Originally we had thought that we would probably head north from Santiago - checking out northern Chile and then crossing into Peru. But once we were in Santiago we met a heap of travellers who had come from Patagonia and we eventually decided that since it was the right season for Patagonia we should probably just head south first, seeing a bit of southern Chile and then crossing into Argentina to see Patagonia (the reason for crossing into Argentina was simply money - we heard that Patagonia was more expensive on the Chilean side).
The first stop on our trip south was Pucon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puc%C3%B3n). Pucon is a really pretty town on the edge of a lake and from most spots in town you get a great view of the volcano Villarica in the distance. The volcano is active and climbing it was the main thing on our agenda for Pucon. There is tonnes of other stuff to do around Pucon, including visiting some hot springs, lounging on the beach by the lake, visiting some national parks in the area etc but I think most tourists come to climb the volcano.
You have to climb the volcano on a tour - pretty much everyone in town offers one. We just ended up going through our hostel which was fine. We had to start off from the hostel at 6.00am for a 7.00am start. The volcano is about 2800m high in total and you start climbing at around 1400m. For the first part of the climb you can either take a cable car ride or climb up this gravelly section of the mountain which takes around 45 mins - 1 hour. The cable car ride was about US$10 so being cheapskates we ended up electing to climb. It was a pretty hard slog up that section and I think a couple of people in the group were wishing they had taken the cable car! After that first section the rest was all on snow. Although we had an ice axe with us we basically just used it for balance - we didn't really walk on ice at any point. Still it was pretty steep in some parts and the snow got pretty deep - a couple of times my feet slipped in the snow and my heart started pounding - the slide down the side of the volcano looked pretty steep (although in actual fact I probably wouldn't have gone more than a couple of metres if I fell). We also crossed a mini-crevasse which was pretty cool.
We had about 4 or 5 good rests on the way up and we reached the top around 5 hours after we started out. I felt like I really only started to get my rhythm right near the top - then we where there! Unfortunately we couldn't see any lava as it was too far down the big crater in the centre of the volcano but we could hear it swishing around down there and we could certainly smell the stench of the sulphur fumes spewing out the top. The view from the top was amazing - we could see Pucon in the distance and a number of other snow covered volcanoes around the place. We stayed up top for about an hour and then headed back down.
On the way up we had seen these big channels in the snow heading straight down the mountain. I was freaking out when I realised that these channels were how we were going to get off the volcano - sliding down on our butts! On the way up the volcano seemed so steep I was sure I could never go down one of these chutes without whizzing right off the edge of the volcano and dying! The first few chutes I was pretty tentative - digging my ice axe right into the snow to slow me down. But I soon got the hang of it and was swishing down as fast as I could. It was so much fun although on the way down you would collect a lot of snow and even though we had waterproof gear on I still got soaked and my shoes filled with water (luckily I rented shoes - Paul wore his own and I think they are still wet). The chutes nearer to the bottom of the mountain were a lot less steep - for these we all had to sit in a big train to get enough momentum to carry us down the slope. At one point we picked a chute that crossed the path of footprints that everyone had made coming up that morning - everyone in the train had to take their turn to bump over the footprints and it probably would have looked really funny if anyone was watching.
We ended up getting down the volcano in about 1.5 hours. We were both exhausted but really glad that we did it. The rest of our time in Pucon we just ended up chilling out. We had come into Pucon on a night bus and it always seems to take us a few days to fully recover after trying to sleep on a night bus (even though this time it was a cushy Pullman bus and not some rattletrap in south-east Asia). So, from Pucon we headed south again to the town of Valdivia...
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