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.