Post #601: Exploring Chiloe

Our friends’ youngest daughter told Jason he was “wearing the hat of an old man.” I agreed – then she said I looked younger than him. I also agreed with that. She said he wasn’t really that old because he didn’t have a lot of ‘crinkles’. I love the stuff kids come up with.

The weather in Chiloe can go from beautiful to foggy and rainy daily, so we took advantage of the clear skies and finally left Ancud.

We drove through the small fishing village in Quemchi. Supposedly, it has the best restaurant in Chiloe, but we didn’t time that right, and there wasn’t enough there to keep us there until dinner.

We continued south along back roads to Tenaun and visited a waterfall located on some private land (about a dollar to go see it). As usual, there were some crazy swimmers, but we decided to stay dry. Probably more of a highlight was in a random field.

Chile has an elusive miniature deer species that lives in the forest. I’ve been keeping an eye out for them since Pucon. Today, a sole pudu bounded across an open meadow right near our car. Rare that we would see one, and even rarer that I could get so many photos (although, not so great). He was about the size of a medium dog. I was ecstatic we saw one. Jason says he was only moderately happy to see it. Bode says, “It would be better if it didn’t look like that. I didn’t even think it was one, at first.”

The day cleared up a bit, so we kept exploring. Just before the town of Dalcahue we noticed cars parked up and down the road and some sort of event . The beauty of not having any plans is that you can stop and see what all the fuss is about. As far as we could tell, it was just a huge fiesta, with a live band, 20 or so stalls selling beer, empanadas and curanto.

We did get to see curanto being prepared the proper way: in a hole. At first, we thought it was a pile of trash. Glad we saw it after we tried it.

We let Bode pick one of the kid activities. Bull riding it was. Although he’s a natural, I’m hoping he doesn’t take this up as a sport.

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