Some more of Pucon

We´re still here in Pucon, taking a night bus up to Santiago tonight. We´ve just got back from a nice 3 day walk in a nearby national park so thought I´d put some photos on here. The walk was really nice mainly through forests of monkey puzzle trees and round lots of lakes.

Today we Climbed a Volcano!!

So here we are in Pucon, which is a village turned tourist town in the Chilean lakes district. It´s touristy with good reason though, cos there´s so much to see and do round here we could easily get stuck here for weeks!
Anyway, today we took a trip up the local (active) volcano, Volcan Villarrica, which is around 2800m high. Luckily for us we´ve managed to time our visit quite well, such that the main tourist season is over, and there were only 6 people in our guided group rather than the usual 30 that they can have during the summer. We got up at 6am to find a lot of cloud and rain outside. We thought it would be called off (which happens in bad weather), but the guides reckoned it would be fine closer to the volcano, so we rather dubiousy set off, expecting to have to turn back any minute. Luckily for us however, as soon as we´d climbed a few hundred meters we started to rise above the cloud into gorgeous sunshine, just like the guides said we would. It was so beautiful, because if you looked ahead of you you could see the smoking cone of the volcano we were climbing, and if you looked back you could see this blanket of cloud stretching for miles with other volcano tips poking out of it every now and again.



Up we went until we reached a stretch of ice and snow just underneath the peak, where we turned to our crampons and ice axes, which was a lot of fun. The walking was fine, my main concern was trying not to miss a step and put a crampon spike through my (fairly expensive) leather walking boots. After the ice there was another 45 mins or so to the summit, during which we walked through some really cool old lava flows from the last time it errupted in 1984.



When we finally reached the crater, the views were awesome. On one side of the volcano we could just about see Pucon and some of the gorgeous lakes through the clouds. On the other side we could see Vocan Lanin, which is the biggest one in the area, as well as the ice field at the foot of Villarrica. The crater istelf was amazing as well. You could see it puffing away as we looked into it, and the sulphur fumes were fairly overpowering at one point. The rocks aswell were such amazing colours and shapes, and in some of them you could actually see where they had been melted before.



In total we had climbed about 1400m in about 4 hours, which was totally worth it, even with the 6am start! It was especially cool because, being off season, we basically had the summit to ourselves. We were both very excited about our first ever volcano. Hopefully we´ll get to do another one sometime later in the trip!

Bariloche and the Argentinian Lakes

A bit further north we reached Bariloche, which is the biggest town in Argentinian Pategonia, and is in the Lakes District. Unbelievably, this place looks so much like Switzerland it´s scary. Its full of chalet style houses, chocolate shops, fondue restaurants and St. Bernard dogs. It´s a bit weird, but still the best place to be for Easter!



Went for a three day hike where we got some pretty cool views, and got to camp by some gorgeous lakes whilst eating chocolate and watching for shooting stars. We also hired a car with the Canadians. We let Adam drive, because although he´s not so used to a manual car, it´s better he drives and we stall, than we drive and be on the wrong side of the road! Turned out to be really fun, found a wicked lake to camp by and had a camp fire and drank wine until the small hours. I even braved the freezing water for a swim, albeit for about 30 seconds.



Back over to the Chilean Lakes next to find some volcanos! Stay tuned!

Hammocks, Jam and Homemade Beer

After the most horrible bus journey ever, on a road that is actually famous just because it´s so crap (it´s unpaved), we made it to El Bolson at about 5.30 in the morning. We wandered round for a bit with our Canadian friends Jackie and Adam looking for somewhere that was open, but no joy. Our last resort was to take a taxi to an HI hostel 4km out of town, in the hope that they might have a 24hr reception. Unfortunately this wasn´t the case, however the door was unlocked and on closer inspection we found seven other people asleep on the reception floor, all of whom had got off the same bus as we had, and who obviously had the same plan. The hostel owner got the shock of his life when he came in to make breakfast in the morning, but he was so nice and showed us to a huge dorm immediately and made us free breakfast! He was even apologetic that he didn´t have more!
El Bolson is supposed to be the ´hippie capital´of Patagonia, and I can see why. The hostel is brilliant, it´s so chilled out, has a great common area with a kitchen and sofas and tables where you can hang out. It has it´s own bar in a shed where everyone moves to after midnight, and you can buy homemade beer brewed by friends of the hostel owners (note: not all of it is good though - some of it tastes like sprite mixed with beer). There´s also a huge garden with hammocks hung from all the trees where you can sit and read/recover from the beer (see me in the picture below?). In the morning they give you cereal and hot rolls and the most amazing organic, homemade jams I have ever had.



