Lakes, Rain, Waterfalls and Thermal Baths in the Chilean Lake District

We arrived in Puerto Montt bright and early after the ferry trip and spent the day exploring the town, doing laundry and trying to catch up on some much needed sleep. It was a scorching hot day, so we treated ourselves to some home-made ice cream.

We booked tickets on the bus heading further north into the Lake District the following day, where we spent one night in the 5 star Sheraton hotel in Villarrica, courtesy of Amex and our Starwood loyalty card who had an offer for a free night stay!

We then headed on to Pucon, the most popular town in the area where many Chilean's come to spend their summer holidays. Pucon is on the other side of Lake Villarrica and offers boundless outdoor activities, from trekking up a volcano to white-water rafting. Unfortunately for us, it was pouring down with rain non-stop for about 48 hours, so many of the activities were not running.

We therefore headed to the thermal baths, something else this area is famed for, as the ground water is heated by the surrounding volcanoes. We spent a good three hours in the baths, heated to different temperatures. One was under cover and the other two were in the open air. We preferred the open air baths as you could enjoy the warmth of the heated bath with rain pouring down all around you. It was a popular activity that day and many of the thermal baths were said to be full of people.

We were planning on staying another two nights thereafter, which would allow us to go white-water rafting the next day before heading up to Santiago, but we received a message from a good friend of Joost's from University who was also in Santiago until the end of the week, so we headed up early to be able to meet up with him.

As soon as we decided what day we wanted to leave for Santiago, we needed to go to the bus station to buy tickets. As this is peak holiday period, you need to book in advance. We were cutting it short as we could see online that there we just two seats left on the bus we wanted to take, but since we couldn't book online, Joost decided to cycle to the bus station in the pouring rain, believing it would be faster than us catching the 'collectivo' together (the taxi's that run set routes and pick and drop people off along the way, like a mini-bus). He braved the rain on a dodgy bike that the hotel leant us, and he managed to get us those last two tickets on the bus! The Dutch and their cycling!

We managed to spend our final day visiting some of the other lakes and seeing the Ojos de Caburga waterfalls, and luckily the weather had cleared up nicely.

That night we hopped on the night bus that would take us the nine hour drive to Santiago.