Until this trip never had I ever...
*seen snow in July
*climbed a volcano
*used crampons and piolets and all of this other fancy equipment to climb this volcano
*slid down a volcano as if i were sledding--but without the sled
*worn long underwear, sweatpants, sweatshirt, two pairs of socks, a 20 degree sleeping bag and two blankets...to go to sleep.
*worn only a bathingsuit in about 40/30 degree (I don't know exactly, but very cold) weather...
Aside from the cold, I really liked Pucon. Although in the summer time it is heavily a tourist town, it was a lot of fun in the winter as well. Most of the town is made of wood, so it looked a lot like a ski town, something like I would imagine some ski towns in Colorado would look like, but i've never been skiing in Colorado so I wouldn't know. It is more of a touristy town, so they had a lot of variety in restaurants, unlike some of the small towns we were in last week where our options were a chilean restaurant or...a chilean restaurant. There were more pizza/pasta places on the same block, then I have seen in a very long time. There were also a lot of artisan markets, with more wool hats and socks than I have ever seen...but it makes sense.
It was a lot harder to speak Spanish here because so many people didn't speak spanish. In our hostel there were people from Switzerland and Holland, and they spoke to us in English. There were also a lot of other tourists who didn't really speak any Spanish at all. It was a nice little English break, but now I'm back in Santiago and it's spanish time.
On our second day we did a canopy tour, which is kind of like a series of ziplines. We ziplined across a river which was really cool. I did something like this in Costa Rica but that was about 6 years ago. It also reminded me of the high ropes courses I used to do at camp, with harnesses, helmets and the whole deal.
Friday was my favorite day in Pucon. We woke up at around 6:30am, earlier than i've been up in a very long time, and put on so many layers, and went to hike the volcano. They gave us pants and jackets, but my jacket was so big there was probably enough space for another person. We also got boots, helmets, snow axes, crampones, which are kind of like spikes you put on the bottom of the boots to make walking on ice/snow a lot easier. Pretty intense. As we walked, despite the fact that it was a snow covered volcano, I was warmer than when I slept in our hostel. We hiked for a while, it turned out no one was able to climb to the top because there was too much wind. Going down the volcano was a lot more fun than climbing up. We wore these, I guess kindof like aprons, but we wore them backwards and slid down parts of the volcano. It was like sledding, and in some parts the snow was really deep so I got stuck, but most of the time it worked pretty well.
Later that night I went with one of my friends to Los Pozones, which are hotsprings. There were at least two pools, well we only made it to two of them. One of them was so hot. The pool was steaming, and when I first stepped in it was so hot that it almost hurt. It was definitely a nice change though, and very relaxing. While running from one pool to another was cold, the water was very very warm.
After looking for the movie theatre that burnt down 2 years ago, eating to pass the time, drinking more hot chocolate, and a 10 hour bus ride back to Santiago, we arrived at the metro before it opened at 8am, which is pretty embarrassing. A true sign that no one should be up at before 8 on a Sunday morning. At 8:20 I arrived back at my apartment and went back to bed. It was very nice to be able to sleep without socks on...
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