Chile: The first few days of Roadtrip: The route to Pucon & beyond

We left on Thursday February 21st to start our descent to the South of Chile in our awesome van! Let me show you the van that we virtually destroyed on the crazy, windy dirt roads of Southern Chile:

We sure did eat, sleep, and live out of this van!

On our way to our first destination City, we stopped by a Mapuche museum along the road. "Mapuche" refers to the Native people of Chile. I learned a little bit about the Maphuche peoples while in Chile, and it sounds like their lifestyle is similar to what I know of the Canadian Native population. The people are very spiritual, use many natural remedies to heal, and have many historical traditions and customs. We also learned that similar to those with Native ancestry in Canada, the Mapuche people continue to fight the government for their land in Chile as well.

Mapuche Museum: I would write the Name of the town here if I remembered it! 

This is a Maphuche house that was in the back of the Maphuche museum. We went here for a little lunch before continuing along on to a little Italian inspired town and many more hours of van travelling (we arrived at our final destination at 1am).

Also in the Mapuche hut, we purchased many bags of homemade mierken.. a seasoning very popular in Chile made of dried hot red peppers. This seasoning has made our suppers extra delicious (and spicy!) since arriving back home! I put that sh*t on everything.

In the mapuche hut, we had several traditional Chilean dishes... empanada's (AMAZING chicken ones!!), and the traditional Chilean drink with a dried peach, juice, and grains "Mote con huesillo".

Capitan Pastene: Small Italian settlement town

After leaving the Mapuche museum, we headed closer to our destination of Pucon, stopping at this little Italian inspired town where they sold dried ham legs: for prosciutto!

Also in this little Italian town: Capitan Pastene we stopped for some supper in an amazing restaurant. Here Aleksy and I had delicious ravioli: salmon and pistachio.

Pucon: The touristy, Volcano Town

We arrived in a big tourist city Pucon at around 1am and searched for about 2 hours until finding a place to stay the night. This is the next morning after we woke up, realized there was a volcano right outside of our hotel room window! This is one of out many stops for fresh bread at a panaderia. Perfect for breakfast with marmalada (jam) and quesada (cheese) and for lunch sandwiches!

Thank you delicious Panaderia's for the extra 7 lbs.

And THIS is the amazing Volcano that we did not see the night we arrievd but we could see from our hotel window the night we arrived. We only stayed in that hotel for 1 night because you know... $70 a night was super expensive and we moved to one of our many rented Cabana's (cottages) that cost us an amazing $40/night per couple!

This is the beach in Pucon... the "sand" on the beach was dark ash (like coal from the volcano) and was not your typical soft beachy sand! You can see the colour difference in this picture.

After exploring the town for the day and some helado chocolate (ice cream!), we decided to head to the volcano to hike up it! Unfortunately, right from the time we decided to head to the volcano (about 10 km from the town) it became cloudy. The volcano is right behind us in this picture but you can only see the base...

During the winter, there are many fully functional ski trails where you can ski the volcano. There was a trail that you can walk up the volcano right underneath the ski lifts, but because the rain was coming in, we took an alternative route.This picture shows the hike that we took at the base of the volcano! We took a piece of this coal-based  ground home with us...

The day that we spent in Pucon (the touristy town 10km from the volcano) was amazingly sunny and beautiful. We left in our awesome van to hike the volcano around 3pm and it immediately became cloudy, which gave us cloudy volcano pictures which otherwise would have been super amazing. Like this one ^... try to envision it without cloudiness... pretty sweet!

After our exploration in the town centre of Pucon and the nearby volcano, we continued our trek South. This is us preparing to board our second Ferry from Hornopiren with some chocolate caliente (hot chocolate) for me and espresso for Aleksy. The Ferry in the background is the one we took... it was a long one (about 5 hours). The first Ferry that we took was late at night the previous night to the day of this picture... it was a quick one.

The scenery while on the Ferry was breathtaking. Actually, the scenery in all of Chile that we saw was amazing, We just don't have anything comparable in Southwestern Ontario: the amazing Andes Mountains allowed for constant stops along the way for pictures.

This was one of the stops along the route to the South of Chile. The route was called the "Austral"... it was a windy, mostly dirt road that takes you to the Southernmost town of Chile... for most Southern towns, it is the only road to access the towns.

Here we stopped to take a picture with an area of dead trees. Areas like this are pretty common along the Austral because of the number of volcanoes in Chile. An erupted volcano with the hot ashes reaching significant distances cause these trees to die, You can also see the ash on the ground around the dead trees.

Chaiten: The City of Ashes

Along our route, we stopped to see the progress that the town of Chaiten has made in rebuilding their town. The Chaiten volcano erupted in 2008, causing the town to evacuate and houses such as this one ^ to fill with ashes, becoming non-livable. For the town, this caused devastation: much of their cattle (their means of living) died in the eruption and they were left without electricity for 2 years (our friends were in Chaiten in 210 and they had their electricity back not long after). Our friends who had been to Chaiten 3 years ago did see a huge improvement on the clean-up of the ash in the town, but unfortunately houses like this are still one in every few houses (right beside this home there was a rebuilt home with a family living in it).

A stop at the Terma (natural hot spring!!) along the Austral:

Along our route, we stopped to cook some supper over a fire and check out a natural hot spring! The pictures above were taken in a little gazebo that we cooked some supper on (veggies, sandwiches  LOTS of avocado! always lots of avocado!)

And this is the hot spring. It was actually quite cold out on this day (do you see my winter coat?) so putting a bikini on was not on the to-do list for me, and we also were there right at the end of the day (the terma closed at 8pm and we arrived around 6:30pm). It was really cool that the water was naturally hot (like a hot tub), but the owners of this hot spring had man-made pools that contained the water, which made it feel less natural.

More pictures and stories to come from further South in Chile, and Argentina!