Blogs from Los Lagos, Chile, South America

Our flight to Puerto Montt from Santiago was scheduled to depart at 5:37 am. That’s the first flight of the day from Latam Airlines to Puerto Montt. That’s damn early! And now-a-days one needs to arrive to the airport even 2 hours earlier even for a domestic flight. From our Best Western it takes at least half hour to reach the airport in the wee hours. So, we had to wake up at least 1 hour to get ready, allowing 30 minutes each for Ryan and me to share the facilities. We just returned from a day trip of Valpariso last night. And we sure were tired, but we didn’t have a choice! Did we sleep at all? Well, you do the math! Hotel reserved a cab for us who came on time. We dumped our ... read more

I have been anxiously awaiting our visit to Puerto Montt, Chile for a unique reason. When I began my tour of Spain in 2022, I was sent from Madrid, Spain to Seville, Spain on a high-speed train along with two other members of our tour group to join the main tour group in Seville. One was a mining engineer from Australia while the other was a chemical engineer from Chile. ‪Armin, from Chile, and I hit it off directly as he was trying to improve his English diction, to expand his vocabulary and to unravel some of the craziness of the English language, such as left (remaining) and left (direction), hops (jumps) and hops (ingredient in beer) and many, many more. I, on the other hand, needed to brush some more dust off my rudimentary Spanish ... read more

When we first conceived this six week trip from Ushuaia to Mendoza I envisaged that we would be spending almost all our time in Argentina. As it turns out we will actually be travelling for over half our time in Chile. You see a difference as soon as you cross the border. In Chile the pavements/sidewalks are always in better shape and you can see from the infrastructure around you that its economy is stronger than Argentina’s. The prices in Chile are not far off those in the UK and apparently the distribution of wealth is far more extreme – the minimum wage is $400USD/month and the average $700USD. There is an openness and friendliness about all the people we have met. Take, for example, Gladys, our AirBnB landlady during our stay in Castro. She always ... read more

We vertrekken pas om half acht ‘s avonds met Iberia richting Madrid, een vluchtje van maar twee uur. Het vliegveld van Madrid is bijna helemaal uitgestorven, er gaan alleen nog wat langeafstandsvluchten naar Zuid-Amerika toe. Eenmaal bij de gate kunnen we nog een half uur zitten voordat we aan boord gaan van de A340-600 van Iberia. We zitten op een tweezits aan het gangpad, een stoelconfiguratie die niet veel meer voorkomt (het is nu voornamelijk 3-3-3). Ondanks dat we net na middernacht vertrekken krijgen we eenmaal op kruishoogte een diner geserveerd, couscous salade, pasta en een kersentaartje. De vlucht naar Santiago duurt 13 uur, dus we hopen toch nog wat te kunnen slapen. De stoelen zitten niet echt heel lekker, ze zijn vooral hard, maar toch kunnen we nog wat slaap pakken. Via de Afrikaanse kust, ... read more

As we stepped onto a ferry, from Dalcahue in Chiloe to another even smaller Chiloen island, Jan caught the eye of a very engaging and characterful co-driver of a truck (we later discovered his name was Alexandro). Much gesticulating through his window ensued (he was trapped in the cab by cars). The dregs of a large bottle of vino tinto were offered to us through the window. When this was declined (as it was just after breakfast) he assured us in wild Spanish that it was purely for medicinal purposes as he had a sore throat. He and his mate Juan offered to take us to our destination the other end of the island so picked us up once the ferry had unloaded. Please do not tell our children that we have been hitch-hiking as it ... read more