Lake District Antics
Surprisingly enough the first part of our lake district travels have been a pretty germanic and you could almost believe you were in the English lakes, Cornwall or Germany. Addmittedly most of the houses are wooden tin clad buildings and the boats are much brighter than we are used to. They really brighten things up with an exorbitant use of primary colour paints.


Chiloe is a really quaint little town and we enjoyed a couple of days before returning to the grotty town that is Puerto Montt. Nat, not feeling to well had high expectaions of where she wanted to stay. She wanted it to be safe, warm, close to the bus station, free breakfast and lastly and very lazily English speaking.This place didn't exist so we compromised on the "close by" and set off to find that our choice hostel has burnt down and its neighbouring hostel had disapered. We ended up in a ladies house with no locks on any of the doors, no breakfast, no English, cold and as an added bonus had a resident Flea! At least we met one of Nats expectations as the place was close to the bus station. We stayed one night (which was one night too many) and met up with Harriet who had taken the four day ferry. We got straight out to the lakeside town of Puerto Varas which we found to be really beautiful. As a backdrop to the lake there are two large volcanoes that poke out above of the clouds. Really lovely.
Nat has been trying to rationalise the contents of her already small rucksack to save space and weight. So she has bought a pair of shoes to help!!?? They are gert lush though and were hand made sandals from a local stall. We had great fun trying on various sizes and the stall holder kept running back and forth to his van for another size, colour or style. He was really friendly.
Tonight we head for Bariloche where we hear there is Mucho Chocolate - woo woo woo. We hadn't originally planned on doing Argentina but are quite excited at the thought of getting another passport stamp! We've heard so many wonderful things about Argentina.
Bariloche is very popular with Argentinian tourists so last night we thought we would book ahead and phone to reserve some accomodation. I say we but we dumped the task on Harriet who is fluent in Spanish - were talking comparitavly here! By the 6th or 7th call Harriet reverted to the "hablar ingless" method which made us chukle. Anyhow we've got somewhere booked but are not sure whether they think we are arriving 10am or 10pm so we are hoping we will still have a bed.

Ciao for now!