Chilean Lake District
We flew down to Puerto Montt from Santiago (after spending about 12 hours in Santiago!) It turned out that the people who did the Sultans Elephant in London over the summer where in Santiago at the same time, this time with the Little Girl & a giant rinosorus…if we´d know that we might have spent a little longer in Santiago, give how much we´d enjoyed the elephant, but nevermind.
Puerto Montt is a bit of a dump and it didn´t help that there we found that we wouldn´t be able to take the 4-day ferry we´d booked at home in August down to Puerto Natales. “Technical difficulties” – we think that it means they crashed it! Instead we headed to Puerto Varas for a couple of days.
Puerto Varas is a pretty little town on the edge of Lake Llanquihue, it is a nice place to spend some time recovering from a cold & generally not do much! From there we went up to Petrohue to see the waterfalls and the Orsono Volcano. It is here that we met our first tabanos (horseflies) – these are evil things that buzz around your ears, try & bite you & generally annoy the **** out of you. I can´t work out if they are worse than sandflies – at least sandflies disappear when you are walking…
The landlady at the hospedaje we stayed in in Puerto Montt had mentioned Cochamo to us…we didn´t really know where we were heading as it is quite hard to find information out here (they have tourist information centres – tucked away in delapitaed government buildings – but they hide all their leaflets etc away, so you have to know what you want in order to ask for it, but thats tricky when you´re trying to just get an idea of the area and what is available…it all gets a bit circular!)
Anyway, we ended up going up this valley with no road, just a horse track / path and ended up in a beautiful campsite called La Junta about a days walk up. We managed to do not a lot for a couple of days up there. If you carried on up the valley on the track / path you´d eventually get to Argentina & there is a border crossing (there is a road to the border on the Argentine side).
From there we headed to Chiloe – an island near Puerto Montt. We stayed in Ancud, which is a nice laid back town (the day trip to Castro, the capital wasn´t great – big busstling rundown place – not very inspiring). Whilst at Ancud we went to a local festival…we certainly stuck out like sore thumbs, but it was fun. About 10 food stalls overlooking a beautiful bay, a stage and during the afternoon various displays from local dancing to how to shear a sheep, spin wool, milk a cow to how to cook seaweed.
We tried the local speciality – curanto. Seafood, a sausage, rib, beans & some cakey type stuff which had been cooked in a hole in the ground, covered with various bits of undergrowth. Not the best meal in the world…don´t think we´ll be trying it again!
Tags: Chile, Lake District, Travel, Trek
Jenni
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