Contrasts

Today we really got to see many different sides of Chile.

We woke up in sunny Vicuna and had a long breakfast and then very slowly packed our stuff together as we enjoyed the morning sun and waited for some laundry to dry.

Heading out to the coast we stopped to have a walk on the massive dam just west of Vicuna. It's an impressive construction and beautiful to see all that water in the middle of a lanscape that is very close to being a desert. Here we also tasted Copao(?) which is the fruit that grows on cactus. We also had some juice from fresh fruit that was almost destryed from too much of the Chilean-never-ending-love for sugar.

We reached the coastal city La Serena just after noon and stopped for lunch. It's an hectic city with quite a lot of traffic. The advantage though of driving in a bigger city is that one-way streets are marked on the GPS and that makes it a whole lot easier.

After having walked around the central plaza for a while we felt like a coffe and a tea. Chile have no cafe culture and it's a bit of a gamle to set your foot into something that is branded cafe. There is no such thing as order at the counter and that makes just having a quick coffee into a bigger project. Anyhow, we got our coffee and tea together with a massive piece of cake. We were a bit sceptical towards the cake because we had a similar one on the night we got food poison and we are not sure if it was from the food or the cake.

We left La Sarena around 16 and started to drive south. As the motorway followed the coastline the ocean simply looked to inviting so we drove off the panamericana highway at a no-name little town along the way. We dipped our feet in the cold pacific water and then enjoyed a fresh melon in the sun (sugarless).

In the late afternoon we reached our goal for the day. Termas de Socos is located at the end of a 2km gravel road off the highway. It's a place with thermal baths and the whole place is surrounded by nothing but sand, rocks and cactus. We took a walk in the cool Lucky Luke western landscape and then prepared dinner. When it got dark we watched the stars while eating some chocolate that had melted in the car when it was parked in the sun.

Czesc rodzinka! Blog mozna latwo przetlumaczyc poprzez www.translate.google.com - wystarczy skopiowac adres strony (http://www.almostneverlost.blogspot.com) i wkleic na stronie Google Translate. W ustawieniach wybrac trzeba jezyk( z ang. na pol.). Caluski Ania