Pucon

Soo.. We caught the bus early morning to a town about 12 hours north-west of Bariloche in called Pucon.. This meant crossing the border again into Chile.. For some reason we always end up buying fruit a few days before doing trips to Chile, of course a good thing as we want to stay healthy, but less good if you want to bring it along to a country like Chile. Fortunately for us it were just two mere banana´s again and I was determined to bring them along.. Little did we know that the borderpatrol at this town was extremely stern.. All backpacks were loaded off the bus and thrown into a x-ray machine. We had no choice than to eat our fruit at the border. A few guys from Isreal brought a lot more, it was a funny sight to see them munch all of their fruit at the border because of these silly restrictions.. After about 4 hours we stopped at a town called Osorno. There we had to wait for about 2 hours for our next bus up to Pucon. Osorno was quite a nice and very typical south american town.. After a small lunch we headed back to the busterminal and continued the ride to Pucon.

We got to Pucon around 19:00. From there we were asked by a guy from the hostel we were staying at whether we needed a bed. I told him we already had a reservation. He guided us to the hostel, which was litteraly next door to the bus terminal. We were welcomed by the hostel owner, a really nice social guy. He was already expecting us, and said straight away, welcome to Pucon Holland! He asked us whether we wanted to climb the volcano the next day, as weather forcast for the next morning was really good. He advised us to do it straight away.. The only thing was that we had to get up at 3 AM that morning as the tour started at 4AM. We decided to do it anyway, as we learned from the past to take every oppertunity available, as it would be a shame to find ourselves in horrible weather a few days later just because we waited. We signed up for the tour and went to the supermarket to buy us some dinner and lunch for the hike. That night we went to bed as soon as possible.. We slept around 22:00, which came down to a mere 5 hours of sleep.

At 3 AM the alarm of my clock went off. Eventhough we had only had 5 hours of sleep, I felt fairly well and awake. I had a shower and some quick breakfast. At 4AM exactly we got into the bus and off we were to the volcano. It took about 40 minutes to get to the foot of the volcano, which was at a height of 1400 meters. We got out of the van and a guide spoke about the climb of the day. He told us we were going to climb to the top of the volcano. The top of the volcano is positioned at a height of 2800 meters, which meant we had to climb 1400 meters to get to the top. Around 5 AM we started the ascent to the top. We were in a group of 12 people and 3 guides. We used the moonlight to see where to walk which was sufficient for the climb. After an hour of walking we had a little break. We sat down and had some water. From there we headed off again. We stopped about every hour. Around 7AM the sun started to rise which was a beautiful sight, as we were already quite high up on the volcano. Half way we had to put our spikes underneath our boots, as from there we had to walk up on the glacier. We walked for another 2 hours on the glacier.. The last bit was extremly tough.. I was getting tired and every step was an effort. I walked on as I was determined to reach the top. Once we finally got to the top we were presented with a massive smoking crater.. It was really impressive to see. I had never been on a volcano before so I had no idea what to expect. We were able to get to the edge of the big gaping hole of the volcano. The smoke coming out of the volcano was not exactly nice. It made us cough like crazy, this is because it´s an actual gas you breath in. I tried to breath as little as possible of the stinky smoke, as that could never be healthy. After 30 minutes we went back down. The descent was fortunately a lot easier and within 2 hours we reached the bottom again. We caught the bus back to the hostel where we decided to have a little powernap. We woke up again in the afternoon. We decided to celebrate our successful expèdition to go and eat out at a local burgerplace. 

After dinner we decided to go to these thermal hot pools a bit out of town. We figured it would be a great way to relax our sore muscles. We bought some beers in the supermarket and headed off to the hot pools. We spent two hours relaxing in the natural warm water. Afterwards we went for a beer with an Irish guy we met in the hot pools. By then we were all really tired and headed off to bed.

The next day we woke up in the late morning. We needed the full night to recover of our long day the day before. We went to the busterminal and bought us a busticket to Santiago, the capital of Chile. We had been invited by Pablo, a Chilean guy who we met back in Puerto Natales during our hike at Torres del Paine, to come and stay at his apartment for the weekend. The rest of the day we did some internetting and read up on the next stuff ahead of us. That night we caught the bus which drove us through the night to our next destination; Santiago!

More news soon from Santiago!

Apr 23rd 2008 – Apr 25th 2008