Dear all,
After rougly a week in South Patagonia, Agnes, Yolande (Agnes' Mum) and I headed to the North of its region to reach Puerto Varas, a nice city built near a huge lake where you can feel the German influence from the XIX and early XX centuries, and where huge volcanoes lay. This city is the door to reach Chiloe island which has a strong fishing heritage and is famous for its typical and numerous wooden churches from the XVIII century onwards. So, we enjoyed living on the "Palafitos", houses on stilts, also very colourful and eating nice seafood. Our favourite part is probably the West and North West coasts where we think it is wilder (nice national parks, walks etc...) and where we met lovely people. We namely met a guy who was hitch hiking called Nyi Nyi (see our Portraits section) who is from Myanmar but has lived in South America for years and years and with whom we were stuck in the mud, in the dark, in the middle of nowhere with our car for nearly 4 hours. Meters after meters, we reached a house. 3 nice men helped us to reach our hostel...and at 10.30pm/11pm, Sonja our host, welcomed us with probably the best food we had so far in Chile (all home made, chicken, bread, veggies etc...), some nice heating and warm shower...The following day, we had a nice walk near the ocean, where the 1960 earthquake created a 2m deep gap, that allowed salted water to surround trees and kill them...the landscape was really beautiful. It is over there that we met a lovely Chilean couple, Alfredo and Elena, with whom we spent time walking in the dunes, fishing, eating and drinking....Check out our latest pics on the usual sections such as Chile, Portraits, Foodies etc...By the way, you will also read about our quest to find the grave of a lady called Jeanne Cabanne, a Yolande's friend who passed away in the 90's in Patagonia.
