El Gallo Pitagórico: First hike of the trip

My Lonely Planet guide book said there was a decent two-hour (each way) hike near Baños Morales, a village in Cajon del Maipo, a kind of river gorge east of Santiago. It also said there were buses that go there, but the fellow at the travel agency in my hotel said they only go on weekends. Today is Thursday.

So I decided to see if I could get a bus anyway, just for the ride, and in case he was wrong or there was some kind of local transportation available. Anyway, he was right, only weekend and holiday buses, and then only at 8am returning at 5pm. The available bus goes to San Alfonso, about 30km from where I wanted to be. Maybe there would be some good views of the gorge, etc. So the first hour wound through the outskirts of Santiago. I didn't mind, it's ok seeing what's out there, even if we'll never say to ourselves "we'll always have the outskirts of Santiago". The bus driver was playing Tom Jones on the stereo which was also ok since I hadn't heard him in decades. Just when I was wondering if we were going on circles, we headed off along the gorge. All right I guess.

Just before we got to the San Alfonso, I asked another passenger who was reading a tourist brochure where he was going. He didn't seem to be going anywhere in particular, but he did speak Spanish. Turned out to be a Spaniard named José. So the driver old him that if we walked through this tunnel we'd find a path to hike on. I'm not sure where the tunnel came from but it was evidently disused. It was just long enough, and had a turn in the middle, that there was a spot partway through that was thoroughly dark for a about 30 seconds, maybe more. We mucked through and came out the other end, where there was an informal memorial to someone who had died there. Theoretically spooky, but not really. The only path we found was marked "private" so we didn't take it and walked back through the tunnel. Later we found out that it was ok to hike there, but we didn't bother going back.

We walked a bit farther into San Alfonso and found a taxi driver who would take us to Baños Morales (more on that later). This took half an hour or so. The start of the hike was actually a small park ranger station where we had to register in case we came to grief, I guess. The hike was pretty decent. The first 15 minutes or so were uphill and I was panting--thought my regular exercise at home would have stood me in better stead. Oh well--I'm not in my 30s any more. I hope this is just breaking in my lungs for more rigorous hikes later on. Anyway it leveled off for the rest of the way. The scenery was great, bonito, chulo--a 5000m mountain with a glacier at the base. our actual destination was a small lake but we learned from hikers along the way that the lake was still mostly snow, as was part of the trail, though the weather was reasonably warm, bit of a hill wind that made my inner ears ache. It took us about 1hr 45m to get there, then we vegged for a while, and made our way back in slightly less time. No blisters from my new hiking shoes--bonus!