Haha a crude drawing to show you, the lower star is Pucon, the higher star is Santiago. We took a 10 hour bus ride overnight from Santiago. So we left Santiago at 10pm on Thursday and woke up in Pucon at 8am Friday morning. The first morning we found our hostel, which was super cute
there were 2 huge dogs and a swimming pool, plus all the trees in the background had fruit on them that we could eat at our leisure. Pretty sweet. After we got settled we went and walked on the black sand beaches,
which were pretty neat.
Then we decided to break up into two groups because Jess and I wanted to go ziplining, while Mimi and Claire wanted to go horseback riding.
Anyway ziplining was great fun, and I met a girl from Boulder which was pretty cool too so there ya go. After ziplining we walked around the town a little bit because it was a super cute town and very much like McCall, Idaho (if you have that frame of reference.)
Obviously we also went swimming in the lake, even though it was freezing.
Then we played Hearts (the card game) around the fire and called it an early night.
The next morning we got up at like 6am (That's right, no typo here, 6am) to go climb an active volcano!
Villarica (the volcano) from far away up close and personal.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. It was a freaking long hike.
This was us in the morning. (During the winter you can ski on the lower part of the volcano, seems like a very small resort though since we only saw one chairlift?) We started the hike out in tons of layers and then pretty much immediately stripped them all off.
View from about 1 hour up (it took like 6 i think?) Anyway pretty beautiful.
So we did some basic hiking for about 4 more hours, nothing particularly eventful happened, but we snapped some sweet pics.
Then we breaked for lunch and then we got to put on crampons and learn how to use ice picks to get through the last part of the hike.
The guide had to help me put them on. and here's Jess.
Anyway, to the top!
View from the top
Into the abyss
on top of the world
Pretty sweet.
By far the best part was the way down the snowy part.
Basically we got to slide down the whole way. It was great but also pretty much soaked us through completely.
Anyway we got down from the volcano and were all incredibly tired and hungry. That night we went to a pretty awesome hot springs and relaxed our tired muscles.
end day two, commence day three.
Everyone was very slow moving this fine morning, probably due to the previous day's exertion. So me, feeling quite chipper, got up and made everyone waffles. I still have the burn on my hand to prove it (cooking is not my forte.)
Then we decided to do a mini nature hike and have a picnic. It turned out to be better than we could have expected, as blackberries were in season and growing on bushes as far as the eye could see.
Jess loves blackberries
We sat down for a nice lunch of avocados and tomatoes on rye crisps with a girl that we met in our hostel (who goes to UC Berkeley actually, small world!)
(on a side note, avocados are SO cheap here.. we pretty much eat them with every meal. Which is pretty much the best thing ever.)
Ooooooookay so that's pretty much Pucon, we packed up and headed for the bus on Sunday night, arriving in Santiago around 6am on Monday morning. It was totally awesome and tons of fun. :D
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