December 27, 2010

It was Monday, we had all our luggage and we were once agin fully equipped. What a great feeling! The goal of the day was the Arrayanes Forest National Park. July had decided to join us and we drove down to the port of Villa La Angostura to catch the catamaran (on the right):

There were a few nice boats down there:

The sailing boat reminded us of the pictures we had seen from our friend Sarah´s wedding in Villa La Angostura. I immediately sent her a text message and asked where it was exactly they got married. She responded immediately, probably  from Washington DC. It turned out she got married about half a mile from where we are staying. A place that is visible from the catamaran:

She also told us that we had to take a walk in the cinnamon colored forest. We did not immediately understand what she was referring to.

The catamaran ride is a slow ride with detours and explanations by a Spanish-speaking guide. It took us about an hour to reach our destination:

Viktor got his daily war painting:

July:

There are lots of very nice houses on the shore of the lake:

On arrival:

Isn´t this a cool photo?:

we relaxed a bit on the beach

and Iseline and Adrian went swimming:

They did not complain about the temperature of the water and I was both surprised and impressed when I again used my watch to measure the temperature of the water:

12.4 C (55 F) in the water in summer would be cold even for Norway. When I was a kid 12 C was the limit for when we would jump in the water to go swimming. 12 C is about where we guys are no longer able to find our equipment in the bushes when we go to the restroom. If you do enter such a state, by free will or by falling into cold water, the trick is to lure it out with a sugar cube and then quickly grab it with a pair of very small tweezers.

Afterwards we had lunch nearby with a nice view of the lake. We now undestood what Sarah had meant with “cinnamon colored forest”

There was a boardwalk path (which was a real one and not an amusement park, like in Santa Cruz ) through the forest. It was very beautiful:

Last chance to go to the restroom before we started our trek back to Villa La Angostura. Iseline carried the backpacks while waiting for mom:

I have recently purchased an app for my iPhone which has so far blown my socks away. What it does is simple to explain, yet very impressive for a computer scientist like me. The application constantly shows you what is captured by the iPhone´s camera, In real-time it does OCR (TLA for Optical Character Recognition), translates any text it finds from Spanish to English and then replaces the text it has found with the translated text in the image itself. It´s just like a babelfish, but for the eye instead of the ear.

I tried it out in the restroom. Here you can see how it works:

It does a word-by-word translation, and it seldom gets them all correct, but that´s normally all you need for signs, restaurant menus etc. Isn´t that great? The future IS here, it is just unevenly distributed.

The sign it has translated here should be well known to any South American tourist. Most sewage pipe systems in South America are very narrow. This means that toilet paper will clog them. I have also been told that there are grinders installed many places that cut your droppings into small pieces so they can pass.

Not throwing toilet paper in the toilet is a major cultural barrier to cross. All my life I have been tossing it into the white bowl without thinking twice. It is very, very difficult to stop this behavior every single time you have finished using a piece of toilet paper. The result is that I´m sorry to say that we have clogged several commodes on this trip with the accompanying embarrassment of telling the owners about our inappropriate behavior. Shameful and humiliating.

We entered the enchanted forest:

We were not there yet. 13 km is a little over 8 miles.

If I understood the guide on the catamaran correctly, the people from Disney were here in this forest many years ago to make sketches for the forest in Snow White.

The first 2 km were difficult. Iseline had decided she did not want to hike today and motivating her was a challenge. There was no way back now, the catamaran had returned and we had to walk back to Villa La Angostura. For every kilometer there was a marker showing us how far we were from town:

It was just before the 11 km mark that I got the idea. We had brought some chocolate for everyone and I quickly calculated how I should distribute this by now very valuable currency. I told the kids there would be a piece of chocolate for everyone at 9, 6, 3 and 0 km. Not only was there now chocolate to be looked forward to, there was a game to be played. Who could reach the chocolate points first?

Iseline changed attitude completely. She livened up, went from grumpy to happy and started running! She more or less ran the last 11 km, no kidding. I had a hard time following her and the two of us were soon well ahead of the others. We waited at each chocolate point and as soon as her ration was consumed she started running again.

Just before the 5 km mark we discovered that she had left some of her clothes at the 6 km mark. I turned around immediately and told her to wait while I fetched them for her. She said “no dad, I´ll get them, I´m very fast you know” and off she went. Here she is, returning to me after a 2 km (over a mile) run:

A seasoned wanderer:

We got some great views of the lake towards the end:

It took us pretty exactly 4 hours to do the 13 km (8 miles) hike, chocolate pauses included. The first two km took about an hour and Iseline had done a total of 15 km.

On the map to the right you can see the peninsula with the Arrayanes forest.

Our trek:

The altitude curve of the hike:

Ah, back at the starting point.

In the evening we wanted to invite our friends to the restaurant in the hotel where Sarah got married. We drove over there only to find out that today the restaurant was reserved for the guests of the hotel. Oh well, at least we got to see the outside:

We found a restaurant in town instead and had a great meal:

However we soon found out this wasn´t the best night to bring the kids to a restaurant. We arrived at about 10pm and the kids were very tired after the hike.

There was no problem getting them to bed afterwards.

Eirik

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