Sunday, November 28th, Porto Montt

Early in the morning, the Vendam turned eastward toward Porto Montt on the mountainous coast of Chile just as the sun was trying to peak out of the clouds. Porto Montt was a tendering port, so the Veendam anchored a ways off shore and we were taken to the pier near the commercial harbor with the ship's lifeboats. We had assembled for our tour in the ship's theater and stayed together as a group for the short, but exciting, crossing. The lifeboats are small and have no stabilizers, of course, so they kind of bob around in the waves like a cork, which is a whole lot more motion than we typically felt on the Veendam. On shore, there a bus was waiting to drive us inland for the day.

The tour we had booked started off with a bus ride from Puerto Montt 83 kilometers eastward out to Petrohue Falls, skirting the shore of a beautiful deep blue lake, Lago Llanquihue, along the way. Across the lake the snow-covered, rounded peak of Volcano Osorno with its layer of fluffy clouds dominated the skyline. Petrohue Falls was located just inside Parque Nacional Vincente Perez Rosales, the first national park of Chile established back in the 1920s, as I recall.

Walking back into the park a few hundred feet on an uneven but well-trod trail, we found that the falls were not that high, but rather comprised of a complex, interwoven set of chutes and channels that spread out over a riverbed maybe an eighth of a mile wide. It did not have the overpowering grandeur of, say, Niagara Falls, but was more intricate and charming on a smaller scale.

From the falls we backtracked through the small town of Ensanada and then back into the national park to begin the steady 12-kilometer climb up the side of the Volcano Osorno to a parking lot at a skiing base station located above the treeline and a bit below the snow cap. This was summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and I suspect that the snow covers the dome of the volcano much further down in the wintertime. In fact, I was told that the ski slopes were actually closed when there was too much snow in the middle of the winter as it was too difficult to keep that narrow, twisty, 2-lane highway up the side of the mountain ploughed open.

When we arrived at the base station, however, the layer of clouds was swirling around us and we could see neither the snow-covered peak above us nor the pristine blue waters of the lake below. That was frustrating, so we all trooped over to the ski lift to see if that would get us far enough up the slope to be above the clouds. One problem was that it cost $15 US just to take the ski lift up to the next level, so there was much debate among our tour group as to whether it was worthwhile to do so or not.

Monika and I decided on the more direct approach of simply walking up the side of the mountain. We found a "Red"-blazed trail that wound around the mountain counter-clockwise from the base station and started hiking along that. It was spooky walking in the fog with no more than 20 foot visibility or so, and the footing was treacherous as the entire trail was just smoothed-over volcanic pebbles about the size of a dime. We were both slipping and sliding all over the place, so we only progressed about a kilometer up the mountainside in 20 minutes or so.

Fortunately, that kilometer was just sufficient to bring us to the upper edge of the cloud layer, so we were rewarded for our efforts by getting a nice view of the brilliantly white, snow-covered cap of the Osorno Volcano just above us. As we turned around to get back by the 45-minute deadline our bus driver had imposed, the cloud layer thinned out and we were also able to get decent views of the lake below us and into the interior of the national park eastward in the direction of Argentina.

By the time we returned to the bus the clouds had blown away and we also had a nice view of Lake Llanquihue below. The lake was 1,000 feet deep or so and a beautiful deep blue, but I was surprised to see no sailboats taking advantage of it despite the fact that it was a Sunday. I'm not a dedicated sailor like some of the members of my family, but if I lived on that lake I would surely own a 20-25 foot sloop and take it out whenever possible as it was just an ideal lake to sail on.

We returned to Hotel Ensanada for a very nice lunch of salmon raised in the salmon farms out in the lake next door. I like salmon and thoroughly enjoyed mine as it was NOT, for once, overcooked, but there was no alternative entree and Monika could only manage to eat four bites of hers before calling it quits. Poor girl! We also had a chance to check out the rooms of the hotel in the floor above the dining room where we had lunch, and they were furnished in kind of a "Bavarian Ski Chalet" style that looked very similar to the style in southern Germany or Switzerland.

Our final stop of the day was the small city of Puerto Varas, which was known as the City of Roses. The roses, as far as we could tell, were all located in a small park in about a 4 block square central business district, but that wasn't really important as the city itself was a pretty resort-style city by the lake. As it was Sunday, local folks were out enjoying the views of the rather cold waters of the lake (only the small children were actually IN the water!), and various vendors of handicrafts and food had set up their operations on the short pier leading out into the lake.

So after a long, exhausting, but thoroughly fun day we took the last tender back to the Veendam and showered before changing clothes for dinner. But we were both really tired, and after dinner we just hibernated in our cabin, quietly reading for a while before turning in for the night.