The pool that nearly killed me! READ THIS BLOG IT’S NEW! (well 10 days new)
It´s been a while since my last post….i´ll try to remember all that´s happend since. Last you all heard i was on my death bed for two weeks and i seem to be better now. All that´s left is a nice cough that showed up after i was feeling good enough to go out and two nights was all it took to run me down again. So aside from that i think i´m going to make it.
After being in Santiago Chile for two weeks where i stayed with the sweetest girl that i met in Cusco Peru who is from Santiago. After 3 days in the hostal with my illness i couldn´t hack it anymore and looked her up. She saved me and wanted to tell you all about her. After healing I headed west to the coast to a town called Valparaiso. It is suppose to be like the San Francisco of Chile…being the largest port with hills and lots of art and culture it turned out to be pretty cool. I spent 3 or 4 days there that consisted of a city tour, boat tour, a full day attempting to go surfing….The guy that i was hanging out with who is from Australia i met in Copacabana Bolivia, he was staying for 3 months to practice his music and of course live somewhere else for a while. Anyways, we left in the morning after our hostels amazing breakie to a surf shop where we would meet a van that would take us to the beach and he would have lessons….we missed the bus because we wanted to have breakfast and ended up having to go to the beach to get his board…(a 3 hour ordeal) then caught another bus up north another for an hour to a better beach with shit waves. He had a board and a suit so he went in and i just relaxed on the beach. It was a long day of hunting for buses, riding them…with some beach in the middle and empenadas of course.
After about 3 weeks in the city i was ready for something smaller. I took a 12 hour bus south to Pucon from Valparaiso. Pucon is a small lovely town in the mountains with a lot of lakes and volcanos. There was lots of rafting, hiking, canopy tours….(whatever they can think of) and something called hydro-speeding. I never heard of it but wanted to try it since rafting makes me a nervous reck but i´m always so happy after i do it. I´ll try to explain it but i´m sure if you look it up online you can see a picture of what it is i´m talking about. It´s basically a little triangular boat that your fore arms rest on and it comes down to your stomach. You go down the rapids on this little thing and hope you don´t flip or lose it. I was sorta scared at times but after we made it through i was on cloud 9. The next day we (me and a guy from Australia who lives in London) went hiking in a national park about 35km out of town. It was beautiful forest with 3 lakes (Los Lagos trail) that we stopped at a long the way. I could have spent more time out there for sure. There was a dog that followed us the whole time and we named him lassie because he well…he looked like lassie. That night we went to some hot springs about the same distance out of town. There were 6 pools that you could relax in next to the river where we jumped in after getting too hot. We brought some wine and sat around for 2 hours in the toasty spring..(the Australian with two Isralies). Finally there was a beach near the town that was amazing…it was called playa blanca on a beautiful lake with mountains surrounding it. I went to this beach twice while i was in Pucon because it was so nice.
I´m at a bus stop right now waiting for my transfer in 2 hours to Bariloche. I left Pucon this morning at 8 and stopped at 4 or so other bus stations before getting to this one to wait for a transfer. It´s crazy half the time is spent stopping to pick up more people or drop someone off. Gotta fill it up and pay for the gas! I am planning on being in Bariloche for 5 days or so then its another long bus ride…about 26 hours down south to El Chalten, El Calafate and Puerto Natales…the gateway to patagonia and Torres Del Paine….Look up pictures for Torres Del Paine online…that´s where i´ll be hiking in 2 weeks! I will try to upload more pictures when i find good internet connections but it´s tricky. I´ll hold you over with a couple for now.
