Hurrah! Finally the real vacation starts!!

After crawling through pitch black coal mines, penguin quests through knee-deep mud pools, driving more than 2000km, fighting tons of sandflies, we at long last made it to Puerto Montt, where the Skorpios II cruise ship was awaiting us! Enjoying nature from our master cabin with 360° view, a chilled caipirinha at the side, while slowly cruising over calm waters to San Rafael glacier... That would be our blissful life for the next 5 days.

To stretch the muscles every now and then, the cruise stopped at some places in the Chonos archipelago (those tiny islands south of Chiloé). In the harbour of Puerto Aguirre, local children were already waiting at the dock, eager to show us their village, in exchange for goodies from the local shop. Puerto Aguirre also has a great lookout! Up there, we were treated to a wonderful view of the islands and fjords of this beautiful region. I discovered the panorama function on our camera just in time!

Forces of nature! We witnessed a rare natural spectacle during this cruise, an erupting volcano! Far away to be safe and close enough to take great pictures and to feel like in the midst of the action! We don’t know if news reached other parts of the world, but a few months after the Puyehue Volcano erupted, the Hudson Volcano also joined the party! It started smoking just 2 days before we boarded our cruise. Fortunately the cruise was not canceled for safety reasons etc. Only the route had to be slightly adjusted, which meant we could not visit Quitralco´s thermal springs, since they lay within the evacuation zone installed by the government.  Well, tough luck, but judging from the brownish streaks of ash and mud in the bay, one wouldn´t want to be too close to the source anyway.
However, not stopping  at Quitralco also was a logistic problem for Skorpios. Now we were running low on drinking water! So the crew had to improvise. After some bold maneuvering from the captain the ship stopped right infront of a Patagonian waterfall. It took the ship's engineers a lot of creativity and patience to set up a provisional pumping system, but at some point after midnight, it did work. Even the captain was taking pictures... A pretty cool sight!

Day 3:
At the break of dawn our boat solemnly entered the San Rafael lagoon. Morning mist was still hiding the glacier, adding to a tense surreal atmosphere. Floating ice blocks were the first harbingers of what we were about to see...  Everyone was on deck to witness this special moment. Even the captain's bridge was public! And then the fog lifted. What an amazing sight!!  A 70m high wall of solid ice!

A double jacket steel raft took us very close to the fringe of the glacier, where we could see (and hear!) huge icebergs cracking off in a fulminating roar. First the ice would sink into the sea, but only to pop up again seconds later. Due to enclosed oxygen bubbles, fresh icebergs are spectacularly blue. But with changing light conditions they can also turn emerald green, solid white or clear translucent. Simply breathtaking. Also the shapes of the icebergs are extraordinary.  Michelangelo, Donatello, step aside, nature is the best sculptor after all. Just take a look at the pictures and decide for yourself. Here in the lagoon, the bar tenders of the ship collected the ice for our entire cruise. Very cool! Did you ever drink a 12 year old whiskey with 12000 year old ice? Well, we did! All in all, this was a once in a lifetime experience on a great ship with an even better crew. We loved it!

As most glaciers worldwide, the San Rafael glacier is retreating fast. 100 years ago it filled up the whole lagoon. Now the ice barely touches the sea. If you still want to watch this amazing spectacle of nature, you better hurry :-)

Lonely Planet says about Chiloé's weather: "When it's not misting or raining, it tends to be sprinkling or drizzling". Brillant prospects thus... But hey, it's just water! In fact, the day we got totally soaked, was the best of all!
We were the only guests at Chepu EcoLodge, a scenic place on Chiloé's west coast, and just listening to the instructions on how to reach a remote penguin colony early next morning.  And then happened what always happens, when you think you couldn't be further away from it all: we bumped into a Dutch couple from Florian's hometown Venlo! The boys even went to school together :-) To our relieve they also joined our penguin quest. Next day's hike sounded quite adventurous after all: get up at 5am, catch a fisherboat in the dark, walk hard for 4 hours, pass through a temporal sandy bridge, find the penguins (!), return no later than 10am, otherwise the only way back would be cut off by high tide... So much for the theory. In practice we found it impossible to move fast, after a night of downpours. The challenge was rather not to get stuck in mud! But eventually got pass the slimy cow trails and continued on a beautiful beach, along a 30 year old shipwreck and a huge blue whale carcass, that had been washed ashore 2 years ago. Aah, and then we managed to take a wrong turn, reducing our time window at the penguin island from 1 hour to just 15 minutes! In addition, it started pouring down once more. In the end we did reach Ahuenco point, and even spotted about 10 Magellanic penguins! But there was no time to contemplate, tide waters were already rushing in. One photo each and back to higher grounds! What an unforgettable trip - and finally a positive experience on Chiloé.

