The next posts will be like a southbound continuation of our vacation to Pucón in March 2011. This time our first travel destination was Puerto Varas. So we basically started south of where we ended back then.
We split the drive with a detour to Lota, near Concepción. The area was once the center of Chile's coal industry. However, the closing of the mines in 1997 left countless people jobless. And the 2010 earthquake shattered whatever was left of Lota's fragile economy. But people remained defiant. Today Lota promotes itself as a tourist destination: the "coast of coal". We did not arrive with high expectations, so it came as a surprise to find that this place was indeed worth seeing! Because all is real: The tours are given by the same mineworkers that used to work there until quite recently. The same scary cage, they used for decades, rattled us down, into the narrow shafts...
Some 30 meters deeper we heard shocking firsthand stories about their working conditions underground. And when Florian lifted the 12kg heavy air hammer, we got a better idea of what manual digging meant. For me, the most striking moment was, when we turned off our head lamps: left in dead silence & total darkness!
We split the drive with a detour to Lota, near Concepción. The area was once the center of Chile's coal industry. However, the closing of the mines in 1997 left countless people jobless. And the 2010 earthquake shattered whatever was left of Lota's fragile economy. But people remained defiant. Today Lota promotes itself as a tourist destination: the "coast of coal". We did not arrive with high expectations, so it came as a surprise to find that this place was indeed worth seeing! Because all is real: The tours are given by the same mineworkers that used to work there until quite recently. The same scary cage, they used for decades, rattled us down, into the narrow shafts...
Some 30 meters deeper we heard shocking firsthand stories about their working conditions underground. And when Florian lifted the 12kg heavy air hammer, we got a better idea of what manual digging meant. For me, the most striking moment was, when we turned off our head lamps: left in dead silence & total darkness!
