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…
Our Big Fat North America Travel Adventure! 