Lihue Calel Park today

Today we drove even further south in South America to Lihue Calel Park.  We passed some lakes on the way to the park, where we stopped to take pictures of flamingos, but the sun wasn't out and it was VERY cold.  And anyway, as soon as the flamingos saw us getting closer, they all started walking en masse away from us.  So, we didn't get great pictures of them.

We also had a VERY unnerving experience while driving to Lihue Calel.  We were driving along, and up ahead in our lane we see a truck passing another truck.  As we got closer, it became very obvious that the truck was not going to be able to pass the other truck before we got to him, and he was NOT not going to slip back in behind the truck to get out of our way.  We had absolutely no choice but to swerve off the road!!!  We were very very fortunate that there was good shoulder and good dirt right there where we had to take evasive action.  So, Guillermo took to the side of the road at about 50 miles an hour (or at least it seemed that way), and the truck passes, we get back on the road and that's just the way it is.   We were pretty shocked, we were so relieved it wasn't any worse and we had no other incidents even close to that the rest of the trip.

As we entered Lihue Calel, we saw lots of Guanacos in the brush on the sides and even crossing the road in front of us!

We stopped at the ranger station, and then drove on to the trail head.  At the trail head were two dogs, that as soon as our car arrived, they hung around our doors overly eager for us to get out.  We sat inside the car for a while, wondering what to do - what the dogs were like, what they would do once we got out, etc.  We hoped they weren't mean, but just hungry, so we decided to give up a loaf of bread that we were going to use for our lunch.  We slowly get out of the car, and I think they jumped up on Guillermo once, but other than that, they just seemed happy to see us and were overjoyed to get some bread to eat.  We saw that one of the dogs had a very badly injured foot and really hoped that they'd both not follow us out onto the trail, but of course they did.  It hurt to see the injured dog follow us, but we couldn't stop him and he actually did really well there and back.

 They were good dogs, and seemed to be hoping for some help, so when we drove away, we went straight to the ranger station to tell them about the dogs.  The two people working there right away got into their vehicle and drove out to the trail head.  We sat in our car in the campground, munching on some snacks, and hoping the rangers would be back with the dogs, but we left before they got back.

On our drive back to Santa Rosa, we stopped in at Parque Luro, where the lady at the gate told us that there were a bunch of scientists on the grounds, and we thought, "Could it be - could Jason, Dave and all the other conference people still be here????"  So, we drove in, parked and first walked a little trail hoping to get close to the water where we could see the flamingos better.  But the end of the trail was at the dry end of the lake and there were no flamingos in sight.  We got back in the car, and drove around to the other side of the park, and saw all the buses and then Rebeca saw Jason walking with other people in the road ahead of us.  So, we pulled up slowly behind them, and Jason was so shocked to see us there!!!  Turned out to be a good thing for him, though, because he ended up riding back to Santa Rosa with us, instead of on the bus with everyone else.

In the evening, we ate an interesting dinner at Los Pinos restaurant, fairly close to our hotel.  They had big slabs of meat roasting over a fire, and basically, at this restaurant, you just let them know what kind of meat you want when they come around, and they bring that to you off of the fire.  They also had a big salad/vegetable buffet table, from which you could round out your meal.  We understand they had guinea pig in one or two of the containers, so anything that looked like meat, most of us passed up.  Jason thinks he tried from the container where they had said it contained guinea pig.