From Puerto Varas I took a day trip to Chiloé Island with a local guide, Ernesto. On the ferry to Isla Grande de Chiloé I saw seals in the water and in the distance I could just make out the Chaitén volcano that had exploded a couple of weeks earlier. Once on Chiloé Island, we drove to the town of Ancud where we visited the San Antonio Fort - the last place that the Spanish held in South America - and the Regional Museum of Ancud in the main square. Ernesto ...

Puerto Varas is a small, quiet town on the shore of Lake Llanquihue in Chile's Lake District. It has many wooden shingled houses, some painted in bright colours (bizarre German influence again) and there was a big new hotel/casino in the middle of town that looked quite out of place among them! I walked around the lakefront and stopped in a little cafe for hot chocolate. Back at the hotel, I had a girly afternoon with Jeanne-Marie and Karien, watching 27 Dresse...

In the winter Pucón is a ski resort and when I was there, during the summer, it offered all sorts of adventure activities. It is in the Chilean Lake District which was once a German colony and you could be forgiven for thinking you've been transported to an Alpine ski resort with all the curiously old European style of wooden buildings. I noticed a lot of German tourists and a number of activities were offered with German-speaking guides. We arrived in Pucón a...

I crossed the border from Argentina into Chile and arrived in Santiago in the early afternoon. Santiago is the capital of Chile - a huge city, very international and developed compared to everywhere else I've been in South America so far. We went for lunch at a good restaurant named Liguria in the Providencia district where we were staying. Then we took the metro to the main square (the first metro system I've encountered in South America). Around the main squar...