Chilly Chile

Perusing our guidebook in Mendoza, we discovered that although the Acongagua Park was closed for the season, the road that stretches from Mendoza through the Andes and into Santiago, Chile was not to be missed. So onwards across and south to the Chilean Lakes district, which we believed would be a bit warmer than the Argentine side as it is lower elevation and closer to the ocean.

The ride through the Andes was pretty spectacular - we think we saw Acongagua, the highest peak in the Americas.



Following another 24 hours of travel and some unfortunate clothing catastrophes (Dave left his coat on the first bus that arrived in Santiago, we tried for hours to locate it in the lost and found. Apparently it was found on the bus but it seemed to get ´lost´again on the way to the customer service desk. We hope it will be used well. Then Megan spilled a cup of black coffee down the front of her favourite shirt. The worst part about this was that the coffee wasn´t even coffee - it was Nescafe).

However, eventually we arrived in a town called Puerto Montt, in south central Chile. Puerto Montt can best be described as similar to Port Alberni. We based ourselves there in order to do a trek in a nearby national park, the Alerce Andino. After figuring out the local bus system and finding a grocery store we were on our way. One thing we´ve discovered about both Chile and Argentina is that in rural areas, the local buses also serve as school buses! So after cramming ourselves and our packs into a bus with many children we found ourselves in the park. In fact, we were the only visitors to the park that day - the ranger seemed excited to see us, even with our fumbly Spanish.



We had fabulous weather and probably the best campsite ever - right beside a river. Definitely glad we got the trek in as the minute we caught the bus back to town it started to rain. And then it didn´t stop raining until we left Chile about 5 days later!!! If we were at all feeling homesick Chile cured us with all the rain. After our trek we headed over to Isla Chiloe, which was very beautiful and extremely green because of the mountains of rain it recieves annually... We met up with a friendly Argentine-Canadian from Canmore and went tootling around the island with him in his car. Must admit the luxury of not taking public transit for a day was pretty nice! We even had some patches of sunlight that day. We gave Chile one more shot and went to a town called Puerto Varas, a bit further inland but on a huge lake. More rain. Thankfully they had a good book exchange.



We left Chile without too much regret - we were a bit soggy and they do not have coffee except for Nescafe. Really. We had heard rumours but once faced with the reality it was difficult for Megan to cope. However, Chile is a gorgeous country with plenty of parks, camping and volcanos to climb. But maybe another time.