Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys Discover a Saint on a Bus in the Mountains

I´m just gonna try and create outlandish titles that are quasi-legitimate.

The Mountains

I decided to go camping in an area known for it´s overall safety: Cajon del Maipo. It was only the location for the 1986 assassination attempt on Pinochet by the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front.
Wait a minute. Yep. The group was named the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front. Chileans might not be the best at some things, but they take the cake on naming leftist insurgencies. IRA, you´ve got nothing on these guys! Obviously they didn´t kill the dictator. I mean he is still living today and currently going through tax evasion and money laundering charges.

Cajon del Maipo is a large area southeast of Santiago about an hour. It was formerly known for plentiful silver mines and now houses many roadside fossil stands. Oh the times, they are a changing. The area also houses Monumento Natural El Morado - our destination, just off the road from Baños Morales, a small town with some hot springs that we failed to try. To translate, that´s The Purple Natural Monument. Although it doesn´t inspire fear it is a very cool place.

I went with Danielle, Chrissie and Lisbeth. I wanted to make sure I had the equipment and strength to take a longer trip next week, so this was a bit of an exercise. An exercise in me carrying way the hell more than I should have because Lisbeth doesn´t have a pack!

That thing in the background is the big Purple at sunset. The picture doesn´t do it justice. It was quite fantastic. And freezing.



A steep but short hike of about an hour brought us to the camping site. Since it´s still early spring we couldn´t make it all the way to the heralded lagoon up near the glacier San Francisco. It was still under snow. So we stopped at one of the few areas that was not a bog from the melting snow.

And since I had carried a ton of crap, I had no problem letting them set up one of the tents.



So what could have been a horribly cold night turned out to be just a pretty cold night. Last week at some point I was rooting around our attic and discovered that we had several thicker, better sleeping bags than the ones Scott and I employed two weekends ago. The weekend after which I was sick! I was mortified and elated to come to the realization. So we used a few of my family´s sleeping bags (I borrowed a really good one from another guy in our program) and I brought along every warm thing I own. This turned out to be great because the girls hadn´t brought very much, so we all shared a little of my clothing, but I made sure I got first dibs.

So then Lisbeth cooked on my new, cheap camping stove that I bought from Jumbo (which is like 10 posts all in itself. 4 words: Puts Wal-Mart to Shame!), and Danielle and I switched off playing guitar.



The sunset was nice. The moonrise was anything I hadn´t anticipated seeing in the middle of the night, but Danielle and I woke up at just the right moment because we thought something was running around outside of our tent. There was no way I was getting out of my sleeping bag for a better look at it, though. And an early start allowed me to take a hike and see some of the sunrise, too.



I like animals. But girls have something weird when it comes to horses. Lisbeth wants to rent a ride any time she sees one, and Danielle attacked several local ones like three or four times. By attacked I mean she would wade through glacial runoff sogged fields to interrupt their grazing and jump on their backs. Luckily, they were well-mannered horses and took her for rides after all the trouble she went through.

We stashed our bags and hiked for several hours. Danielle went swimming in what had to be some of the coldest water on earth. At that point in the day I still couldn´t feel my hands because I had washed the dishes the night before, so I imagine by tomorrow she might feel her body again. We were several of very few people up in the park, so it was wonderful.

Chrissie and Danielle taking one of several rides.



Lisbeth looking like she should be in a Bond movie or something rough and cool.



As if the trip hadn´t been cool enough by that point, it just had to get better. We had taken buses as far as we could on the way in and then hitched several rides to make it up to Baños Morales. However, on the way down we were amazingly luckily. We walked one kilometer...maybe, and then the cavalry arrived. We hitched a ride with 2 people whose names I never got, but who will long be remember as Los Santos Morados. They took us to within 2 blocks of my home. TWO BLOCKS. Santiago has roughly 6 million people. Chances that we will hitch a ride of roughly 60 or 70 miles with people who live 5 minutes from me? About a snowball´s chance in hell. It was amazing. And saved so much time on the return because we didn´t have to wait at three bus stops and 2 metro stops like on the way there. So they capped off a great trip.

