Pretty much the first thing we did in Puerto Natales was check the weather. The weather here seems to be very hard to predict and every website always has a different take, but when more than one website had a mention of SOME sunshine (even alongside passing showers) we got excited and took that to mean it was good weather. We had met so many people that were on their way back north after coming down to Patagonia and seeing ¨nothing¨, sometimes waiting one or two weeks and still seeing ¨nothing¨. Let me just interject here that the concept of seeing [View Full Entry]

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I think towards the start of our South American blog I made a comment about how cities here feel the same as cities anywhere else in Canada, America or Australia... and that there was not much of a so called third world or developing country feel about it. (Both those descriptions are strange ones though, which I am never entirely comfortable using). I was talking mainly of Chile, and particularly Santiago. But even then, we did not really spend too much time in Santiago outside the central few blocks where our hostel was. Also, so far most of the towns we [View Full Entry]

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Chiloe, an island off the coast of Chile is promoted as being a tranquil, undeveloped and beautiful island with a country feel and a very strong and interesting culture. One of the hostels we were looking forward to staying in was promoted in our lonely plant book, and a travel brochure as being a seaside hostel in a beautiful coastal town (Chonchi) with a friendly host that took you on tours of his seafood farm and occasionally cooked big meals from that day's harvest. He had bikes, boats and fishing gear to rent, centrally heated rooms and hot water. The island [View Full Entry]

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So, we made it out of Cochomo with all limbs in tack but plenty of scratches to show for it. Oh, and a pile of very very dirty clothes. My hiking pants will never look the same again, forever carrying Cochomo dirt in the pores of fabric, which is kind of nice or memory''s sake. Who needs photos when you can just collect dirt in your clothing instead. Scratch and sniff style. Haha. They do say that your memory is triggered by scent more than visual cues. I experienced this later, when I was washing my clothes at our friends place [View Full Entry]

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Getting out to Cochamo valley was a multi stage process. Organising the horses was just the first part. Then there was finding and catching the bus, finding somewhere to camp and walking out there. Catching the bus to Cochamo from Puerto Varas was not such a mission as getting the bus from Bariloche, although there were still moments of confusion. I was waiting at the bus stop minding our bags while Jono went back to the hostel to get our other bags. (We had four in total.) The locals there were all being very friendly. One older man asked me in [View Full Entry]

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We hung out in Bariloche for a night when we got back from the great cathederal of rock, then caught a bus to Puerto Varas the next day. We managed to find a hostel that was not too much of a back breaking walk from the bus station. It cost 5000 pesos a night each (about $11) just to camp in the backyard, so it was a little on the pricey side, but nice enough. I often sleep better in a tent then in a dorm, so I was looking forward to a good night. Except there happened to be a [View Full Entry]

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We eventually managed to catch the bus to take us to a ski resort town where we would catch a chairlift up to the ridge top and walk in to Cerro Cathederal, but it was pretty comic. To cut a potentially long story short, the bus we needed to catch leaves Bariloche every hour, but we did not realise that it alternates routes each hour, so that the stops will be different depending on which hour you take it. Once we realised this, we were about to leave the stop we had been waiting at for nearly two hours as the [View Full Entry]

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We spent a long day travelling on Feb 25th from Santiago to Osorno (a small German themed town), where we had to wait for about five hours before catching another bus to Bariloche in Argentina. The bus ride through the Andes was very pretty, and the border crossing from Chile to Argentina was so smooth and painless compared to crossing from Canada to the US. The bus too was luxury compared to Greyhound buses in the US. Funny that the world´s biggest economy has possibly the worlds worst public transport system. I guess because ´the US is such a so-called rich [View Full Entry]

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OK. So Now I am really jealous. Now I know what us regular citizens are missing out on in the aviation world. Let me start at the beginning though. We caught another scary taxi to the airport, and flew back to Mexico City for a night and then went to get on our plane the next day to Santiago, but found out that the plane had been overbooked. Would we consider being upgraded to business class for a flight the following day, put up in a fancy hotel and given a fancy dinner for the night in the meantime. We would [View Full Entry]

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As we were driving up the road towards the campground where we would stay (posadas), and once we got off the terrifying highway, we could not take our eyes off Potrero Chico. It is such an amazing bit of rock. More impressive even than the Chief in Squamish in terms of size and splendour, which is saying a lot, as anyone that has read over this blog will know already, we are both in love with the Chief. If only it were the same quality of rock, which is not possible, as it is limestone and the Chief is granite. Haha, [View Full Entry]

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