Our first stop in Chile was a quick pop over the border from Bariloche to Puerto Varas via Puerto Montt. We’ve now become accustomed to getting local buses (and not really knowing what’s going on) so we jumped on one of the local mini buses, handed over a few thousand Chilean pesos and headed to Puerto Varas. The buses were the most South American-like buses we’d been on and a sign of what’s to come in Bolivia and Peru. Every time they stopped a guy selling things would jump on and jump off again whilst it was moving in the middle if the street. Not something you’d see on the 640 in Bradford!
We arrived at our hostel, Margyouru 2 (one of the nicest homely ones so far), checked in and took a little hike up one of the recommended hills. Not the best view we’d seen so far but a nice warm up for our hike up the volcano the next day. The Volcano Osorno was the reason of our visit to Puerto Varas.
The weather wasn’t looking great but with just one full day here, we didn’t want to extend our visit to wait for better weather. How bad could it be right?! We set off (on a bus we had no idea where it was going or where to get off) and the weather looked okay. Started the hike and it still was okay… About 10 minutes in it started to rain and it didn’t stop for a full day after! We persevered thinking it may stop and we could maybe still get a good view of the volcano if we hiked high enough… Wrong! 4 hours of walking and we couldn’t see a bloody thing. Meeting a volcano would have to wait until our next stop, Pucon.
We hadn’t even heard of Pucon until a guy in our hostel in Buenos Aires mentioned it. We liked the sound of it so included it in our plans. These recommendations are working out well for us! We had two options to go to Volcano Villarrica – hike it or ski/board down it – It was an easy choice…
Luckily we had a good day for weather. We saw the sunrise in the morning which was great while having breakfast looking out onto the lake at the hostel. In fact it was the only time we had seen the sun so far in Chile. Walking out of the hostel we forgot how close we were to the volcano (due to the rubbish weather when arriving) and had an amazing view of the volcano.
We went to the rental store like excitable kids at Christmas. The gear we rented wasn’t great. The snowboard was pretty old and the clothes we rented looked like a workmans uniform. The pants had Velcro all down the side and popped open a lot – not very waterproof! But it would do for a day.
The day didn’t get off to a great start – 2 runs in and my bindings on my board broke and I couldn’t get my foot out so couldn’t go back up the chairlifts. We had to go all the way back down to the bottom and get the rental guy to come take it off for me. He couldn’t either so I had to get my foot out of my boot while still attached to the board. All got sorted and back going again. The day got better from there. It was like spring skiing – icy in the morning then a few hours later it softened up and the conditions were pretty decent.
We hadn’t lost the knack and felt quite good in comparison to some other people. What a difference 6 months of doing it constantly makes! Saying that we didn’t go too far off piste as we didn’t get insurance for the day so didn’t want to risk breaking anything. I did manage to fall off the chairlift and bang my head on it… That’s why you wear a helmet kids!
We did pretty much all the runs we could on the mountain as it was pretty small compared to most, but it was well worth it to be boarding on a active volcano! The resort had a lot of pros against other resorts – no lift lines even on a Saturday, cheaper food on resort and laid back staff who let you do what you want really.
The whole day cost about £55 each which was a lot for one day but so much cheaper than most other resorts and something we had wanted to do. The price included everything – lift pass, ski/board hire, clothing hire, transport both ways and a meal on the mountain.
The next day the weather wasn’t looking great. Rain, rain and more rain. So what better activity than river boarding down the rapids?! Hydro boarding as it’s called was new to us and is the only place in South America you can do it. So we thought whatever we would do, we would get wet so might aswell go all out. It was brilliant!
You basically have a float to lie on and flippers so you can manoeuvre down the river. We went down about 4 rapids and as it had been raining a lot the river was flowing much faster than usual. Some of them were pretty big and we both managed to fall off which was a pretty scary few minutes trying to get back on. I should have an awesome GoPro video showing it all. Watch this space! We picked a good day to do it as the day after the water levels were really high and it was running even faster. We did our runs in 40 minutes whereas the group the day after did it in 25 which is scarily fast. Don’t think we’d have stayed on the floats for very long!
As it’s the middle of winter here it was bloody cold when the water hits you in the face and then when we got out we had to take our wetsuits off outside so that was pretty damn cold! I don’t have any picture of the hydro speed yet as we are still waiting on our guide to send them to us… But instead you can have this lovely picture of us in our wetsuits!
That evening we decided to go to one of the natural hot springs in the area. Laying in a pool of 39 degrees water was just what we needed to relax! Again bloody cold getting out though!
We loved Pucon and would love to return some day. The hostel was very homely. You can’t beat coming back from a cold day to sit by a fire! We also found a pub that we made our local and visited 3 times in our three day trip. If you’re ever in Pucon, check out Latitude 39 – a great little place. We could have stayed much longer but we spent a lot of money in the few days and needed to carry on to get to Bolivia. Our next stop was Santiago.
We only spent one night in Santiago so didn’t really get to see too much of the city. We went on a free walking tour to see the main bits and get some local history. Not an amazing tour but it left us in the main place for bars and restaurant so we settled there for the night. We’ve decided we much prefer the small little towns than big cities.
The next morning we were on the road again to Arica which is a little beach town in the most northern point of Chile. This was a good place for us to base ourselves to get a bus to Bolivia.
My first impressions of the place weren’t great (was a little grumpy from the 32 hour bus journey) but it turned out to be a really nice little place. Due to the bus taking longer than expected we only had two nights and one full day to explore but that was just right.
We had a nice little stroll on the beach (although we almost turned back due to an out of control dog almost killing us!), had lunch at a little cafe then walked up to El Morro De Arica. You get an amazing view of the city and see Christo Redeemer number 2.
Another place we visited was the Arica stadium which was one of the host stadiums for the 1962 World Cup. Kyle was more interested in it than me but it was quite cool to go to one of the grounds. It was Uruguay, Russia, Colombia and Yugoslavia that played their games there. We didn’t get to see a game there as the local team were playing the day after. We were very tempted to stay another night but we couldn’t really justify it just to watch an amateur team play.
After Arica we jumped on a bus to La Paz to start our travels around Bolivia. The journey was the most scenic one yet. After some very windy and steep roads we were in the desert with some incredible views of mountains, wildlife and lakes. Going through the border was the easiest yet – ‘do you have fruit’ to which we replied no and we were on our way without our bags even getting looked at.
It was turning out to be our best bus journey yet (we even got fed) then all of a sudden BAM… I started to get a horrendous headache and felt sick – altitude sickness had started to kick in.
A couple of hours later we arrived in La Paz or so we thought we were about to. We reached a sudden stop and saw a huge queue of traffic at a complete standstill. Then the bus driver came out and shouted something we didn’t know quite what he was saying but it was something along the lines of ‘we can’t go to the bus station, get off here’ then everyone got off the bus and claimed their luggage. There we were in the middle of a road with all our bags, all we could do was walk in the general direction of the un-moving traffic until we got to what looked like the centre to find a taxi. It was a bit of a mission! Finally we reached our hostel in La Paz 13 hours after setting off from Chile.
Our Big Fat North America Travel Adventure! 