Chiloé
Hey. So here I am again. My head hurts a tiny bit but I think I just might be hedyrated. I don't drink much water here. I keep forgetting and just not caring that much. Ooops.
So yeah, time to write about Chiloé... We had a really good time. Originally there were five of us (Me, Danielle, her friend Ben, Theo, and Lindsey) but good old Marcus ended up finding us too. It was a really good crew.
Right now my fastalbum link isn´t working. It´s really lame, there seems to be a problem with fastalbum itself. As a result I posted my pictures on facebook and will continue to do so until the problem gets fixed (if it ever does). I didn't want to use facebook because not everyone can see those pictures, but it's the best I can do. Okay, back to my weekend in Chiloé...
The trip actually started out a bit annoyingly. Because of bus schedules, we decided the best option would be for us to leave Friday at 8am. Yikes. Mauricio told us that the trip would be about 5 hours but it turns out he was lying. Our bus decided to stop at EVERY single stop along the way, so it took us waaay longer. We were on the bus for over 7 hours and ended up getting to Castro (the largest city in Chiloé) around 4:30pm. We were all pretty tired, so at that point we just ate and then looked for a cabaña.
From there things got much, much better. The cabaña we decided on was AWESOME. It was fully furnished, two stories and included a kitchen, tvs, and perfect room for all of us. The guy who owned it was super cool too. He quoted us a price of 25 pesos a night (roughly 8 bucks per person) and didn't take down any of our info or anything. He just told us to pay him Sunday and that we could "check out" anytime of day we want. Talk about trusting. Theo was convinced it was some sort of scam. Haha.
So once we got settled in there we decided to buy a bunch of food (and some alcohol)and make dinner. We stopped by a liquor store and then bought groceries for us all (pasta, sauce, manjar, FRESH bread, etc) for only about 2 dollars a person. Once we got all that we headed back to the cabaña to relax for the night.
Once we started making dinner we got a call from Marcus. He had decided to go off on his own for the weekend to a place a few hours north of Chiloé. Marcus is the most random, crazy person I have ever met (he's also super nice and friendly and we love him). Anyway, he called and said that things didn't workout where he wanted to go, so he just hitchhiked over to Castro and was wondering if we were around. So Theo went and found him in the plaza and that's how Marcus ended up joining the Chiloé crew. Gotta love it.
So the rest of the night went well. Theo broke out the Uno cards and we had a rousing round of that. I wanted to do some Euchre, too, but NOT to my surprise hardly anyone had even heard of it. We went to bed relatively early, but not before Theo could set up a "security system" of a glass bottle on a chair in front of the door because he still didn't trust the cabaña owner. Haha.
The next day we got up, went to the artesania (the touristy, market thing with clothes and weird stuff) where I bought a hat with llamas on it and a scarf made partly of alpaca fur (for a total of 8 dollars). Then we headed off to Chonchi, a town near by that one of our books said was nice. It turns out that it was kind of weird, although there was an interesting looking church. We immediately decided that was a waste of time, and hopped on a bus to the National Park of Chiloé (about an hour away). By this time it was 3pm and our main concern was being able to catch a bus back to Castro before they shut down for the day. En route to the national park we discovered (after a LOT of confusion between Marcus and the bus driver, haha) that the last bus for Castro leaves the national park at 5pm and we were scheduled to get to the park at 4pm, leaving us just an hour to explore. Oops. Fortunately there was a trail to some outlooks over the ocean and stuff that was less than a mile long, so it ended up being worth it. The area was really, really pretty and I was a little disappointed because I don´t think my camera fully capured how cool it was. That´s okay, though, because I've got it in my head. So then we took an hour and half long bus ride back to Castro on one of the most packed Micros ever with a lot of random other gringos including some ANNOYING girls from Valaparaiso (from Minnesota) who would NOT stop talking, a cool guy from Holland, and a guy from Australia.
Once we got back to Castro, around 6:30, we went to this Mexican restuarant beause we had seen it walking around before and decided we were really craving it. Turns out that it was the tiniest restaurant ever and there was about one thing on the menu. There was one lady running everything and we were the only people in there. It was actually pretty good, although it was pretty funny. The lady left the restuarant twice (leaving us completely alone), once discreetly bringing back a bag of something that we are SURE was necessary for our dinners. Hmmm.
After that we spent the night similarly to how we spent the night before. We went to the grocery store and bought more fresh bread and manjar and whatnot and then headed back to our cabaña. We thought it was completely possible for us to return to the cabaña and find all of our stuff missing, new people renting it, and different management in the office, but suprisingly everything was just as we left it. Haha.
The next day, Sunday, we basically just got up, hung around and ate, and then left around 1ish. We wanted to go to the peguineria (where there are a TON of penguins) so we headed off to Ancud before going home to Valdivia. Sadly in Ancud we heard that the vast majority of the penguins are in migration until September and it would be really expensive to go out there, so we decided to just give up and head home.
Fortunately our bus ride back was a LOT shorter and nicer. We only stopped 2 times, and it was clearer out than our journey down, so we were able to see Volcán Orsorno and the mountains around Puerto Montt. It was really cool. We decided that we definitely want to go back and see that stuff. We also saw a bunch of dolphins on the ferry ride back. I got a picture of one because I'm awesome.
We ended up getting into Valdivia around 10pm. It was kind of strange when I realized how much I already think of Valdivia as home. Some of the others echoed my thoughts when we got off the bus. It was a great, great weekend but it was also good to be home.