Monday, February 17

Today we woke up late, ate breakfast, and moved out of the refugio. We made the hour drive to the Saltos de Petrohue, which is a giant, powerful waterfall and national park. The water was a beautiful turquoise blue and incredibly powerful rushing over the rocks.

There was an incredible number of people there touring, and probably more tourists speaking English than Spanish. We took pictures in front of the waterfall, and then spent a while walking through the forest and exploring. Then we drove further to Puerto Varas, where we parked the car and walked a while down the boardwalk, watching all the people having fun on the beach and enjoying the incredibly huge volcanoes in the background. We went to a nice pizzeria in the middle of town and had the yummiest lunch ever.

Then we walked through the city to a huge church and a virgin statue nearby where people leave plaques giving thanks to the virgin for helping them in some way.

Then we went to another feria artesenal and walked back along the boardwalk and through the city to the car.

Then we made the drive to Frutillar and looked for a camping nearby. We found a nice camping on the beach next to a lake.

We put everything together super fast, with Monse and me blowing up all the mattresses, and in an hour and a half we were eating dinner. During dinner, the tensions of traveling together all the time started to show, as Maxi and Monse begged their parents to return to the house early. They were tired of camping and traveling and wanted to go home to watch TV. I got really angry at them because I was having a fantastic time and I felt personally hurt that they were asking to cut short my only opportunity to see the south of Chile. I tried to make them understand how important this trip was for me, but they just wanted to go home, so we agreed to disagree and let the parents decide. After dinner, Eric took out the projector he uses for classes, hung up a white tablecloth along a bush nearby, and Monse and I watched El Rey Leon on the big screen while bundled up in blankets because it was freezing cold outside. Then I went to sleep around midnight.

Sunday, February 16

Today we woke up around 10 and packed up everything that we had unpacked after staying a week in Chiloe. Tia Julia cooked us giant sopaipillas for breakfast, which we ate with manjar. Then we said a huge thank you and goodbye to everyone and got on the road to Ancud, another city on the island of Chiloe. On the way there, we stopped at the other festival custombrista where we saw these giant cloves of garlic that Chiloe is famous for and also some oxen being driven without reigns or anything just with a stick that their owner was holding.

We ate a salmon lunch in a nice restaurant there, and then walked down the boardwalk along the ocean for a while.

Then we went to Fort San Antonio, another Spanish fort taken over by Chile. After that, we drove back to the ferry and crossed over onto mainland Chile.

We drove through Puerto Montt and then a long way to Puerto Varas. First we went to the Lider in town to buy chocolate and marshmallows because I wanted to make s’mores that night. Then we spent about 2 hours driving down the highway at night through the woods looking for a camp ground. We finally arrived at Camping Las Montanas at like 10 at night only to find that there were no more available spaces. They took pity on us and gave us the refugio building, which is like an empty log cabin with a chimney inside. I thought it was absolutely great until I looked up into the rafters and saw all the giant bugs. We decided to deal with the bugs, and while I inflated the mattresses, Nancy prepared dinner. After eating a light dinner, we broke out the graham crackers that my mom had sent me from the US (graham crackers don’t exist here) and I made my family their first s’mores ever. They loved them and wanted more and more. I was proud of introducing them to such a typical American tradition.

After we finished eating, we talked for a little while, and then went to sleep relatively early. I slept with the blanket over my head as protection against the bugs, but I actually slept really well and woke up without any new bug bites thank the lord.

Saturday, February 15

Today once again we all got up super late. I was fed up with waiting for the other kids and wasting time, so I went to the fiesta custombrista with the adults and Monse while the rest of them were still sleeping. We ate empanadas with centolla (type of crab) inside, which is a huge delicacy apparently. Then I really just wanted lettuce and vegetables because I had been eating nothing but meat and bread for the past few days. I asked for just a salad instead of meat with a side of lettuce at one of the food booths and they looked at me like I was crazy. After lunch, I accompanied Nancy to start working the Julia’s food stand. I put on the hairnet, took like 3 orders, and then Maxi, Oscar, and Javi came and invited me to hang out with them and so I left the food stand. We hung out for a while watching the dancing and talking. We went over to this really cool machine that utilizes water energy from the river to grind flour. Then we went over to this track nearby where they were doing free rollerblading. Maxi and I took skates and started trying while the rest chickened out and watched. Maxi was absolutely horrible and kept falling down, but I actually took to it. Two little girls came up and started skating next to me and giving me pointers and talking to me, and I slowly gained speed and confidence and ended up having a great time. I pride myself on always being able to try new things and not being embarrassed to look like an idiot doing them. Then Maxi, Monse, and I sat down at one of the tables and played escoba together. While we were sitting there playing and eating empanadas a little boy came over and I offered him an empanada. Then his dad and uncle came over and started talking to me. They were very obviously poor country people (sorry if that sounds mean I have no other way to describe it—one of them was missing teeth), and when I told them I was from the US, they sincerely told me they had no idea where that was and had never heard of it before. They were the first people in Chile that I’ve met who haven’t heard of the US. Later, Monse and I went to see a demonstration of sheep shearing. It was brutal the way they did it and the sheep ended up with a bunch of bleeding cuts from the sheers. 

