The Lake District

After checking back into the Holiday Inn Express in Puerto Montt we decided to get some much needed laundry done and contacted some guy our cab driver gave us in order to book a rental car for the next three days. It was a Saturday night in Puerto Montt, but all we could handle was room service and some R&R after a long week of exhilarating riding.

The next day we picked up our rental car, which I like to call “piece of shit car” after the Adam Sandler song (Jeff you know which one I mean). No joke, this thing was falling apart. The stereo was stuck on an FM channel and the volume was stuck too. The car itself made some funky noises and I’m pretty sure if we pushed it the wheels might have fallen off.

Anyway, Tovah navigated us out of Puerto Montt and we headed for a couple of Volcanoes we could see in the distance. Winding through lakes and beautiful scenery, we took some pretty crazy dirt roads and constantly worried about our “piece of shit car”. We drove through a number of small German- influenced towns and finally decided to stop in Valdivia, which was a very pretty town with a couple of rivers. We found a pretty cool Hotel across from the river. We parked ourselves in the hotel bar and drank wine and ate cheese for dinner as we wrote the last few blog posts for Futaluefu. Pretty fun night really drinking wine overlooking the river and watching couples stroll along the bank.

The next day we headed northeast to another set of lakes and volcanoes. We stopped for lunch in Villarrica and then headed for the resort town of Pucon, which sits a few kilometers from an active Volcano. We watched a beautiful sunset before walking into town to sample a middle eastern restaurant we’d heard of (a nice change from traditional Chilean food). Found another dog that was in need of my Shish Kabob.

The next morning we chilled out in the hotel spa before heading back to Puerto Montt which was a good 5 hour drive back. Checked into “The Holiday Inn” as snoop dog would say and frantically booked our next segments of our trip to Torres Del Paine and a cruise through southern Patagonia down to Cape Horn.