Fish and stilts in Chiloe

In a comfortable bus we drove South through Chile, onto a ferry, across the Chacao channel and onto the island of Chiloe. Chiloe is the largest island in the Chiloe Archipelago. We stayed in the capital of Castro in a nice wooden bed and breakfast which had very gracious hosts, and unfortunately bed bugs. Castro is famous for it's houses on stilts which run all along the shore. They reminded us of the stilted homes in Vietnam, and likewise, you didn't feel too safe in them! Restaurant where we had a fantastic fish and chips lunch

We treated ourselves to a massage in town, Christian's first since his traumatic Vietnamese experience. I am not a religious person but I have been wearing a St Christopher necklace throughout my trip and I took it off for my massage. As soon as the necklace was off, things started going wrong! Christian left his debit card in a bank machine, there were no flights out of town (which is how we were hoping to get back to Argentina), the fish restaurant that we went to had no fish, and that evening I got bitten by bed bugs. I remembered to put my necklace back on the next morning but by then Christian was penniless! It is worth noting that I had already lost my debit card at the New Years party and it was winging it's way over to South America courtesy of "DAD Couriers".

After we had exhausted the wonders of Castro town (which took all of about hour) we decided to go and see the National Park. We left on a rickety little bus the following morning which dropped us at the park entrance. Chiloe National park covers over 10,000 acres and includes beaches, forests, lakes and meadows. We wandered along a nature trail for a while before we were forced to retreat by a really fierce flying bug. It wouldn't let up! If anyone was watching us from a distance they would have been in stitches, we were running in the midday heat and swiping the air with a beach towel and my camera case, spinning in circles and screaming. It took forever to get rid of the pest and by that point we were exhausted and hungry. We sat by this lake and had our picnic lunch.

 

After lunch we wandered over to the beach. It was not the kind of beach you see on front of a holiday brochure, it was windswept, empty and glorious. The sea was rough and the wind was blowing but when we laid out on our shared beach towel, we could just about convince ourselves we were sun bathing! After a long walk up the beach with the wet sand in between my toes, and some playtime with my camera (see results below), it was time to head back to Castro.

We could easily have spent longer at the National Park, but Argentina was calling us to return, and it wasn't going to be as easy heading over the border this time, in fact unbeknown to us it was going to take an entire day.