Volcano gazing from Chile to Argentina!

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Well, you probably all know now, but we are coming home early! We are due back on the 24th March, Easter Monday. Paul got offered a job he was on a panel for, and he simply couldnt turn it down. So we´ve shaved about a month and a half off our trip and tried to put the foot on the accelerator!! ..... well, it turns out we have become lazy, so we shaved the plans instead, and have opted to just visit a few places, and if we like it we can come back and visit another time. So its back to work with us!!! 5 weeks left, and we have just crossed Chilean/Argentinean border.... But onto blogging...

So we left you in Pichilemu when we were heading off for our conversation evening in the Spanish school It turned out to be a lot of fun, and a good way to practice spanish. We all brought drinks and played pin the tail on the donkey amongst other things.... So I can safely say we are fully proficient in shouting left, left, hot, warmer, cold etc in espanol now! We loved the spanish classes, and were very dedicated students doing our class revision every day, but another week would have been great. I also have to admit that after 1 full week in Pichilemu, surfing capitol of Chile, we didnt even get into the sea with a boogie board, the shame! No excuse apart from being a little lazy and also a little busy with the classes.... and the relaxing.

Our next stop was Pucon. We got our first bus at 7am, changed buses at lunchtime, and arrived into the town at 8.30pm that night, stiff and starving. We loved Pucon, its so pretty, and Paul has said that it is his favourite town in the world so far so thats saying a lot. Its a real alpine village, with all wooden houses, and a beautiful lake, lots of tourists, lots of lovely places to eat, and a really impressive puffing volcano overlooking the town. Its an active volcano that spouts out puffs of smoke the whole time, and they have a volcano warning system to indicate when its time to evacuate. It was at green for safe the whole time we were there, but red means youre in trouble. Supposedly if the volcano erupts on the right (or wrong)side, it could take as little as 7 minutes to engulf the town. But that was half the fun of it, we have more photos of the volcano. Paul wanted to climb it, but giving my accident prone history I was adamant that I wasnt going up no volcano!!!! Firstly its a 5 hour climb up an incline, getting steeper the whole time. And secondly there are crevices, that an accident prone person such as myself might fall into never seeing the light of day again, and thirdly, if you slip on the ice, you can virtually keep sliding down miles of ice until you fall into a crevice or hit a rock, or expertly manage to whack your ice pick into the ice to stop yourself! Now tons of people do it every day, but I am accident prone.......

So we had to settle for less exciting ventures in Pucon. We went down the lake and rented a jet ski out for half an hour. That was great fun, and Paul (being the boy) was designated driver. All well and good, until he decides to go pro with some deft twists and turns, and ends up sending the two of us flying off it. Luckily they have the key on a clip thing attached to your wrist so the jet ski cut out and we could just swim back over to it and mount again albeit a little wetter. Good fun though, and topped off with a dip in the lake and an evening trip up to the thermal spa!

We headed up with Richard, an English guy from our hostel, and shared the bus with about 6 kiwi guys on a 5 month party session of a life time hoping to see some pretty ladies in the steaming spa pools. We had stocked up with wine, and settled in for an evening in the pools. Lovely Jublee! And as it turned out, there happened to be an eclipse that evening amongst the lovely starry night, so that was an added bonus. Turned out also you werent supposed to bring alcohol in either, but luckily we werent caught out by the torch man until the 2 Litre vino was pretty much consumed by myself, Paul and Richard! Top work! Our bus driver wasnt very impressed by the pack of rowdys he had to transport back to town. We had some laugh on the return journey with the kiwis about some radio add on new zealand radio about impotence... I think the driver must have thought we were nuts!

So back to the hostel El Refugio for some more vino, and a not so early night. Its a bit of a young party hostel, so thankfully we didnt have too many early mornings, its a wooden building so not great for sound absorption, but homely and a bit of fun for just a few days. Anyway, we were all a little worse for the wear the next morning. Paul and I did a coffee bar crawl for most of the afternoon. And sure hadnt we signed up for a ¨Canopy¨ session at 3pm, which involved climbing wooden platforms in the woods, and flying down cables on harnesses through the forest and over canyons.... One surefire way to wake up I can tell you.

