CAVES and HANDS in Chile

By Moglander's Travels on March 5, 2013 in Chile, Truck

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View down a valley on the Carretera Austral. This was our lunch stop.

A lovely place to stop, well one of the many lovely places to stop along The Carretera Austral is Puerto Tranquilo, and from here you can take a lovely boat trip to the Cuevas de Marmol which are a set of marble caves on the lake shore south of the village , of which the most spectacular is the Capilla de Marmol otherwise known as Marble Chapel. The boat really maneuvers in through them and you can see the many different colors shapes and shadows in the very clear water. The caves are really the product of river erosion , hard to believe this can happen to marble !

We loved the light reflecting onto the rocks

Rock.

Peeking in to the Cathederal

Underwater was as spectacular as above the waterline

Reflection or not….

And then there were 2….

Inside the Cathedral is simply stunning.

The boat came right into the cave. Jurgen was shooting just about as much as I was.

a small graveyard with what looks like small huts.

Here we also bumped into Mathilde and Romain whom we had previously carried for a couple of days, so we all shared the same boat. However, Romain felt very brave and decided to go for a swim in the beautiful clear warm water ( or so he was led to believe ), but once he was in he screamed “FLIPPING FRIO” and yes we all laughed. It was interesting to hear this mix of English and Spanish from a French guy for an Irish and German audience!

Flipping Freo. Must be French for something…

Our next visit, very short one I must say , was in another small village called Cerro Castillo . Here we went to see pre-Hispanic rock paintings and this style of painting outlined hands which showed the remains made by the Teluelchs with the hands of positive and negative adults and children. The hands were done mostly in red, but there was the odd black one .This style of painting was developed over 8000 years ago. To make the positive images, they put paint on their hands and pressed it to the rocks. For negative, they put their clean hand on the rock, and spat paint all round it.