Set off on another sunny windless morning (must be a record for here) and decided to explore a section of road that passed the start of a footpath up Cerro Lopez in the hope of finding a cabana as close as possible. Luckily, we found a beautiful spot about 3km from the path with a view across a grassy clearing to the mountain itself. They had space and, amazingly, it was just $125.00 (£21.00)……the same price as the mouse infested, gritty, wind lashed camping spot in Torres del Paine! We watched competitors, returning from a route taking in the 4 refugios on Cerro Lopez & Catedral, covered in dust and in various states of exhaustion. It was quite a big event with a film crew and crowds of people. We took our netbook to take advantage of the wi-fi in the local restaurant and only managed to return one e-mail before we had the frustrating problem of typing out replies, only for the’ session expired’ warning to appear after we hit the send button. This happened 5 times before we gave up…it may have been that local traffic was very high after yesterday’s earthquake? We returned to our little cabin and watched the 24 hour coverage of the earthquake on all the local new channels. It looked much worse than we had imagined and we were shocked to see places we had cycled through along the coast badly damaged. We hoped the people we had met in the beach resort of Maintencillo were OK. The cabanas were only 20m back from the shore and the lovely café terrace, where we had sat on Boxing day chatting to the friendly owner, was almost on the beach. Valparaiso and Vina Del Mar had also suffered damage despite the distance from the epicenter.
Back to our Cabana.
