This past weekend I finally got to the national park that's an hour outside of Angol! It's actually pretty close, but the road is through winding mountain valleys the whole way, so it's hard to get to. My whole host family drove out there for the day, and even though it was a little chilly, we had a fantastic time.
When we were first coming through the entrance, I hid behind my host sister Panchi in the car, because foreigners have to pay an entrance fee that is something like $15 whereas Chileans pay $2. I was Chilean for the day! (shhhh). We went up to this rock called La Piedra del Águila, which is so high up that you can see for miles through the hills and forests all the way to the ocean. It was foggy, but that actually made for a really cool view, and we could still make out the coast! But I'm getting ahead of myself here. The park is known for having forests entirely composed of Aracaria trees, which are the official tree of the region and legally protected. They are very recognizable, because they grow really tall but only have branches at the very top, and rather than leaves, they grow little succulent spike things (I have a picture later that shows them well).
 |
| treehugger 4 lyfe |
 |
| we found a beautiful tree fairy! |
 |
| it was a family effort to help Yeny deal with her fear of heights... |
 |
| we could see the ocean through there! |
 |
| <3 |
 |
| Panchi giving me attitude because I wanted her to pose like me |
Here is your wildlife break! This first picture is some branches of a little baby Araucaria, so you can see their funky spikes. And the other one is just some pretty forest flowers covered in the moss that was all over everything.
Our next stop, after a quick snack, was La Casa de Piedra, a cave-like spot that been formed by a huge flat rock falling on some little ones (I assume).
 |
| WELCOME TO OUR HOME |
Next up, picnic lunch! We were getting cold so we huddled up under the picnic shelter and made ourselves some tea(/coffee) to warm up. Then we followed a path that we thought led to a super old Araucaria tree with a huge hollow trunk you can walk through, but we were wrong. Turns out that tree was in a completely different part of the park. But we did see lots of digueñes, the local fungus that everybody harvests and eats this time of year (you may remember I posted some photos of them in a salad a while back). Now I know how they look growing in the wild! Nice and squishy.
It was a wonderful day spent with my host fam! It'll be very hard to leave them in a few weeks...
No comments:
Post a Comment