Yesss we are still alive and thriving! We have been quickly moving between places the last two weeks along a famous route called the Carretera Austral, so haven’t had a good opportunity to recap our first two pitstops in Chile. We are currently resting in a windy lakeside town & figured it was prime time to share some pictures and stories.

Puerto Varas

We reached Puerto Varas, Chile via bus a few hours before the arrival of 2025. If you look at a map, Puerto Varas is directly west of Bariloche, Argentina but there are some huge mountains, commonly known as the Andes, you have to drive around so the journey took 7ish hours. It’s funny that we continue to choose holidays & Sundays to travel, as if we haven’t learned from our previous inconveniences. By the time we had checked into our hostel and dropped our backpacks off, the whole city was shut down. As we walked back with our mediocre gas station chicken sandwiches, nothing compared to Town Pump hot food, we grumbled about not having any cervezas, champagne, or good buddies to bring in the new year. To our surprise and delight, our new home for the night was hosting a celebration of sorts. They provided a few 1 liter bottles of wine, some unique celebration accessories, tacos, & new friends! We played a truly American drinking card game, King’s Cup, which I wonder if the incredible readers of our blog will recognize. After enough of that, we all wandered to the main square in town where the city was hosting a free concert; a DJ counted down to midnight and we began 2025 dancing on the streets to live music in Puerto Varas. Neat way to start the new year!!

There are a few main attractions that bring tourists to Puerto Varas, including Lake Llanqihue, Volcan Osorno, y Museo Pablo Fierro (there’s more, but these are the three places we spent time). We were surprised to spend a few sunny days relaxing on lakeside beaches, but it ended up feeling necessary to recover from some of the long treks in the Bariloche area. After two nights in our first hostel, we moved to a different accomodation, Mapatagonia Hostel, which quickly became our favorite hostel of the last nearly 3 months!! (3 months?! time is racing by…)

Not only was the building beautiful, but we fell in love with the owner, Pierre, who moved to Chile from France 17 years ago. He runs lowkey tours to Volcan Osorno and a nearby waterfall for his hostel guests, which we happily joined. It was an interesting start to the tour with Pierre as the chauffeur…I can only imagine Grandma Judy would be asking to get out of the car & prefer hitch hiking a ride to the volcano. Our mixed ability group made it safely to the base of the volcano, which serves as a small ski area during their winter months. We walked for a few hours up until we reached a view point close to the base of the glaciated top & enjoyed some salami and tomato sandwiches while relaxing on a chairlift. The descent back to the car included gracefully sliding down a large snow field. Today marks closest we have come to skiing all winter…

After a fun, unique, and interesting time wandering around the volcano, we cruised into the rainforest to hike to an impressive salto (which is now the third or fourth Spanish word we’ve learned to describe waterfall). Pierre offered a bottle of wine to anyone who jumped in at the base of the waterfall; Devin had no trouble stripping down & dunking, to the excitement of everyone, especially me because…wine! I’m usuallly one to take advantage of those offers as well, but for some reason I was really hesitant. Once Pierre said Devin was third person ever to jump in (for Pierre’s bottle of wine), I quickly decided I wanted to be the fourth. Cheers!

We just genuinely enjoyed the time spent with Pierre, so we decided to extend our stay which allowed us to go on a bike trip with Pierre and his daughter up to Fruitillar, another small town along Lake Llanqihue. This also marked a special day for us. The route to Fruitillar brought us along abandoned? (we hoped) train tracks through the country side, cruising next to some impressive estates with gorgeous gardens. There was no way we would’ve discovered this on our own, and we ended up adopting another bike rider who was a bit lost but saw our group in the distance and decided to catch up. This was a traveler from Belgium, who we have ended up reconnecting with a few times since then. Seeing familiar faces, even those we just met five days ago, in such unfamiliar regions is comforting! (get here soon, Caroline, xoxo!!) I enjoyed chatting with Luna, Pierre’s daughter, along the route who is just your typical 14 year old who loooves to gossip; I’m here for the Puerto Varas tea, no doubt. Guys…who would’ve thought I would miss conversations with high schoolers?! A treat of a bike ride ended at a stunning lakeside theater and with some delicious Chilean sandwiches y cervezas.

Mapatagonia gave us a most comforting stay and helped us create connections with two other travelers interested in going to Chiloe Island. We had all heard it was advantageous to have a car on the island, and figured that splitting the cost between four of us would make it affordable. We found a nice Air BnB outside of the main city, Castro, to be our home base for a few days and took off in the rental car, with Devin as a chauffeur (a nice change to Pierre, as we kept mentioning).

Con amor,

~ Rachael

Isla Grande de Chiloe

Chiloe is the largest island in the Chilean Patagonian archipelago boasting some incredible oceanic wildlife and local sea faring Chileans. As Rachael said above, we drove through this island with two friends we met at Mapatagonia: Nathalie (French) and Leo (from Germany but lives in Estonia). The island is only accessible by ferry and we launched from the north end on a short ride to the town of Ancud. We quickly stopped here for a seafood lunch and found ourselves awkwardly in the middle of a Chilean Cueca dance. Scoffed down some delicious chupe (seafood chowder) and some salmon with potatoes & mayo and then headed to Punhuil for the penguin tours! We were all escorted on a 4×4 raised trolly to our skiff and made our way around a few outcroppings in the ocean to spot some wildlife. We got to see some Magellon and Humboldt penguins, a sealion (lobo del mar), a sea otter (gato del mar), and a bunch of cool birds.

After the penguins we drove on a “shortcut” dirt road to get to Castro. Since our rental car was just a wee little compact sedan with no 4WD I was a little nervous driving over some very steep topography. Luckily the steepest sections on our route were paved on one side of the road and we made it to our homebase for the next couple of nights, Castro. The next morning we explored the town a little bit. Castro is on a point surrounded by the ocean on three sides, so a lot of the houses are build on stilts or palafitos. We also got to peek inside the main church which was built entirely from wood in the area. Chiloe is actually pretty well known for its many wooden churches around the island which were constructed by Jesuit missionaries. Leo worked in the morning but we picked him up and went on a little cruise through another island just off the coast se llama Isla Quinchao. We peered into couple more churches and stopped at pretty much every town on the island. It was so nice to be able to drive again, not only just the luxury of going at our own pace but to just drive some really nice winding roads. At the end of the island we stopped at a bee farm we heard about from some people in Puerto Varas. The bee farm was really just a honey shop, but the owners were so excited to have us that they gave us a tour of their entire setup! We had a hard time understanding everything but we got the gist and were able to try SO MUCH honey. The sweet couple gave us a tasting from every step in the process. We ended up buying a 500g jar and have regretted not buying more.

On our last day on Chiloe it was pretty rainy but we decided to drive to National Park Chiloe to see some of the coastline. We stopped for some cozy coffee drinks in the town nearby to wait out the rain then parked for the Muelle de las Almas hike. The hike was not too long but went up and down through a landscape that looked like the Scottish ocean cliffsides from movies I’ve seen. We got to the tip of the point and there was a super cool boardwalk built to look like you were walking out into the ocean. We ended the day on a massive beach and hung out in the cool windy weather by the ocean. The communities on Chiloe seem to live a very laidback and chill lifestyle which we were gracious to have been able to stop here along our travels.

The next morning Rach and I said goodbye to Nathalie and Leo and hopped on an early bus to Quellon along the southern tip of Chiloe so that we could catch a long ferry over to the mainland where we would start our grand voyage along the Carretera Austral.

Until next time,

Devin