Sledding down glaciers

O.k. I know it has been a long time since posting a blog and I have had to change my blog address to mainevagabonder instead of mainevagabond@blogspot.com.  I have a good reason other than just being too busy, which has been true;  traveling throughout 4 countries in South America is hard work but also great fun.   I will start with the reason for the change of address.  Like so many travelers in my country and elsewhere, I was the victim of a robbery while awaiting a bus transfer in the middle of the night in a funky, chaotic town of Calama, chile.   I was the perfect victim as I was exhausted, suffering from. 13 hr bus trip and some altitude sickness,  surrounded by a throng of bus passengers.   My small pack had my lap top, cell phone, all my passwords including the one for my blog, some credit cards and miscellaneous stuff.   I fumed and felt sorry for myself all the way to my next stop and then had an epiphany that it was only things I lost and most could be replaced except of course the photos on my cell phone.   So I arrived at the surfing resort town of Arica, chile and bought a small iPad mini so I could get my email and make our skype calls and got onto the business of having more fun adventures.

So that let's you know why I have changed my blog address and one reason why I haven't posted in so long.  I will attempt to catch you up since my last posting in Argentina, although it is short on detail as I lost my journal as well.  

Kasia, gilly and I all arrived at the town of Villarrica, Chile, where we intended to climb the Volcano Villarrica located about half an hour awAy in a cute town of Pucon.   The town of Villarrica had been greatly damaged after the 2010 earthquake and was larger, more congested than Pucon.  We had a nice hostel overlooking the large lake by the same name.   It was run by a German ex Pan Amrican fighter and his lawyer son.   We had an interesting conversation about the number of Germans that came to both Chile and Argentina after world war ll.  the lawyer attempted to distinguish the SS officers and the Gestapo and how his father being an officer was less culpable in the atrocities that took place in Na8 controlled Germany.   Amazing how much Germanic influence there is especially in the lakes district of both Argentina and Chile.

Thanks to Kasia again we arranged our tour, the only way to hike the volcano, for early the next morning.   When we arrived at Pucon, we were fitted for shoes, jackets and pants as well as given gloves, helmet, sled, ice ax and crampons.   Our tour included a number of young people from Israel.  We drove to where we would take a ski lift cutting off about 1000 ft of climbing; we started our hike up the 2847m volcano lead by 3 guides.   The terrain was lava rock and sand up until we got to the glacier.  We traversed in a switchback manner instead of  straight up.    There is no vegetation at all on the  volcano and nothing to keep the earth from sliding down the volcano in a landslide and you
along with it; we heard tales of tourists who were not as lucky as we were.      We stopped every once in a while for a break; the air was getting thinner as we got closer to the glacier and I suffered from some altitude sickness, making it increasingly harder for me to catch my breath.  One of the guides was nice enough to give me an assist so I could keep up.   Once we got to the glacier, we donned our crampons thankfully, making you feel at least more secure.    We finally reached the top, with the clouds obscuring much of the view below; however we managed to get peaks of the far off landscape
 below.   We took a myriad of pictures and glanced over the rim of the now quiet crater.   Often steam is erupting from the crater.  

Now for the fun part; we were instructed to get in our waterproof gear and affix our saucer shaped disks between our legs to sled down.   The paths where we would be sledding we're slick with the
countless others who had gone before us.  The sides were often banked making the sledder at times tip up on their side but still feel secure despite traveling at fast speeds; without the banked sides there would be little keeping one from going hurdling down over the edge with the exception of your ice ax, which we were instructed to use as an anchor just in case we did lose control.   Each one of us would take turns sledding over hills and bumps; if you braked too much with your feet or ice ax, the next sledder would surely bump into you, which happened to me several times but I also got to try that out too.    We all felt like kids at a crazy Disney ride.  Once the glacier ended we put away our gear and made a fairly quick descent using a forward skating  motion on the gravelly terrain.   You would get going so fast that you would stir up a cloud of glacier dust.

Once we returned to Pucon, we enjoyed some refreshments with our wonderful guides.  Clearly the Volcano was one of the highlights of our South American trip.