Chiloé Part 2: National Park and Penguins

Parque Nacional Chiloé 

Day 3: Nature Walk and Penguin Spotting

With an early start, we began our second full day in Chiloé by heading back to Cucao, an entrance to Chiloé's National Park. Though a little rainy, we had a perfect morning as we leisurely wandered through the open space.

Incredibly well maintained, the majority of the trails in the park feature sturdy wooden paths to keep your shoes mud-free. We didn't really appreciate this until we wandered off the path and my hiking boot sunk into a pit of mud so deep that my foot was prepared to come out of my shoe before my shoe wanted to come out of the mud.

The park features dense, green forestry as well as beautiful lake and beach views, highlighting more of the stunning natural beauty Chiloé has to offer.

After grabbing a few empanadas, we hopped on the bus back to Castro, and from there took a bus to a town called Ancud in the northern part of the island. 

This is the town advertised for having dozens of penguin tours, and from the research we had done, it seemed like it would be fairly simple to get there and find a tour (between the hike and penguins, it's evident we need some better researching skills). Long story short, we met an incredibly nice man originally from NY who runs a local tourism agency and called a friend that runs a local hostel who then got us set up with what turned into a private tour.

Half an hour later, we were crammed into the back of a range rover, setting off for a beach slightly to the west of Ancud where the penguin tours lead off. Our new friend (range rover driver and impromptu tour guide) is pretty well known by the penguin tour guides, so we end up getting a private sail boat and guide who took us out to 3 different islands to view the penguins.

Puñihuil beach

The beach is called Puñihuil and is the only place in Chile that features both Humboldt and Magellanic penguins. They were smaller than I expected, but precious and we were thankfully able to see quite a few! Fun penguin fact: they mate for life. However, if the male dies, the female will find a new mate, but if the female dies, "the males die alone" - direct quote from our tour guide.

Penguins!!!!!

After seeing the penguins, our range rover friend took us off-roading to see the lakes district from above, which we were able to hit right around sunset.

Countryside

After seeing the penguins, we went out to a restaurant in Ancud to try Chiloé's famous local cuisine: Curanto. Cooked traditionally, Curanto is made by digging a hole in the ground, placing extremely hot stones inside, and then adding various types of shellfish, chicken, chorizo, pork, and chapaleles (a type of potato dumpling). Nalca, Chilean wild rhubarb, is placed over the dish as it cooks, often taking up to a day or two to fully prepare. Unfortunately (but understandably), most restaurants prepare the dish in oven-baked cast iron pots, which is what we had, because it is more efficient. Despite this, the meal was still incredible, and definitely shareable between 2.

After our incredible luck throughout the day, I gained a new appreciation for setting out with a lack of planning, and forcing myself to adapt to situations outside my comfort zone to accomplish what we wanted to get done during the day. As someone who loves to plan everything down to the last detail, setting out like that with no planning not only stresses me out, but worries me that we won't be able to do the things that we might have otherwise been able to had we planned. However, if we had tried to plan the penguin tour ahead, we would have been in a big group with at least 20 other people, and certainly wouldn't have gotten the private, off-roading adventure. Not saying I'm completely go-with-the-flow now, but we honestly could not have had a better day, even if we had planned down to the minute.

Chiloé Part 1: Castro and Trekking

Due to celebrations for Fiestas Patrias, we were fortunate enough to have this last week off from classes at our university. Though still recovering from a weekend of "fondas" (Chilean for celebrations), 7 of us set off for an island in the south of Chile called Chiloé, home to incredible natural beauty, great seafood, and unbelievably welcoming people. I intend on writing 3 separate posts for this trip because there is so much that I want to share - hopefully you will be able to appreciate why none of us were ready to come home!

Day 1: Monday - Travel

Though Chiloé is a large island, it's not exactly easy to access unless you have a lot of money and can fly into the small airport in the main town of Castro. Instead we flew into a town on the mainland called Puerto Montt (1.5 hrs), and then hopped on a bus that would take us to Castro (3.5 hrs).

Views from the plane

About halfway through our bus ride, we drove onto a ferry that carted several other trucks/ buses/ cars across the water to the island. Though it was freezing, we got out for a few minutes to walk on the deck, and saw a couple dolphins in the process.

The rest of the bus ride consisted of rural Chilean countryside; the island is covered in green with rolling hills that span miles.

Once we arrived in Castro, we headed to our airbnb - only a 12 minute walk from the center of town. We stayed in what are called "palafitos", which are technically illegal houses that sit on stilts on the water, however they decorate the majority of the coasts in southern Chile (or so we've been told), and the government here certainly isn't trying to do anything about them. Lucky for us, because our little yellow and red cabin right on the water was beautiful.

Palafitos

View from our deck

The town of Castro itself is pretty rural, but developed enough to have a sizable population and all the necessary amenities for a cold little beach town. We were told before travelling south that the accent there would be much more difficult to understand, however for the most part we understood everyone pretty well.

Chiloé is known for its wooden churches, many of which are UNESCO World Heritage sites, and though we did not get to see many of them, the few were did see were brightly colored and incredibly beautiful.

