Cajon Del Maipo, Chile

We spent our first week in Chile in an area called Cajon del Maipo, which is about an hour from Santiago (although it feels much further away when you are there). Cajon del Maipo is a beautiful, mountainous valley area nestled on the west side of the Andes with amazing hikes and wonderful hot springs. There are some small towns throughout the area with restaurants and shops, but if you keep driving down the only road in the valley things get remote and gnarly pretty quick. We stayed in a small guesthouse on an immaculately decorated property where the owners also lived. The large outdoor courtyard had countless different areas to sit, lots of flowers and trees, and a small pool (although they kept the water really cold). Another big plus was our new doggo friend Cala who ended up waiting on our porch every morning and sitting in our cabana quite frequently (sorry for cheating on you Bowie).

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The main downside of the Airbnb was that the internet was not nearly as fast as advertised, so Shari was unable to make work calls from the property. When we looked up coworking spaces, we were expecting to have to drive back towards Santiago but were shocked to find that there was a small coworking space about a 5 minute drive from where we were staying. As it turns out, the space only opened in September, and the owner was inspired by all of the coworking spaces in Brooklyn. Shari ended up working there for three days (the WiFi at our Airbnb was good enough for Davy), which actually turned out to be quite nice given that the space was beautiful and the people who worked there were really nice and gave us some recommendations. When you’re working from home everyday, it creates a greater challenge in terms of meeting/interacting with locals, so this was a nice change for a few days.

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On Thursday we began our real exploration of the area and spent our Thanksgiving going on a beautiful hike to the San Francisco glacier (warning: now begins many pictures of Shari walking). Although we couldn’t make it all the way to the glacier due to avalanche warnings, we were able to hike to a nice lake where we enjoyed some lunch while admiring the mountains in the background. After our hike, we drove to a nearby hot spring called Termas de Valle Colina. Although it was nearby, it was not easy to get too given that it was an extremely rocky, unpaved road (this would become a common occurrence). The hot spring had bathrooms and changing rooms and more people than we expected given the aforementioned bumpy rooms (although this was really the only mildly crowded place we encountered in Cajon del Maipo). They had a few different pools of varying temperatures, and you looked out at the mountains as you soaked in the pools. After this we headed back near our Airbnb for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner of pizza and sandwiches (to be fair, we tried to eat a lot to really capture the feeling of Thanksgiving).

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The following day we drove to Embalse el Yeso, a man made dam with bright blue water. There isn’t much to do at the dam besides admire it and try not to focus on the cliffside road you’re driving/walking on, so we walked around a little bit and then kept driving. We then drove to another hot spring called Termas del Plomo. If we had known the previous day what the roads would be like to get to Termas del Plomo, we certainly would not have complained about the roads to Termas de Valle Colina. Termas del Plomo was much more remote and near the end basically involved driving across a rocky and stream-filled open area until you arrived at the hot springs. There were certainly no changing rooms, and it just involved getting in a small natural pool rather than getting in a constructed tub. Before going in, we went on a short hike nearby through a beautiful valley. We didn’t see anyone there for nearly the entire hike, which was cool/spooky. Davy went all the way to a lake which had some amazing views. Afterwards we took a short dip in the hot springs, but neither the air nor the water was particularly warm, so we didn’t spend too long there.

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On our last full day in Cajon del Maipo, we did a hike called Refugio Plantat which is near the hike we did on the first day. The beginning of the hike led us by some horses in a scenic valley, and we then had to walk through a large open area until we reached some mountains on the other side. It initially was not clear where the path went, and we really only figured it out after seeing other people trek up a large hill. There was a pretty decent and challenging uphill climb at that point, but the views of the snowy mountain range at the top made it worth it, even though we couldn’t make it all the way to the refugio due to snow. On our way back down, we met two friendly doggos who we initially thought belonged to two other hikers. As it turns out, they were stray dogs who somehow managed to get up to nearly 10,000ft. They ditched their other hiker friends and followed us down the mountain for quite some time. We kept thinking they were going to struggle to go down this steep mountain, but they were actually quite graceful doggos. Eventually they found their other hiking friends and decided they weren’t that into us anymore, but they were nice hiking companions for a brief period. We were relieved because we weren’t sure what level of care we should/could provide for them if they followed us all the way to the car.

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The following day we were pretty pooped from three days of hiking and mountain road driving, so we slept in, checked out of our Airbnb, and headed to Santiago to check into our next Airbnb. We still had the car until 8pm, so we decided to take advantage of this and drove around an hour and a half to the coast of Chile (it was pretty neat that we could be in the mountains and along the coast on the same day). We first went to a beach called El Canelillo, which was extremely crowded but had nice blue water. We didn’t go swimming, but there was a nice path along the water that we walked on for a bit. Afterwards we headed to nearby Isla Negra, which is primarily famous for having Pablo Neruda’s vacation home. We had lunch at a restaurant attached to his house/museum and had great seats overlooking the water. After that it was time to return the rental car and get settled into our new home in Santiago!

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