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Published: March 13th 2012
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January and February are high summer in Chile, when Chileans escape in droves from their cities - smoggy, sweltering Santiago in particular - to enjoy their country's extraordinary natural wealth: its lakes, its rivers, its mountains, its beaches.We'd never have guessed as much over the past 6 weeks, however:so out of the way is the Carretera Austral that only a relatively small handful of people make it there. Chiloé, with its (not altogether unearned) reputation as a place of endless rain, also escapes the summer hordes despite its accessibility.
And so we have been lulled into a dangerously false sense of security. Our plan for after Chiloé is to visit regions X and IX - Los Lagos and Araucanía respectively - just when tens of thousands of Chileans are doing so as well. There really isn't much choice - North is pretty much the only way we
can go. The first alarm bell rang when we had to stand all the way on the 2.5 hour bus journey back from Ancud on Chiloé to Puerto Montt, capital of Region X and the major local hub. The next, when we were told at Puerto Montt bus station that there were no
seats left to Cochamó, a small village at the head of a famously impressive valley where we were planning to do an overnight hike. What's more, the only reason we planned the slight detour to Cochamó rather than follow the obvious route northwards to Puerto Varas - a popular lakeside holiday town - was that despite our efforts we couldn't find a bed there...for days!
Since our arrival in Buenos Aires back in October, with very few obvious exceptions (such as El Calafate, for instance) we've been able to turn up to places without a room booked and buy bus tickets hours or even minutes before departure. Not any more, it seems we're going to have to start thinking ahead a bit more, not really something we really wanted to do on this gently meandering adventure around the continent. Needs must, I suppose.
Thanks to a fortunate combination of good luck, dark looks at queue jumpers at the bus station and sharp elbows to guard my position at the front of the queue at Puerto Montt bus station (the Chileans are lovely, but the British art of queueing is beyond many of them) I manage to grab the
very last two seats on another company's afternoon bus to Cochamó. Hurray - no need to spend a night in dingy Puerto Montt (supposedly called
Muerto Montt even by locals)! A sweltering three-hour ride in a packed bus (the people behind me in the queue at the station are all standing...ha!) takes us through Puerto Varas - the place of no available beds - before following the shore of Lake Llanquihue eastwards and turning south under the shadow of Mount Osorno, a huge and impressive snow-capped volcanic cone.
Cochamó is a beautiful but tiny village (with a stunning Chiloé style church) perched at the end of the Reloncaví Sound, at the very northern edge of what one might call Patagonia. The northern end of the Carretera Austral - of which we've seen quite enough for now, thank you very much - is but a stone's throw away. The landscape, however, is not quite Patagonia any more. Step aside, glaciers and fjords: hot springs, volcanos and lakes take centre-stage here. The lovely but steep and muddy day-long walk up the Cochamó Valley - overlooked by hulking, Yosemite-lookalike granite peaks - also shows us how much the vegetation has changed, too.
Here, in this intensely wet part of Chile, mountains are draped in lush, temperate rainforest known as
bosque valdiviano, Valdivian Forest, and quite unique to the region. A couple of days' further hiking upvalley lead - as they always seem to around here - to Argentina. Strange to think that a few months ago we were only just across the mountains from here in El Bolsón...
After this pleasant time-buying detour we arrive in Puerto Varas (with a bed booked, of course). It's a smallish resort town on the pretty Lago Llanquihue (pronounced yan-kee-way), opposite the beautifully proportioned Volcán Osorno. It is well known as a base of all sorts of fun, including whitewater rafting and canyoning. The latter I haven't heard of until now, but it sounds like a hoot.
Cue a couple of days of neoprene-clad aquatic fun! We kick off with a lovely rafting trip down the Río Petrohué, a stretch of almost continuously churning white water right under the nose of Osorno - the rapids here are class III and IV (out of 6!) making the trip rather more physically demanding (not to mention wetter) than our bimble on the Río Corcovado over the
border in Esquel. As long as you don't dwell too much on what might hapen to you if you fall out of the raft, it is - once again - a huge amount of just-the-right-side-of-scary fun. As for canyoning, well...
Canyoning starts with donning a huge pile of kit. Yes, neoprene again! And lots of it. Not a promising starts, admittedly: thick wetsuit (not the paper-thin version we scaredy cats use to dive in tropical waters), a thick hooded bodysuit (neoprene, of course, complete with that flap thing you pull through your legs and fasten at the front, very fetching), neoprene gloves, rubber-soled neoprene shoes and a climbing helmet (fortunately
not neoprene). To top it all off, we all have to slip on a bright blue slippery plastic miniskirt number over the wetsuit - sexy! It's a frankly ridiculous get-up which makes one feel vaguely like a performing circus sealion (it's the hood...). Thus attired, we commence a half-hour walk (climbing hills in 10 millimetres of neoprene, on a sunny day, is deeply unpleasant) to a small tributary of the Río Piedras, not far from the hamlet of Ensenada, an hour or so along the southern shore of Lago
Llanquihue from Puerto Varas. There are few rivers about which lend themselves to canyoning, and this, happily, is one of them. Easing ourselves into the (very very cold - thank Heaven for neoprene) water, we begin an exhilarating afternoon - very hard to put into words - of sliding down natural water chutes (hence the slippery slinky miniskirt, you see?), swimming through pools surrounded in lush rainforest and ferns, jumping off rocks and cliffs into the water, climbing along rock faces and rappelling down them beside waterfalls. I fancy it's a bit like being an otter for a day - and considering how happy otters generally seem, that is a very good thing!
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