We didn’t want to watch any more so we went to the track and ran races and flipped around on the bars nearby. I may not be the monkey bar champ I used to be but I still have some skills to do flips and things. Then came the fashion show where Javi and Pia were performing. It was a show of typical Chilote clothing, which is basically socks, skirts, dresses, hats, and jackets all made of different colored wool.

After briefly going to the house to change clothes (it quickly went from burning hot to freezing cold outside), we met up with more new people from Javi’s friend group and watched the dancing and talked until late in the night. I saw this traditional Chilote dance called Chamame that looked really fun and I asked Javi to teach it to me. She taught me the basics but it was actually a lot harder that it looked. The last song of the night was a Chamame, and this old drunk man came up to me and invited me up to the stage to dance with him. I tried to reject, but everyone was cheering me on, so we went up to dance together. I tried to do what Javi had taught me, but the drunk dude was dancing way to fast and running all around the stage and through the other couples and talking to me the whole time and I just couldn’t stop laughing at the ridiculousness of how we must have looked. Anyway, it was definitely a failure, but it was fun anyway and really hilarious for everyone else. After the song, the drunk dude escorted me off the stage and tried to kiss me, and Maxi had to step in and tell him to leave. After that, Nancy, Monse, and I walked home, ate some empanadas de manzana, and went to sleep around 3.

Friday, February 14

Today I woke up at like noon, but I was still the first one awake, so I watched TV for a while and waited for everyone else. Around 2, Javi, Oscar, Maxi, and I walked down to the beach to go kayaking. We probably splashed more water at each other than we actually kayaked, and by the time we finished I was absolutely soaking wet. I was wearing shorts that were way too big for me, and I ended up having to walk all the way home holding my shorts up with my hand so the weight of the water wouldn’t pull them completely off. We all quickly showered and then walked over to the fiesta custombrista, which was a bunch of kiosks selling typical Chilote food and a stage playing music and featuring dance groups. I tried typical food—empanadas de manzana, navegado, curanto en hoyo, harina molida, and chicha.

Then after lunch, some more of Javi’s friends showed up and we all decided to play cards together. I thought them all how to play ERS and we played for a long time (I won hahaha I can’t beat anyone in the US but here I actually have an advantage in ERS and I love it). One of Javi’s friends Pipe, showed up with his face all black from dirt, and when I asked him why he said it was because he’s a fireman and there was a fire in the morning. That’s another big difference in Chile—the fire department here is completely made up of volunteers. They are normal people with normal jobs who carry radios with them and when they hear a fire call they stop what they are doing (the job gives them special permission because they are fire fighters) and go to the fire if they are close enough. They don’t go to school to train, but they have workshops on the weekends where they learn the science of fighting fires, first aid, and everything else they need to be well prepared. Anyway, after a while we got bored and went back to the house for a while to watch animal planet. Then Javi, Maxi, and I walked along this gorgeous trail to the beach. The tide was super low and we could walk really far out.

The only thing that was kind of gross is that we went right at sunset and all of the mosquitoes were out. I think I have like 30 bites now. After we got back to the house, Maxi and I walked up to the fiesta again. We sat on the fence next to the soccer field all alone and had a really nice talk about our love lives. It felt nice being able to open up with Maxi and have him open up with me because although we try a lot harder in our relationship now, we still aren’t as close as we could be because we’re just really different people. Then Javi, Oscar, and their friends showed up and we walked around and hung out with them for a while. Nancy, who had been helping Julia with her food stand all day, came to introduce me to her friends from the food stand, which by that time was all drunk and just wanted to dedicate poems to me in broken English. Later, while we were all standing around watching the dancers, this super creepy old lady walked over to Maxi and kept asking him to dance and wouldn’t leave him alone. She even went so far as to kiss him on the cheek before we all got her to back off. I swear she looked like a witch! We went home from the fiesta around 3 in the morning, and it was a really nice time although it was a little uncomfortable hanging out with a bunch of Javi and Oscar’s friends whom we didn’t know.

