"Vale La Pena"

This is a Spanish phrase that I have come to know well. It means "worth the pain". This is how I would describe yesterday, for example. We joined a tour to the lagoons outside of San Antonio de Areco, Chile where we are staying. The lagoons are not the usual swampy type that this word usually signifies. Rather, they are salt lakes in the desert surrounded by a ring of volcanos (some of them active!). We arrived at the first lagoon, which was shining bright blue in the middle of a stark white salt flat and we were here to swim. This desert (the driest in the world) can drop below freezing at night even in the summer. This keeps the surface of the lagoon water so cold that it burns. However, there is a hot thermal spring under this lake that meets the cold at a depth of about 3 feet. This lagoon is also extremely salty so that there is no actual swimming necessary. This is what I knew before jumping in.

Jess jumped first and proceded to scream. So I waited. After a minute she settled down and said that it was fine. Although I didnt believe her I jumped in anyway. The effect was quite wierd. The top 3 feet of my body was burning from cold. The bottom of my legs and feet were burning with heat. And I was bobbing in the water with no need to tread. I couldnt tell if I was cold or hot--just uncomfortable. I couldnt take it for long but it was quite the experience and reportedly quite therapeutic. I was glad to get out of the pool and into the heat of the day to sip some pisco sour (an extremely sour local cocktail) with our guide. All things considered, vale la pena.

I would also use this phrase to describe today. A mini bus pulled up to our hostel at 4:20 this morning for the tour to the local geysers. From here we proceded to drive up the mountain to a height of about 16,000 feet. When we arrived, the ambient temperature was -11 degrees celcius (or 12 degrees farenheit). The combined effect of exhaustion, altitude sickness, and below freezing temperature may not sound like somethig that a reasonable person would inflict upon oneself on vacation. But we did it for the geysers. Our destination was a field of steaming and spitting geyers located in what was essentially the crater of a volcano. There were streams of orange, red and green bacteria flowing from what looked like mini-volcanos and the emmitted water quickly turned to ice, making the field slippery and steamy at the same time.

The sun shortly came over the mountains and warmed things up somewhat. Just in time, in fact, for our next thermal bath. We arrived at a pool that looked like a field of steam and we gladly shed our clothes and headed in to warm up. Although we doubted it at 4:20 am, at this point we pronounced the trip vale la pena.

Unfortunately, internet connections here havent been substantive enough to upload pictures. So we are only able to describe our adventures. We will upload the best ones when we can.