Energy Doldrums
The bus arrived at about 9:30am in Pucon, giving us the greater part of the day to source a hostel and a booking to climb the main attraction, Volcan Villarrica. First things first, we took a taxi to Hostal Donde German, a relatively tidy German run hostel with volcano views.
Directly over the fence, grazing sheep and mountain backdrop made for a scenic vista.
Dan and I rented bikes from the hostel to check out the town. Coming across an amazing florist, we marveled at how he actually clips your flowers from the plants growing in front of the stand. No problem with shelf life here.
I was really lagging, so thought a decent lunch would help and this massive burger helped to energize, despite half the bun needing to be jettisoned.
The town of Pucon could not be much more scenic and comes complete with a fresh water lake and black volcanic beaches. This area of Chile serves as the playground for the "well healed" of Santiago and mid-Chile.
After booking our climb for the morning, we headed for the beach to take a little breather. For some reason, I was absolutely exhausted and no amount of Coke Zero or ice cream could shake the doldrums.
A dip in the lake was soothing and many other vacationers had the same idea.
A beautiful thing was that fresh fruit smoothie vendors walked the beaches with glasses of chilled slurry for sale, at about a $1.50 per glass. The continuous injection of calories didn’t seem to change the status quo, so finally I submitted to several hours of sleep on the beach, while Dan explored the furthest reaches of the shoreline.
After napping away the remainder of the afternoon and evening, we headed back into town, via bike, for an awesome fusion dinner of Asian/Chilean seafood.
Returning to the hostel, just after sunset, the owner was awaiting our return and was very interested if we had booked our volcano hike for the morning. When we replied that everything was booked, he looked at the volcano and ciphered from a wispy plume of rising sulfuric gases that there would be bad weather by the morning. Yeah right, all that meteorological wisdom from a simple volcanic puff? The morning would bring the truth of his tell.
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