I really dropped the ball on this one. It’s been four months since our trip to Chile. I had meant to include a bit of a write up of the trip, but I just kept putting it off, until we get to now.
I uploaded all the pictures to our Flickr account. You can view the full collection of photos from the whole trip here.
I broke them up in to small sets, based roughly on the town or area we stayed in. I’ll break them down a little below. The order they are listed below is the order we visited them. Starting on October 9th and returning home on November 2nd 2009.
Sorry if this update is so short and not up to my usual witty standards. :P
Santiago: Link to pictures
Our first stop was the Capitol of Chile, and the largest city in the country (+5 million). We were completely exhausted after flying 13 hours from Seattle to Atlanta, then Atlanta to Santiago. But we took a bus from the airport to downtown and then jumped on the subway and explored the city. We did not really want to spend much time in Santiago. As in our view, big cities are big cities. But we did have 8 hours to kill before our bus south to Puerto Montt left.
We traveled from our home in Seattle to Puerto Montt, Chile. Which as the crow flies is a distance of over 6800 miles. But only actually walked probably less than a mile to get there!
- Walk a hundred yards from our boat to the parking lot and into a car.
- Get out of the car and walk another couple hundred yards into the Seattle airport and to the terminal.
- Sit all the way to Atlanta, then walk from one terminal to another, a distance of another hundred yards or so.
- Sit all the way to Chile, walk out to a shuttle bus, get off that bus and on to another and sit all, until we get to Puerto Montt.
All told, we could not have walked more than a mile. Not sure why I find this so interesting?
Puerto Montt: Click here for pictures
After sleeping most of the overnight trip from Santiago to Puerto Montt (11 hours) on the most comfortable bus in the world, we showed up in Puerto Montt around 10am. We spent the next two days exploring the town and getting used to the way things worked here. This process actually took longer than a few days. But we had to start somewhere.
Isle Chiloe: Click here for pictures
We rented a car in Puerto Montt for a week and drove all over this large island. The largest island in Chile, maybe even South America. We stayed in a number of little towns, Quellon, Castro, Ancud. And visited many others. By the time we turned in this little rental, I sorta felt bad. We drove the shit out of that thing. And I think that the car was actually the guys personal car that he rented to us. Not some random rental car. It was a little expensive, renting cars anywhere in Chile is. But we thought this would be the best way to see the most of the island.
Puerto Varas: Click here for pictures
After leaving the island, we drove to a town named Puerto Varas, which is north of Puerto Montt about 15 miles. The town sits on the southern tip of a large lake named Lago Llanquihue (pronounced Yankeeway). Very cool little city with a heavy german influence.
Mount Osorno: Click here for photos
Still having the car, we drove east from Puerto Varas to hike around a very large, very active volcano named Mount Osorno. The volcano was covered in clouds most of the day, but just as we were about to turn back, the clouds cleared and we got some awesome photos.
Frutillar: Click here for photos
This was another very small town on the shore of Lago Llanquihue, again very heavily influenced by german immigrants.
Valdivia: Click here for photos
After returning the rental car, we started taking the buses everywhere. It is very cheap and they go everywhere. For the longer trips we took the more comfortable buses with the larger bus companies. (Pullman, Turbus). And would take the local buses for trips around town or to closer towns. Valdivia is on the coast. We visited a few old forts that protected the city from pirates way back in the day and also stopped off at the Kuntsman brewery for dinner and some local beer.
We also saw what had to be the largest freaking sea lion in the world.
San Baralocia, Argentina: Click here for photos
When we came down here we had just over 3 weeks total. And no schedule or plan. So, for what ever reason, we decided to take a bus from Valdivia to San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina. We figured, we were all the way down here, might as well take a visit to Argentina. Bariloche is a ski town and much more touristy than the other places we’d visited so far. But it was a very cool town. And as you can see from the pictures, the modeled themselves after a typical swiss alps villages. Again, heavy on the german/swiss influences here.
Osorno: Click here for photos
Prior to our trip down, Tawn had been email back and forth with a british couple that had sailed from Britian down here to Chile 15 years ago. They had sold their boat and bought a chunk of land and started a ranch/b & b. We had planned on stopping there for a few days to meet them and visit. But the guy was going through some medical stuff and they were up in Santiago. They thought they would be home while we were there, but were unsure of the dates. So we started moving in their direction and visiting towns and areas along the way in case we could setup a visit.
It turned out we never did get to meet them.
Pucon: Click here for photos
This town was a very cool town. Sitting on the shore of a large lake. It reminded me a lot of a mountain town in Colorado. A lot of outdoor tourism goes on here. Just about anything you can imagine. White water rafting, kayaking, mt biking, hiking, horse back riding, motor cycle tours, zip lines. They had it all here. We rented some mountain bikes and took a ride on day and took a bus tour up to some natural hot springs on another day.
You probaly also notice we have a lot of pictures of random dogs. Chile loves their street dogs. Every town has a crap load of them. They are all friendly, dirty as hell, but very well fed. Some are owned by people and some seem to just belong to a certain neighborhood. Out of all the street dogs, we liked the ones here in Pucon the best. Not sure why.
Constitution: Click here for photos
Leaving Pucon, we decided that since we were running out of time. We would head north and visit some towns in the famous wine regoin of Chile. This would also get us a little closer to Santiago, so we would not have to take a huge 11 hour bus ride again.
We decided on going to a town called Talca. To me the funniest thing about this town, was people kept asking us why we came to Talca. They could tell we were americans. I guess Talca was not high on the list of tourist spots in Chile. On our first day in Talca we jumped on a crowded bus and headed to the Town of Constitucion. Which is on the coast. Sort of a small coastal town, and we really had no idea what to expect. But after walking around abit, we found these very cool caves and a HUGE rock outcropping.
We were told to take the train back. We did, that in and of it’self was a very interesting ride. When we saw the train, I thought it was an old piece of shit and kept wondering when the real train would show up. We sat in the back and the lady checking tickets kept coming back and yelling at me for opening the back door of the train to take pictures.
Talca: Click here for photos
As I mentioned, the main reason we went to Talca, was to visit some of the wineries. But it turned out that the day we were there was national holiday and all the wineries were closed. Booo!
So on our second to last day in Chile, we jumped on a bus and went out to a national park and went for a hike.
We jumped on a (nice) train the next day to Santiago. We wandered around town checking things out before jumping on our flight that night.