June, 2011

We walked on the moon: San Pedro de Atacama
It began with a very unusual event for us: while sleeping in an overnight bus, suddenly, at 2:00 am we wake up and see, that everybody is getting up and gathering their belongings. We are at some kind of check point in the middle of nowhere, as far as we can see, and we notice that everybody has to pick up their luggage and open it for an inspection by some kind of agents. Weird...as we are not crossing any border. Pinochet is dead, but it looks like the system structure remains the same. Apparently, this is a control point to nail smugglers of prohibitive substances? We are back on the bus about 30 minutes later. We arrive in Calama at 4:00 am, and, another weird thing, we are supposed to continue sleeping in the standing, by now quite freezing bus till our connection to San Pedro at 8 am, but get kicked out at 7 am and have to wait outside, as everything around is closed, including the bus station. Finally, at 10 am we are in San Pedro! a little town in the middle of the Atacama Desert and one of the most sought after destination in the northern Chile. From this town wide variety of tours are available through the Atacama desert and the pre-Andean summits. The town is situated in the centre of the most spectacular nature scenery of the region. On the main street tour operators, souvenir shops and restaurants line-up one after the other. Before heading to a higher altitude we decide to stay for a few days at this level to acclimatize, and start by exploring the Valley de la Luna, one of the driest places on the planet and the Valley de la Muerte. WOW! surreal lunar landscapes with sand dunes, incredible rock formations - yes we walked on the moon - sunsets here are spectacular and create a superb changing of color all around us and on the distant ring of volcanoes. After three days of perfect weather we are ready to tackle the higher grounds and higher altitude, although some heavy clouds started to roll in during the night. We begin with the Laguna de Chaxa, a National reserve for flamingos. These birds love the salt flats, don't mind the cold, and are concentrated in one of the biggest lithium reserve in the world. As we continue up, we see something, not many Chileans had ever seen here, snow at 3000m! Our tour guide is quite exited, snapping photos as we drive - none of us are though, as snow flurries and no-visibility forces us to turn around. We see nothing beyond 30 meters. (Yes, even here they are talking about unusual weather patterns.) We don't see the lagoons, we don't see the world's highest geyser field, all the roads to these attractions and Bolivia are closed for at least the next three days. We even experience some rain, although this region receives only 14mm of rain a year, and not at this time! Mother nature has the upper hand. So we had seen what many Chileans had never seen, but we don't see all that we came to see. Maybe we'll be back later.

May, 2011

Exploration of central Chile
It takes some twenty-five hours from Iquique to reach Santiago by bus, and so we took an advantage of quite inexpensive internal flights and hopped on the plane. We had an awesome view from the window of the Andes and could see, if traveling by bus, we would have been going for hours and hours through the brownness of Atacama Desert. Our first destination was Valparaiso, only 120 km from Santiago. It's a charming city, with many hills (42 of them!), a maze of steep streets, stairways piled high with colorful, often crumbling mansions, covered with graffiti, that the locals are quite proud of, as they are of the fondness Pablo Neruda, the poet, had of this place. (By-the-way, Pablo Neruda took his name from the Czech poet Jan Neruda, not because he admired his poetry, but because he took fancy to that name!) To explore the wine routes, one either has to take very expensive tours, or rent a car, which we did and headed for the best established wine region called Colchagua Valley. We drove through a beautiful autumn scenery, low hills lined with row upon row of vines, the sun shinning through falling leaves, colors of nature indescribable. This is the time of harvest and so the best time to visit and taste some wine. We took a fancy to Carmenere red, one of the wines produced here and recommended by Chileans. On the first day of Easter weekend, and that was the only day we had some rain, we drove to the coast to visit unofficial surf capital Pichilemu. That was also the only place where it was quite chilly and we couldn't but admire the brave surfers in the freezing ocean, and although they wore wetsuits, they had no gloves or hoods and, many of them bare foot, while the watching Chileans, or tourists were shivering in winter jackets and boots. After two days we turned around and headed to the mountains, to one of the favorite weekends destination for Santiaguinos, to Cajon (canyon) Maipu, where we spent the rest of the week in a beautiful, private nature reserve, where we could easily hike on their property, which included some water falls as well. The last week we toured Santiago and felt for the first time, this is a town we could live in. Modern, creative, green, less hectic than other big South American cities we had seen so far - we were sorry to finish our stay there. Now we are back in Iquique, where the whole town is getting spruced up for May 21, celebrating the Battle of Iquique of 1879 and Naval glories in Chilean military history. Workers are washing windows, painting flag posts, polishing bronze plaques, cleaning bird shit from statues, practicing marches and decorating the city in general. We'll be part of this celebration, as they asked us to sail with Nikan out of the harbour (at 6:30 AM!) to welcome with other local sailboats Esmeralda, the 113 m long brigantine of four masts, the training ship for Chilean Navy. Should be fun!

