Santiago madness

Ladies and gentlemen, I have to confess: we are psychos. We have heard that on this very night the albinos of the Kuna Indian tribe, who live in the Darien gap, will shoot arrows from the bow into the sky to prevent the dragon from swallowing the moon. And sure, we didn’t accept a thought to go to a good restaurant and to follow the eclipse from there. It was just necessary to go to the mountain to make the distance smaller 😀 With my cheap every-day camera…

Cerro Manquehue, a bit over 1500 m

We took a look at the map to find a suitable mountain to go. It wasn’t enough for us to go to the hill located in the center of the city since it is only about 60 meters above the surroundings. We were also dissuaded from another mountain: locals said that the area at the foot of this mountain is too dangerous and we shouldn’t go there. So we googled the third one and decided to go there using the shorter track of two existing. As it turned out later, the longer route starts higher, which means it is also not that steep. But that was later.

And that was our best picture! 😀

We arrived at the feet of the mountain by bus, passed the small glamorous neighborhood full of beautiful houses, and at the beginning of the trail found a fence – yes, Chilean people love fences! So we headed to another trail about 500 meters away, started going on it and got lost almost immediately. It was pitch dark since the moon was on the other side of the mountain, and there were a lot of overgrown bushes on our route. And we were crawling to the peak as very clever people: Tim with sandals, me with Converses, and both with just flashlights of the phones. Headlights? Oh, no, it’s not going to be that serious there, we thought before. And now we were literally crawling since the slope was steep and everything was crumbling under us. The abyss under the slope was terrible, and we had to be very careful: every single move could be fatal. Somewhere in the mid of the route, I notified Balter, who was waiting for us in the capital and in San Antonio and with whom we hadn’t met yet, about our location, and asked him to call the rescuers, if he doesn’t hear from us after midnight: yep, even I can feel uncomfortable at some moments. It happens 🙂

…and this is not the peak yet. But beautiful, damn it!

So, we climbed to the ridge of the mountain at about one a.m., starting at ten in the evening. It was only 600 meters higher than our starting point. We looked at the eclipse, tried to take some pictures with my pocket camera and continued exploring the trail: there were still 400 meters of height and about 900 meters of horizontal distance left to the peak. At the same moment, we found a real trail for hiking and made a quarter of it, but after that it also turned too difficult to continue in the night and being already very hungry, so we returned back to the ridge and decided to sleep there – and no, we didn’t plan to spend the night in the mountains! We found a flat place under a tree with thorns, wrapped ourselves in a blanket and froze for about four hours, waking up with enviable regularity from the bites of ants, the bright moonlight and other delights of life high in the mountains. The spines are still in the blanket.

We woke up at six in the morning shaking of cold and had a sinful thought that we could go down bypassing the peak but finally decided to continue. And we did it, and it was worth it! We went down another path, which was a normal one, and it took a little less than two hours to find ourselves on the asphalt road. We took an Uber to the city and it was already almost 11 am.

Eclipse was beautiful, of course, but we have seen a lunar eclipse before in Russia, so this time the main point was not about that. Our Airbnb host greeted us with congratulations “oooh, you are alive!!!” – and finally, it was already time to take a shower and to start to repair the legs, which were beautiful and tanned but now turned into scratched and tired sticks with bruises and abrasions.

A bit later in Santiago :
— Everything ok? What is it with you?
— Yes, everything… Wait… can you feel it?
— What?
…a few seconds later:
— These vibrations, what is it?
— Oh, it’s an earthquake.
…a few seconds more…
— Usually I just wait for it to end. This is quite a big one, which doesn’t happen that often… But it’s normal here. Chile is located at the junction of tectonic plates, did you know that?
— Sure. Not, I’m not scared anymore 🙂

p.s. The dishes jerked, I didn’t jerk that much; the constructions were trembling, but the furniture did not move from place to place and nothing collapsed anywhere. We felt this in Santiago, and the center of the earthquake was in La Serena, from where we left a week ago. It seems that everything went without victims there, but on the video of eyewitnesses the bottles of wine, which were tumbled down in the supermarket, looked very epic. In short, we did like Santiago and we want more 😀 It’s hot, over thirty Celsius degrees all the time, but we still managed to have a good time there! 🙂