Back in Arica

Hello, and thank you for your patience!


What I failed to mention in my last post about Putre is that it is located at 3500 meters. For those of you who, like myself, have no point of reference when it comes to altitude, that's high up! Naturally, our director Rossana wanted to make sure that none of us experienced altitude sickness during the drive up, so rather than go directly from point A to point B, we stretched the 2 1/2 hour trip from Arica to Putre over the course of 5 hours. We also chewed "hoja de coca," which happens to be same plant that cocaine comes from. I was a little skeptical at first that chewing on a leaf would actually help the pressure in my head, but it did-- and almost instantaneously. So we may have dabbled in illicit drugs, but on the bright side, no one threw up! 


The altitude does have it's advantages, and one of them is a sky so clear and blue and beautiful that you don't even care that tilting your head back to look at it makes you a little dizzy. I tried to take pictures of the sky, but my pictures don't do justice to the real thing. If Elisa were here, I'm sure she could've done something way more artistic. Instead, here are a few of my amateurish shots.

Most of these pictures are from the last day of our trip, when we visited
the highest lake in the word, Lago Chungara.

To be honest, I don't know the name of this mountain. But I will find out!

How gorgeous is this!

That would be a llama and alpaca crossing sign

Just one of the many beautiful sunsets

A dip in the "piscina" (pool)  before getting into the hot springs

I am on the left wearing sunglasses

While we were "bathing" Rossana, Veronica, and Leo were preparing lunch for us--
they even brought peanut butter and whole wheat bread because they know how we
gringos love that stuff (of course they can't understand why!)