March, 2011

Iquique (northern Chile)
We are late in updating our blog, but we haven't had a decent Internet until now, here in Iquique, in the hemisphere, where the seasons are opposite to yours. From Lima we motor-sailed along this incredibly arid coast and it took us one week to get to Arica, the first Chilean town, averaging about four knots (7.5 km/hr), against light winds and at times strong current. We didn't stop along the coast, since Peruvian authorities are extremely difficult to deal with and the fees are outrageous (entry and exit in any port in Peru, $900 US minimum). But what a dramatic, barren coast!, and although desertic, we have never tired from looking at it - the light changes during the day paint these hills in all spectrum of colour. From Arica we took a tour to Lauca national park and we reached 4500m driving through some stunning scenery in approximately three hours! which made all of us, tourists, quite queasy and breathless (headache, tired, loss of appetite), and although they served us nice “almuerzo (lunch)”, only the young ones were able to consume it. J-P didn't smoke the entire day - and that is something! After Arica we moved to Iquique with a day stop in the bay of Pisagua. Here in Chile it's an entirely different feeling from Peru, the authorities here are very cruiser friendly, with a well organized safety maritime control, which we had a chance to experience during the tsunami alert. We never felt a thing, since we spent it out at sea drifting with all the cargo ships and some fishing boats for 24 hr, but on our return were told, the sea raised by 2m and some of the fishing boats that stayed in the port suffered damage. We are presently in the driest desert on this planet, land of dust, rocks and steep hills, as well as by surfer friendly beaches with quite a cold ocean. From here we went to visit old nitrite mining towns, now ghost towns, with stops in oasis villages and by the slopes with geoglyphs from many years ago. It's quite unbelievable, that already from around 7000 BC this land was inhabited and cultures prospered for all these years in this inhospitable environment. Originally we were going to winter in Valparaiso, but after speaking with many locals, we were convinced to stay up north for this coming winter, since here we are out of the storm area and the sun and the warm weather is guaranteed all year long. So our plan for the next six months, with a base here, is to visit Chile by land, as well as Bolivia, Argentina and eventually pay a visit to Canada as well.

January, 2011

Yacht Club Peruano, Calleo (suburb of Lima)
At New Year we toasted all of you from Paita, Peru, where we anchored for a rest after zigzagging around Cabo Blanco for two days (two days - 60 miles – a new record in snail pace for Nikan!). This time the weather and the sea were much calmer, also it was considerably warmer than at our first attempt in September, which is winter in this part of the planet. After that it was mostly smooth sailing, motor-sailing, with a rest at Bayovar and Isla Lobos Afuera, a tiny taste of Galapagos, minus tortoises. Lima underwent incredible change for better since our last visit some 20+ years ago. Renewed urbanization amazes J-P, while I still can't get over how clean this city is with parks almost around every corner, the cleanest place since Cuba. Lots of outdoor cafes remind us of St-Denis or Crescent street – wow, what a treat, espresso machine in every one of them! The yacht club, where we secured a safe mooring, with water taxi at our disposal is a very friendly place, and is also located in a very safe area. Although we are not far from equator, and in full summer here, it gets quite chilly as soon as the sun disappears behind clouds or the horizon. Of course nothing like the brutal cold that awaits us in Canada, where both of us are flying to visit and take care of our parents. We will resume our navigation south around mid February, while it's still summer here, before autumn blows in even more cold air and harsh winds. Hasta luego, amigos!

December, 2010

Nikan's renovation is completed!
For the past two months I had been reminded of what I definitely do not miss from my working life, and that's an alarm clock, in my case J-P, who goes to bed and gets up with chickens! It's been quite hard to function in all the mess of renovation, and at the same time to have two more people around (in 33 ft boat), marine carpenter and his helper, who showed up at 8 a.m. exactly, 6 days a week (yes, people here work Saturday!), and took over the interior of Nikan, usually for the whole day. But now, all is done and we are very happy with the result. We are planning to be on our way by the 27th of December and will toast you all, hopefully from the calm sea, January 1st, 2011!

November, 2010

Nikan is 30 years old: now with a new interior!
After two weeks in Puerto Lucia, J-P woke up one morning and announced we are going to remodel Nikan's interior. (I knew something was brewing in his brain, since for days he has been staring at nothing and everything with a dreamy expression on his face.) Two months later, after six sheets of Formica, three liters of varnish, one liter of polyurethane paint, two and a half sheets of plywood, 30 linear feet of different shape moldings and hours and hours of sanding, Nikan's interior is starting to look as we imagined. Stewart Yacht Services provided us with the manpower: one very, very shy carpenter with slow, but golden hands (don't even have guts to take my camera out, let alone to ask him if I can take his picture!) and his helper, both of them working without stop, starting 8 am., half an hour for lunch, till 5 pm., no coffee breaks as we are used to, no brakes at all (majority of people don't drink here coffee anyway, even though it's one of Ecuador's major export - and if they do, it's an instant kind). J-P assists daily with various tasks, sometimes I pitch in as well, although my main function remains typical of a woman: meals preparation, vacuuming, swiping...etc. It has been busy, busy eight weeks. Unfortunately J-P has to fly back to Montreal, since his father is quite ill, so I'll try to step into his shoes as a project manager and we'll be on our way as soon as possible, since our visas are expiring shortly.

September, 2010

How we left for Chile and ended up in Ecuador, Puerto Lucia, Libertad.
Although being three months earlier than the recommended time to take this passage to Chile, we made a try by the coastal route. Unfortunately, the conditions around Cabo Blanco (Peru) with waves of 2-3 m, with interval of 3-5 seconds, with the cold Humboldt current (nights were freezing, had to put winter gear on, including warm hat!) and the wind against us as well, we didn't progress very fast, sometimes, loosing ground as well. After nine hours of patiently waiting for conditions to improve, we took the decision to go back 120 miles of 220 miles we already covered, this time with the wind in the back, which made for some really pleasant sailing. After five days at anchor, debating each day the departure, we decided to put into Puerto Lucia Yacht Club for three months and try again in December, when the sea is supposedly calmer, less wind and less cold, as this will bring us to the beginning of summer in this hemisphere. It's a very comfortable private club, with big swimming pool, well equipped gym room, everything we need close by. Salinas, few km away, is the summer playground of the wealthy Ecuadorians, right now quite deserted, as it's the winter season here. We will hit the road again, as there are many places in this beautiful country we still didn't cover. Overall, no complain from this crew of two!