Jannis & Martine

After having stayed 10 days on Chileo island, we have moved out of Patagonia and moved on up north.

First we stayed one night in the touristy town of Puerto Varas and then moved on to Valdivia, a university city located near the Pacific coast.

When we travelled from Chiloe island to Puerto Varas everything suddenly changed from a very scenic isolated, hilly countryside dotted with wooden churches and little farms, with colourfull people and their traditions, to another very nice hilly forest and wheat covered area, which just looks like…

…Germany.

This is all not so strange since this is the area where lots of Germans emigrated to a century ago, to farm in this area.

You still notice that there has been a big German influence here as the local speciality here are küchen (very good cakes), one of the famous beers here (and by far the best) is the German-sounding Künstmann beer and the area is dotted with German-looking houses.

We saw some German influences in Puerto Varas where we had some very delicious küchen, but this was nothing compared to the area around Valdivia, as this city was the center of German immigration.

What they really have inherited from the Germans here, is the way they party.

Yesterday they had ¨The Night Of Valdivia¨ here, which is the main thing of the year visited by more than 100.000 people, with decorated boats floating down the river finished off by some pretty amazing fireworks. A lot of times it was pretty hard for us though, to discover that there was actually a party going on, as everyone was just standing with their hands in their pockets watching really good drum-bands playing ritmic Samba-music and quietly sitting on the ground watching the marvellous fireworks. Very down to earth…

We had more experience with this German-like party attitude here some days ago, when we stayed in the very nice village of Niebla, which is located in the beautifull hills nearby Valdivia with beaches on the Pacific coast. Because of this Niebla is full of Chilean tourists, and to entertain them they organise something of a bierfest-thing there every night. Just image that you are travelling in the middle of Spanish-speaking Chili and you enter a big tent where you see rows and rows of people drinking lots of beer and doing some folk-dancing on a band playing Schlagermusik-sounding music, with Spanish lyrics sung by Heidi-dressed singers…

…really strange.

The good thing is that it is not all like Germany here, though.

One of the things they certainly have not inherited from the Germans, is some feel for efficiency (a Danish guy who is working here confirmed this yesterday). The total lack for caring about doing something a bit efficient is a Chilean heritage where the Spanish have more rights to lay claim on…

But apart from all this, Valdivia is this a very good place to spend some time…

…we did, for more than a week.

Till next time when we have arrived in Bariloche.

Jannis.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 at 10:25 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.