Sunday, March 2, 2014

Wednesday, February 19

Today we got up early, ate breakfast, and spent about 2 hours packing everything up. We drove for a few hours up to Parque Nacional Puyehue, where there is a river with water flowing straight from under the volcano.
The water is as hot as a Jacuzzi in the pools around it, so a hotel built this manmade giant pool with water flowing directly from the river next to it for people to relax in.
We had to wait in line to get in, so while Nancy waited, the rest of us went down to walk by the river. There were a lot of people lying in the river relaxing in the hot water there too. They were all covered in mud from the river to relax their skin.
After a while, Nancy called to tell us she was in the front of the line and we went back and got into the pool immediately. We first had to go to the tiny bathroom to change into our bathing suits. Then we got into the pool and it was really impressively hot (also impressively filled with people and the water was impressively filled with hair and other disgustingly human filth). We sat around basking in the luxurious heat for about 10 minutes before it got uncomfortably hot. Then I stood up on one of the ledges to cool off for a while.
All in all we were in there for about half an hour before none of us could take the heat anymore and we got out. Then we went back to the tiny and crowded bathroom, and Monse and I showered together in our bathing suits in a shower without a door. I changed my clothes in the bathroom, and although it was a whole lot of trouble to change clothes and shower and everything just to go in a Jacuzzi for a few minutes, I did feel a lot better after getting clean. From there, we went to a museum nearby to look around at the typical plant and animal life of the national park and the volcanic activity there. After the museum, we piled back into the car and drove about 4 hours (I should really be measuring time in kid movies that we watch with Monse instead of hours so 3 movies) before arriving in Villarica at like 9:30. We hadn’t eaten lunch yet (we had bread and hard boiled eggs on the road), so we stopped at a restaurant in town and I had a “lunch” of grilled chicken and a nice big salad. It was our last night of the trip, and it was late and nobody had the energy to find a camping and pitch a tent, so we went to a little hospedaje down the street (it's like a house that rents out rooms to travelers and then everyone shares the same bathroom) and got a room. Monse, Nancy, and I put on our pajamas and laid down together in the queen bed (Maxi and Eric were in the bunk bed on the other side of the room) and used the internet from Nancy’s iphone (I don’t know if I’ve mentioned before that here you can “share” internet from a phone, meaning that it becomes a wifi hotspot for devices around it that know the wifi password) to watch a movie on the ipad. Recuerdame was really good, but I was also really tired and I fell asleep halfway through the movie.

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