After Christmas, we headed south to the very top of the Patagonia to a town called Puerto Varas. We took an overnight bus for about 14 hours which was much more painless than I thought it was going to be. While planning this trip we found beautiful pictures of Puerto Varas, one of the reason why we chose to sit on a bus for 14 hours to get there:
The town
Our hotel outside of town…really more of a big old farmhouse.
The land our hotel is situated on
Unfortunately, what we expected from our online research was not exactly what we got.
The town of Puerto Varas was cute, a lot like a ski town in the western part of the United States. Our hotel on the other hand was nearly an hour outside of town by bus. We knew it was outside of town, but that was a bit further than we expected. This made it pretty unrealistic to take day trips into town. Not a problem if you are busy hiking around the beautiful land the hotel sits on, but we got a bit bored cooped up inside the house. It was also a 3km walk from the road after the bus let us off. The owner said we could have called for a ride after the bus let us off, but using what? It’s not like there was a bank of pay phones on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere. This was more of a problem on the way out since the owner was not available to give us a ride and it was raining when we needed to leave.
Here I am with Jenna hiking up to the hotel with all our stuff.
The hotel in the middle of nowhere might have been fine however since we were mostly planning to hike the various volcanoes during our time there….except….that it rained every single day.
We managed to get out and do a little hiking in between giant rain clouds, but we never got that beautiful view of the volcanoes that we had our hearts set on. In fact there’s one that we are not even sure exists because the entire thing was covered in a cloud the whole time we were there.
We still took pictures and tried to make the best of it, and hopefully, we’ll find time to go back again in the next few years because it really does look like it would be beautiful if it wasn’t raining.
Wandering around the various dirt roads that led from the hotel we did get a chance to enjoy some fresh air and see some “wild life.”
There were horses, cows, and sheep!
There were also some pretty flowers.
This is pretty much the most of Volcan Osorno that we ever saw, but if you look really carefully you can see a little bit of snow at the top before the cloud covers the rest!
Did I mention Alex and I were camping in all this rain?
Turns out it wasn’t too bad of a choice though because the house was freeeeezing! Jenna and Jesse were inside and although they didn’t have to put on their shoes and tramp through rain and wet grass to get to their bed, they were much colder than we were at night. Our little tent is just the right size for two people and kept us very toasty and dry while it poured every night.
I would just like to finish this post by saying that I camped a lot as a kid and am very capable of doing it….but I don’t exactly find it to be the most enjoyable endeavor. Alex on the other hand has a newfound obsession with it. I feel that I was a pretty good sport and in general had a very positive attitude about camping in the rain in the middle of nowhere! Luckily, even with the little view we had due to cloud cover, it is still amazingly beautiful in Southern Chile.
From Russia with Love 
Looks beautiful! Sorry the weather sucked though…
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