Valdivia

A few weeks ago, I finally made it to Valdivia, which is actually a somewhat known destination, in contrast with many of my other travels (it scores a whole five pages in my travel book...or four and a half, at the very least). It's a pretty university town surrounded by various rivers and little islands with old fortresses. Sure, they have older ones in Florida, but they're not too bad here in Chile either. It's slowly growing more commercialized - there's a huge casino - but it's definitely still got that charm, without the Beaver Creek feel I got in Pucon.

After a quite complex and solo bus trek down on a Friday night, a big group of us got up Saturday morning to see a crew race (or match, or whatever it's called in crew) on the main river in Valdivia itself (the Rio Valdivia, of course). The river is pretty and also has a host of sea lions, which were both larger and uglier than I remembered the ones at the Miami Seaquarium to be.

The weather wasn't great, as is typical for drizzly Valdivia, so we went to the Historical and Archaeological Museum - thanks to the university, there's a lot of cool resources right in town. A lot of interesting Mapuche (Native American) things.

That night we got in touch with the region's proud German heritage by going to the Kuntsmann beer brewery. Kuntsmann is one of the few Chilean beers that does not taste like the water you forgot to rinse out of your old Nalgene bottle, so it was fun. Getting there was actually my first colectivo experience. Colectivos are somewhere in between a bus and a cab - they are cab-like sedans, minus the wall separating the backseat, and they follow a set route and pick up as many passengers along the route as will fit at a time. At the cerverceria (Spanish for "brewery," and frankly, easier to say), several of us shared a sampler of different varieties, which was nice. There was also an enormous platter of fries and meats - please see photos, words would not suffice to describe this mountain of food.

The next day, Sunday, we began our boat/island/fort tour. The first stop, Fuerte Niebla, has the oldest ruins, as well as a small historical museum with seriously creepy wax figures that were truly the stuff of nightmares. Unfortunately photos were not allowed inside. What makes the fort really worth seeing is the gorgeous views and drop-off to the Pacific.

Boat ride two took us to Isla Mancera, which boasts the most abandoned of the forts. We kind of had to break in, which I suppose makes it not a very good fort. It had a lot of sheep and was rather English countryside-esque. We also became very hungry, and there is no food on Isla Mancera, which brought us rather rapidly to boat ride three.

Fortunately we found a large and touristy (by small-town Chilean standards) restaurant almost immediately on Corral. It wasn't as easy as we had thought, mostly because it's not yet tourist season, and a lot of places are only open in the summer. The fort was really neat, though - it's the largest and most intact. More scenic outlooks over the Pacific. Those old-timey Spaniards really knew what they were doing.

We started off Monday (which was Columbus Day - he discovered the AMERICAS, after all) at the famous market by the Rio Valdivia. It was...smelly. Lots and lots of seafood, and some hungry sea lions eagerly gathering along the side of the fence.

A smaller group of us then headed off to what I believe was technically a national park, but you would reallyyy never know it. It's clearly been around for awhile, but only appeared in one of the two editions of the guidebook we have. The paragraph that explains how to access the park - which contains four different types of rainforest! - reads something like: "There are two properties, and on the second property is a little house with a man who can let you in the gate." There were also claims that a bus traveled through this area. None of this was particularly accurate. Fortunately my co-teacher (the sole Chilean and sole male among us) had driven down, so we were able to meander through backroads in his car, asking directions to Punta Curinanco along the way. We arrived at the Punta (dead end at the beach), and several old Chilean men told us there was no particular park, just this beach, whereupon we sat in the car and pondered what to do. There were in fact about fifteen little houses, and we didn't especially want to knock on every door. After a bit, however, another old Chilean man rapped on our window and said he would lead us to the man who could let us into the park. We followed him through several yards (if they could be called that) up to a fenced-in house. The fence was especially important, as various dogs, cats, and roosters filled the yard and doorway of the home. Our guide did not enter the yard, but yelled, "ALO! ALO!" a number of times, until another man came out of the house, navigated his way through his farm animals, and grunted at us. The first man left. The second man presented us with a large, elderly, stained record book, in which we wrote our names. We paid him 1000 pesos each ($2), and he presented us with shockingly commercial brochures of the park and then led us up the hill to a beautiful view of the ocean and the park entrance.

The park itself was really cool - you could definitely tell when the type of rainforest changed. (You could also definitely tell that it had been awhile since someone went through all the paths that we came across.) Unfortunately my camera, now on low battery, had somehow gotten set on a panorama setting, which meant that it took sixteen tiny pictures at a time. Eh.

After emerging from a few hours in a variety of rainforests, we ate our lunch sitting on large rocks at the beach. Accessing the beach was not easy, due to a dead sheep that blocked the main route, and departure was also a challenge, as a dog had arrived to consume the sheep (lunchtime for all!), but the picnic itself was really nice. A very mean cow glared at us the whole time, but it was really cool to sit right where the Pacific meets the shore, next to a rainforest.

We spent the late afternoon in the botanical gardens of the university, really relaxing and pretty. All in all probably one of my coolest days - of one of my coolest trips - in Chile.

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