Ready

We have Rusty’s border permit, and after we got back to the campground  I filled the water tank, emptied our toilet and washed the van. Layne had two large glasses of sangria with lunch in Pucón, so she is resting on the bed. Rusty is sleeping in the grass outside. All is ready for our drive to Argentina today, Tuesday morning.

Downtown Pucón with the Villarica volcano always dominating the skyline with a near of smoke down its slopes. Weirdly enough you get used to it just being there. 

Lunch was scallops in a cheese sauce and mushrooms fried in garlic and olive oil. 

Followed by a giant shovel of paella full of shellfish and chicken.  We got a to go box and plan to have for dinner on our way into Argentina. 

We sat by the window on a hot sunny afternoon and watched tourists watching tourists. 

It was warm, close to 80 degrees and quite lovely in the illustrious municipality of Pucón. Why Chile makes  its cities with that title I couldn’t say. 

I was weaving through traffic and saw a read cap coming my way. I guess he’s not a federal employee on vacation. Trump has lots of supporters all over the place. 

Schools start up in the next couple of weeks and we are hoping crowds will thin out and we can enjoy the fall weather working our way north before the arrival of winter. 

Looking forward to exploring the lakes of Argentina next, around the towns of San Martin de Los Andes and Bariloche. 

Waiting

We are enjoying fine weather at the campground which is lucky as we are here until Tuesday. We’re hoping to get a delivery of a new voltage converter to allow us to charge our batteries using 220 volt shorepower. Our old one was too small and burnt out, so learning as we go we have preserved a larger model this time. 

When we get Rusty’s border papers from the government office in Villa rica we will be free to leave for Argentina. They are supposed. To be ready Monday so we’ll be going to town to do laundry and some shopping to be ready to leave here Tuesday morning. 

The route we have chosen to drive to Argentina is supposed to be very scenic with lake views, a 90 minute ferry ride, a border crossing and 27 miles of gravel in Argentina driving to the city of San Martin de Los Andes where we plan to meet some friends. Argentina will be home for a few weeks I expect as we cross cross the country as there is afternoon tea to be drunk in the town of Gaiman where Welsh miners once emigrated to get work. 

Then we will drive back across Argentina through the steppes of the famous pampas, windy and boring we are told.  Still I want to see these great grassy plains of myth. 

I’m ready to travel but I’m happy waiting here. The temperatures are perfect, there are no insects and the campground dogs are friendly. They make Rusty jealous so he is much more cuddly than normal and I like that. 

It’s like being parked in a park. There are some other campers, a Colombian whose wife doesn’t want to travel anymore so he’s here alone, and a Dutch couple in an expedition truck planning to park for the summer to go home to mow the lawn. 

We wash fruit and dishes, take hot showers and decent WiFi and read my Kindle. Electronic books are a thing I never knew I would become dependent upon. If you want to know what the pampas was like to grow up on a hundred years ago Hudson, an English boy who grew up in Argentina, is evocative. 

Eclipse Campground

Afternoon high of 73  degrees and an overnight low of 50; tell me that’s not perfect. 

Rusty and I walked down to the lake yesterday morning after a very quiet night sleeping on the streets of Villarica, though I should point out we were hardly alone. Two expedition trucks did t the night in a parking lot across the street at the cultural center…

…and two tents were set up in the park on the waterfront. Coming from the US where this sort of behavior is not tolerated Chile breathes its own sort of freedom. 

Lake Villarrica had ever appeared to be a layer of smog which seems unlikely as the main industry here is tourism but the sunrise was lovely. 

There were also a couple of vans, a German and an Argentine tag and this VW from Colombia. I often read on the travelers’ pages about concerns of those planning to drive the PanAmerican and then I see something like this. No four wheel drive, no high clearance, just a lot of ingenuity. Hats off to them, whom I never saw as they had no dog to roust them out of bed:  

We had business to attend to and we were at the doors of the Agriculture office well before opening time at 8:30 in the morning. The front desk cheek out he through the wringer asking about Rusty’s details, my details and scrutinizing his health certificate and the details of his anti parasite treatment and his chip number. He loved his vet visit as you can see. 

I shuffled documents like a croupier at the poker table, made up an Argentine address as my residence and finally promised to back Monday to pick up the 60 day border crossing certificate for my pain in the ass dog. (Love you Rusty).  If we get to French Guyana Rusty is getting a European pet passport.  

Then we went for another walk in case they checked and found something wanting we’d be close by to make corrections. 

I quite like Villarrica on the lake. It’s hectic on the tourist waterfront but much quieter away from the tourist part of town. 

And it’s full of businesses and pedestrian traffic and a feeling of purposeful business pervades the town. 

We did some shopping at Lider, the Walmart owned store in Chile and drove to our campground place of find memory from our journey south last November. 

The owners ordered a new voltage regulator for us as our old one burnt out in Chiloé Island. The new one is a bigger 2000 watt model to reduce vintage from 220 volts to US style 110 when we want to plug in to shorepower to charge our batteries. 

There’s an online delivery service here similar to Amazon called Mercado Libre and the owners have an account so they ordered the $80 voltage regulator for us. It should be here on Saturday.

