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Published: April 9th 2005
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Church in Achao
This is the oldest church on Chiloe Island. Built in the 1700´s. Hola everyone,
Ryan here. Do you like our new home? I think it will do for a while. Notice that there are a lot pictures that we have added to the old emails (blogs). I´ve had free high speed Internet access at our guesthouse for the last few days, so I spent way too much time putting this page together. Though technology-wise, it is incredibly easy. The only problem I foresee is that we often can´t do pictures as quickly as blogs. So if you are reading this blog the same day I´ve written it, you probably won´t see any pictures. But come back in a few days and I will have probably put up some pictures from the places Ana and I talked about.
So let´s see. What´s been going on? We went to the island of Chiloe for Monday and Tuesday. It´s billed as a quaint little island with a lot of old traditions and folklore. Well, it was quaint, and in addition, a little bit boring. We stayed in the capital of the island, Castro, at a hospedaje (guesthouse) run by a older lady named Judith. Hospedajes are pretty common in Chile. For the most part,
the guests and owners all use the same common rooms and kitchen. It´s an interesting way to live. We seem to stay at them quite frequently (probably because they are relatively cheap, the one in Castro was $12 USD a night for the 2 of us). Ana and Judith talked quite a bit. I mostly listened and tried to understand. She had a boarder who was staying for an extended time and he worked at a salmon farm. Fishing is huge in Chile and fish farms are becoming more common. I wish I could speak Spanish better because I wanted to ask him a lot of questions about the farming.
The town itself was nice but for some reason, we became quickly bored. The next day wasn´t much better when we went to an even smaller town, Achao, for a day trip. The place is supposed to be popular with vacationers, but it didn´t have much to entertain us. Even the historic church was closed. But before you get the wrong idea, Chiloe island is beautiful, perfect for cruising around in a car, not stuck in the small towns. But alas, that is the hardship of our journey.
After that, we moved on to the super touristy German look-a-like town of Puerto Varas, just north of Puerto Montt, on Lago Llanquihue. We arrived in the rain, but found a great hospedaje with the high speed Internet I was talking about. This place was run by a Chilean and Swede, both of whom were on vacation, but Denise, a German, was left in charge. The place was nearly empty and had cable TV and a huge kitchen(we cooked dinner all 3 nights). It was a very relaxing and comfortable place to stay, especially when it´s raining, but it´s also firmly on the gringo trail.
Puerto Varas was all about the guide-dogs. Not the seeing-eye dogs, but the ones that like to guide us. First, a little background. The dogs in South America are incredibly amusing to me. Very few of them are confined to their property like in the States. Instead, they just cruise around. There are dogs everywhere, in front of stores, on the sidewalk, in the street, everywhere. Some are stray, but many are pets that just wander around. The awesome part about it is that the dogs are the most mellow I´ve ever seen. They
Hospedaje Mansilla in Castro
This is the guesthouse we stayed at on Chiloe Island. never bark at people and rarely at each other. Since the dogs interact with each other so much, they have socialized themselves. The little dogs get put in their place by the big dogs and the young by the old. The only dogs that we see barking are the few that are not allowed to roam and are kept in a yard or house.
So that brings us to our guide dogs, or at least the dogs that follow us. Ana and I seem to send out vibes that say, we´re friendly, come spend time with us. On Thursday in Puerto Varas, it was cold with on and off rain. Nevertheless, Ana and I decided to do a 3 mile walk to the next town along the lake. We left the hospedaje and a minute later, Woofie, the dog from the hospedaje, caught up and began walking with(guiding) us. No big deal, we thought, she´ll stop eventually. No, she followed us the whole way.
Ok, maybe that wasn´t so strange. The next day, we decided to go hiking at the base of Volcano Osorno on the other side of the lake. Orsorno is a huge, very conical volcano
covered in snow, that is beautiful when the clouds don´t obsure it (we saw the top of it for the first time from the minibus on the way back from the hike). Not more than two minutes after we set out on the road to begin our trek to get to the trailhead, two big German Shepherds start paralleling us the the other side of the street. The dogs followed us for the entire 4 hour, 8 mile walk. It was quite amusing and they were real friendly. Plus, we knew the dogs would figure out how to get home just fine. The trail ended at some small waterfalls alongside the main road. We arrived just as 8 tourbuses full of Germans arrived to see the falls. We didn´t mind at all though because we just joined the crowd and walked past the admission gate without paying our $2 USD each. Pretty lousy of us, huh?
Today, we saw another small German town called Frutillar and moved on north to Valdivia. We´ll let you know how it is soon. Bye for now, time to sleep.
Ryan and Ana
P.S. We saw our first McDonald´s today. Took over
3 weeks. Who would of thought that anyone could travel this long without seeing fast-food?
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