Sunday 5th February- Up and over the Andes Mountain range

We have all heard of the film ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ (which incidentally was showing on Santiago TV the night before we left) but maybe you have not heard of four coaches and three boats to cross the Andes. Good friends of ours did this last year and recommended it to us.

Chilean Granny Toilet issue rip off merchants

So at 08.00 prompt the tour coach turned up to meet us at the Hotel and took our bags away with airline tags, good so far, and then we did a tour of several other local hotels where we collected additional passengers and then off we went and the first stop was to see the very nice Petrohue Falls. It is only a short walk from the coach about 600 metres to the Falls and back and we were informed that if we needed the Loo we should arrange it here as it would be about another hour to the port to meet the first boat.

Dutifully we all went up to the toilet block where two elderly ladies sat outside with a table with a large roll of loo paper on it and also stacks of pre torn sheets which they were passing out and most people including us sighed and said how much?. So we bought two packs to be safe and when the work had been completed we both found next to the washing bowls area a large machine dispensing loo paper by the ton free of charge. Talk about granny rip off merchants and being scammed by two old ladies bugged me for the rest of the day.

However we left the falls and eventually arrived at the small port on the Lago Todos Los Santos (Emerald Lake) where several other coaches appeared and so there was about a hundred people on board. The couriers and organisation were first class.

The Lake crossing was for about 20 miles and took just over an hour and half before we would arrive at Puella where we were due to stay the night. During the boat trip there were several announcements about our route and other information including the facts that Puella is a small town of two Hotels, one of which is closed and this happened to be the one we booked at, and about 150 people live around the area. We also learnt from one of the guides that Bariloche Airport is also still closed from the effects of Volcano dust and so with the news of no hote and no flight we thought that this is a great start.

Around the lake there are many expensive houses and quite isolated and so the boat we wer on collected the kids on a Monday morning and took them to Puerto Varas and then brought them back on a Friday night.

The Hotel we booked

It turned out that we had been rebooked at the other Hotel which actually was much better than the one we booked. Most of the people on the boat were on days trips or continuing their journey that afternoon through to Argentina but we stayed the night along with about 10 other couples in a Hotel with about 150 rooms.

We had a good lunch there as there is not much to do in this area unless you like horseback riding and/or a zip wire experience and then we rested a while and finally went for a long walk down to the quay where we took some photos and Jen some bird watching.

The hotel had wifi and so I asked for the code and man at the reception proudly gave me a piece of paper with the code on, great and about half an hour later I tried to connect but no luck I kept on trying and eventually went back to the reception and explained the problem and he said the wifi has been down for a couple of days. I thought that perhaps he might have told me that before he handed over the password etc…Oh well thanks Manuel.

We returned to the Hotel and decided on a early night and as we had eaten well at lunchtime, in fact too much, the quiche Lorraine looked like a car crash and was loaded with all types of vegetables,  A French Chef would have been shocked to see this.

For comfort we decided to put on our jammies and sit up in bed and watch TV and at about 9.30 pm the phone went and after a little confusion it turned out to be the restaurant saying where were we? as they have been waiting to serve us since 8 pm, oh well here we go again.

It is jolly quiet here in the middle of nowhere.