Wednesday, April 23

From Valdivia it only took us a couple of hours to get to Pucon. Pucon is a touristic village with a cosy, relaxed atmosphere on the lake with a perfectly shaped active vulcano in the background. Thanks to the low season, there were (luckily) not many tourists around.

We did a long and tiring hike (3 hours uphill and 3 hours down) on a more than perfect day; clear blue skies with excellent views on the vulcano and on some beautiful small lakes that were hidden between the mountains. We were very happy that Pucon has a lot of natural hotsprings in the area because our muscles needed to relax. We visited them at night (some are open until midnight) and it was nice to sit outside in a hot pool with a nice view on the stars above us.

Since the weather forecast was bad (3 days full of rain), we decided to take an early morning bus to a small hostel more to the north (read: more to the sunny weather). It was a very remote place and we had to take all the food for three days with us because there are no restaurants or supermarkets close to the hostel. The hostel had one special room with a roof made of glass and we were in the lucky position that it was available; we slept under the moon and the stars! The couple who owns the place are Belgian/French and they only started to build the hostel 3 years ago. They told us they had been cycling around the world for almost 2 years (Mathias, can you imagine that?) and since she was pregnant for 5 months already they needed a place to stay. We rented their bicycles for one day to cycle to some natural hot springs. According to the owner they were only 2 hours away; it took us 4 hot, sweaty and tiring hours of uphill cycling to get there... On the way back we cheated a bit because we hitchhiked a part in the back of a pick-up truck, but we still cycled about 60 kilometers in total, of which 40 slightly but countinuously uphill and partly over a bumpy gravel road.

Another long day of busrides was followed by a stay in the beach town Valparaiso, a World Heritage Site (it rained and was cloudy mostly). The major attraction here (besides the beach) are the antique elevators to the top of the surrounding hills and the colonial buildings. We enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere and mainly did some things we had to do in a "big" city (ie. laundry and send a DVD with pictures back to Holland). From here we went to Easter Island, see the next update.