Siete Tazas 

 Ditches, No Reservations, Cold Nights, Fried Electronics

(all in a Beautiful setting)

Tuesday October 16, 2007

The last two days were adventurous and eventful. Sunday, we grocery shopped before leaving Santa Cruz, planning ahead for nights to be spent in a cabaña in the Reserva Nacional Radal Siete Tazas. This park is located within a few dozen kilometers of the sharp Andean escarpment, and the notable feature for which the park is named is the Rio Claro dropping over a series of basalt cliffs into seven distinct pools (or "tazas/cups"). But in addition to the highlight of the well-photographed tazas, the reserve also contains lush woods, meadows, numerous river rapids and waterfalls, and picturesque views of the not-too-distant snowy Andean mountaintops. 

That all sounds like a recipe for a wonderful experience, but our Sunday was a little dicey. I had started trying to email and call the cabaña proprietors a few days in advance, wanting to ask them specifics about the cabaña facilities (oven? refrigerator? electricity? heat?) before our arrival several days earlier. My emails went unanswered as well as did my voice messages left on the phone listed on their website. So we shopped in Santa Cruz before leaving, hit the road, and hoped for the best.

By 5pm, we were within a few kilometers of the entrance to the reserve with plenty of sunlight left in the day. Chile had switched to daylight savings time that morning, and I was lucky enough to figure out the change by accident, since the clock on my computer had automatically advanced an hour. I noticed the strangeness of my computer thinking it was an hour later than my watch when I checked emails (hoping for a response from those cabaña proprietors) not more than 15 minutes before the hotel breakfast service was due to shut down. Then we hastily threw on our clothes, rousted the twins and popped in the dining room door 5 minutes before the no-breakfast doomsday deadline. First potential disaster - averted! 

But now, shortly after passing by a riverside campground speckled with tents (Monday was still a holiday day for everyone), we came upon a Carabinero checkpoint. Usually it is fairly obvious that normal passenger cars don't have to stop at these checkpoints, but we couldn't see a bored officer waving cars through or whether the little hut sitting a dozen yards back from the road was even occupied or not. I was torn between just plowing along and letting them come catch me if they wanted, or stopping to go search for someone who might want to look at my papers. I slowly pulled into a dirt parking lot next to a bus while I was looking to the side for signs of life in the Carabinero station (and not straight ahead) - and I didn't see the short, small, steep, concrete-walled ditch until it had gobbled up my right front tire. Second potential disaster - not averted? 

Lynn yelled, Anna screamed, I blushed, and Lynn and the kids piled out of the right side of the badly tilted truck accompanied by a stream of broken pretzels and other forms of assorted long-car-trip detritus. Soon a small crowd of helpers and otherwise simply amused on-lookers had gathered to watch the best show playing for miles around. From our perspective, it was not an amusing event. We were at this point, having been driving on a dirt road for almost an hour, most likely quite far from cell phone service let alone a tow-truck.  Left to our own devices, with the help of one persistent passerby driving a 4x4 (who's wife spoke a little English), we employed both his and our jacks, a stack of large rocks, one flat board, our truck's winch wrapped around boulders on the other side of the road, and his tow strap -

    "One, two, three... OK!" I shouted out the window from behind the wheel of our truck. Anna flipped the  switch on the winch motor, our Chilean savior gunned his 4x4 and I eased our Hilux into low-4x4 reverse, everything in unison. The right front tire of our heavily loaded pickup popped over the concrete wall and the problem was solved almost as quickly as it had been created. Our truck has aluminum running boards mounted on the sides, and the right side board had absorbed the weight of the entire front of the truck when the wheel went into the ditch - with only an inch or so of deformation suffered by the bendable metal right side board. This add-on feature which costs less than a couple hundred dollars saved the truck from potentially serious mechanical damage to its undercarriage and any other apparent cosmetic damage (and after a few hard pulls with a pliers, the deformation of the running board is hardly noticeable). OK, I'd say the second potential disaster was barely and for the most part - averted.

We were all a little frazzled - especially me. In retrospect, I wish we had pictures of the whole debacle, but at the time and before we knew how it was going to turn out - it just didn't seem like something we'd want to remember in vivid detail with the aid of pictures. 