The famous Pan-American Highway connects the Americas, from northern Alaska up to southern Chile. While driving, we crossed a "Nameless Bridge" and passed a village called "Nothing Is Worse". Uhm, we decided better not to stop there... ;-)  Even so, the Chilean Panamericana is a decent modern highway. You'll get anywhere safe and fast. After leaving Puerto Varas we drove to the very end of the Panamericana: to Chiloé island. The place was recommended to us by many friends. So here we were!

The island is famous for it's fine handicraft,  it's numerous wooden churches and for it's colorful pile dwellings. Nonetheless will we remember Chiloé's capital Castro for something very different: dogs!! We were walking along those stilt houses, on a public road very close to Castro's main square, when suddenly a pack of 6-8 dogs came running after us! One got hold of Florian's jeans and ripped it up! Mere chance that we got away and his leg remained unharmed. Nothing happened, but it gave us a real scare. Emergency rabies shots were definetely not part of our holiday plans...
Hungry unneutered dogs are a common sight in Chile, since there is no state authority that cares about them. Plus, Chile remains a Catholic country, and many people feed the strays occasionally. But grown dogs just can't live on bits of leftovers forever. Poor creatures.

Around 1850 the Puerto Varas region had become the new homeland for thousands of fortune-seeking German emigrants. Even today, the township of Frutillar feels like a romantic compilation of German clichés: half-timber, dwarfs, watermills, dolls in leather trousers, and all the rest of it. No swastikas, thank god! Not many still speak the language, but German signposts are literally everywhere. Very weird, if you just flew in from present-day Germany.

There are hundreds of volcanos in the Chilean Andes, and quite a few of them are still active! During our stay around Puerto Varas, we explored two of the better known volcanoes: Osorno and Puyehue. In terms of beauty the Osorno would be in one league with Pucón's Villarica Volcano. Perfect cone shape and a beautiful lake at its foothills. But because Puerto Varas lies further away from Santiago, it is somewhat less touristy than Pucón.
Second volcano on our list was Puyehue. You might have heard of this one in the news lately. It erupted in June after being dormant for over 50 years. Usually all the ashes are conveniently blown over to Argentina. Only when windless, ash comes down in Chile. The day we visited, the volcano was covered in a (dust?)cloud, we never really saw it. Snow and plants were coated in grey dust. From time to time we noticed an indefinable sharp stench, which must have originted from volcano gases too. It was safe to go, but as always in Chile, we had the whole great park to ourselves!

The next posts will be like a southbound continuation of our vacation to Pucón in March 2011. This time our first travel destination was Puerto Varas. So we basically started south of where we ended back then.

We split the drive with a detour to Lota, near Concepción. The area was once the center of Chile's coal industry. However, the closing of the mines in 1997 left countless people jobless. And the 2010 earthquake shattered whatever was left of Lota's fragile economy. But people remained defiant. Today Lota promotes itself as a tourist destination: the "coast of coal". We did not arrive with high expectations, so it came as a surprise to find that this place was indeed worth seeing!  Because all is real: The tours are given by the same mineworkers that used to work there until quite recently. The same scary cage, they used for decades, rattled us down, into the narrow shafts... 
Some 30 meters deeper we heard shocking firsthand stories about their working conditions underground. And when Florian lifted the 12kg heavy air hammer, we got a better idea of what manual digging meant. For me, the most striking moment was, when we turned off our head lamps: left in dead silence & total darkness!