Baños Morales

Last week, we took the Adventure Van, aka the Ballena Blanca (BB), aka White Whale, we're still trying it out, for her first journey out! The seat belts and A/C installation was complete, so it was time to hit the road before school started the following week. We mostly wanted to spend time in the Van itself and get a feel for her, figure out what organizational improvements could be made, test out the systems inside, etc. So we stayed relatively close to home, just in case things went sideways. We drove up the Cajón del Maipo, which is a beautiful valley about 2 hours southwest of the city, to the tiny town of Baño Morales. It's about an hour of city driving as we live on the north edge of town, and an hour of windy, mountain driving where you follow a glacier melt river. We learned two lessons quite quick on our trip out. 1. We needed a latch on the fridge door. One tight turn about 3/4 up led to my milk and a few other items falling out onto the floor and making a mess. 2. Emerson gets car sick when he's facing backwards for a long period of time on windy roads. Luckily he gave us enough warning, and we had a trashcan in close proximity, so the meses was thankfully contained. So for now, Avery gets the backwards facing seat, but we might have to switch them back and forth depending on how windy the road is, or squeeze them both on the same bench to get them both looking forward. So, the trip started with a few bumps. But once we arrived at our destination, which was a parking lot at the entrance to a private park towards the top of the valley just outside of Baño Morales, things started looking up. First, we were the only people parking/camping in that lot the entire 3 days/2 nights we were there. The SUV you see actually belonged to a local villager in Baño Morales, and it didn't run, so we literally had the place to ourselves. Granted, we were there mid-week, and apparently in the height of summer on a weekend, there can be 100 people a day coming to this park to hike. But not this time. Second, the park is staffed by a private park ranger 24/7, and the ranger on duty while we were there is our new favorite person. His name is Nico, and he was staying in a little hut right next to us. The hut was great as it provided shade (the van doesn't have an awning or anything so you have to go inside for substantial shade), and it had bathrooms. We might be on the look out for a shade tent of some sort, as we're realizing the mountains here are very exposed, and poor, fair Emerson can only take so much of that. Nico was very kind with great English, and he put up with the boys endlessly asking him questions about his job and the valley and the mine and the rocks and the dinosaurs (we did see lots of fossils in this area). When we weren't exploring the town, going for little hikes, or visiting the pools, we hung out with Nico in the shade, and he put up with Drew and I asking him endless questions about his job and the valley and the mine and the rocks and the dinosaurs. He works 7 days on, 7 days off. His partner also works for the same park at the second entrance, so they have the same schedule. He makes $600/month, or $7,200 USD per year, and somehow he lives on that. His rent is $550/month, which he splits with his partner. Perspective for sure. 

Here is the map of the route we took out of the city. 

The canyon we were in had two very interesting things going on in it. The rock walls were the craziest array of colors. The photo below doesn't do it justice, but one section of that rock wall is green, one is red, and another orange. It was most beautiful at sunset. At sunrise, the rock was almost backlight, so the colors weren't as vibrant, but sunset was another story. The other super interesting thing about this canyon is it's home to a huge gypsum mine. I had to google what gypsum is; apparently it's used in construction and cement. Now, we couldn't see the actual mine, which is at the base of the volcano that is right at the top of the valley. But we could see the white distribution pit ( I'm not sure what else to call it, you can see it in the lower right hand corner of the photo below) that was located along the main road just past the turn off for Baños Morales. And we could see dump trucks, thousand of dump trucks, going up and down the main road every day. The trucks apparently run well into the night, but kudos to the sound proofing inside BB, we couldn't hear or see them at all during the night. But they were definitely a part of the scenery during the day. We got to talk to a local family about the mine, and they were very divided about it. On one hand, mining is Chile's top industry and brings alot of wealth, jobs, etc. to the country. But gypsum mines are open pit mines, so they really mar the landscape, and this mine, in particular, is disturbing a million year old glacier in the process. It's also fascinating because this valley gets alot of snow in the winter time, so the road that you can see in the picture gets washed out almost every year from either an avalanche or a rockslide after a heavy rain. The entire mine closes in the winter, and, in the spring, they come back and reevaluate how much damage was done and what needs to be rebuilt to open the mine. Then they burn the candle at both ends all summer and fall. Fascinating economics at play here.

This picture shows the volcano, El Volcón de San José, at the end of the valley. The volcano itself is 19,213 ft tall. Shocking right? Because it doesn't even look that tall! And we were camping at only 6,000 ft. And basically on the other side of that is Argentina. In the map above, you can see the dark line on the right hand side, that's the Argentinian border! It really is nuts how narrow this country is. We can drive 2 hours east and be at the beach or an hour west and be in Argentina. The Andes really do shape this country.

Lunch time inside the van. The sunshades inside BB are amazing. The van was in full sun, and it's strong like Colorado sun, all day, and it never got hot inside. And it emulates blackout curtains at night so the boys got decent shuteye. That was a major win. The front passenger seat also swivels around, which is what I was sitting on.

The little town is called Baños Morales because it has thermal hot springs there. I wouldn't call them "hot" springs, more like thermal temperate springs. The water is the funny brown color because it has alot of minerals in it, and lots of people have been coming here for years for the medicinal/therapeutic benefits. But the water wasn't hot, it was luke warm at best. The bottom of the pool was a natural gravel bottom, which was nice. You could find areas that were extra bubbly and dig your feet in and make it warmer for yourself, like sitting in an Alka-seltzer bath. But having it not be super hot was actually nice because then we could stay in there for longer. As you can imagine, Emerson overheats very quickly in normal hot tub situations. We actually went to the hot springs twice in one day, as our tickets were good for the whole day. We went once when it first opened, and we had the place to ourselves, and then again an hour before closing time. The families we saw there, same as the Tupahue pool, were there ALL day, picnicking, etc.

A fun little surprise about this valley is it had some natural fruit trees: apples and plum trees that had teeny tiny, yellow (or sometimes red) plums or ciruelas that were half sour, half sweet. We, of course, checked with our resident park ranger that they were indeed edible and not someone's private trees, but they were fair game, and oh so delicious! We had to share them with the horses that were constantly roaming the valley. More on that down below.

The boys had lots of fun rock climbing and being independent. 

This last photo was taken by Nico the day after we left. The weather got much colder, and you can see snow fell on the volcano. You can also see the horses I mentioned before. There were 2 or 3 horse day-trip excursion outfitters in Baños Morales, and when the horses weren't in use, they just let them wander around the town and the surrounding countryside. So we saw horses every day at all hours; it was very charming. Most were quite small, and they loved the apple trees; that is actually how we noticed the trees in the first place.