It took us a while to get to the National Park and its stops, but the view was great! The tour guide only explained everything in Spanish, so my understanding was far from complete. Still, the trip was worth it! We stopped by a little tiny town first called Poconchile, with a correspondingly little church and cemetery. It was surprisingly chilly outside (combination of early morning and the altitude, I assume) and I was asked whether or not I spoke Spanish.
One thing I've noticed about tourism in Chile is that a good proportion of tourists are Chilean - that hasn't been true in Peru and Bolivia. I have an inkling that it's because people in Chile are better off overall and there is more to do in Chile, but those are claims that I would have to look up more about. Out of the 15-20 people on the tour, I think it was just me and another lady from Mexico that were not Chilean.
Anyway, the park was also like many others that I've been to - gorgeous mountains, interesting plants, lots of llamas, alpacas, and vicunas. We stopped by a little "zona magnetica" that was an optical illusion - it looked like we were headed down a hill but in reality the land tilted the other way. There was a special species of cactus that our guide pointed out as well.
The above graphic (from Google) shows the route we took. Along the way were lots of mountains (snow-capped are the prettiest!), valleys, and various animals at a distance. Luckily, when we arrived at Chucuyo, there were three alpacas on the road that came to greet us. They got extremely close to us, to the point where I was able to get great video footage from my GoPro and pet one of them! But it sneezed on me shortly after, which made the experience a lot less great. Still - petting an alpaca on the side of the road?! Not something that happens every day.
The main attraction of the trip was Lake Chungara itself. It's at extremely high altitude - 4500 meters plus - but the view was worth it! I don't know what it is about lakes and mountains in the background that make for incredible pictures, but seriously - this view was incredible. The guide also mentioned that two of the mountains in the background were actually located in Sajama National Park - the same Sajama National Park that I went to when I visited Oruro. It's right on the Bolivian border with Chile, but to see that brought the two countries together in a really special way! Completely awesome to relive that, even if I still don't know if Sajama was worth it.
At this stop, I also met 4 Taiwanese people who were traveling together. I was thankful to be able to speak a language that I could understand well - it was a luxury that I did not have when the tour guide kept talking and talking. My Chinese needs practice, but it was a relief to at least be able to understand and not have to guess half of what's going on.
On our way back I started to feel kind of bad. I think it was a mix of the altitude and not having eaten very much, but I tried to take a nap and just wait until we got back to zero altitude. We finally stopped for "lunch" - though it was basically 5 pm - which was some bread, soup, and a delicious plate of alpaca meat, rice, and potatoes before walking around the little town of Putre and heading back to Arica.
I was dropped directly to the bus station, where I bought a ticket to Antofagasta. Once on the bus, the driver's assistant/attendant person checked all out tickets (as is standard) but, like the guy from my Iquique-Arica bus, took my passport for a while before giving it back. He just noted down the information from everyone's identification card so I don't understand why my passport needed to be held for a bit, and didn't have the Spanish to ask. Oh well.
We were all woken up at 4 am for some sort of immigration checkpoint. It was the weirdest thing ever, but we stopped, everyone filed out, and all our bags were put through a security screen. I have no idea what it was or why it was happening so randomly and late in the night, and I understood exactly 0% of what the driver's assistant said to me. I just did what everybody else did and got the heck back onto the bus. Well, weirder things have happened.
No comments:
Post a Comment