Day 268, 269 - Pucon & the chilly Chile Sum up - Tuesday 10th, Wednesday 11th July 2012

We arrived into Pucon early morning and once off the bus headed towards our hostel, along the way checking out the huge huffing and snow-capped Volcano Villarrica which serves as the backdrop to the town. It was freezing and as we passed a little restaurant that looked cosy and warm we realised it was in fact our hostel - result! It was early so we settled down for a bit of breakfast and chatted to the owner about climbing the volcano the following day; we were gutted to discover that the weather forecast for the following three days were rain and so all climbs were cancelled! Feeling a bit down heartened we decided we'd instead spend the day wandering the town and head out to the hot springs the following day. It took us only a couple of hours to cover the town, shops and sights, and I mean the entire town and at a very slow pace! Pucon is very cute with little wooden houses and smoke bellowing from all the chimneys and I can imagine that in the summer its very busy and packed out but in the midst of winter it was only the insane (that being us) who braved walking around the town and lake. We stopped for a while at a lovely little chocolate café and warmed ourselves up with dulce and chocolate drinks with a brownie to round it off - we are loving the cakes and chocolate of South America! We decided to head back to the hostel for a hot shower before heading back out again for dinner - the nicest and hugest steak topped off with a bottle of Chilean red wine! A day of food and drink - we headed back to bed a little tipsy!

Wow, the bed in our hostel was one of the most comfortable we've come across in our nine months of travelling! So comfortable in fact that we stayed in it until noon! When we finally did emerge our hostel owner looked at us strangely and asked if we'd had a good night's sleep - we'd headed to bed at nine the night before meaning we'd been in bed for fifteen hours!! After a very late breakfast, we dressed in our waterproofs (it seemed it had been raining all night and day) and walked to the bus stop for the bus to Los Pozonas, the hot springs. The hour drive to the hot springs was lovely - there was snow on the ground and lots of little wooden houses dotted all over the countryside. It was bitterly cold when we arrived so we quickly got into our swimming gear and jumped straight into the lovely hot waters and didn't move again for about two hours! When it was time to get out we were both not keen to get back out into the freezing outside but after a game of paper, scissors, stone it turned out I was the first to make the dash. Dressed, hair wet and pretty cold we made our way back up the hill to the waiting bus and started the journey back into town. Once back we headed to a little café for wine, soup and empanada's followed by, yet more, chocolate melting cake before heading back to the warm and comfy bed of our hostel.

Chilly Chile sum up

When we crossed the border from Bolivia to Chile the differences between the two countries were vast and immediately apparent. For starters, any Spanish we'd learnt went completely out of the window - it seems the Chilean's do not actually speak Spanish as we know it, they instead like to call it "Chilean" which basically means they speak at a hundred miles per hour and add different sounds and words on the end of some of the words; all of this added up to us being back to square one on the language stakes! The first time we asked someone for directions (given that we'd already learnt most of the words for right, left, straight on etc), we stood there completely baffled and wondering if the person we had asked was perhaps not Chilean at all and from another part of the world - it was an interesting sight, the lady barking directions at us whilst we just stood there staring at her like she was from another planet! Chile is rich by the standards of the countries we'd already travelled through in South America and this again was immediately obvious - in terms of the surrounds and prices! From nine months of travelling I've learnt that you can tell how wealthy a country is from just one thing - if the children and babies are carried or in prams, in the poorer countries the kids are always carried be it on backs or in arms but yet in the richer countries you suddenly find your heels being attacked by the onslaught of hundreds of prams! We found the Chilean's really friendly and very chatty; if we had a pound for every time we were asked if we liked Chile, we'd be very rich travellers! We were so perplexed by the constant barrage of questions about if we liked Chile and what we liked about it, that we asked Julia, who we stayed with in Santiago, about it. Her answer was thought provoking; she said that Chilean's can sometimes feel like they are at the end of the world and are very isolated, to one side is miles of ocean and the other they are separated from their neighbouring countries by the Andes, add to this the constant attacks they suffer from mother nature (Chile really suffers from earthquakes and volcanos) equals a vulnerability and a want to be liked by other nationalities - Ad and I can understand this and can honestly say that we found the Chilean's to be extremely likeable so they are obviously getting it right! Another question that had been bugging us was why all of the stray dogs chased the cars as they went by and tried to bite the tyres and so on our bike tour of Santiago, whilst watching yet another display of this, we asked the question of our guide. His answer was that he thought it was because the dogs had seen so many of their friends get killed by cars and their tyres that they liked to try and attack and get their revenge - he added that he had once seen a dog actually bite through a tyre and completely wreck it! It was something about the way he worded this that made it seem even more real and so we have now adopted his theory!

All in all our time in chilly Chile was short but sweet - yet another great country in the South America continent!