On Mercado Libre it was a few dollars cheaper even than on this website. Meanwhile we have a ferry reservation for Tuesday afternoon to ride across a lake to Argentina from a place called Fuy, pronounced “Phooey.” 

Meanwhile hot showers, WiFi, deliveries and sunshine. We will co to it to muddle through. 

Villarica

After we ended up spending an extra day in Puerto Montt meeting Jim and Karyn…

We spent the night back at our truck parking area north of the city and left as close to the crack of dawn as we could.  It’s hard getting up early in this climate as I find my bed infinitely preferable to the cool morning air. 

I find the PanAmerican Highway (Ruta5) in Chile mesmerizing even though on this section the pavement was occasionally lumpy and uneven. 

The road most closely resembles a freeway in the European Union with similar signs and markings and orderly traffic that allows Team Lost tourist momentarily they are in South America. 

Even though occasionally you can be startled by some decidedly non freeway traffic: 

We paid about $11 for the three hour drive. Divide Chilean pesos by a thousand and add five percent for US dollars.  On the official rate 3500 pesos is $3:66.  I’d calculate in my head as $3:50 plus 17 cents.  Or I’d just figure it’s a “bit more” than $3:50. I’m rather slap dash when it comes to money. I don’t fit the mold of the heroic Aryan male head of family projected by our new leaders at home. My little lady controls the purse strings to keep us from going bankrupt. 

Layne was lamenting the absence of roadside food such as we found in Mexico and just then past the toll booth we found breakfast. It was not at all Mexican being slightly bland, and had I not been lazy and had Layne not been in a hurry we might have paused and doctored the sandwich up. It did the job; I got scrambled egg and Layne got machada, shredded beef. Hot sauce we’ll add another time. 

Onwards and upwards. The reason for the rush was to get to a vet’s office in Villarrica to get Rusty an appointment for a medical checkup. His 60 day border crossing permit we got in Punta Arenas expired on 10th February so he’ll need another to cross into Argentina next week. Businesses tend to close for lunch so we had to get our skates on. 

We were listening to our favorite audio book author Michael Connolly but Layne kept dropping off and napping such was the excitement of smooth pavement and not much scenery. 

The final half hour was an easy cross country drive on a pastoral two lane road. 

There is no wild passing or road rage in Chile but I pull over when I can, mostly at nicely paved pull outs at bus stops. 

And yes we are getting used to snow capped volcano backdrops. Those are the Andes and the border is in there somewhere; Chile is a long narrow country. 

Villarica is a tourist town in a lake but it wasn’t as jam packed as some places we’ve visited this summer. This is high season, summer vacation time and Argentines and Chileans are seeing the sights. 

I parked on the sidewalk -as you do - and walked round the corner to the vet’s office. It was noon and we got an appointment at one pm. They were efficient and thorough and gave Rusty a complete check up for  $16. He is in excellent health with clear heart and lungs though he still doesn’t enjoy a thermometer up his bum. He is steady at 52 pounds as he has been all the way. 

And then we got his health certificate and I walked off to find the agriculture office called SAG (Servicio  Agricola y Ganadero - agriculture and livestock services) the federal agency responsible for keeping disease out of Chile. 

Of course I didn’t pay attention to the map. Had I done so I’d have noticed the SAG office closes at two in Villarrica. As it was I wandered around in the 80 degree heat enjoying window shopping and checking out the stores and not noticing I was walking the wrong way. Well done Team Lost. 

We tried to use a free camp spot recommended by iOverlander but it was packed with beach goers.

Miraculously we found an open spot on the street nearby and decided to spend the night as the recommended waterfront parking lot wasn’t clearing out any time soon. By this morning the street was empty. 

This morning at dawn the street had cleared a bit but now we have to go and camp in front of the office to get Rusty’s border paperwork started. We have a ferry reservation to Argentina to catch on Tuesday afternoon. And a lakeside campground reservation to enjoy until then. 

My Dinner With Jim

It was a strange day yesterday and the photographs will attest to that; the sort of photos that normally might be -ahem -discards. 

Our home in Puerto Montt a truck parking area of no particular merit except it’s mostly empty and we can sleep peacefully here. It works for us. 

We were working to meet a guy I knew in Key West a decade ago who was vacationing in Argentina with his wife Karyn, and were driving a rental car to Puerto Montt to cruise the Carretera Austral.

Forest fires in Argentina have closed several border crossings so they got caught in a huge backlog at the one crossing that was open. Consequently we didn’t a fruitless day postponing lunch until dinner as we waited for them and our plans to drive north got delayed. 

No big deal and we see some good mussels by ourselves for lunch and Layne and I shared a cake dessert plate when they arrived for dinner. Make it work…

They said hi to Rusty and checked out GANNET2 which is the sane Promaster as their commercially built camper they use to tour the US and Canada. I tried to reassure them that driving around South Snerica safe, always with common sense of course, but I’m never sure I’m believed. It’s hard to break down that fear of Latin America I find. 

We can left Puerto Montt for the last time this year maybe as they drive south to take the ferry to Hornopiren.  On the way Layne managed to catch a photo we have consistently missed on our way out of town, snoopy the rock. The light was bad and we were going 50mph but she got me the memory. 

Wednesday we want to be camping among the lakes near Pucón. Petals we will have a story to tell.