Me enjoying the hitch. I only stayed in the back for about 20 minutes. The following hour had the four of us crammed in the back seat of the truck, but I am not complaining!



The Saint

Probably just around the time that I was watching the moon rise, much of Chile was awake to watch the live announcement of the Catholic canonization of Padre Alberto Hurtado live from Rome. At either the beginning or end of each Year of the Eucharist (I guess with a cyclical calendar the beginning and end are roughly the same day if not a day apart at most!), the Catholic Church likes to create more saints to be patrons over things. So Chilean Alberto Hurtado was one of 5 on Sunday. It´s been huge news since I´ve been here and almost 10,000 Chileans were in Rome for the announcement. This means that Chile now has two saints: Hurtado and St. Teresa de los Andes. I don´t know her story, but Hurtado died around 1950 and was really well-known. He opened several houses for the poor in Santiago and was apparently a pretty nice guy. There are many rules in becoming a saint and Hurtado passed with flying colors. You have to perform X amount of miracles; he did that without any problems. Just stuff like that. He saved a few people, blessed a few things, your normal saintly sort of heroics.

The big question now is whether the street "Padre Hurtado" will remain as is or be changed to the new "San Alberto Hurtado." Hopefully people won´t let something insignificant like street naming or homosexual marriage swing the presidential election in December. But just wait...who knows!

On that note, the campaigning is beginning. I think there are 6 candidates, but only 2 matter: Michelle on the left and Lavin on the right. Michelle (whose last name I don´t know) is the favored candidate. She runs for the socialist party pretty much, although distinctions aren´t super clear. The election is early December.

The Bus

Santiago is in the first week of introducing the new TranSantiago system. This unfortunately means that the frightening old, yellow micros will be no more. They have already provided many an exciting ride to school! The new system is trying to use all cards, less cash, and intergrate all of the many bus and train routes through Santiago. The new buses are huge. Some are regular, but the only noticeable ones are the doubles. They are so long, and very slow I discovered today. The drivers seem to have orders to make these new ones last, so they are properly stopping, turning, accelerating, etc. It was horrible. The trip home took forever, and we didn´t even come close to having an accident. I´ll try to use them as little as possible!

I´m gonna try to be an entrepreneur. There are tons of vendors who hop on and off of the buses. You name it, they sell it - or so I thought. Most of it is actually small snacks, drinks, pens, purses, band-aids...stuff like that. But I have found my niche. I am going to import tons of tiny bottles of that clear, anti-bacterial stuff. Then, I´ll get on buses with these other vendors and say things like "This guy who is trying to sell you ice cream, I just saw him use the bathroom." and "Look at the old, dilapidated seats you´re sitting on. Thousands of other hands have touched the pole you´re clinging to." And then the kicker, "I have anti-bacterial hand ointment in convenient little bottles. 100 pesos."

I would be living the good life!

Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys

Remember those detective books you read in about 5th grade? I sure do, because I just finished their Spanish equivalent. When you realize that you´re reading something that is at a very low level it´s somewhat demoralizing. But in my case, I didn´t really discover that until about the last 10 pages! I read Nunca Enamores a un Forastero for my class. (Never Fall in Love with a Foreigner) Its mere 173 pages were daunting at first, but it became pretty easy to read. It was a little detective flick starring Heredia, who is Nancy Drew´s South American counterpart. He sleuths many a mysterious clue.

It can´t be good if I can catch major flaws in a story written in something other than my first language. So it was fun, now it´s over, and tomorrow I have to write a 5 page paper about it. I also have 2 tests Wednesday, so tomorrow will not be fun.

I haven´t finalized my departure plans yet, but Thursday or Friday I will begin my week break my taking either a train or bus about 20 hours south to Puerto Montt. From there I will hopefully camp in several national parks, visit the island of Chiloe, and make my way back through the Lake District of Argentina. But we´ll see how much plans have to change.