The R&R Big Adventure

Chilly Chile

Considering it is late Spring here, we had an unusually cold and wet day yesterday, with temperatures below what they were in London. The scenery driving further south from Pucόn to Valdivia was deceptively familiar – as if we were in the West Country; except the locals were jabbering in Spanish (or rather, Chilean). We made our way to the fish market when we arrived, and whilst the guidebook told us to expect to see sea lions there, we were not expecting the colossal, morbidly obese (by the looks of it) animals that were all lined up behind the quayside fish stalls, waiting to be fed discarded fish heads. Vultures were their unlikely companions; dozens of them hovered overhead, like a scene from The Birds. The impatient sea lions actually tried to lift up the steel barriers with their noses to get at the fish as it was being cut up to sell. I wondered how many poor fish sellers had been accidentally flattened over the years.

After lunch – a delicious local fish and chips – we headed out of Valdivia to try and get to some of the great beaches we could see from the road. It turned out to be a quite a challenge, due to there being no parking and/or no path down to the beach. Eventually we found a beach we could access: deserted and very wind swept – the verdant cliff tops making it definitely seem much more like Ireland or Wales in November, except we were looking out to the South Pacific, and this was Chile in Spring. We worked out the next nearest land mass due west would be New Zealand, 5,400 miles away, somewhere near Napier (North Island) – where we will actually be in two and a half weeks’ time 😊. We persevered walking on the beach until the driving wind and rain made us retreat to the car. A big pot of hot tea and a couple of scones would have gone down a treat, but then we remembered we were still in Chile. The seaside café we stopped at didn’t even serve coffee: a pisco sour was just wrong.

The drive back to the hotel was made more entertaining by a sea lion deciding to bask itself in the middle of the road heading into town. As we followed the other cars, gingerly driving round it, we could see another group of sea lions had somehow managed to heave their heavy bodies up from the river and onto the nearby quayside. If anyone got too close to take a photo, their deep growls soon sent that person scurrying back.

This morning’s weather was a considerable improvement on yesterday as we set off to our next stop in the lakes, Puerto Varas. We stopped half an hour away from there at Frutillar, recently made famous as the final check point in the last ‘Celebrity Race Round The World’ TV programme, where Scott Mills, Kelly Brooks et al had to get speed boats, to get across the lake to the volcano on the opposite shore. There were in fact two volcanoes rising up in the distance, Orsono and Calbuco, which made the lakeside views even more spectacular. We spotted several German flags in the town, and some businesses with German names, and read that many Germans had settled in this region of Llanquihue in the mid-1800s. It did seem incongruous to see Alpine-style chalets in this part of the world.  Driving round the lake from there to Puerto Varas we had further lovely vistas of the lake and surrounding mountains and volcanoes, with green meadows and grazing cows on the other side of the road. I am not sure many people would immediately associate this image with South America.

The German theme continued when we got to Puerta Varas, with cafes specializing in ‘Kaffe und Kuchen’, which were popular late afternoon. I had to have an apple strudel; and probably the best pot of tea I have had so far in South America. R agreed his mug of hot chocolate was delicious. I am typing this in a lounge of our hotel: the style of décor is wood chalet, and the smell of a burning log fire is pervading the air.

This all seems a million miles from our recent hot, dry desert adventure less than a week ago – and yet we are still in the same country.