Chile Adventures: Coyhaique & Rio Tranquil

Leaving Puyuhuapi was very hard & sad since we loved the hiking and Bartolo's family so much.

After 3 nights, we headed to Coyhaique, which is about a 4 hour drive from Puyuhuapi, which is the most populated town for many km's and has many stores ad touristy things to do. Here we stopped, parked our car in a lot and stopped at some street vendors and stores (where we bought our matte... a traditional Chilean tea drink), then stopped for some supper. While in Chile, we tended to savour the food when eating a meal and we did this while in Coyhaique: had some appetizers, a nice big meal, some dessert then headed back to the van.... then we realized THE GATE WHERE WE PUT OUR VAN WAS LOCKED! Ooops.... we lost track of time and forgot that the sign said at 8pm, they lock the gate and you can't get your vehicle until the morning. So we checked in with the cafe beside the parking lot, got the number of the owner of the lot, and while some of us had coffee and found a cabana, the others cabbed it to the owner of the parking lots's house and got the key to the parking lot!
p.s. it was raining... and I had flip flops on...

This is the cabana (cottage) that we found after the van incident: We may have been unlucky with the van, but we got super lucky with this cottage! It had multiple floors, a full kitchen, an a ton of space! It was a quick stay though... we arrived about 10pm and left the next morning for Rio Tranquil! Rio Tranquil is the farthest South we went in Chile!

This hand print is from a stop that we made along the way to a museum (in the middle of no where) where there were hand prints on the face of the rock of the mountains which were said to be done by animal blood. These hand prints were also said to be there for million years and placed there by the native people of Chile. 

It was a nice break along our drive for a little bit of history. These hand prints are on many Chilean post cards, and I think its really cool when we get to see some of the infamous sights in Chile.

< We actually did camp in Chile!!
When Aleksy and I were preparing to go to Chile, we pictured a ton of camping and roughing it, but it turns out that Rio Tranquil was the only camping that we did in Chile! It was for 2 nights and was a nice change from our cottages (that all had full kitchens!).

I like camping and am not a complainer (ok I lie, if there's bugs I'm a complainer) but here at this place, I had the COLDEST shower of my life. It was like showering in glacier water. I was ready for a cabana again after that!

So, I know I said it it my last blog... but again, you are just not ready for the awesomeness of these pictures. We weren't even expecting this crazy amazing scenery! While we were in Rio tranquil, we went on a day outing to hike a glacier. We thought it would be similar to the beautiful nature hikes in Puyuhuapi, but it was so so different!

This is the first part of our hike. It was really rocky, and we thought it was really neat that underneath us was ice (the ice was just not visible unless you brushed the stones away). It didn't look like a glacier, and we could not see any snow in the distance because of the fog so we didn't know what we were in for...

And then as we got closer to the mountains, the fog began to go away and the view was amazing! The rocks disappeared the closer we got to the mountains and the ground became ice/snow!

When the rocks completely disappeared, we has to put claws over our shoes so that we could get to amazing caves and areas where the glacier had melted and created deep holes of turquoise water... there was a certain technique to going down the hills...
< that's the guide helping me down because otherwise I probably would have tumbled (or pricked a hole into my lululemons like Chels!).

The guide was great at taking us to caves for picture taking, even if it was hard to get there down/up the hills of snow.

You can see the claws on our shoes in this picture. These allowed us to go anywhere on the snow!

This is a little water trail down the glacier (with little stones along the trail under the trickle of water) where we hiked back up out of a cave!

We also drank that glacier water... although Aleksy kept talking about million year old diseases that scared me a little so I only had a little...














After our camping (with some delicious campfire food) in Rio Tranquil, we headed to Chile Chico where we crossed over to Argentina!