Isla de Chiloe

Once we safely were on the overnight bus from Talca to Puerto Montt, we realized that one of the things we were going to do with the hour or so of free time we had at the bus station was to replenish our water supply. We had no time to do that, and only about a half liter of water in a bottle to last us all night. That was a pretty thirsty twelve hours. Then, on getting off the bus in Puerto Montt at about 630 AM, we found nothing open, not even the bus ticket terminals, and the soda machines were broken.

At 7AM, the bus terminals opened, and we bought tickets on a bus to Castro, on the island of Chiloe, leaving in about 5 minutes. So, our entire Puerto Montt experience was about 35 minutes long. That was enough. It’s a really gritty port town, a long way from anywhere. It serves as a transportation hub (note: we wound up back in PM a few weeks later, as the fastest way to get to the part of Argentina we want to wrap up the trip in – more on that when we write about it. Much nicer in the daylight than we thought earlier.)

Chiloe was the last stronghold of the Spanish in Chile at least (possibly Latin America). Its isolation allowed it to develop a character of its own – there wasn’t even a paved road the length of the island until the 1950s. It’s mainly a fishing and farming economy. Really pretty. I was reminded of driving around on the Olympic peninsula. Except you’re far more likely to get stuck behind a herd of cows than a Winnebago.

Three hours later, we finally got to Castro, and bought some water and soda on getting off the bus. Best. Diet Coke. Ever.

Castro is the town the guidebook told us to visit if we only had time to visit one town. So, we booked two nights in a hostel there, which overlooked what we thought was the main waterfront (turns out the main waterfront, and the rest of the town, were around a corner, something we didn’t discover until our last morning there, thanks to the crappy map in lonely planet (yeah, I know, but it’s the only resource we have.)) The view from our room was crazy – we had a direct view of the harbor, and could watch the tides come in and go out. Also, a colony of ibis were in a tree just down the hill, and would put on a show squabbling with each other right outside. They would frequently land on the roof outside our window (and early in the morning, the roof on top of our room), and squawk at each other, and dig at stuff in the roof with their long curved beaks. Beautiful birds. I got lots of pictures from no more than 10 feet away of these birds that are bigger than mallards. They give the impression of being waterfowl, but don’t have webbed feet or bills – they have more of an insect digging beak.

Castro is full of “palafitos”, which are just houses on stilts, built out on the tidal flats. The stilts have to be tall, as the town is near the place on the island with the greatest tide differential (I can’t remember if this was seven feet or seven meters. It was dramatic, either way.) They, too, color their houses in neat, bright pastel colors – the houses are not in great shape (no buildings are shiny and new here), but a fresh coat of yellow or blue or pink paint sure does spruce up the look. Americans should be painting their houses like this. It’s impossible to walk through a neighborhood like that and not smile.

So, we just kind of relaxed and messed around in the town while trying to figure out the best way to get down to Punta Arenas – the roads kind of stop at Puerto Montt, where the geography kind of becomes like the Alaskan Riviera. We finally settled on buying a few plane tickets out of Puerto Montt, saving 36 hours on a bus, and several days of recovery (at the cost of quite a bit of money.)

We had one day left before flying out, so we bused over to the other main town on the island, Ancud. We really liked the hostel here, too – we paid a bit too much (we still have the tendency of saying yes to whatever gets said to us in Spanish, then realizing 5 minutes later (once we work out exactly what was said), we could have made do with something cheaper – bano compartmentido is just as good as bano privado as far as we’re concerned. We’re getting better at this.) We’re hoofing it from the bus terminal to the hostel in Ancud, when some stranger pulls over his minivan and offers us a ride. Hmmm. I was all eager to get in, Evelyn was properly skeptical. It worked out fine, but we do need to stick to our travel rule that the one who isn’t being a moron gets to make the decisions. Turns out he runs a penguin viewing service, and offered us a brochure. We went for it, so after a few hours of resting, he came and picked us and a few others up and drove us out into the countryside.

The views along the way were great, and we snapped lots and lots of pictures – as I said, the countryside really is beautiful. He drove us to a “mirador” (nice view) on top of the tallest hill around, where they’ve located a schoolhouse with a neat fish sculpture, and some impressionistic sculptures of the local supernatural folk (local legend has a lot to say about “brujas”, witches, and “traucos”, forest gnomes whose job it is to give young girls impure dreams and the occasional “surprise” child (nice work if you can get it, I suppose.)) We decided we could be pretty happy in the little farmhouse just across the street from this school. We would get some sheep, and a dog to keep them busy, and just sit on the porch and stare at the view all day.

Anyway, all that picture taking wasn’t such a good idea, as when we made it to the penguin preserve, the camera promptly ran out of battery (I had been meaning to charge it for many days, and it finally caught up with us – still, a testament to just how long that camera’s battery lasts – it was about a week of vacation picture taking.) So, while we got to go out in a boat and see penguins and five or six other neat birds, we didn’t get too many pictures of them. We did see cormorants and a few new gulls. It was pretty neat. The whole thing cost 20 bucks each, and was well worth it, but would have been a lot more worth it if we had more pictures (note: we did see penguins again later in Punta Arenas, and got tons of pictures and movies (we didn’t even know the camera would take movies). More on this later.)

Ancud was nice to walk around, and I found myself wishing for a lot more time on the island. I’ve wanted to visit it since I read about it in a book of travel essays 15 years ago, probably, so I can finally cross that one off my list. But, I could easily give the place two weeks instead of three days – there are many more small towns and a big forest reserve/park to visit as well. It looks like it would be the perfect place to tour by bicycle.

From there, back across the channel to Puerto Montt and the airport. The channel crossing consists of these barge type ferries that the buses drive onto. A bus seems to leave every half hour during the day, so they must run pretty frequently. From the ferry deck (the crossing takes about 15 minutes, so you can get out and look around), we saw a whole bunch of some large bird circling in the air (surrounding a school of fish?) and we think we caught a glimpse of a few sea lions (or sea wolves – lobos del mar – as they’re called here.)