Ha! Hahaaaaa! Yep. Funny it was when we arrived in Pucón and wanted to start a hike into the Villarrica national park. Conaf, the national park administration, told us that all national parks down to Valdivia were closed due to earthquake warnings and problems. This national park covers three volcanoes, one of them being an active one, the volcano Villarrica. So this was a quite thrilling situation but we did not want to climb this hill for nearly 80 Euro … too much. After kidding around a while we could enter the park on our own risk, they told us where to start the best route for a hike of around three days.
TravelAid is a small tourist info in Pucón run by a Swiss guy who gave us great information and fed my Garmin eTrex Vista HCX GPS with some possible hiking paths and the local contour lines. Nice service! We arranged to get to the park entrance “Quetrupillán” the same day and camped in the forest at the junction of two small rivers making a big bonfire.
Then our first day of real hiking was a nice but hard one. In the end we finished around 20 km together with 1700 height metres and Daniel was near to death. The first part was a steep ascent from 1000 m through a thick forest full of Nothofagus until we reached lighter regions with many Araucaria (in my opinion after Platanus the coolest trees ever), finally stepping out of the forest in around 1700 m with a beautiful view on the snow-topped and smoking volcano Villarrica. Most of the time then we were walking up and down on a plateau consisting of small grains of volcano ash, picked with little colourful flowers. Of course accompanied by bright sunshine, like everywhere where we go … Already at night, at around 9 pm, we had to descend to Laguna Azul a steep way from 1900 m crossing snow fields unexpectedly. This is funny because we just stood there parallysed wondering of this snow. A few days before we have been in the endless dry desert just “a few” kilometres further north … and now everything juicy green and snowy … hmm Chile is geographically crazy.
We started after sleeping enough and had to cross an old lava field which was created during an eruption around 100 years ago. So impressive!!! From further above it really looked like if somebody poured black glassy stones into the valley for kilometres! Everything still looks “fresh”, the stones still shiny but eroded significantly showing the typical conchoidal fracture. The rest of the day we again spent walking on basaltic ash and circled an old volcano crater. After kilometre 12 we had to climb up some hundred metres to pass the mountain ridge and it followed a nice descent through wide swamps into the Nothofagus-forest again, where we arrived at Laguna Los Patos after around 17 km. We had the whole lagoon for us alone; the black beach was untouched and the water warmer as assumed, probably because of the black sand. I never saw so clear water and had to dive in directly after putting down my backpack. Yeeehaaaaaw, together with the 6pm sun and without wind it was the best refreshment ever. We camped at the beach using only the inner tent.
The last day of this trip we spent walking 10 km only through forest full of yellow flowers called Alstroemeria aure. Mmhhhm! Before reaching the main street between Chile and Argentina we had a beautiful view into the valley of Río Trancura with high and sharp mountain ridges in the background.
The next two days we spent in Valdivia visiting the parents of Alonso who I met in Santiago some days before. On the Sunday market we tried some sea food including sea urchin tongues … oh baby, this is THE WORST on earth, it tastes like death, it smells like death and it looks like guts. You get it cold and raw in a sauce of death. After trying one you have to fight vomiting. Usually I am very open to food and I try _everything_ what I don’t know, I like everything … at least I thought this until this last Sunday. No way. After that I had to eat my Chilean blue mussels, which were times better!
The old fortress in Niebla was closed because the earthquake destroyed some walls … it gets boring after a while, this whole earthquake stuff. We went to the local and famous brewery Kunstmann but a brewery tour was not possible, so we only tried some beer and I had a big steak sandwich. The beer is nice, they have many different kinds with Lager and Ale as the mayor ones but also offering a Wheat beer and one with Honey and some more. I t is a bit poor for a “German” brewery that they do not have any great Pils but I don’t care, one reason more to return to Germany hehe. The funniest thing is that the founder of this Brewery in 19th century was a guy from Dresden but the whole atmosphere in the brewery is Bavarian style. Bloody marketing fuck shit, all Chilean take photos next to Almmaedchen with Dirndl and now all Chilean (in general whole South America) thinks that Germany is like small ancient parts of Bavaria. But Daniel and I were the only two real Germans … no one noticed that because at least I look like a Bolivian tennis player, Daniel more like a Gringo with his beard and hat, he also wears his sunglasses at night.
Ha! Now we are on Chiloé and in a few minutes we are going to search some possibilities to hike around on this island. On the way from Puerto Montt to Ancud we had to cross with a ferry and were escorted by some dolphins. Hihi.
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