My holidays on Mapuche land, exploring the region of Araucania.

Picture 1: Photo taken at Villarica coastal walk. 

Picture 2: Photo taken at the top of Ruka Pillan (Villarrica Volcano), looking at Mallolafquén (Villarrica lake).

On January of 2019, me and my family traveled to the region of Araucania at the south of Chile, where we took the Route 5 to go there from Valparaíso, my home. The travel in the car took the whole day, and we stopped at different Pronto Copec to renevue energies, to eat and for bathroom use. When we finally arrived at Molco, it was at night and we were really tired. The next day we explored Pucón and Villarica city, and we got our lunch at the restaurant. I don't remembet the exact order of the activities that we did, but we traveled towards the different lakes, like Calafquen or Caburgua lake, where we explored the shores, we swimed and we did some lake exploring using a pedal boat that we rented from a lady at the shore, also we climbed the Ruka Pillan (Picture 2), from were we took a look, it was amazing. Other thing that I loved was the view at night, the region of Araucania is really dark at night, so you can look at the sky and see tons of stars, I felt really quiet and happy, The holydays took a total of 7 days, I wish I could go back in time to live that again, becouse I felt really amazed that we could take a journey as a family, something that we never could do me being a kid.

But, one thing that really called my atenttion, was the name of the places that was written on all of the signals. I concluded that none of those names came from the spanish colonization, travelling from Valparaíso to Mallolafquen was a reminder that I was travelling into other country that was anexed to Chile, all the names and signature was like going into other country. Just make the exercise and read the names like Ruka Pillan, Calafquen, Licanray, Pitrufquen and many others, I doubt that those names came from the spanish languaje, those sound are clearly foreign from our mother languaje. I felt really weird.

Greetings.