Monthly Archives: September 2024

Unlike Colombia, the latest business trip to Chile turned out to be very rich in tourism: we climbed the Sollipulli volcano, got acquainted with some other sights of Araucania, and had a peek at Lake El Yeso. So far –  so good! But there’s also a “bonus track” – our visit to a ski resort near Santiago.

It’s real close, so off we popped. Not to ski; just to breathe in the mountain air and enjoy the views…

Read on…

There’s a good quantity of natural marvels of a high caliber dotted throughout Chile. Many I’ve already seen down the years and reported on on these here blog pages (for example, the Torres del Paine National Park and the Uspallata/Bermejo Pass/Cumbre Pass), but there are still some that I’ve yet to check out – including the Atacama Desert, and the marble caves at General Carrera Lake.

However, those two are quite far from Santiago – where we’d just finished the working portion of our trip. We needed something nearer. We asked the locals, and the answer came swiftly: the El Yeso reservoir and dam – but only in the summer when the water’s turquoise and the rocks are multicolored. Well that was no good to us here in August – the last month of winter in the southern hemisphere) ->

All the same – we went to have a look…

Now for some technical details…

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Sollipulli volcano – conquered. So what else is interesting around these parts (in the Araucanía Region)?

First, much of the local population is made up of indigenous South Americans – the Mapuche. And you can tell this simply by walking along the bank of a lake here. Different toponomies are also curiously interesting; for example, we passed a road sign with Das Dorf on it: clearly there are plenty of Germans here too…

But for me the main things here are the natural beauty and the meditative views. For example, there’s the Villarrica volcano (named the same as both the lake and town it towers over)…

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After Colombia, next up on our tour of Latin America – Chile. All as per: busy – meetings with partners we’ve been working with for many years and also large clients; new acquaintances, and a few university lectures – since educating specialists for careers in cybersecurity needs to be done as early as possible. University is a little too late; better to start at middle-school level (which we do, but that’s a whole other story). Still – better late than never…

Fortunately, between the working portion of the Colombia visit and that of the Chile visit – weekend! Time for some active tourism. So out came the map of Chile to work out what we could check out in two days. Not that it took long, for as soon as I saw them it was as good as decided: volcanoes!…

That photo is of the caldera (~crater) of the Sollipulli volcano (here). Impressive, eh?

Read on…