Grüße aus Zentral-Chile

After a few Pisco’s, 5 wines, 3 apple strudels, a bratwurst and a lot of hot dogs with avocado cream, we have already arrived at Chiloë. This is where the Pan-American Highway (48,000 km of asphalt from North to South America) ends. We are approaching the southernmost point of our journey, it is getting colder and nature is getting rougher.

But, our last blog ended at the wine district; in Vicuna we visited the pisco distillery and got to try quite a few piscos. Pisco is a “grappa”-like spirit made from grapes and that is, the local graped in the region where we stayed. Actually, this stuff is terrible, so they have made all kinds of mixed drinks from it, which makes it slightly more attractive. Because they were so busy in Vicuna making pisco from their grapes, unfortunately we can’t do a local wine tasting so we’ll have to find the Chilean wines ourselves 😉

‘We wanted to conquer the Pacific on a board’

We stayed for 2 days in the sweltering capital of Chile, Santiago, and then quickly moved on to Valparaiso, a town on the coast with a bit more charm. There we walked around between the beautifully colored houses and admired all the art on the buildings from Van Gogh to indescribable modern art. Now we were already so close to that beautiful coast, with amazing waves, meters high, we could almost touch them. Almost, indeed, in Valparaiso there is no beach and only a dirty harbour. Because the surf blood crawls where it can’t go, we quickly traveled to Pichilemu where we wanted to conquer the Pacific on a board. We put ourselves to the test by going into the icy water (with an incredibly thick wetsuit but that didn’t help) to catch a wave, and of course admire the real surfers who braved meters high waves.

completely taken over by the Germans!

After a desired rest in Pichilemu and recovered from our surfing adventure, the travel gods were less favorable to us…. We had to take a lot of buses and had to wait for about 11 hours  in an ugly city, until we arrived in Pucón, in the middle of the Chilean lake district. This is a town with an active volcano where smoke comes out and with plenty of outdoor activities. We had to conquer the waves again, this time from a wild flowing river, while rafting our way though the mountains. Luckily Chile consists of about 19% of national parks and our next visit was Huerquehue National Park. and we made a number of day hikes, one to the summit of San Sebastian where a phenomenal view awaited us with 8 perfect cone shaped volcanoes in the distance. In Pucon we marveled at all the German influences; the architecture, the food and even the beer has been completely taken over by the Germans! What resulted in us being able to enjoy an apple strudel at the lake together with a Kunstmann beer 🙂 Yet again a nice change from our standard breakfast these days; fresh sandwiches with sambal cheese and pizza chips.

We have been on Chiloë for a few days now, an island off the coast of Chile. Here we are filling our days with penguin watching, visiting villages and hiking until we make the 30 hour bus trip to Punta Arenas… to be continued.