Last Hurrah in Southern Chile: Chiloe and Puerto Varas

After leaving Patagonia, we only had a few weeks to explore the rest of southern Chile before we needed to hightail it to Santiago and greet our next round of visitors.

Past experiences had made us somewhat distrustful of Patagonian transportation, so we didn’t want to jam too much in and get stuck in some remote town with bi-monthly mule departures. We decided to play it safe and stick to two places – Chiloe and Puerto Varas – and pre-booked as much transportation as possible to avoid disaster.

We were rewarded for our caution when we arrived by bus to the transit hub of Chaiten and found hordes of travelers stuck for up to 5 days because the ferries were sold out. We smugly reported to the dock the next morning and watched the horizon for our reserved boat. Our departure time came and went without so much as a dot appearing in the distance. An hour passed. Then another hour. Finally our ferry arrived, and we waited another hour to board as the crew slowly unloaded cargo using a single semi truck that had to be hitched to said cargo, driven from the boat, unhitched, repeat. A full four hours after our scheduled departure time, we were on our way to Chiloe! Ah, Patagonia travel.

Chiloe Archipelago is a smattering of islands off the mainland in the Pacific. We stayed in Castro, one of the larger cities on the big island, and spent a few days walking and enjoying the classic sites, like homes built on stilts, colorful boats and colorful Jesuit churches made entirely of wood.

We also hopped on a bus to Chiloe’s national park on the western part of the island to do some hiking and see what the Pacific ocean looks like down in that part of the world. It looked pretty much the same. Maybe colder.

From Chiloe, we took a combination bus and ferry to Puerto Varas, a town in Chile’s Lake District with a beautiful view of two volcanos and in close proximity to a lot of great hiking, kayaking, etc.

I’d like to say that we took advantage of all of this, but we decided to have a princess week there in anticipation of the craziness that comes with guests. A secret about long-term travel is that you don’t maintain the pace of a typical vacation, where you jam an activity into every second to make the most of it. You take down days where you waste time, pay bills and forget to go outside like you do at home; you just feel more guilty about it since you have people back in the states living vicariously through you (i.e. reading your blog from their office and cursing your charmed life).

Our most ambitious activity in Puerto Varas was a bike trip around the lake to the neighboring town of Ensenada. Naturally after wasting 3 days of beautiful weather playing cards in our pajamas, we chose to ride mountain bikes 30 kilometers on hilly terrain during a storm.

Also, just a quick tip: if you’re into bicycle theft, Puerto Varas is the city for you! When we rented our bikes, we were asked to write down our names and passport numbers (which they never verified) and to pay in cash. And since they were closed the next day, they asked us to leave them locked at our hostel when we were done. Umm, thanks for the new, super discounted bikes and the two day head start?

Refreshed, but sad to leave the lower half of the country which we had found so beautiful, we boarded our 12 hour bus to Santiago.