Great news: I safely made it back to my Chilean home of Valdivia! After three months of backpack wandering I have found a new appreciation for this rainy little town and a bed I recognize. I came across this quote about traveling back in December that really speaks to what I've been learning down here: "No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow. ~Lin Yutang
I have seen so many things this summer, met so many people and heard many diverse beliefs and stories, it's so exciting to really understand just how different and beautiful the world and all it's people are! But what has been resonating the most with me lately is the notion of home. I never thought I would feel this attached to Valdivia, but here I am feeling very comfortable and at ease in my own room and in a city where I know where I want to go and how to get there. I have people here who I run into around town! After being homeless for a bit, I will no longer take for granted these simple aspects of a sedentary life. I think it's all about having a deeper comfort level, I was not fully at ease in, for example, La Paz but here I can relax. Not to mention go barefoot in the shower, woo! It's all very exciting and I feel so incredibly lucky to have found such a wonderful community here for the last third of this continuing South American adventure. So basically I've just been walking on sunshine ever since I got back. So I just wanted to say a quick thank you and share my appreciation for life at this moment. Thanks for listening and I hope you're doing well too, I know we all have things to be so thankful for that we just don't think about enough.
And now for travel updates!
The Atacama Desert was the next stop after sending my Mom to the airport and meeting up with my travel buddy Jac again. (By the way, her blog is great and she takes some truly incredible photos, http://www.lajacabroad.blogspot.com/). The Atacama Desert is the driest in the world and in the extreme North of Chile, about 4000kms away from Patagonia. San Pedro de Atacama is a beautiful, dustly little adobe oasis set at 12,000 ft above sea level where we stayed at not the greatest hostel but was made worth it by the colorful owner, Maria, who had quite a few stories about what those foreign govs are really doing in the desert with those big telescopes (the sky out there was UNREAL) and it has to do with UFOs (which she and her son have had direct communication with) and Cold War conspiracy theories. In the desert we saw a geyser field, just steaming away in the early morning, Valle de la Luna, which is really just a bunch of rocks and sand dunes but so orange! And we drove (sans road) around the National Park of Flamingos where we did indeed see a lot of flamingos and some salty lakes. We walked a lot and wore a lot of sunscreen and it was the complete opposite of Patagonia. Chile is a weird little country indeed.
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