Following my travels through Chilean Patagonia, I was happy to make my way to the coastal town of Valdivia, Chile. This very pleasant town is home to a small university and is good staging point for trips into the Lake district of Chile. For me, though, it was an opportunity to see a familiar face, as a friend of mine is a student there. I settled in at an extremely interesting old house which rented rooms out to travelers. Purely by coincidence, it happened to be owned by a forestry professor at the university. We had a few interesting chats over breakfasts and dinners, though strangely enough they often focused on topics other than forestry.

My first day in town I went out to the University to have a look around. For the most part, it was just like any other University I´ve visited. The great find for me, though, was the expansive botanical gardens on the campus which had areas of trees from all over the world. I found a huge tulip poplar and ate lunch underneath the yellow leaves of autumn. The smell of the leaves definitely brought me back to the US, and it was a nice to spend an afternoon looking for errors in the signs on some of the North American specimens.

After holding around town for a couple of days, I discovered my friend at the university was out of town for the week, so I decided I´d go spend a couple days exploring the lakes and try to make it back. The final night I was in Valdivia, Frank, a German forestry student who was also staying at the Residencial, invited me to a Salsa party. This sounded like great fun, and we headed off. It wasn´t exactly what I was looking for, since it felt conspicuously like a frat party. Hundreds of college kids (many of them trashed out of their minds) sauntering about with overpriced beers. Still, the salsa music and dancing were great. I wasn´t up for a late night, so I checked out around 4AM. The following morning I made my way to Pucon.

Pucon is an extremely touristy town nestled amongst active volcanoes and fantastic lakes a few hours northeast of Valdivia. The main attraction here is the excursion to the edge of an active volcano where you can look into the mouth and see the lava churning and bubbling beneath you. I´d heard good reports on this experience, and decided to check it out.

Upon arriving, though, I determined that the cost was too much and decided instead to hike out to an outlying village which was supposed to have great views of many of the volcanos and lakes in the area. I didn´t have a map of the area and was going on rather vague instructions about how to get to this town, but I was relatively confident in my abilities (don´t ask me why). I hoofed out of town first thing in the morning and made my way north for a while and turned at the road I felt had the most potential. I sauntered down a dirt road for a few kilometers and was thrilled to stumble on a sight I won´t see in my lifetime in the US, locals gathering huge bundles of chestnuts. All along the street were huge chestnut trees dropping tremendous volumes of nuts. It was a treat for me. I enquired from one of these folks about where the town I was looking for was located and they gave me a rather amazed look and explained I was nowhere near where I needed to be. Luckily, I was rather used to failed excursions and took the news with a grain of salt. I made the best of my mess and walked out to the river where I munched my lunch under the shade of a willow tree. Days like this make me realize how much better it is to screw up vacationing in Chile than it is to screw up at work. After a couple of empanadas I headed back to town.

As I mentioned previously, Pucon is a purely tourist town (a guy at my Residencial who worked in town had a nifty story about Richard Gere´s recent visit) and is much too expensive to spend much time in. I knew I had to either return to Valdivia and try again to catch up with Gonzalo (my friend there) or continue north. After much consternation, I elected to move on and packed my bags for Santiago.