Thursday, February 13

This morning I got up really early with Julia, her dad, Nancy, and Eric to take Julia’s truck to a nearby beach to gather clams.

We had to wear ugly clothes and big rubber boots to get muddy in. My boots sank into the mud almost covering my entire foot. We had to look though all the rocks to see where little spouts of water would shoot up and then dig there for clams. In about an hour we had like 2 buckets full and some nearby fishermen had given us 2 nets full of mussels. When we got home, there was still no one else awake, so Julia, Nancy, and I walked into the center of town to the feria. I bought a wool hat and also a warm wool headband that I absolutely fell in love with. Then we walked a little further down the main street until it started paralleling the river. We stopped at a natural juice stand and drank juice together.

Then we got home to cook the clams and mussels. We had a lunch of clam soup and rice, which just confirmed the belief I already had that I do not like shellfish of any type. It’s not the taste, but that chewy texture that is really gross. After lunch, Javi had to go to a fitting because she was going to model traditional Chilote clothing during the fiesta custombrista that the town was putting on the next two days. I went with her and met some of her friends. Then we all went down to drink some more natural juice. After we finished the juice, Javi, Pia, Oscar, Maxi, and I walked down to the beach to watch the sunset. We went to the part that was full of a kind of clay called laja. It looks like rocks, so it’s really fun to throw it and watch it explode into a million pieces when it hits something.

When we got back to the house, Nancy and Julia had baked 3 different types of pie—blueberry, key lime, and raspberry, and so we had dinner of just pie. Then the whole family stayed around talking until like 2 in the morning. They told me all of the legends surrounding Chiloe. Apparently there is a beast living there called the Trauco that mysteriously gets virgin girls present. Also, there is a phantom boat called the Caleuche that people see in the distance in the night. I don’t believe in any of that stuff but it’s still interesting to hear the stories.

Wednesday, February 12

Today we woke up really late after having stayed up until 5 the night before. I watched TV for a while and we talked and killed time until lunch. I was starting to feel a little antsy to do something and continue seeing sights. I felt like we were wasting precious vacation time while Nancy cooked with Julia and Eric took a nap. After lunch I got my wish and we went to another town in Chiloe called Dalcahue.

We went to a big feria, and Javi and I had a lot of fun together talking about boys and taking pictures near the boats in the harbor.

Then we went to Castro, the capital of Chiloe and to a giant feria. I was astounded by the number of things made out of wool that were being sold there. We went out to the dock when we got tired of the feria and watched the catamarans docking.

In the center of the plaza there was a gorgeous yellow and purple church (if you haven’t caught on yet, Chiloe is famous for its beautiful and historic churches).

We had to drive quickly back to Curaco de Velez because the tire in the van had been pierced and was quickly losing air and there were no mechanics open because it was 8 at night. We had to stop at like 3 different gas stations on the 30 minute ride to put more air in the tire. We got home, ate dinner, and sat around talking until like 2 in the morning.

Tuesday, February 11

I got up around 10 this morning and ate breakfast with everyone (except Oscar and Javi who wake up extremely late every morning). Maxi, Eric, and I went out to buy sodas for lunch and to look around the town. We tried milcao, which is a traditional Chilote (a person from Chiloe) food that is like a potato latke filled with meat in the middle. Then we went into the center of town and saw the cute little green church and the museum of old tools.

It was really noticeable that we were in the south because all of the houses were made of wood to keep the heat in. It had the look of a cute western town in the US. While in the museum, Maxi went to the bathroom and met up with some Canadian tourists speaking English. He tried to talk to them and then brought them to meet me. We talked for a while about what we were all doing so far from home, and I was shocked by how difficult it was for me to speak in English. I kept thinking in Spanish and then having to translate the phrases into English. They told me how cute it was that Maxi called me his sister, and I told them it wasn’t untrue and that I really do feel like his sister. I change my clothes in the car in front of them and we can talk about whatever. I really feel like a part of the family now. We got back to the house just in time for lunch.

This time the salmon had a lot of bones in it and I found it almost not worth the trouble of searching each bite for bones. We then packed all 12 of us into the car built for 8 to go sightseeing in Dacahue.

We went to a historic church made completely out of wood and without a single nail. Then Javi, Oscar, Maxi and I walked along the beach for a while. We could see a bunch of salmon farms out in the water. When we got back to the house, we prepared dinner of completos. After dinner, Yeni, Fernanda, Nancy, Monse, and I played Lota and Karaoka for a while. Then Maxi, Javi, Oscar, and I stayed awake talking about drama in our lives until 5 in the morning. It was cool that we could talk about such heavy subjects and I could understand everything and not ruin the conversation by having to ask for explanations all the time.