Pacific waves and waterfalls

It just keeps getting better. We are now in the hands of the Rotary club in Curicó, a (small? compared to Santiago, yes, but not compared to Asheville!) city south of the big metropolis. Here we cannot see the Santiago smog and the whole rhythm of life seems much slower. We arrived Sunday afternoon and on Monday they took us to the seaside town of Iloco. I never imagined I´d be so lucky as to spend three different days at the Pacific shore during my month in Chile! We spent the entire day at this hotel right on the beach, eating, drinking, walking on the sand, and just basically loving life. We went there ostensibly for lunch but stayed until sunset. The highlight may have been watching some of my teammates tasting a sea creature that our waiter had just harvested from the rocks in front of us. We had already finished a meal of several courses including crab, shrimp and cheese empanadas, two kinds of ceviche, fried conger eel (ubiquitous here), and abalone, with of course the customary pisco sour and then wine, and were relaxing with an amaretto when we saw the waiter run out to the shore. Melinda and Michael were just returning from a walk on the beach and joined him in harvesting a shelled creature shich none of us recognized. Upon returning to the restaurant, the waiter showed us how to remove them from their shells, drip a little lime juice on them, and suck them up. Wow.

Above are two normal everyday scenes one may see on the way to the coast from Curicó.

Today we visited two apple orchards and a national park. The first falls we saw was interestingly named Bridal Veil. (Don´t we have one of those in WNC)? This one´s 150´tall, about 1/3 taller than Looking Glass Falls, I believe. We were amazed at how clear and blue the water was.

The falls to the left is called 7 teacups. Unfortunately we couldn´t find a spot where we could see all seven falls and their pools, but it was impressive enough to see this much. Michael and I slipped through the fence at the lookout point and climbed right down to the edge of the lower pool you see here. Sam, you would´ve wanted to dive in for sure, but it was too cold for me! Plus, at this point we´d spent about four hours in and around the restaurant nearby and sunset was impending.

Tomorrow we have some vocational visits planned, and then a meeting with the mayor of Curicó followed by a presentation at the Rotary club meeting, which starts at 8:30pm!