The town itself is cool too, and has huge craft fayres three times a week, where I have bought an awful lot of 'gorgeous little things' (as my mum would say).
I´m loving it here, it´s so relaxed and so WARM which is a very welcome change. I could easily stay here a few weeks, but sadly we have to move on if we want to reach Mexico any time this year!

El Chalten

After visiting the glacier in Calafate we caught the bus to El Chalten. El Chalten is a little village in the mountains which is quickly turning into a town, about half the buildings weren´t quite built yet and the roads were in the process of being paved. It´s location is amazing tho - both Cerro Fitz Roy and Cerro Torre are only about 3 hrs walk from the centre and both can be seen from the centre of the village, well when the weather permits anyway.

Unfortunatly the weather wasn´t really on our side this time, it was very grey and slightly rainy for the first few days and we didn´t see any mountains at all but we walked to Fitz Roy on our third day and it cleared up just at the end of the 3hr walk, right when we were closest which was very lucky and that was really awesome.



The weekend was really crap weather, lots of wind and rain and hardly any visibility til sunday evening when it cleared up a bit and we got our first view of cerro torre. We did the proper walk to Lago Torre/Glacier Torre on monday and got awesome views of the Torre Trio - (from left to right)Cerro Torre, Torre Egger and Cerro Stanhardt. These mountains have some of the best climbing history of any mountains and it was really good to see them for real!



After a 32 hr bus journey up ruta 40 in Argentina we are now in the Argentinian lakes district and it is much warmer which is very welcome after a week of shivering next to the tent in El Chalten (it was around 0 degrees every night). Anyway more soon!

Perito Moreno Glacier and the baby Guanaco

After our mammoth trek we headed back to El Calafate in Argentina, a quaint little trourist town which is the place all the tourists in the world appear to come in order to see the Perito Merino glaciar.
We decided to take a tour rather than find our own way there, mostly because we just wanted a few few hassle free days, and we´d heard good things about it too. This tour took an alternative, much bumpier road to get there, the advantage of which was that we got to see a load of cool wildlife that doesn´t live near ther main road. We saw about seven or eight huge eagles, lots of nandus (small grey ostrich type things - have yet to take a good picture of these!), grey foxes, hares, a skunk and a condor (albeit from far away). The best bit however was that we stopped at this little goat farm on the way, where they had adopted an abandoned baby guanaco (little a llama) which seemed to live indoors and think it was a dog. Anyway, it was so cute and I got to feed it milk from a baby bottle! Anyone who knowns my fondness for all things cute and fluffy will be able to imagine how happy this made me!





Next we continued on to the glacier. We stopped a little way away from it and did a short hike along the shore of the lake towards it, before hopping back in the bus which took us up to the viewing platforms. The reason this glaciar is so famous has a lot to do with the fact that there´s a very convenient peninsula which lets you get right up next to it, and it has seriously good views from there...



The glaciar is huge.The walls are about 60m high above the surface of the lake, and go about 180m down below the surface, and big chunks of ice fall off it every few hours. We ate lunch looking out over the glaciar, and while we were watching this huge section fell off into the lake making a really loud boom and an enormous splash. It was so awesome to see, although the best was yet to come, as our tour included a boat ride into the lake, and as we were floating about 300m from the wall four huge stacks of ice fell off one by one into the lake right in front of us! We couldn´t have been closer really, and we got a perfect view. Made the boat rock a bit too! If you look carefully you can see some of it falling in the picture below.



Ice falls and baby guanacos in the same day! Definately one of the highlights of the trip so far!
In El Chalten now looking at more mountains. Btw thanks for all the comments, we love to read them so keep them coming!