We finally crossed thje border into chile, to the border town of Osorno where we were forced to stay the night before heading to Pucon a small town most famous for having the backdrop of the stunning volcan villarica which we decided to try and climb the next day. The volcano can only be climbed when the weather is clear and we arrived on a perfect day but were told that the weather was going to get worse over the next few days so our best hope was to try and climb it the next day. We had booked a relaxing trip to the hot springs afterwards to soothe our aching limbs. We got some food and supplies and headed to bed fairly early to prepare ourselves for the climb.

We woke up and didnt have the perfect view of the volcano that we had gone to bed with but headed off undeterred. We got kitted uo with our boots, gaiters, trousers and jackets and got given our backpacks with the rest of the equipment and headed up the volcano. At the bottom you have the choice of climbing the initial part or getting a chairlift up the first few hundred metres. We thought it would be silly to exert ourselves this early so caught the chairlift up the first part. The climb up felt ok, the ground was pretty uneven but we were soon at the front of the glacier and putting our crampons on for our second attempt at ice climbing. The weather was begining to turn and some groups werent heading onto the ice, but we were sent up as a test group to see what the conditions were like further up. After about an hour we were in the clouds and it was clear we were going no further. Unlike when we were going up where we took it nice and easy, the guides were on a mission to get us down as fast as we could. We were almost running through the snow and our knees started to ache halfway down. If we had made it to the top we would have been able to slide down a lot of the way which would have saved our knees. Once we were off the glacier we took off our crampons and continued down the shingle. My legs felt like they were going to give way with every step as we slid through the gravel and finally made it to the bottom. My feet were killing and when we finally made it back to the office i could see why, I had blisters the size of 50p pieces on both ankles. Walking was definitely going to be difficult over the next few days.

We killed a few hours before heading back to the hot springs. It was really dark and some of the pools were empty but the ones near the bottom seemed to be a bit more lively so we headed there. The natural pools and volcanically heated water eased the muscles as we drank a couple of bottles of wine and relaxed. We were a little late back for our lift who didnt seem to impressed as he raced us back to town. The next day the weather was really awful and as i could barely walk we decided to relax a bit and sit by the fire in the hostel and watch a few movies. The day after we booked our night bus to Santiago but had the day to kill so decided to go to some other hot springs. These ones werent nearly as impressive as the first, being more like swimming pools than hot springs and they werent nearly as warm. We also found ourselves surrounded by about 40 middle aged chilean women who found us fascinating. We had to have our photographs taken many times and tried to explain in our pidgeon spanish what we were doing there. We werent massively disappointed when it was time to go home and then killed a few hours before we headed to santiago later that night. It was one of our strangest journeys as we found ourselves being tucked in by one of the people working on the bus, well at least we were warm!