Field trip

Let's see...

First of all, happy spring, it is sunny and beautiful, only one rain shower all week!

 Friday our Ecosystems of Chile class went on a field trip to Parque Oncol, basically all afternoon in our professor's car or on very foggy trails. We drove up up up, in a very old car at top speed over dirt roads, through plantations of eucalyptus and pine, until we entered the park where we could identify some cool native species.

We heard frogs making sounds like small children, saw tiny birds hopping through the undergrowth, and tiny ferns growing in the moss on the bark of enormous tree trunks (think Avatar - seriously a green world). There were many different types of trees and plants, all very new to me. Each fern leaf in the picture below, for example, is about the size of a coffee table.

 The park is located on a mountain, from the top of which you can see the 5 closest volcanoes on a sunny day. However, the summit was surrounded by clouds on Friday in typical southern-Chile weather. From halfway up, we stopped at a viewpoint and could literally watch the clouds moving in second by second to surround us in a chilly fog. This is Valdivia from afar right before the sky turned completely grey...