refugios or cabanas or other accommodation.
Luckily we got that horse ride in. I knew it was the end of the season, but I didn´t realise the woman had dropped her price from $50K each to $40K for both because we would be their LAST customer for the season.
That´s why the proprietress was going back to Santiago.
And that also explains why everyone had run out of icecream.

I worked out that any room with a double bed was called a matrinomial. Our matrimonial room had a double, two single bunks and a trundle single.
I don´t think there´d be much matrimonial activity in such a room.

Although, maybe that explains the six hour horse rides.

Bye, kids!

Anyway, I better get back to the room before Maho realises I´m wearing her bikini.

Chile. Baños Morales

What´s the best thing to do after a three hour bus ride into the Andean foothills?
That´s right: a six hour horse ride! Especially when you´ve never ridden a horse before.

(Harry parousing a menu at a restuarant called ¨Life Experience¨)

Waiter: Good morning, sir. What would you like?

Harry: Well, the horse looks good. I´ve never had that before.

W: How would you like that? An hour of gentle riding or a gruelling six hours?

H: Um, the gruel, I think.

W: It´s ¨gruelling¨.

H: Fair enough.

W: And how would you like your testicles?

H: What do you offer?

W: We have lift-and-separate or repeatedly-squashed.

H: Repeatedly squashed.

W: An excellent choice, sir. See you in six hours.

The landscape was scarecly vegetated steep scree slope (say that five times fast) with a white river tumbling in the valley. All the water was melt water from the galcier we ended up at. It was a small sized glacier, but still very impressive. I´m not about to argue with the size of my first glacier. It probably wasn´t all that impressed with me, surely having seen Australians before. If it had a glacial lake of soothing ointments, that really would have been something.

My thighs. My thighs, I tell you.

Look, I just don´t get horse riding, ok. Genuinely, I would much rather walk. Yes, for six hours. I only vaguely knew what I was doing, and the horses (particularly mine, which had to be abandoned after two hours) were tired and hence hard to control. Fernando, the fifteen year old cowboy, effectively herded Maho and I up the path, which was a bit embarrassing really. And I was so physically uncomfortable that when we finally got within sight of the village I jumped off with a petulant cry of ¨That´s me done!¨

So, fuck horse.
And the horses they rode in on.

Missing Pieces #1

England: Slobro met me at Heathrow at the improbable hour of stupid o´clock. He told me that our Aunt couldn´t put us up for two days as she was ill. So instead of heading west to Dorset we headed North to Suffolk, in the mighty Peugot 407 6 cylinder turbo diesel. I offered to take first driving shift as it was the sensible option, (1) Slobro would be all confused being from wrong-side of the road Canada, (2) I really really really wanted to drive that car right away.
So, trusting in the kindness of friends (whom we hadn´t called yet) we vroomed off north stalling 18times.
In Colchester we had a snack, a walk around the castle, and got Pip´n´Susan´s phone number from teh email.
"Hello Pip, it´s Harry from Australia."
"Hallo!"
"I was wondering...."
He gave us directions to Stowmarket, a bit north of Ipswich with instructions to call once we got there.
We had a drive and did some brotherly catching up, and got to Stowmarket.
No worries. Except that we didn´t have any more small change.
Slobro trooped off to a bakery.
"Eat this," he instructed. It looked horrible.
If you dropped it, someone would compare a really ugly girl´s face to it.
"What is it?"
"It´s an Eccles cake. haha!" (joke due to SCA name of Harry of Eccles)
We called Pip and were able to convey bugger all appart from our location before we were cut off. I didn´t know if he was going to come and meet us, or not. So we waited.
Evidently we had to call him again.
Through tears of laughter Slobro announced there was no option but to buy me another Eccles cake.
A two pound conversation later and we had half the directions before being cut off. I have nothing to offer by laughter, tears and Eccles cakes.
Then, the public phone rang. It was probably someone from the phone company wondering what was so funny.
No! It was Pip using the wonder of technology.
We only got lost once.
Anyway, Suffolk is a beautiful part of the world.
Photo´s are at Pip´n´Susan´s website here
Thorpeness is a gorgeous seaside heath which is so pristine and remote that they put a nuclear power station on it. The pubs and villages are all beautiful, and it Pip is an awesome guide.
Considering that in my week in England I didn´t expect to see them, it was simply a fantastic time.

