My birthday, a volcano, and an ice pick

After the desert, I took a long bus south, out of the desert, past Santiago, and to Pucon, which feels like a haven for outdoors people.   There is nothing but outdoor stores, restaurants with fireplaces, cabin like hostels, and people offering tours.  Here is the town (and the volcano which I´ll mention soon!):

February 10 was my birthday (I am 23!), and to celebrate I climbed a snow covered volcano called Villarrica, which is one of Chile`s most active volcanoes.  Here is me with the an ice pick!

The volcano is very steep (there are people in the bottom left of the above pic), and we had to wear large spikes on our shoes for the snow and ice.  The trek up took 5 hours, and here are some pictures:

 

Here is me on the summit, next to the smokey crevice.

It took 45 minutes to get down.  After we got to the top, the guide told us to sit down, put our feet in the air, and sled down the volcano using our ice picks as the break, which is what we are doing here:

I have been in Pucon a week now.  Here are some pictures from my 3 day backpacking trip I just got back from:

  

(I went with some Chileans I met on the bus)

 my awesome tiny tent!  I got a bunch of high tech backpacking stuff for christmas (like uv water disinfectant, solar panel charger, fire starting gel), and the Chileans keep saying that I have magic.

 

 

And hidrospeeding!!  Imagine rafting, except instead of a raft, a boogey board, full body wet suit, flippers, and of course a helmet!

I am going to rest in Pucon for a couple more days and then keep heading south to the glaciers!

Flamingos, Salt, and Llamas

So I finished up in the desert and here are the last of the pictures.  Millions of years ago, two mountain ranges formed next to each other, trapping a lot of sea water, which evaporated to form a very flat salt plain. 

 And apparently flamingos love this.

And here is me with some flamingos. I was like ¨´hey flamingos´´ and they were like ´´hey jon.´

Interesting fact;  flamingos are only pink because they eat these tiny shrimp that have lots of .. in them, the same thing that makes carrots orange.  If you raise a flamingo at home, it will just be white.  There are only a few hundred thousand left.  Weird things keep interfering with their reproduction habits.   This is a llama named Micheal Jackson (because of the white and the black), who escaped last year and ran into one of the major nesting areas of the flamingos on a cold night and freezing all the eggs.  The Micheal Jackson:

We visited a couple villages in the deserts with population of less than a hundred, so of which are the original settlements founded by the early spanish explorers, and havent changed too much since.  The women play the dominant role, doing all the farming and cattling.   We also went and visited some lagunes.  This is a picture of laguna miscanti :

In the background is the miscanti volcano which is very sacred to the villagers nearby, and no one is allowed to climb it unless you are in tribe, which you can only do by marrying in... so if you really wanted to..

Im heading down south, where there are lots of glaciers and penguins, and I will update soon.
Where I am going right now:  pucon chile

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My First Desert

Most of northern Chile is desert, the driest desert in the world, with some locations never having recorded any rain fall ever. A few days ago, I left Valparaiso on the coast and took a 25 hour bus ride to the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, very close to the border with Bolivia. And while a 25 hour bus ride might sound boring, the bus system in South America is amazing and it was probably the most luxurious time Ill have here. Its a two story bus, and I got the front seat on the 2nd level, so the only thing in front of me was glass and a panoramic view of Chile, and the seats recline all the way, and they feed you!  Here is a picture of my seat at night;

When we entered the desert, I was excited and felt rushed to take pictures, but I felt silly later since the next 20 hours of desert looked the exact same, like this;

 

The bus dropped me off into this small village San Pedro in the middle of the desert with sand roads, sand pretty much everywhere.  The houses are just mud, rocks, and sheet metal.  Here is my hostel;

  

And here is me alone in the desert looking for water; (you kind of have to zoom in to see)

Not really.  I went into the desert with group and tour guide.  Here are some pictures;

  

  

and we climbed this massive sand dune, and on the other side looked dangerously steep and about 100 meters down, and the guide told us to just start walking down, and it was really amazing, because you could run and every time your foot hits the sand it kind of forms a step, so that was fun.  Before we ran down the dune;

  

We then went to an area called Valley of the Moon, which is supposed to be very similar to the surface of the moon, and where NASA tests some of its missions.  The heat causes the rock to crack, so there is all of this erry cracking noise.  The moon;

 

I´ll be here for a week more or so and Ill update soon.