PUCON BRIGHTENS DAY 2

WEATHER: Spot of rain in the morning – sunn-ish in the afternoon

HIGHTLIGHT OF THE DAY: Getting into some hot pools – nice and warmmmmmmm

BUMMER OF THE DAY: Not being able to see Villarica volcano

BUYS OF THE DAY: The tour for 18,000 pesos

The weather for the day was another wet predication and after a heavy storm last night, apparently, I did hear it rain, but didn’t really hear the severity of the storm we woke to grey clouds as expected.  So it was still quite muddy from the rain, but we stayed dry in our tent, which is more than I can say for poor Mike who was in a small river when he woke and all his stuff was wet.  He just can’t cut a break poor Mike, well things can only gets better for him we hope.

Paul and Lizzie booked us in for a ‘tour of the area’ and a hot springs stop for this afternoon.  We really should get out and see a little bit of the area, so it was nice to say we had something on.  The new group seems quite ‘active’.  Climb that, hike this, cycle that, swim this – so luckily there are more than one that all the fitness freaks can hang together, and the rest of the ‘holiday’ makers can all sloth and mull around.  So needless to say they were off this morning to walk some national park.  We were going to a national park as well but as part of the you’re on wheels.  Now that’s more my style!

The morning was spent slothing around the camp; it still hadn’t rained as yet, so I had my laptop back outside charging under the letterbox outlet in a plastic bag.  I was keeping a beady eye on the weather as I didn’t want it to suddenly downpour and my laptop was stuck in the rain.  Not a good combination I am thinking.  I also used this time to move my overhead things, again, and tidy up my overhead, again as Helen was now in ‘my seat’ and I had moved up the front.  In my defence there isn’t a lot of overhead room at the front as that is where the charging station is and a lot of the carp for the truck, so once again lucky Mick is sitting behind Helen and I again have taken up all his space with my crap.  I did well to start with and got rid of the book crate I was using, but with us camping so much I have a lot of bags (bag lady) for different things.  Stuff it, Mick doesn’t care, so I have just moved my stuff 2 seats where it will stay till Rio when we need to take everything off the truck and ‘that’ will be interesting, but I’m not going to worry about that for now. 

Kate and I walked into town at 1pm for another look around town before having to be at the tour shop at 2.25pm.  I tried to make a call to Zeme using my mobile, but I have found the South American phone company’s a tough nut to work out.  I have tried getting sim cards in each country as I move, but I have found them more trouble than they are worth, as you need a national identity card to activate the sim, if you have people who know what they are doing then that’s fine, but in Santiago they just sold me the sim without activating it so it was useless and I am finding I am spending money on sims and loading them with money and not being able to use them.  So I am currently sticking to my UK number, as I won’t be using it that much once Z gets here and then the weekly text to Shellybelly so I can cope with that cost going onto the UK number.  I am lucky I have Paul and Liz on tour, so they are okay with me using their credit card and me paying them back in local currency here on the trip, so I am set till Rio which is the most important.  So that said, I still couldn’t get a line out to Z’s phone, so on the walk into town I stopped at 2 cabina’s (phone places) to phone him that way, and it is a lot cheaper this way, but for whatever reason I couldn’t get through, so I will just have to leave it till I get into Argentina tomorrow.  You know when you just want to hear some-ones voice – that’s where I was at. 

As we left the camp site it of course then decided to rain, so with wet jackets donned we braved the rain for the 10 minute walk into town and with my calls unsuccessful we went to one of the coffee shops where KWT got an ice-chocolate.  Si it got us out of the rain and took up the rest of the time we needed to into town and headed to the tour store for our afternoon outing. 

I really wasn’t sure what our afternoon was all about.  All I knew was that there were some waterfalls and the hot springs at the end.  Pucon is known for its outdoor activities and has at least 4 hot springs that I know about also in the area.  Hot Springs are one of those things you can do in all weather conditions, so it didn’t worry us about it raining or being cold for that bit.  As we boarded the van for the afternoon we found out that the tour was only in Spanish, so one of the ladies on the tour translated for us what the trip entailed at the start and I was hoping that she wasn’t going to have to do it for the whole trip, what a pain in the arse for her.  But she didn’t so the negative to that was we really didn’t get too many details on the 5 stops that we did.  But then it was just a lot of nature, waterfalls and rivers.  The last stop being the Caburgua eyes, some magnificent natural pits in the core of the Valdivian rainforest. They are a group of natural pools. This underground water emerging amidst a thick forest comes from the same lake after which they are named and other nearby streams which also had some smaller natural waterfalls, which during winter are a lot bigger due to the water coming off the nearby mountains. 

So I guess we didn’t miss out on too much.  The surroundings of Pucon are beautiful and I am glad I came, but it is for the outdoors person and if you were here longer than a few days and you weren’t that type of person it would get a little boring.  The tour itself was okay.  It wasn’t awe inspiring but it was a good way to kill 6 hours and the hot springs were pretty cool.  They were the third hot springs of the trip so far and probably the best maintained of the 3.  But there were no drinks permitted in the pools, where the other 2 had waitresses running around bringing beers and what not to you.  Now that was really cool……. 

So we were dropped back into town just after 8.15pm and then we had the 10 minute walk back to camp.  The sun is still high in the sky at this time and it is so hard to judge the actual time if you didn’t have a watch on.  The afternoon turned out to be no rain and a small ray of sunshine poked out its head towards the end.  So Pucon did brighten for the last few hours of daylight that we had there.  The frustrating thing was while we were waiting at the tour place, the weather conditions for the next few days was sunshine and high 30’s.  That would be right, but you just have to take the bad weather days with the good ones and we copped it in Pucon.

It’s been nice having the free Wi-Fi from the hotel next door.  I wonder if they will get a shock when they see their next bill after having 20 people the last 3 days streaming from their account.  Surprise!  It was also super nice to receive all the wonderful comments on my news to everyone about Zeme.  I wasn’t sure if I should have waited till Rio, till I had him here in my arms, but unless his visas are not approved I know he will be here, so I took a leap of faith and told the world, literally on my blog.  There is no better way than to put yourself out there is there?  If I do something I do it 110% in everything.  If it works out great if not then I know I gave my best.  But enough of the backup plans and excuses.  36 days and counting…… and thanks to all for the words of encouragement and congratulations. 

We head tomorrow to Bariloche for another 3 day camp.  So it is nice putting up the tents knowing we don’t have to take them straight down the next day.  Bariloche sounds like another outdoors kind of place, but we are right beside one of the lakes of the area, so fingers crossed the weather here is a lot better and I may just get some rays of sun for the next 2 days.