Norte Chico - Pan de Azucar
Continuing the story of our trip to Norte Chico [1], after Valle del Encanto we drove up to Parque Nacional Pan de Azucar. Pan de Azucar is about 1000 km north of Santiago. The landscape gets progressively more desert-like as you move north. At about kilometre 970--as we turned off the Panamerican highway onto a dirt road that followed the coast into the park--there was sand drifting onto the road.
Driving up to the park we stopped to look at some strange (and scary) rock formations just north of the town of Caldera. There are many roadside shrines in Chile; these had been converted into a shrine to St. Gemita:
We guessed that these rocks had been at the shore once and were thrown back inland by either a tsunami or an earthquake.
The center of Pan de Azucar is a little fishing village made up of about two dozen small shacks, a tourist information centre and a few campsites.
After stopping at the Conaf to pay our entrance fees we hiked out to a look-out point called Mirador. A little grey fox, probably accustomed to hand outs from the tourists, followed us up the path:
The hike was quite dull, but we saw lots of cacti. Lots and lots of cacti. Some of them were sick:
A desert-meets-ocean panorama was waiting for us at the top:
On the way down from Mirador we had to lock up the gate to the access road (the warden gave us his only key):
After the hike we booked a boat to take us out to Isla Pan de Azucar, or Sugarloaf Island. It's about 15 minutes offshore and is home to pelicans, cormorants, seals and about 3,000 Humboldt penguins. Most people pay about $US 10 for the tour, but because we were the only tourists in the park that day we had to pay 40,000 pesos, or about $US 80.
We started the tour around four o'clock--around dinnertime--so we would see lots wildlife. And sure enough there were hundreds of penguins out on the shore:
That's a lot of penguin guano, huh? We passed one seal sitting alone on a rock that posed for us. I took a short video with my Nokia E70. You can hear our tour guides saying "macho, macho."
On the North end of the island we drifted up to a rock with a dozen or more seals on it:
A couple of them slipped out into the water and swam over to investigate our boat, their sleek heads bobbing above the water. A pink and orange jellyfish oozed underneath us. Our driver, who managed to keep the boat steady in choppy eight-foot swells, rushed to the railing exclaiming "medusa!"
Off in the distance packs of penguins swam out to fish for their evening meal. Overall, it was an amazing tour, easily worth double what we paid.
Travel Notes
We poked around Chanarral (the town closest to Parque Nacional Pan de Azucar) for about an hour looking for a hotel room. It's a colourful place, but still very much an industrial fishing town. Don't bother staying there. Also, the Hotel Costanera in Caldera is not the spotless and charming beachfront hospederia described by the Lonely Planet.
We ended up staying in Bahia Inglesia at the Rocas del Bahia where we got a suite facing the beach for about $US 100 per night. (If you pay in US dollars you can avoid the 19% tax).
(My photos from Parque Nacional Pan de Azucar on Flickr.)
- Norte Chico means Little North. The far north of Chile is Norte Grande.
