Reñaca – Earthquakes and dog bites

In this blog, we experience our very first earthquake and learn how to navigate a foreign health system as well as discuss our time in Renaca, a suburb of Valparaiso. Things are not always amazing while traveling, but you get to know yourself better and learn to deal with challenges.

After leaving Freddy’s place, we spent two weeks in Reñaca which is a suburb of Valparaiso. We stayed in an apartment near the big dunes and on walking distance to the beach roads, all of which was very nice. One evening we walked to the top of the dunes and watched the sunset from the top. My brother asked some people if he could use their sand board, and they said yes. Thirty seconds later my brother went from the top of the massive sand dune to the bottom on a body board that they were using as a sand board. I decided to stay at the top and enjoy the sunset which was incredible.  

An Earthquake

In my last blogs I spoke about Freddy and Guiliano, however Freddy was not the only friend we made while staying in Valparaiso. Early on we got to meet Caro and Megan, who are a lovely Chilean/Australian couple. We made sure to meet up with them every weekend. While they were visiting us one afternoon, we experienced our first earthquake or earth tremor. We had a jug of water on the table at the time and you could see the water rocking from side-to-side without anyone touching it.

As a person who comes from a country that doesn't experience many earthquakes, it felt really weird that the earth and everything around you is moving. It’s not as scary as I thought it was going to be, I’m sure bigger earthquakes can be really scary. Megan said she has learned to feel comforted by earth tremor because it means the pressure between the tectonic plates is getting released so the chance of a big earthquake occurring is less likely. We experienced two earthquakes in total while we were staying in Reñaca.

Above is what it looks like when you do a google search after an earthquake has occurred.

Dog bite

Another interesting event we had while in Reñaca was that my brother got bitten by a dog. He went for a walk by himself as he does more often these days. This very friendly German shepherd walked up to him, bit him through his jeans and then stuck around looking very friendly, while his owners looked after my brother with first aid. We then got medical advice that was clear he needed a full course of rabies vaccination. He now has to get five jabs over several weeks. As we are travelling to different locations during these weeks, in every place we visit we need to find a vaccination clinic to get his next jab. We have asked the vaccination clinic if my mum and I should get vaccinated as a proactive measure, as there are a lot of stray dogs here. The specialists just say, ‘Well you haven’t been bitten yet. We only give rabies vaccinations after someone gets bitten!’

My learnings from all this is that if we had our time again, we would get a pre-rabies vaccination before we left just to be safe (we received medical advice that we didn’t need this vaccination). If you are planning to travel to South America, don’t be scared of getting bitten. In my experience over 90% of the stray dogs are really friendly, but you shouldn’t go and pet them.

Regardless of vaccination status, you need to go and get medical advice after a dog bite because rabies is life threatening. If you are already vaccinated before a bite, there are less follow up jabs and the process is less scary, because you already have some immunity from your pro-active medical treatment (which means less chance of Death).

Our final thing during this time was our shopping trip in Viña del Mar. We haven’t gone shopping for clothes since we left Australia three months ago. Argentina tends not to haves many big shopping malls (mostly independent stores), so it was strangely comforting that Chile does have malls and bigger shops. We had to go shopping for extra warm clothes because we are heading some were cold – on that soon! I got some thermals a beanie, slippers and a new travel towel. So yes, we got quite a bit, but we will definitely get some great use out of it.

Tune in for the next blog, where we embark on a long bus trip south!