Adios Chile

 Before we left Pucon we had time to visit some hot baths and to enjoy a couple more meals on our lovely balcony.  We stopped on the way back to Puerto Varas on the side of the Rio Calle Calle for a picnic which was very nice with the cool breeze and sunny day.

The river next to the hot baths

Hot baths

Heat did not deter play

Does it count as affection if its caught on a selfie?

Our balcony in the condo complex at Parques Pinares, Pucon

Rio Calle Calle, quality picnic spot

The stay in Puerto Varas was to allow us time to get our pre-USA covid tests and to be close to Puerto Montt airport for our long flight to LA.  We happened upon a triathlon and we enjoyed an early morning watching the swimmers on Llanquihue Lake and the first transition to the bike.  

One of the first swimmers exits the water in the triathlon

Our flight was in the evening, a couple of hours back to Santiago and then 11 hours to LA.  After the now familiar stress of waiting on covid tests, the rest of the journey went smoothly.  LATAM food is great, even at 1am, and their hot breakfast omlette was like a flashback to the good old days of proper aeroplane meals.  

Anyway, I'm not here to review airline service.  I wanted to wrap up our time in Chile.  I think the rafting and meal in Pucon that I wrote about last time probably does that quite well.  This is a country whose extraordinary diversity of natural beauty has been well conserved with a plethora of national parks.  We intentionally started in the south to take advantage of the end of the southern summer.  Nevertheless we were treated to the full wildness of the end of the earth - ferocious winds, blazing sun, torrential rain.  As we worked our way back north the landscape softened but became no less beguiling.  We didn't get to go to the desert north which would have been quite another world again.  Another time.

I have a tendency towards focusing on the natural world above the human and this was probably exacerbated by our lack of Spanish, on top of the somewhat isolating effects of covid, which Chile is still taking very seriously.  We would have had a different experience had we had more of the language and I can see how important this would be travelling through the rest of South America.  My impression of the Chilean people was that they were consistently patient, polite, kind and considerate.  A sweeping generalisation if ever there was one but I was always struck by how few people ever used their horn on the road.  This one observation seemed to carry across to the way people tolerated our difficulty with the language and were always helpful to us, not in a deferential way, but with a quiet self-assurance that sometimes seems lacking in our own culture.  

So thank you Chile for your hospitality, the beauty of your country, and the vibrancy of your culture (see for example proliferation of street art).    We would love to come back, hike some of the big circuits in Patagonia, enjoy more time in Pucon, and see the northern deserts. 

But for now, onwards we must go…