As much as anything, the sight of a llama and sheep in the same farmyard represent Chile for me.
We started out our first day with a trek through Chilean temperate rainforest,
one of only three in the world: the other two are the Pacific Northwest and
Tasmania. Being able to see this type of vegetation was one of the reasons
I was so interested in this tour, and
I could have spent a lot more time in the rain forest than we did.
There were a lot of Alerce trees to be seen on this day’s walk. This is
Fitzroya cupressoides, slow growing, with very useful
wood, a tree that now is protected by law, but was extensively cut in the
nineteenth century. It’s Chile’s answer to the redwoods and sequoias
of the U.S. west coast, and we saw some immense stumps, but no living trees of
legendary size. I took these pictures to show the profusion of growth in the
Chilean rain forest, things growing on things growing on things. You can see
an alerce trunk in the extreme left of the left thumbnail picture
(big image; small),
and prominently in the other two here (middle thumbnail
big image; small
and right thumbnail big image; small).
Everywhere you look, there’s something new and different. Here, hanging off
a tree trunk are little ferns, each leaf at most 2 inches long.
Big image; small.
“Hurry up and take the picture, you’re falling behind everybody.”
Big image; small.
We came out of the forest and had a nice lunch at Jorge’s farm. For some reason, I don’t have any pictures from there. A pity—he had a number of interesting things there, such as an enclosure with some pudú, a small native deer.
I took this picture after we had gotten out into open country, as much for the
sky as for the scenery below. In Southern California we mostly have just plain
blue above: not really any kind of sky at all, and so I took endlessly many
pictures of clouds, usually using my camera’s polarizer to deepen the
blue of the sky. Big image;
small.
This is a view I often had: everybody in our group ahead of me. I stopped
frequently to take pictures, or to look at vegetation; and I was slower
than anybody else. This first day of walking had lots of up-and-downs,
and I found myself getting winded. Later, I learned to adjust my stride
to climb the hills more efficiently, and I suppose I got whipped into better
shape, too, so that on the following walks I never got as winded as I
did this day. Big image;
small.
Previous day’s pictures; next day’s pictures
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