Fire, Flood, Foca

I apologize for my long absence. School has started back up, and with it basketball. That means that I have had neither time to write nor things to write about. But I just got back from a few days at the beach, and there have been some interesting events around the country this month, so I'll try to scrape something together.

Happy Easter! I hope you had a fun and meaningful holiday. I spent my weekend with my host family in Concon. It was a nice time. While there, between eating seafood and walking on the beach, I found time to admire some of the giant sand dunes. 

Like this one. That is a 17 story building.

Wanting to get a closer look, I decided to climb one. An hour later I was at the top, completely covered in sweat and sand. My shoes were so full of sand that it was hurting my feet. I couldn't believe how big these dunes were.

So tired at this point.

Turns out, Chile is home to the second biggest sand dunes in the world (Peru, our neighbor to the north, has got us beat with "The Everest of the Desert"). The biggest of the big are found in the Atacama desert, in Northern Chile. The Atacama holds another record, being the driest place on earth. In fact, there are some parts of it that received no rain between the years 1570 and 1971. That's over 400 years without rain!

You might remember, if you read my last post, that there was a pretty impressive volcanic eruption in Villarica, a popular tourist destination in the South of Chile. The volcano goes by the name of Villarica as well, but the natives call it Rucapillan, which means "House of the Spirit." The volcano's last major eruption was in 1971, but since March 3rd of this year, the volcano has been pretty consistently active. The initial eruption (shown below) triggered the evacuation of thousands of people. Since then, people have decided that the volcano poses no real threat and the general attitude of the towns surrounding it is one of excitement. I was just watching the news and I saw a woman being interviewed by a reporter. In the background was the volcano, spewing smoke and lava, and this woman was just talking about how exciting it was for their town because of the tourists that it will bring in.

Attracting tourists since 1971

On an equally exciting but much more tragic note, there has been massive flooding in the North of Chile. When I say massive, I mean massive. Ridiculous amounts of rain fell in the Atacama Region in late March. Being a desert, that part of the country was not at all ready for it. 25 people have died, and four times that many are missing. I've seen videos of trucks and houses being washed down the street like they're nothing. I've seen pictures of bodies washed out of cemeteries and into yards. It's a really awful situation. One of the worst parts of it is that so few people know about it outside of Chile. There is a Wikipedia page, but it has next to no information. I'll post some pictures so you can get an idea.

The Aftermath

This flooding has made me think about a couple of things that I hadn't before. One of them is that it makes me realize how awful the Johnstown Flood (I'm from Johnstown) must have been. About 25 people have died in the North, and after looking at some of the videos, I can't imaging how a flood could get much worse. But the Johnstown Flood killed over 2,000 people. That blows my mind more than ever now.

Shout out to my hometown

It's also made me think about how news spreads in a country. This is a big disaster, and the whole country is very aware of it. That is something that we don't see very much in the United States, being such a large country (Chile is 7% the size of the US). For example, because the United States is so big, if you're from New York you might not even hear about a disaster that kills 20 or 30 people on the West Coast. Like that landslide last year. What landslide? Exactly.

There is the opposite problem going on in most of the rest of the country. In February a fire destroyed almost 80 square miles of ancient forest in Patagonia. Last month, there was a wildfire near Vina Del Mar that took 200 firefighters several days to put out. Last year, there was a huge fire that destroyed over 3,000 homes in Valparaiso. The list goes on and on. Farmers in the South are suffering because their crops can't grow. There are several bridges here in Santiago that go over nothing, as the rivers dried up years ago.

In case you've ever wanted to know what 3,000 houses on fire in a world heritage site look like

Back to the positive side of things, the Chilean Pacific has a thriving seal population that has yet to be affected by drought, fire, or flood. Here are some pictures.

Originally spotted from halfway up the dune. I could actually hear them before I could see them.

"Foca" means seal, for those English-speakers who have made it this far.