Chile South Part 2

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The next chapter of our journey starts in Pucon right in the heart of Southern Chile. It's a very touristic town at the lake Villarica and close to a Vulcano, also called Villarica! The view is really impressive and also staying in tourist trap has its benefits, as there are European style supermarkets, nice restaurants and English speaking people. A visit to the famous Huerquehue National Park was also dedicated to our motto "mucho, mucho nieve"! This time though we didn't get stuck with the car on the way up. We aslo did a guided tour to some vulcano caves which was hm...yeah when you grew up in Austria you have seen more breathtaking caves, but the fact the they were vulcanic still made it worth it. All in all we had some quite relaxed days there and enjoyed to sleep under an actual roof.

Leaving Pucon the plan was to explore the coast between Lebu and Curanipe the following days. After a full day drive we arrived about 6 pm in Lebu and started looking for a camping site! By asking some people and for the first time ever understanding the answer we soon found it, or what was left of it, looked like no human beeing has set a foot on it the last ten years. Next day we checked out the surf, but there was none! Since Lebu, no offense to the people who live there, is a really ugly town, we decided to leave and drive north! Next supposed stop was Arauco! Again no offense, but that was kind of ugly to! Next planned stop was Concepcion, well you can imagine how that looked like! By that time we got really frustrated, originally we wanted to spend one or two weeks in this area (there are supposed to be some waves) and now we ended up driving the whole thing in one day! Some of our conversations sounded like: "If whole Chile looks like this, lets get out of here as soon as possible", "Do you think that other travellers like it here" and so on! Really stressed out we arrived at Curanipe that night, but it got worst (first)! The camping site we checked out on the internet was closed and we had again no place to sleep (by that time it was already 8pm and dark)! That was the point when our fate turned, we decided to not care about money and take the first Cabana (Room) on the way. We ended up with a really nice family which rented us a whole little house for 18 Euros a night! Next day there was some great surf, friendly locals and Curanipe turned out to be a really lovely small Chilenean fishermen-town!
Following 5 days started with the message "Una noche mas per favor" for our landlord. Still a bit confused about the cities we passed before, we checked our travel-book on that area and recognized with a smile on the face that it is the only area of Chile entirely left out in the book.

After a couple of days the surf got worse and we returned to Pichilemu which is about 23o km north, the drive there was quite challenging since it was raining cats and dogs and some streets were flooded! Got pretty close a couple of times, Sabine got out of the car walked through the flooded part to check how deep it is, the rest was only about speed! So we are still in Pichilemu waiting for some surf and taking some Spanish classes meanwhile.

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