Resumen 1: El Resto del tiempo con mi padre

Although 'Day 2' in San Pedro de Atacama has been on the top of my blog for six months, we did not actually get lost in the desert for that long. Call off all search parties! What we actually did after 'Day 2' was crash early and get up at 4 a.m. to see El Tatio Geysers, the highest volcanic hotspot of its type in the world (for comparison's sake, Yellowstone is a comparable hotspot, but at MUCH lower altitude). El Tatio is essentially a field of geysers. There must be at least 50 of these things in a square mile, and they shoot mainly steam with a little bit of water. Unlike lame tourist attractions in the U.S., here they let you get right up to the geysers and peer inside!! (although I'm more in agreement of the conservationally-superior, safer practices followed by the park rangers in the States).



My dad posing with some sweet geysers. After the sun rises, much of the steam goes away and the cool war-torn-desert effect kind of wears off.



We also were lucky enough to see about 50 vicuna in a field on the bus ride back to S.P. de Atacama. These guys are related to llama, but wild. And, yeah, if I lived in the middle of the Atacama Desert, I'd probably find a nice stream to hang around, too.


And apparently, they often stand on rocks!! I posited that this guy was their leader.

After the trip to El Tatio, we hitched an overnight bus ride back to La Serena (on Salon Cama...the deluxe bus with seats that recline almost the whole way...definitely worth the cost for a 13-hour bus ride!). We stayed a couple days there, and my dad said his goodbyes to Serena and we headed down the coast to Valparaiso, the biggest port south of Lima, Peru. Valpo (as Chilenos call it) is a blue-collar city & very beautiful. It lies on a bay surrounded by hills....which are covered in amazingly-built houses that seem like they will fall over at any moment, and are beautifully colored. They also have some SICK bars in valpo. There's a street called Subida Ecuador that has about 50 bars. We were there on a tuesday night, and still about 8 bars were open practically all night. I went with my dad to a bar that served these surprisingly-tasty $1 shots called 'Sacrificio Maya' (mayan sacrifice).


Rockin' the Bachelet t-shirt & watching the sunset between Vina and Valpo. Bachelet is the first woman president of South America.....more on that later!

We also did some exploring of Vina del Mar, which is the white-collar (and lame) neighbor to Valpo. It's like gringolandia in chile...everything's expensive, everyone's rich, the beaches are packed solid, and all the cuicos (=lame overly-rich people) think it's cool to summer there. Anyway, i don't have too much love for Vina...valpo is sooo much cooler. But we did have a nice wine and dine on the beach in Vina. After a couple days on the coast, it was time for dad to head back to the US (he was back in June for a few weeks, too!)... It was great exploring a different country with my dad, and i'm really glad I put off a lot of my travelling until he came. It made exploring all those new sights that much better!



Jeez...more walking up hills!! I'm sure my dad slept for a week when he got back to the States!



Overlooking Valparaiso. The walk up that enormous hill was well worth it!!

A little update!

So, my bad for not posting for a few months!! Things got pretty crazy (crazy fun!) in Chile the last, oh, 6 months! I finished out my 10 month Fulbright grant in June and have been back in the States since. Ended up doing some great research in Chile, modeling planetary nebulae and attempting to quantify light pollution in northern Chile. I got to use data from the biggest optical telescope in the world (!) and had a chance to observe 4 nights for a really cool project to calibrate microwave background radiation data! Also met a ton of great people down there & it was very sad to leave so many friends behind. For now, we're doing a pretty good job staying in touch, and hopefully that will continue. I definitely want to go back ASAP to visit my friends and finish up some work that needs tidying up.

Right now I'm in Pittsburgh, about a month into my grad program in Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University. It is going well so far. I have a very nice apartment about 2 miles from campus (and better yet, about 100 feet from the bus stop!). The work has been demanding, but not overly-hard thus far. Have also met some cool students in the department, and we go out and blow off some steam every now and then (a necessary activity to maintain sanity!).

In the next few posts, I'll try to summarize the rest of my time in Chile (plus side trips to Brazil and Peru). Unfortunately, my camera died in March, and I have very few pictures of my last 3 months. But fortunately, Canon fixed it for free when I got back to the US!! I'll leave you with a few pictures from this weekend's activities (which entailed celebrating the completion of our first grad school exam!).


Gary and I are the two Californians in the department. We're dreading the winter, and are both seriously concerned about our survival of the snowy months.



For some horrible reason, we decided to torture all bar-goers by singing karaoke on Friday night.



And of course, there's always time for some beer-brewing!!!