Valdivia - 15th April 2009

After an early start for our bus, we spend a slightly worried few minutes trying to track someone who works at the hostel down so that we can pay for our stay... we eventually manage to wake the owner's wife up, and are on our way.

The bus ride to Valdivia is comfortable and short enough, and we have bravely not booked any accommodation at the other end. We decide to trust one of the touts at the station, who bats her eyelashes at us and promises us a room with bathroom, breakfast etc, for a reasonable price. She tells us that her hostel is only just around the corner, so we decide to go and have a look...

... it turns out to be quite a nice hotel, with only one catch - the prices seem to have altered dramatically since we left the station, and we can indeed get the room we were promised, but for three times the original price. However, there is a plywood shed around the back with a bed in it that we can use for the price discussed. We have a look, and it's ramshackle, but clean and right next to the station, since we leave Valdivia again in the morning.

Bags stashed, we head out to hunt for Valdivia's main attraction - the huge sealions that harass the fish stall owners at the market every day. We are in luck, and soon spot about twenty of them, the males almost three times as big as the females, alternately competing with the cormorants for scraps at the waterside and dozing in the sun. They are enormous, and one brave mischief has snuck along behind the railing to get closer to the fish scraps... he is soon chased away with a broom by an amused stall holder.

Our objective for Valdivia complete, we have a wander around town and then back to our shack for dinner. We have been assured that there is a 'lovely full kitchen', although it turns out that there is one huge aluminium pan, one fork and a giant industrial-sized gas burner. We manage to cobble together some pasta and sauce, glad that we're out of here in the morning. The bold horse pattern on the bedspread does go some way towards cheering the room up though, and aside from having to queue to use the only toilet in the building the following morning, when the proprietor's husband confines himself in there at leisure to read the morning paper, we emerge in the morning (without the promised breakfast of course), to a sunny day and another bus: we're off further south to Puerto Montt.