Kyle Hepp

February 9, 2011

You may have noticed that all my post titles about our trip to Coyhaique have been kind of weird. I’m trying to give them good SEO juice so that people looking for tourist information about Coyhaique can find my blog and then realize there’s another way — that they don’t have to pay the ridiculous tour prices that all the tourist information people tell you is “the only way,” to see certain attractions, such as the Reserva Nacional right outside the city. When we asked about how to get there, we were told “the only way” was to go with a tour. The cheapest guy we found was going to charge us 25,000 pesos per person. We said, “Screw that, we’ll go by bike!” The bike rental guy told us it would take at least two hours to get there by bike and that we probably didn’t want to do that. When we finally found the park entrance, we realized it was so close to the city, we could’ve walked there. I would’ve been incredibly pissed off had we actually paid 50 lukas for a guy to pick us up and drive us there.

That being said, we never actually got to the Reserva Nacional

We rode our bikes straight on past it and up the world’s largest bikeable mountain. Why did we ride past it, you might ask? A. Because inefficient traveling/touristing is something we work very hard at. And B. Because we thought the damn park was an hour and a half away so we weren’t looking for it five minutes outside of Coyhaique!

However, our adventures probably burned a lot of calories and also provided us with some amazing views of the city. We took a bike ride of approximately two hours uphill. And Seba is looking up the elevation that we covered as we speak. I’ll report back.

Wait, first, I need to backtrack. Before we took our incredible 20 mile uphill bike ride to nowhere, we first walked downhill to visit La Piedra del Indio. And our bike ride was probably more like 2 miles. But it felt like 20.

See the face? That’s an Indio face in the rock.

Can you tell what this picture is? Seba thought it was a rock. It’s water with raindrops on the river.

I see rainbows wherever we go. Exhibit A. The Amazon:

PS. This photo is a blast from the past, in case you’re confused.

Exhibit B: Over Sodimac in Coyhaique.

For some reason I was obsessed with jumping on this trip. You’ll see more in later Coyhaique posts. This is only the beginning.

Ok now these are really from the bike ride. We had no marker to be able to tell on a map how far we went, so we have no idea of the elevation we covered, but please trust me when I say, “It was a lot.” I was definitely still recovering from the food poisoning, my stomach continued churning so I really hadn’t eaten much in the days prior, and I had to walk my bike up a lot of it because I was too worn out. But the views were amazing.

AH! And before I forget. Photography tips for people who wanted them. I’m trying to keep sticking them in the photo posts somewhere.

The light in Coyhaique was amazing. Why? Because a lot of the time it was overcast. Even when it was sunny, there were always so many clouds that the sun was usually behind one. So that really diffuses the light. Low contrast light is always the best. You don’t always want high sun — though for particular looks, it can be used well. But, most of the time, especially if you don’t know how to manipulate the photo, it creates nasty shadows under people’s eyes when you’re photographing humans. And if you’re photographing landscapes, high contrast means that to properly expose for the mountains, you have to overexpose the sky. Or to properly expose for the sky you have to underexpose the mountains. In Coyhaique, as you can see, the light was most of the time nice and even so that you could get a good exposure of both scenery + sky. Hope that helps.

Also, I hate bike riding. Will someone please remind me for our next trip? I dislike not being able to take pictures as I go. It’s hard to bike with a heavy camera bag on my back. And bike seats hurt my lady business.

Alright. And now these pictures are after we’d biked back down. We visited the mirador right near the hospital. Rob tipped us off on Twitter. Thanks, dude!

See the farthest away mountain? The pale one in the distance? That was what we had just been biking up. Until we got to the top and finally saw another living soul — a construction work who was supposed to be directing traffic. I say “supposed to be” because not very many cars had driven by the whole time we were heading up. Anyways, we got up a ridiculous hill and finally said, “If the Reserva Nacional is not around the next corner we’re going home.” We turned the curve and saw the construction workers. When we asked them where the Parque Nacional was, first they got really confused. We were so far away from the Reserva Nacional that they thought we were trying to head to a different national park even farther outside Coyhaique. Then they realized what we were talking about and told us our last 2 hours of lung exertion had been for naught — the Reserva Nacional was all the way back where we started.

Yep, we’re idiots I’m not afraid to make that a public statement.

PS. My next Coyhaique post gets even prettier. Can you believe it?

PSS. Which of these photos should I make my new desktop photo? I’m paralyzed by indecision.