One of the advantages of teaching at a Catholic school is that we get lots of breaks for Catholic holidays that normally wouldn't be allowed to be officially celebrated in a public school. (Part of the reason I went to Gonzaga. Just kidding. But it was a perk.) So for Easter we had a 4 day weekend, just enough time to get out of the city for a while. My roommate Allegra and I planned a very last-minute trip to a city called Pucón, about a 10 hour bus ride south of Santiago. The city sits between 3 active volcanoes and a beautiful lake, with lots of touristy outdoors activities. We bought our tickets on Tuesday for a Wednesday night departure. We rushed to the bus station after class on Wednesday night and boarded the bus, expecting the worst. Our guidebook said it was worth the extra cash to take one of the more comfortable lines, but since we like to live on the edge and wait until the day before to purchase tickets, we got to ride the very plush and elegant Jet Sur line. It actually wasn't all that bad if you get past the lack of a/c, the screaming children playing musical chairs while climbing across their parents laps, and the man who kept snoring despite my attempts to stir him by dropping heavy objects on the floor right next to him. My parents told me story after story of people getting ripped off on buses in South America, so I tried to sleep while clutching my bag so tight that I could have ripped holes in it with my pathetic excuse for fingernails. After the longest 10 hours and worst instant pound cake (their attempt at breakfast) of my life, we finally arrived in Pucón after over 10 hours on the bus. It was absolutely worth it, though. From the bus we could see the sun start to rise, creating this beautiful blue, orange and green horizon. A foggy mist covered the ground and the fields as we passed, and as we drove into Villarrica (a nearby city) the mist gave way to a lake with the most blue water I've ever seen. The lake was surrounded with green hills and a huge snow-capped volcano in the distance. Neither words nor pictures can really capture it. Coming from the smog-filled city of Santiago, it was incredible to be able to see a mountain so clearly!
We checked into our hostel, which is any hippies dream hostel. It's completely "green" and promotes showering with friends to save water. It has a great vegetarian restaurant (which meant we had to go somewhere else at least once so I could get some meat) and the rooms were very clean at a decent price. After checking in we embarked on our first outdoor adventure: a four hour horseback riding trek. We galloped through the valley and across the river with a picturesque view the entire time. My horse, Petiza, loved to gallop which was great until we got going too fast and my sunnies flew off my head. It made me miss riding so much! We waddled home, literally, and relaxed with a glass of carmenére wine and went to bed. The next day we climbed Volcán Villarrica, an active volcano. It was incredible, and warrants its own blog entry. I'll just say that it was one of the most physically challenging things I've ever done besides the marathon, but it was absolutely incredible!
After climbing the volcano we were too sore to explore any other adventure activities and spent a day exploring the town of Pucón. I should say we spent a few minutes exploring the town...it's pretty small and most of the activities lie on the outskirts. We also checked out the hot springs, or termas, that are found around the area, but they were a sore disappointment. There were tons of tourists snapping pictures and a guard monitoring everyone which prevented us from enjoying our wine. It was a tourist trap, and I fell in head first. Oh well, it was a nice way to relax our muscles after a long climb.
The last day, Easter Sunday, was the only day that we had any rain, so we zipped up our coats and headed out to explore until our bus left that night. We found a bar and watched Chile's most popular soccer team, Colo Colo, lose to a much smaller team by 2 goals. It was just about at that time that I got food poisoning...I'll spare the details. Just know that it was a long bus ride home that night. We got back to Santiago the next morning at about 7:00 a.m. and I was ready to teach at 11:30. It was kind of a fairy tale weekend...a whirlwind really. We had a great time playing tourist, and Pucón was an incredible place. The "real world" hit us hard on Monday morning...but we're recovering.
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