Pucon

Well, its been a while but here is an update on what I've been up to.  This past weekend, I went to Pucon, a town in the south of Chile with a few friends. We took an overnight bus on Thursday night and got there around 9.  The hostel that we stayed at, which was conveniently right next to the bus station, is run by a middle aged woman named Elizabeth, who lives there with her son Helmut.  She was very accommodating and welcoming, it almost felt like I had another host parent in Chile.  It rained the first two days we were there, but Pucon is an adventure town so we had no choice but to go outside and get wet.  On Friday, we went and visited some termas (what the Chileans call hot springs) and sat in them while the rain came down all around us.  The scenery in the south is so different from the middle or north of Chile, it is incredibly green and lush, with little streams and waterfalls all over the place.  The most active volcano in South America sits right outside of Pucon, and it was smoking steadily the whole time we were there. 

Volcan Villarica

On Saturday, we took a bus ride to a national park outside of Pucon and went for a hike on the muddiest trail I have been on.  When we went to pay the entry fee for the park, we got to pay the Chilean citizen price, because we all had our residency ID cards with us.  It seemed like a big deal to us at the time because when the ranger asked us where we were from and we answered, "Santiago", we were actually telling the truth.  It was raining steadily the whole time and we were slipping all over the place, because 3 out of the four of us had on running shoes.  As we got higher, we got into areas that were snow covered and started to get worried that we wouldn't make it out of the park to catch the last bus home because it was such slow going. 

Gettin' dirty

Snow!

We turned around and made it back in time to catch the bus.  

We woke up on Sunday and saw the sun for the first time in Pucon.  We took a bus to a place called the Ojos, which is a lagoon that has four or five waterfalls draining into it, plus random subterranean streams coming out of the rocks.  After we had lunch at the junction of two rivers, we took the bus back to our hostel, showered and ate dinner, and then got on the bus back to Santiago.          

Las Lagunas

  

A questionable bridge