Weekend in Pucón: Horses and Volcanoes

My friend Machi and I went on a fun little adventure this weekend! She also lives outside of Temuco, so we met up in the city on Friday to take a bus to Pucón, a tourist town a couple hours southeast of Temuco. We got there late Friday night, and the hostel that we really wanted to stay at was full, so we just found a random cheap hostel nearby and crashed. But the good hostel told us we could check in Saturday morning and stay Saturday night.

Saturday we shopped around the town a bit and walked by the lake. We got a nice view of the Villarica Volcano, or Volcán Villarica. Then we went horseback riding! This guy Matías who lives way out in the countryside has a horse farm and just organizes day and overnight trips on horseback in the area for tourists. There were 2 guides and 4 other people in our group, and we went on a beautiful and exciting route. First we went down some dirt roads, then into a Mapuche community with little houses, gardens, and fields with farm animals. Then it opened up into this beautiful grassy plain below the mountains. We crossed a river on horseback, which was probably the most fun part! After a snack by the river, we went through these tiny little paths in the woods up to another river, the bigger one in the area with currents. The rest of the ride was along the river and then return back down the dirt road to the horseowner’s house. The whole trip was about 4 hours and very tiring, but SO worth it! It was the most beautiful and interesting horseback riding I’ve ever done.  After horseback riding, Machi and I went on a romantic dinner date and ate way too much fettuccini alfredo and sopaipillas (sopaipillas are like little fried dough in the shape of a donut that they eat as rolls, or with mustard, or with coffee..deliciosas)

Sunday we woke up at 6:30 to start our Trekking up Volcán Villarica, the huge active volcano you can see from near and far in the Araucanía region of Chile. La Araucanía is one of the most volcanically-active parts of the world, with over 60 volcanoes just in this region. 2 Dutch girls from our hostal, Machi and I headed to the national park after we were fitted for boots, jackets, pants and mittens, and stuffing the huge backpacks they gave us. We took a ski lift to cut out an hour of trekking and then starting off to the summit! They gave us a quick lesson on how to use our ice pick and we were off! The first part was mostly loose volcanic gravel. It was really hard to climb. Then we reached the snow. They gave us these spikes for our boots and started putting on layers. The ice was so steep, and even though we were walking so slowly, I literally thought I was going to have a heart attack or something. It was like the stairmaster times six-thousand. Our guides kept pointing to a spot a little bit ahead and telling us we would have a break once we got there. But a spot that looked just a little bit further up took foreverrr to get to. Once we started getting closer to the top of the volcano it got even steeper and windier and I thought for sure I was going to fall over. (that would not be a good thing because it’s so steep and slippery I would literally just slide down the mountainside a few thousand feet.) I’m not scared of heights but when I turned around to take a look at the view I was pretty scared. But anyway, we finallyyyy made it to the top and could actually look down into the middle of the volcano! All we could really see was the smoke coming up, and we couldn’t look for too long because it was practically impossible to breathe with all the toxic smoke. But it was awesome to have climbed all that way and be looking into the crater of an active volcano! I was afraid that my camera was going to freeze, but we took a bunch of pictures real quick to document the achievement  =)  On the way down they gave us these funny black diaper-looking things so we could slide down on our butts and on these little plastic sled-things. It made the way down a little faster and a LOT more enjoyable. I was actually more terrified of the sledding than anything else, because it’s so steep that it’s hard to stop yourself. But once we got going it was so much fun! The whole day was one of those things that is so fun because it’s dangerous enough to scare you but safe enough that you know you’ll be fine. Once we got to the bottom we were so tired our legs were shaking and I felt like I was going to fall over any second. Crazy. They gave us beer when we got back and then I bought lots of ice cream.  =) We were so tired and really sore the next day, but it was SO worth it!