Day 2: Tuesday - Muelle de las Almas

On our second day, I headed out with two friends to a small town called Cucao, about an hour and 15 minute bus ride from Castro. The bus system in Chile is really remarkable - you can pretty much get anywhere. However, you do have to put up with Chilean quirks, including somewhat crazy bus drivers who often detour the bus to say hello to a friend or two along the way.

After talking to a few local guides, we set out on what we figured would be about a 5-6 hour trek to a site known as "Muelle de las Almas" or "Wharf of the Souls". Initially a graduate thesis project, it is now a tourist site that features a wooden path that incorporates island mythology surrounding the journey to the afterlife. Though we had done research, we weren't exactly prepared for hike we had ahead of us.

We started by walking on a beach path, and made a few friends along the way.

We continued on, up and down several sets of hills through lots of mud.

Several hours later and still a decent distance away from our destination, we were starting to grow wary about whether we would make it to the site or not when we met Rachel and Steven, two recent Stanford graduates who had studied abroad in Santiago and were back visiting after graduation. They were incredibly nice - and also had a car - and were heading to the same destination and offered to give us a ride. The last mile or two of the trek, however, had to be done on foot, so after a short car ride we continued walking.

And walking.

And walking some more. We saw many sheep.

And we kept walking.

And after what felt like hours, we were rewarded with breathtaking cliff views, and most importantly, the bridge.

Our new Stanford friends were nice enough to let us hitchhike with them back to Cucao where they were staying for the night and where we were able to catch a bus back to Castro. This was a saving grace as the hike ended up being about 10 miles each way, something all of the information I read beforehand failed to mention. Had we started earlier we would have been okay, but we were able to make some friends in the process and avoid the rain. Really, we could not have been more lucky. However, the views made every minute walking there worthwhile.

Fiestas Patrias

Fiestas Patrias in Chile commemorates the day that the first Chilean governing body was formed, and the start of their independence process from Spain (their actual independence day is February 12th). Though the "real" holidays are the 18th (referred to here as dieciocho - Spanish for 18 but also holds cultural significance) and 19th, the festival usually lasts around a week and most schools and businesses close to celebrate.

Celebrating Fiestas Patrias is truly an event here, and people commemorate the holiday in various fashions. Though most locals use it to host huge fiestas at their houses with extended family and friends, lots of music, and enough food and drinks to last weeks, the city also puts on huge festivals at the large parks around town (think state fair, but MUCH bigger). Though we are foreigners, we got to experience both the home and local celebrations.

Friday the 16th: Darcy and I are invited by friends from our soccer team to a house celebration. There's music, traditional Chilean BBQ (known as asado), and lots of dancing. It's also fairly typical to stay out until around 4 or 5 AM here, especially during festivals. So sleep isn't really a thing.

Soccer team friends and family

Saturday the 17th: Though still recovering from Friday night, we headed to a Parque O'Higgins in the middle of downtown Santiago to experience the public side of Fiestas Patrias. Mostly, we ate lots of food and listened to live Chilean music while watching the locals dance "La Cueca", the traditional dance of Chile.

 

Traditional asado

Fried empanadas

Performances with Chilean artists

Sunday the 18th: We venture to a park a little closer to where I live, where the atmosphere was more family oriented but still fun. We went to Parque Padre Huertado which was packed with a rodeo, food trucks, an art fair, music, and plenty of people. 

Food trucks - we enjoyed "choripan" which is a traditional
Chilean sausage.

Sunset Rodeo

Katie and I enjoying "Terremotos",
a traditional Chilean beverage

Skiing La Cordillera

This past Saturday, we got out of the city and up into the Andes mountain range to fulfill one of our more impulsive decisions: skiing in La Cordillera. Though my knowledge of the Andes is limited to what I can see from Santiago and the tales I read about in Pears Paul Read's Alive, it was not a whole lot different from what I imagined it would be, which was nothing short of stunning.

Just a quick (and winding) hour and a half drive outside of Santiago is access to three popular mountain faces situated right next to each other, though owned by different ski companies. *Side note - we learned the hard way that the 3 mountain faces are literally connected, and their borders not easily distinguishable on the actual ski runs. Though at one point we thought we were exploring a less populated part of the mountain, we had accidentally ventured over to one of the other mountains, and had to pay a shuttle to take us back to the mountain we were supposed to be on! (Thankfully only a 10 minute drive). This is definitely their sneaky way of making more money, as it apparently happens daily.

 

We  spent (the majority) our day on the middle of the three mountains, known as "El Colorado", which features runs that are rated by four different levels of difficulty. Though we ventured up to ski at the end of Santiago's winter season, the snow was still fairly good and surprisingly not too icy.

The most obvious difference between skiing here as opposed to back home or in Colorado is the landscape. Because the mountain is located at a higher altitude, we were rewarded with breathtakingly clear views of the rest of the Cordillera, as opposed to skiing through trees as I would be at home. Though we left the mountain with tired muscles and sunburned faces, El Colorado was certainly one of our most memorable days yet.