Puerto Montt, Chile
Puerto Montt was founded in 1853 by German immigrants and named after the then President Manuel Montt. It is the capital of Chile’s southern Lake District and is the fastest growing city because of the explosive growth of salmon fishing.
At 9:30 we took a tender into the port. The sun was out, it was in the 50s and the water was calm. Immediately we were surrounded by taxi and van drivers all bidding for our business. We choose Irving because he had a new car, charged us $100 for 5 hours (for all of us) vs $60 p/p and he spoke perfect Spanish.
We drove through the city to the outskirts then finally we were in the country! We have spent so much time in cities we all were missing the country life. As we drove along the shore of Lake Llanquihue, the largest lake in Chile, we stopped at the upscale resort town of Puerto Varas. We felt as though we were in Germany, right down to the homes and farms. We walked around the center of town for a half hour stopping at an authentic German bakery to pick up lunch for later.
We continued around the lake stopping at two farms. One raised llamas and had a two day old male. The other had your regular farm animals along with an emu that kept putting it’s head in the kitchen window and the owners kept shooing him away and a female llama, obviously in heat, tied up in a fenced in area and a male on the outside of the fence keeping guard. Whenever anyone or anything came near, he would scream at the top of his lungs and run towards her – it was the funniest thing. I will try to put this in the blog later.
30 miles from port we arrived at Vicente Perez Rosales National Park. We hiked through the forest along a well marked path to the Petrohue River where the turquoise waters plunge over hard volcanic rocks to form wild, gushing cascades. Mount Osorno, the perfectly shaped, snowcapped volcano towers over the park. Unfortunately, it only peaked in and out today. We are incredibly lucky to have such beautiful weather because this area has rain 300 days a year!
Heading back to town we stopped at a bee keeper’s place for our picnic lunch then an overlook of Puerto Montt. We had Irving drop us all off at the handicraft market. Again, the guys ditched us and headed back to the ship. LuAnn and I had to check out all the little shops with their alpaca or wool sweaters and shawls all hand-spun and hand-dyed, jewelry, llama rugs, penguins in all shapes and forms, leather goods and carved wood figures.
We decided to walk to the center of town, got half way there and stopped to take a photo of the ship when we noticed a big, black rain cloud heading our way. We got about 50’ and it poured! We each had our waterproof jackets, hers had a hood but mine didn’t. We ran about two blocks and came upon a huge tent with about 30 craft stands – perfect! LuAnn found a unique scarf on the third time around. We decided to bite the bullet and run back to the pier to catch our tender. When we arrived, I looked like a drowned rat – both of our jackets failed the waterproof test! Several hundred other people decided to come back at the same time so it ended up taking about 45 minutes to catch a tender and then we had an exciting ride back through the choppy waves. We got back at 7:15, missed dinner with the group so we went to the buffet and then joined them at the show. We were quite surprised when we left on time at 8 pm; in fact, we took bets that morning as to when the ship would leave knowing it wouldn’t leave on time.
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| From Puerto Montt, Chile |
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