Siete Tazas and Salto del Laja

Heading South from Santiago and it isn’t long before the landscape starts to become more lush and the climate more temperate. We were finally putting the deserts of central South America behind us.

We had decided to visit a National park called Radal Seite Tazas as our first stop on the route South  The road into the park was paved until the last 30km and then turned into a decent gravel road. The last 12km or so actually in the park was a less good gravel road but still absolutely no problem – in the dry.

Seite Tazas park is famous for a series of seven waterfalls in a canyon into small pools. Unfortunately you can only see the last 3 of these and there is no path to the others. However there are a couple of really large other waterfalls in the park as well.

We arrived in the late afternoon and spent a very enjoyable few hours viewing the waterfalls and hiking down to the base of one of them. The long evenings in Chile are really great for travelling as you can get your miles in and then still have time for some fun !

We were a bit disturbed though to see quite a large number of tarantulas. I almost kneeled on one when I was taking a picture.

We decided to spend the night in the National Park at a deserted campsite and were very pleased when it turned out to be free as we were out of season.

However in the morning the skies opened and it started to rain – hard. By the time we got on the road it had been raining for over an hour and the road had seriously started to disintegrate. On the way in we had commented how the book requiring 4×4 was ridiculous – well on the way out we were very glad of 4×4.

Further South along the Pan American there is a set of very large falls, Salto de Laja. These have been compared to Igazcu falls in Northern Argentina although that is pretty ridiculous. The falls are very pretty though – and there is good swimming at the base.

In the area around the falls there are at least 10 campsites and we choose one for a very relaxing day.