Just one week after heading up north to the desert, we flew south to the Region Los Lagos (the Lake District) to hike around the volcanos and tour the Lakes.

Our low point happened when we arrived with 2 starving kids at 7pm at our rustic hotel, La Baita, in the middle of the Conguillio National Park, expecting a nice restaurant and a warm bed and were told that they didn’t think we were coming until the next night and that they didn’t have any food or water.

Fortunately, they were able to throw together a pizza (which was more like ketchup on matzoh with slices of American cheese – probably the worst pizza I had ever eaten) for the kids. And after the kids had gone to bed, and the manager of the hotel had driven an hour to get some fresh meat, Ben and I had a delicious steak & potato dinner with a nice bottle of Chilean red wine.

The next day was a truly magical day of driving and hiking through old lava fields with the snow covered Conguillio volcano to the west and cold sparkling lakes and the tree covered Andes mountains to the east.

The contrast of the white tip of the Conguillio volcano with mounds of black, rocky hardened lava dotted with splashes of yellow flowers was truly picturesque and quite unique:

While driving through the lava fields, we came across an area of strange “bearded” pine trees that were about 5 stories tall!

One of the best parts of staying right in the Conguillio National Park, was that we didn’t encounter any other people on our hikes.  But that made it hard to get a good family photo.  Fortunately, we were able to figure out the self timer on Raquel’s new camera.  Of course, it took us a few times before we got it right!

After a day of hiking, we took a long convoluted drive on the “evacuation route”:

to get to the scenic lake front town of Pucon.  Check out the view from our room at the hill-top Casa Establo Hotel on the outskirts of Pucon:

The next day we set out (with more water and food than we had in the lava fields) for a 6 hour, mostly vertical hike in the Huerquehue National Park:

The highlights of the hike were the stunning views down across the crater lagoon and up toward the snow capped, smoking Volcan Villarica, as well as the well maintained wooden ladder paths:

We are so glad that we took advantage of the 2 beautiful days we had to hike in the National Parks, because our last day was so overcast that we could no longer see Volcan Villarica in the distance.  So, we decided to check out the Mapuche village of Curarrehue, near the Argentina border.

And of course, we had to make it back in time to eat lunch and have some delicious sweets at Cassis, before flying back to Vina del Mar. 

Here is one of Raquel’s favorite artsy photos from the Conguillo hike: a part of a tree that had fallen in the woods:

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