Lake Crossing to Chile   

Thursday, 4 March 2010

Early in the morning, we shoved off from Puerto Pañuelo and headed for Puerto Blest, where we would board a bus to reach the next lake. The sky was overcast, and the colors washed out. Click on the map to enlarge it if you like.

At the next lake, the weather was the same, but it didn’t take long for the sun to come out.

Some people live literally in the middle of nowhere. Here is a remote house, lower right.

The photograph above shows a glacier. Below, the telephoto was used.

We crossed into Chile on a bus, went through immigration on foot, and ate lunch at an old hotel, with lots of wood panelling in the dining room. At the dock, there was a nice little waterfall. There was a very pesky type of large, biting fly in the area (black deer fly). The more I moved, the more they followed. They bite through clothes.

Then we departed on another boat on Lago Todos Los Santos.

The lake had a nice color to it. With the late afternoon, the clouds began to return, washing out some color. 

Still, very nice. The tour guide said this lake gets a lot of rain, and we should be happy with some sun.

At one point about half way in the trip, we turned a corner and saw the active volcano Osorno:

Just down river from the last port, the bus pulled into a national park site to see the Saltos del Petrohue. The water color had a lot of green in it. There was also a nice roar from the falls.

From here we drove down to the small city of Puerto Varas for the night. We passed a number of upscale looking dairy farms, and drove along the shore of Chile’s largest lake.

We left the Bariloche area on a hydrofoil to begin the 3 lakes crossing to Chile. Because the earthquake threw flight schedules into disarray, we were unable to complete the activities we had scheduled in Puerto Varas and spent our time trying to get on a flight.

Next—San Pedro de Atacama, which has the driest desert in the world.