I am writing this from a trundle bed in Valdivia, Ciudad de los Siete Rios, before Zack and I catch a bus up to the district of the Siete Lagos in the morning. With this much water around it is clear we are not in Santiago this week!
Olga, one of Zack's two Fulbright hosts, is a professor at the Universidad Austral de Chile, located about nine bus-hours south of Santiago in Valdivia. This area of Chile is most similar to the Pacific Northwest, where it rains for roughly 9 months of the year, and the countryside is lush and amazing. True to form, it rained all day our first day here.
Today we got a break in the weather in time to take a touristy-boat-trip up the river that runs through town, and see the marshes of this beautiful estuary. We stopped to walk around and eat a snack at the old 'ruins' of a dairy which had been begun by German immigrants and was abandoned in 1960 after a massive earthquake caused a large portion of their productive land to sink several meters (?) and become a massive wetland. It was a crazy story. But walking around the old farm reminded in a comforting way of our own family farm Oregon - especially when I found a few old, now neglected, apple trees with perfectly ripe apples. Something about that flavor takes me to Alsea.
The rest of the story of our trip will have to wait until next week, when we can also post pictures. Tomorrow we are headed to Huilo-Huilo Reserve, a private nature reserve with little cabañas sitting along the river. The photos seem amazing, and the website makes it look like a little ecotourism-disneyland. We decided at the last minute to abandon our plans for a four day hike up to thermal features and volcanos when we saw that the weatherman was calling for lots more rain this week. The idea of a dry bed and the stories and pictures Olga showed us were quite convincing.
Until Then!
Anna
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