Chile is big. Did I mention that before? We started this holiday in Santiago, only half way up Chile and after a few days including an interesting driving experience, we were off to the second part of our holiday in Puerto Varas. Our options for getting there were bus or plane. Bus, according to the guidebook, is a standard way of travel around Chile, with various grades of sleeper ticket being available. A closer examination of the option however showed that it would be a 14 hour journey from Santiago to Puerto Varas. The plane was a 2 hour flight, plus extra time for check in and getting from the airport to the accommodation. A 14 hr bus trip with a 7 and a 4 yr old or a 2 hr flight? It wasn’t a difficult decision. The only minor issue was the lack of easy public transport from the airports, but airport transfers were easily arranged through our accommodation. After doing the standard backpacking thing whilst a student/without children, there’s also something rather nice about walking out into arrivals to see someone with your name on a board ready to give you a private transfer direct to your accommodation. What can I say? I like a bit of luxury.
Anyway, we arrived in Puerto Montt airport around lunch time. It was instantly apparent on the approximately 30 min drive to Puerto Varas that this was a very different climatic region to Santiago. Gone were the dusty, reddish coloured, hot hills around Santiago with a reasonable number of fir trees for greenery. Here was a lush green land, filled with trees, rich green grass and clearly plenty of rain. Also, filled with volcanoes, many of which were live.
The volcanoes dominate Puerto Varas. We have probably close to 100 photos just of the volcanoes, so it was hard to cut it down to the few I’ve put on this blog. Walking down the hill into the town on our first afternoon, the first thing you see is the perfect cone of Mount Osorno. It’s still capped in snow even in the height of summer. According to Wikipedia, it’s one of the most active volcanoes in the area with 11 recorded eruptions from 1575 to 1869. However, although it’s still a live volcano, it hasn’t erupted since 1869 and it’s never erupted from the cone, only from the many secondary craters around it, so we weren’t terribly worried about it. It has a road up it, and a ski resort on top. Next to Mount Osorno however is an altogether different volcano, Mount Calbuco. Also towering over Puerto Varas, Mount Calbuco last erupted in April 2015. It’s a few hundred metres shorter than Osorno (2015m high compared to 2675m high) but, perhaps because it doesn’t have that perfect cone appearance, it looks considerably more foreboding.
You could be forgiven for wondering whether you managed to board the right plane when arriving in Puerto Varas, as it does not look like a town influenced by past Spanish colonial rule. This is also true for most of the towns/villages in the surrounding area. The buildings rather than being Spanish, are very Germanic in origin, down to the German club and the names of many hotels – ours was the Dein Haus Hotel for example. There’s also rather a lot of torta and kuchen on offer in the town’s cafes. I can assure readers that after some diligent sampling at Dane’s, the kuchen is excellent. The reason for all the Germanica and kuchen is that the town, together with much of the local area, was all built by German colonists in the 19th century.
Puerto Varas definitely caters to the tourist – mainly the active tourist – with plenty of tours and outdoor shops. We had hoped to do some outdoor sports, having found one company that said they would take children as young as 5 on a floating kayak trip on a nearby lake. However when we visited their offices, they told us that children had to be at least 10 years old. Activities as a result had to be confined to organised tours or catching local buses. Even with those limits, we still managed to get up Mount Osorno, taking our first trip in chair lifts to reach the snow line, see the Petrohue waterfalls, take a boat trip on Lago Llanquihue and negotiate the local buses to get to Fruitillar. Having found a fantastic Helados and Churros cafe (ice-cream and doughnuts) in Puerto Varas, conveniently next to an excellent pizzeria, we also tried a lot of ice-cream and churros.
The final stop of our trip was Punta Arenas. It was a necessary stop as the flight to the Falklands leaves from Punta Arenas airport. Given the susceptibility of the flight to delays or time changes caused by rotor winds in the Falklands, we’d also been warned to plan to spend a couple of days there so that we would be prepared to any changes.
Punta gets a mixed reception when mentioned here. Many see it as a necessary stop over and nothing more. Whilst a big thing in Punta Arenas is nearby colonies of penguins, that isn’t really a massive attraction when you live in the Falklands with 5 different species on your doorstep. It would be wrong to discount Punta on this basis though as we found that there was plenty to do for our three days and plenty to keep the children amused. For our final stop of the trip we had a self-catering apartment which turned out to be brilliantly located a couple of minutes from the waterfront and 10 minutes from the centre of town. It was also directly across the street from a play park to run off excess energy (the children’s, not ours). Punta itself is home to some quirky museums – the Salesian museum for example, housing a lot of taxidermy of questionable quality and interesting exhibits on the local tribes that were largely wiped out by western diseases brought by settlers in the region. It has a uniquely stupendous cemetery – admittedly an odd stop on the tourist trail, but well worth doing, especially if you have aspirations as to your mausoleum.
It’s also well worth getting out of town in Punta. The town is of course on the Straits of Magellan and in one direction on the edge of town there is a replica of the Victoria, Magellan’s ship, together with a replica of the Beagle (Darwin’s ship), the Ancud (which brought the first settlers, convicts, to the area), and the James Caird (the small boat which Shackleton successfully sailed from Elephant Island to seek rescue for the remainder of the crew). The ships are open to visitors to climb and explore everywhere, and were a delight to the children, so long as they didn’t fall down any of the hatchways!
In the other direction, an hour out of town, is the national monument, the Straits of Magellan park, with an excellent museum covering the navigation of the straits and the conserved Fort Bulnes, the original home of the first western settlers of the region. There are also stunning views of the straits.
And finally, in a holiday that seemed to include an awful lot of cake and ice-cream, we found the cafe with the cake selection to end all selections. If anyone happens to be in Punta Arenas, I would thoroughly recommend you find Famigrante, a small cafe over the road from the Croatian consulate. If you plan to have cake, make sure you haven’t eaten for quite a while before going. With a choice of about 20 different coffees, 10 different hot chocolates, a number of teas and somewhere close to 20 cakes, choice was a little difficult. I’ll end with a picture of what arrived in response to our order so you can all see what I’m talking about.
Five penguins and us 