Toronto: (puts on Joanie Mitchell hairstyle)
They took all the shoes and put ém in a shoe museum.
And charged everyone eight dollars Canadian to see ém.
(Interestingly, that week she´d been inducted into the Canadian hall of fame.)

My flight to Halifax was delayed, so we took it as a sign from god that we really should go to the Bata Shoe Museum. BigRob, Lyen, boyfriend Chris and I spent about 2 hours there. I was very impressed. It was the museum with the best display to information ratio I found in Canada. The other museums always left me wanting more info.
The bottom floor is a history of shoes and it was fascinating.
Of particular note was an Egyptian story from 2000BC of a rich man who had servants and slaves. The daughter of one of his slaves was so beautiful and graceful that he gave her a pair of ornate gold sandles. The daughters of one of his servants were extremely jealous that someone socially inferior to them should be so favoured, and hated her guts. Pharoah came to town and all non-slaves went to a grand banquet/celebration. Horus, in the form of a hawk, fly through a window of the rich man´s house, picked up one of the gold sandles of the slave girl and fly to the banquet where he dropped it in Pharoah´s lap. Understanding that such a fine sandal meant it was owned by the best of women Pharoah stood up and announced he would marry the owner. A search ensued and the slavegirl marries the Pharoah.

Toronto2:
"Life is not a problem to be solved.
It is a mystery to be lived.
And it takes courage to make life a celebration,
a dance."
I found this randomly on a white board the day Aveline died.

Colon part 2 or 3

It´s damned inconvenient when you return from your dawn wildlife tour and a bunch of workmen have dug up the road directly in front of your hotel.
The manager shook his head ruefully at me. Hey, I feel for you buddy. It must suck to have your business interrupted by douchebags.
His reply was a trifle heated and involved lots of finger poking at me. I don´t speak Spanish so I have no idea what he was talking about.

I returned to the lobby five minutes later, phrase book in hand, to tell him "El banyo es no funcional."

There was swearing from out the front directed at the manager. He then looked at me. I dunno what he expected me to do about it. He then directed an appeal to God. I heard the words "stupido turismo".
I guess his xbox driving game is broken as well as my toilet.

But anyway, the pre-dawn start wildlife excursion was excellent. It was so good that it deserves a post of its own.

This is a post of its own.

Did you just write on my blog? Did you just write on my blog? Come on! Did you just write on my blog?

....I AM your blog.

I don´t care. Did you just write on my blog?

Yes, I wrote on your blog. And I am your blog.

Okay, just so long as we sorted that out.

On the river

The Guarani natives say that the Rio de Uruguay is the source of dreams. You can see their point watching the interface between water and air. Patterns of silver continually form and unform on the opaque brown waters.
What lies beneath?


Well, fish obvious.
But metaphorically: anything.

The boat trip was a cruise down the river and a wander on a large sand island with a guy called Charlie. I figured him for an English expat who´d found his little piece of heaven and retired to it, showing tourists around for fun. I asked him. No, he´d been doing it for fourteen years now and they were twelve hour days!
Enthusiastic, fun, academic gone a bit hippy. He quoted Latin and iterature.
"As the old boy said "In nature you will find the truth.""
We only had one and a half hours, but I could have spent days with him. He told us about adaptations, medicinal use and a bit of the mythology of the plants we saw. He got excited when he found a mushroom he hadn´t seen before and got one of the Dane´s to photograph it and promise to email it to him.
He studied nature to better appreciate it´s beauty: a true natural philosopher.
When we were in the boat he said:
"We´re in the main channel here. Why is that important? Well, if I steer this way we´re in Uruguay. And if I steer this way we´re in Argentina. We´ve looked for the dotted line, but we can´t find it. It´s ridiculous to say ´this belongs to us and that belongs to them´. We belong to it.