Marco's Chile Adventure

Check out news & photo's from Marco's most recent adventure:

Yesterday I arrived back home from my trip to Chile! I have never traveled so much around a country like i did on this recent trip in Chile and it was an adventure! The crew was Stephan Maurer, Eric Themel, Basti Gogl, myself and our guide, Sebastian Camus Valenzuela, from Chile. We arrived on the 19th in Santigo, Chile. Sebastian picked us up from the airport and showed us Santigo! Later that day we drove to Colorado to the first ski resort which was a 1.5 hours drive from Santiago, where we stayed for two days. On the first day we got super lucky with the weather and the snow, a lot of powder but super rocky and I f*cked up my board super bad! On the next day, a big storm came up and we decided to drive back to Santiago to organize the next stop of our road trip from Sebastian's place. We stayed two days in the city, then we traveled to the next ski resort, Portillio. We ended up having to stay 40 min away from the resort because there was only one hotel and it was fully booked! The ski resort was close to the Argentina border and I was in the longest traffic jam of my whole life! At the resort they had the funniest t-bar lifts ever! Check out the photos - they brought you up with 50 km/h- 5 people in a line, it was crazy! The first day was perfect in the morning and around noon it got so warm that they had to close a big part of the area, which was super bad for us because there were four other crews on the mountain at the same time! The next day we got up to the resort really early, we had perfect weather, but the temperatures were so warm that they could not open fully again - so we had to do some jib stuff - it was fun!

Then we had a little meeting to talk about what we should do and again we decided to go back to Santiago. We did some more site seeing in the couple next days because the weather forecast was not that good up to 4000 meters, it was around zero degrees and super dangerous. The only options we had was to fly south for snowboarding or go to the beach for surfing! After talking with the crew, we traveled to Sebastian's beach house, but the house was not finished - no toilet, no hot water, no kitchen...but when we arrived we realized that it would be another adventure for our trip. You could tell it was winter - super cold at night and I had to sleep on the floor on some insulation stuff because everything else was locked in a container! Altogether we had a great time on the beach!

After two days we were happy to check into a hotel with a warm shower! With only one week left before we would fly back home and realizing we did not get that many riding photos up to this point, Sebastian came up with a plan to go and meet up with this guy, Cristian Wehrhahn. He runs a sled operation somewhere 1.5 hours away from Santigo (sorry i forgot the name of the place)! So we fixed everything up with Cristian to try to get the shots that we still needed for the story. We knew from Cristian that the house we were going to stay in was up around 2700 meters without electricity, without hot water, but there would be some hot springs around the house - again another adventure for trip. We planned to stay around 5 days at this place and hopefully get the photos together. We knew that we had to hike the to get to the sled's and bring as little as possible with us, so we had to bring enough food for 6 people to last for 5 days. I can tell you it was a hell of a hike to get to the sleds! When we arrived at the house and we saw the spot were we would stay in the next days it was a little bit of a shock for me at first, but after a little while, I realized it would be something special to stay there! We had a perfect time up there - only 1 good day out of 5, but on this day I had so much fun on my board and we got some really good photos out of it! After 5 days we drove back to Santiago with a smile on our face. The next day we flew back home to Europe! All in all - this trip was a great experience for me!

Upcoming Plans:
On the 11th of September, we have the world premiere of the new Pirate's movie happening in Innsbruck/Austria!

All the best,
fichtl