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….. means that the smog is bad. Despite two days of downpour, the first decent rain of the year, the smog doesn’t seem to have cleared much. For one day it seemed to be clearer, but last saturday we went hiking just outside the city. Chile only has two sorts of hike - completely flat or zig-zagging up a steep mountain. Needless to say Douglas prefers the latter, so once again we found ourselves at the peak of a mountain after a 2500ft climb, looking down over Santiago. We know it was Santiago because we couldn’t see it - in fact we couldn’t see anything except a thick layer of yellow-brown “cloud”. Still, you have to look on the bright side - with all the pollution the sunset was truly spectacular!

Pretty slow if you’re an aircraft, but you can do this from Santiago by car and on foot! And thats exactly what we did one afternoon after i finished my CRE work at 12.30. The mountain is called La Parva, with an extension to El Pintor afterwards.

The road from Santiago is well known as death road. Actually, its called the road to Farrellones and has a famous 40 zig-zag curves which gets quite dizzying! This road takes you to the ski resorts of La Parva, Colorado and Valle Nevado and then, with a bit of scary high altitude gravel road driving, you can reach the top ski lift station from where you start walking. This is at a head spinning 3300m. You feel the thin air as you start walking at normal pace, quickly realising that you can’t maintain that for more than 5 minutes without a trip to hospital!

So here our pics of the climb. Unfortunately, we didn’t get our camera out quickly enough to capture a passing Andean Condor which flew past us as we reached the main ridge leading to the summit. An amazingly graceful bird with a wingspan roughly equalling the length of a car, this was a real highlight. The rest of the scenery, looking east to El Pintor and, a whole munro above that, to El Plomo (the lead mountain), and south east across the Cordillera to Argentina is absolutely incredible!

All in an afternoon’s work eh?!

Yes, i put some code in here…..

No. Oh well. Piggleslop. I tried and failed to post a map of the countries i’ve visited to the blog.

I’m an idiot. Say no more.

The return trip to Santiago from the UK…. ugly view. I could fly over this every day and never get bored!

In the style of Private Eye

Lookalike
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Doug Gilmour………………………………….Dave Gilmour

Shame my musical talents don’t compare!