And then didnt the hostel decide to have a barbeque that evening to add insult to the already injurious hangovers we had. But sure who were we to turn down a party. Turned out Richard had a guitar and quickly became Pauls best friend, the two of them doing a sing off until about 4am the next morning. Pauls typical renditions (of course including the Joker Richie!) being matched by Richards radiohead intermingled with Puff the magic dragon and a few particularly disturbing renditions of Father Teds ´my lovely horse´. Also throw in a very funny german girl called Bretta, into the mix who had us in stitches about her popping home to Germany to get the love, with the evening being sealed by Richards repeated offering of an evenings spooning in his bunkbed to the hostel manager Lotta, a 20 year old german girl, who was planning on sleeping on the couch that night due to a full house, and didnt quite know what way to take him at all! Hilarious night!

Our next venture was into Argentina via San Martin Los Andes. Paul really wanted to stay in Pucon forever, but the clock is ticking so we will have to go back another time, not that we need an excuse! So we did some off roading on some more unsealed roads across the Argentinean border. We had read about an irish guy sleeping in bus station in San Martin, so when we arrived an old guy approached us offering accomadation in his house for the night, private room, mi casa, su casa type arrangement, so we jumped at it, being tired and hungry and not up for the traipse around town with the backpacks. Arrived at the house and the set up seemed ok. Altho he did hand me the sheets and say ¨u´ll make up the bed eh!¨ in a ¨me caveman you woman¨ type way, but sure a beds a bed! A bit perturbed by the fact the bedroom was in fact on a wooden open balcony over the living area but the house seemed quite enough, so made the bed as ordered and headed into town to get bus ticket to Bariloche for the next morning and a feed. San Martin was lovely, and quaint, and would have been nice to spend more than a night there but we wanted to start more spanish lessons in Bariloche monday morning so had to keep moving. After a feed and (only!!!) a beer or two, we headed back for a relatively early night.

Or so we thought.... an endless traipsing of people through the sitting room, using the computer, turning on and off the lights was only surpassed by the owner himself turning on the computer for a couple of games of solitaire, clickedy click, out with the earplugs for Paul and Elaine now, cos its coming on 1.30am... And sure then didnt pull himself out a mattress to sleep in the living room (full house it seemed), turns out hes a smoker, and smokes in bed, and his bed being in the sitting room and our bed being in the sitting room makes it smoking in our bedroom. All for the grand price of 120 pesos, (about 30 euro) and we didnt even get breakfast cos he was still in bed when we left at 8.30am. And YES he did also snore! most ridiculous accommodation on this trip so far, but we had another bus journey ahead and both of us slept our way to Bariloche.

So we find ourselves now in Argentina. Bariloche is nice, but not as lovely as Pucon, but we are only settling in. The spanish school messed up our booking too, and only had afternoon classes, so we opted out, and are trying to sort other stuff out now! We are managing ok with our spanish, and can make ourselves understand, but they have a frenchy italieny twang to their accents here so are a little more difficult to understand so the lessons would have helped with that, but i´m sure we will pick up more lessons somewhere else.

So time to make a plan for Argentina! We are both really winding down here, and finding ourselves a little laid back in organising ourselves, and time slipping away, but have planned to dedicate some time to planning now so hopefully we can get more organised.

Seems we will be seeing you all sooner than we had planned, so no time for missing you all anymore, rather looking forward to seeing you all!

Hasta Luego!

Pablo y Elana

x

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Photos

Green is gooood!
Aprantly when it erupts the lava can take upto 7 minutes to get to town, when that light goes orange I think its time to go

Comments

[nickandsinead]

Oz ---????//
Sad to say we are getting a little tired of the auld travelling too.. and oz is as expensive as Ireland,... especially after China.( its feckin 4 euro an hour for DIAL UP INTERNET>>> theres no BROADBAND IN TASMANIA>>>>> jebus.... save me jebus...... We u are looking al great and brown.. Sinead has a little colour i'm still pale blue... :-D give us a hostel nubmer or something... we will ring u...

[Richard]

Spooning
Whata great night that was! I still can´t believe that Lotta didn´t take up my offer of some gentle spooning on the sofa....Back to the drawing board again, I suppose.

[Mark and Mary]

Don't be lazy!
We know you are nearly home but you can't go getting lazy with the blogs now! We want a new one and more photos!!! Very demanding us!