So now it was after 6, we were emotionally spent, and task of arriving at the cabaña to put a dinner on the table and get to bed seemed a little more pressing than it had an hour ago. We gave our helper a bottle of very nice wine before each heading our separate ways. About twenty minutes later we turned off the main dirt road onto a narrow, heavily rutted track riddled with puddles and mud pits. This "driveway" stretched on for an agonizing distance, but finally the woods cleared into a pasture with 4 little cabins in clear view - the hamlet of "Cabañas Valle de Las Catas." Hmm, there are cars parked in front of all of them... Which one can be ours? An old man at the pasture gate directed us the cabin "where the dueños are staying."  OK, great, they are just waiting for us to show up and check us in! Wrong, they were staying there for the long weekend and had no idea we were coming. I double checked my records and could find neither a confirmation nor a note telling me that we still needed to contact this place for a reservation.  Oops! Third potential disaster - ????

There were plenty of campsites nearby, but dusk was threatening and I knew it would be a very cold night. We have very basic camping stuff with us - a good tent and sleeping bags, but very minimal cooking gear. I really didn't want to try to set up a camp and cook dinner and construct a fire in a race against the sun - so we asked the old man where there might be other cabins or a hosteria and he pointed us onward down the narrow drive.  After another 10-15 minutes, passing over a few rickety bridges, the little drive lead us to the terminus of the main dirt road, flanked by a field full of boy and girl scouts camping on one side and a hosteria with mini-market on the other. 

Hosteria La Flor de la Canela offered us a tiny box of a room with one double bed and a set of bunk beds. The room featured no lights, a drafty door, non-lockable square windows that almost-but-not-quite fit in their badly skewed frames, and a shared public bathroom with muddy floor. A space heater was promised for "later."  In addition to promising a heater, the dueña told us we could eat dinner and hang out in the dining room until they turned off their generator at 11pm.  So we took the room and unloaded our sleeping bags plus all of our extra blankets. It still wouldn't be enough to keep everyone warm.

We did indeed hang out in the dining room for a few hours, a room with lights where we were eventually served some soup and tea, but the staff always seemed just a "little-too-busy-right-now" to put an actual heater in our room. They repeatedly told us "Altiro!" (Chilean slang for right-away) when we asked a couple of times about it.  Finally they were done cooking for all their guests and cleaning up the kitchen and there was no better excuse other than - "sorry, all the heaters are being used."   Lynn was pissed! Later that night, Lynn was cold! The camping scouts yelled and sang during the night. The neighboring hosteria guests slammed their doors going back and forth to the bathroom. Their baby cried. None one slept well, and everyone was quite grumpy in the morning. After eating a hasty breakfast in the dining room and quickly repacking the car, we were ready to just get the hell out of there (I think Lynn and Anna would say they were ready to get the hell out of there 5 minutes after we arrived!). Then the dueña tried to charge me 5 thousand pesos more than she had quoted me the night before. Now it was my turn to be pissed. "You told me 15 thousand pesos and you promised a heater that we didn't get!" 

Trying to leave our frustration behind us, we drove to some trailheads and hiked around the tazas for a couple of hours before returning to the scene of our original disappointing rejection, Valle de Las Catas. Now it was Monday, the last day of the three day weekend, and two of the four cabañas had been already vacated. So we could finally unpack more than our sleeping bags, wash with hot water, and cook ourselves a good meal.  Third potential disaster - survived, I guess.

Scouts in the field across from Hosteria Flor de la Canela.

Various (six?) of the "Seven Tazas."

We noticed this wasp dragging a small tarantula around during our hike, very cool!

The "Six Falls" are almost as popular to photograph as the "Seven Pools."   

Finally, at Valle de Las Catas, we had a home with a bathroom, hot water, and a heater! Notice that the truck is safely and expertly parked and not in a ditch.

Trying to copy the trail asado techniques of Diego our cabalgata guide at Cascada Las Animas.     

Views of the beautiful forest and Rio Claro.

Anna and I rode horses late Monday afternoon, a real treat since Atillano, the old man who tried to help us out when we arrived on Sunday (but couldn't stay), simply saddled up a couple of his horses and let us ride off on them - for the whopping fee of  $5 per hour per horse.

And Lynn, finally, got to unload her telescope and peer into a clear night (after the sun set, that is...).

The cabañas at Las Catas had electricity from a generator between 8pm and midnight, and we used it to power the kids laptop so we could watch a BBC documentary DVD about geology, and I also plugged my laptop in to recharge the battery. The kids laptop was off and unplugged long before the generator went off. I forgot about mine and left it plugged in. This was a big mistake, which I didn't notice until  two days later, when it finally became apparent to me that my computer wasn't recharging. My charger had been fried when the generator turned off! Fourth potential disaster - to be continued...

-Rolf