PUERTO MONTT

This was a place for which we had no expectations. Yet we both loved it. Arriving early in the morning of the first day of sunshine since before leaving Puerto Natales helped no doubt. We left all our stuff at the funny little B&B we had found in our Handbook (Leticia) and wandered off to have coffee and look at artisan stuff. There was masses of this a short walk along the water front. We both indulged. Then wearily we turned our minds to picnic and decided to go on a wee boat across to an island. We got on the boat without asking too many questions and promptly set off on a tour around the island and back again! Unexpected but very nice. We even saw a sleeping seal on the loading platform of a fishing boat.


Puerto Montt still has many of its little, higgledy piggledy wooden houses going up the hillsides. But Temuco, where we are now, had all the wooden stuff burned down after a great earthquake in 1960. The result is a quite ordinary, modernish city centre, full of shopping malls etc. This morning we have been to the municipal market which is full of handicraft and artesanal stalls, as well as meat and fish around the edges. However, apart from a few things much of it is pretty standard and looks almost mass produced (tat for the most part).

I feel we are following backwards in the way of Brian Keenan and John McCarthy, the Beirut hostages of early 90's, who came here a few years ago to realize a fantasy they had whilst imprisoned together. They wrote an interesting book together of the trip "Between Extremes", which I read and now keeps coming to mind.
During the bus ride yesterday we passed some lovely green countryside, not entirely dissimilar to the English Lake District. A sad fact is though that millions of araucania trees have been felled in the past 30 odd years to produce much of it. Some of this has been replaced by the wretched eucalyptus. Ah me!

Tomorrow we shall be in Santiago.