Early in the morning, we discover the one flaw with Ecole! when we are treated to a first-hand account of each conversation in the adjoining rooms around 7:00 a.m. The guide book had warned us about thin walls. We struggle out of bed and enjoy a tasty breakfast of eggs, homemade bread and fresh honey.
We are scheduled for a afternoon raft trip, but it is very cold and rainy, and we are beginning to have second thoughts. We decide to spend the day updating the blog and finally adding our pictures, as Pucon features the fastest Internet we´ve seen (pictures take a while to upload), with fancy-pants flat screen monitors to boot! We spend several hours typing away, and then find Betsy and Rich to make the judgment call about the whitewater trip. As a chilly wind has now joined the rain, we decided to not immerse ourselves in a glacially-fed river and take our chances hiking instead. Oregonians, please forgive our wimpiness.
After bundling up, Rich joins us for the drive to Volcan Villaricca ( the big volcano that looms over the entire village). We wind our way up a bumpy dirt road in the rain until we reach the visitors center. We ask the Spanish-speaking ranger "Hiking?" to which he responds with several paragraphs of explanation that we are actually able to pierce together as "yes, there is hiking. Park up there and take the loop trail to the right, its about 35 minutes, and it will bring you back here." The body language and gestures helped as well, of course...The park itself was very beautiful, and it reminded us of our native Oregon with all of the rain working to keep the entire area very green and lush. It rains on us the entire time as we worked our way around the loop, pausing to admire the signposts that explained the various volcanic activity featured (but of course the signs were unintelligible to us). Too quickly we are done we are back at the car, but we have to get back to town to get ready for the trip we had scheduled to the Thermas (hot springs) later that evening. However, many of the adventure companies in town offer guided hikes to the top of this volcano (about 10,000 ft., with 3000 feet of climbing with some glacier travel), and we are determined that if we make it back to Pucon after New Years, we are going to make it to the top.
We show up at the booking agency at 7:00, and after some delay (nothing in Chile happens on time), we load in the van and whisk off into the rainy night. The hot springs are actually various swimming pools of varying temperature that are fed with the natural waters heated by the volcanic activity.
The building where the swimming pools were housed was big and new, but the pools themselves were not as nice as we had been hoping for. Nevertheless, we floated around for a few hours while admiring the surrounding mountains until it was time to head back to town.
We arrived back in Pucon extremely hungry around 10:00, so we decided to act like native Chileans and eat dinner with everyone else. No one eats dinner before 9pm here. The restaurants don´t even open for dinner until 8pm. If you show up at 8pm, they are shocked, like when you show up for a 5pm on the dot dinner in the U.S. Anyway, we stopped in a little restaurant that had been suggested in our book, and Rich and Dave enjoyed a very tasty fillet for $10 while Betsy and Carrie shared a goat cheese and mushroom risotto and fresh fettuccine with marinara. YUM. We finish dinner around 11:30, and head home for some much needed rest. Our visit to lovely Pucon was coming to a close, and none of us were quite ready to leave...
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