ANDEAN LAKES II: PUERTO VARAS

Viewpoint on Costanera Avenue, with Lake Llanquihue and, in the background, volcanoes Osorno (left), Calbuco (right) and Cerro Tronador (center).

So, as I said in the last post, the years passed by, the marriage came to an end, others have come and life went its own way. I could travel more, in and out of Brazil and I met new places and people. Inevitably, in my conversations, friends, knowing of my passion for traveling, and following my stories (some of which I think it should be very tiring) always asked my opinion about which place among my wanderings was the most beautiful. My first impulse was always to answer that it was the Andean Lakes region.

But the more that 1995 trip was behind in time, the greater was my inner doubt when it came to answering - even though the answer to my friends was invariably the same. Until twenty years later, in 2015, when a new companion (the most traveler of all I have ever had) was the incentive for the "scientific expedition" to check if my first impression was correct or if it was just a betrayal of my affective memory.

Now much more experient, with a little more money and also with more time, I prepared a meticulous itinerary. Starting in Santiago de Chile, on December 28, 2015, before traveling through the Lake District, we went to the little town of Peñaflor, where my friend Marta Cid lives, to Valparaíso and Viñadel Mar, where we spent New Year's Eve, crossed the border to Argentina, where we spent a few days in Mendoza and Maipú, and returned to the Chilean capital (about this part of the trip I am going to tell in other post).

From Santiago, on the evening of January 10, we made the longest and most tiring journey of the trip, from Santiago to Puerto Varas, the first city of our itinerary through the Andean Lakes region. I had a very vague memory of this little town thanks to a stop that must have lasted no more than ten minutes on my 1995 trip from Osorno to Puerto Montt. This very short entrance into the city, however, had been enough to show me that Puerto Varas was charming. The pictures that I saw during these twenty years of waiting only confirmed that first impression left by my meteoric passage there.

I didn't regret it. On the opposite, Puerto Varas is a charming and cozy city framed by the stunning Llanquihue Lake and the magnificent Osorno Volcano, making any photo, taken from any angle, on a clear day, worthy of a postcard (when they still existed...) or a calendar (another domestic object increasingly rare...).

Nightfall at Lake Llanquihue, with the Osorno Volcano in the background.

On this trip, which, as I said, began in Santiago, I used the Airbnb lodging service for the first time. In Puerto Varas, we rented a room at El Roble Hostal, a super cozy house that we shared with the owners and another couple from Buenos Aires, Ricardo and Patricia, university professors, who became our friends and whom we met the following year in the Argentine capital. Besides the excellent breakfast and the privileged view of the Osorno Volcano, as a bonus our host, Martin, invited us to sing on Wednesday nights, when popular Chilean music, Argentinian music and even Brazilian Popular Music were played.

Our host, Martín, and Ricardo, a guest like me, at a musical soirée at Hostel Los Robles

Besides having its own enchantments, such as the beautiful Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Puerto Varas also served as a base for three round trips: Frutillar, a flowery little town 28.5 km north, also on the shores of Lake Llanquihue and with a spectacular view of the Osorno Volcano; Valdivia, a beautiful university town about 200 km further north, passing through Osorno almost halfway; and Puerto Montt, 20 km south, from where we extended to Castro, the main city of the Chiloé archipelago. From each of these short but intense trips we brought back in our memories smells, flavors, but mainly unforgettable images.