Volcanoes and Sea Kayaking

The Lakes District region of Chile is like a little piece of Europe - if you ignore the smoking volcanoes at every turn. Most of the areas surrounding Puerto Varas were first occupied by German settlers in the 1800's. Many of their orginal houses still stand, clad in native redwood shingles. There is a German school, and everywhere you go there are signs for 'Kuchen', German apple pie. Amusingly, there are also signs everywhere for 'Onces' which translates from Spanish to Elevenses. It has been changed slightly from the orginal English version, it is no longer served at 11am, but between 4 and 6pm, and it's not English morning tea, but German treats instead.

Puerto Varas for us was another opportunity to climb a volcano. So we set out on a day trip, hiking along the bottom of the Osorno Volcano, along lava fields and through sparce forests. Walked along black sand beaches on the shores of bright greens lakes, awash with pumise, still floating from the last eruption of Volcano Puyehue near Bariloche in November 2011. Most of the day was spent looking up at Osorno, waiting to see if the cloud cover would clear giving us the chance to climb part of it. Eventually it looked like we might have been in with a chance.
We drove most of the way up, then our guide stopped and let us out, pointing out the path. He did try to warn us that the weather can change fast up there, and perhaps G should have listened to him and put on some water proof pants. But, pah, we were tough, we didn't need that sort of thing. 15 minutes, thats how long we lasted before a huge strorm flew around the side of the volcano and nearly knocked us off our feet. Sideways sleet traveling at face numbing speeds melted off our jackets, slid down our legs and filled our shoes in a matter of seconds. Even my pockets were puddles.

The following day, having given up on volcanoes, we decided to go sea kayaking. Now my father, John, is a serious sea kayaker, he does crazy things like paddle from Wilson's Prom across the Bass Straight to Tasmania, in a sea kayak. So I kinda knew what we were in for. And perhaps I wasn't clear enough about what was involved when explaining it to G. She has this romantic sort of idea that we would paddle gently down an estuary, watching the world go by, not really putting in much effort, just going with the flow. So when we did eventually, after a 2 hour drive, get onto the water, G was really rather surprised that it was quite hard work. And that was the easy bit, when we were still following a river course that did most of the work for us. So G was well and truely in shock when we reached the fjord, the wind changed direction and we were fighting against it and the current. No fun at all. The weather came in, we could no longer see the beautiful mountains, volcanoes and ridges that surrounded us. Just lots of wind and rain and mist.
Our guides made a choice, instead of spending the next 3hrs fighting the wind we turned around and with the wind at our backs travelled much faster. Our guides also chose to seperate us, another smart plan, we couldn't argue that way. It was not an exersize either of us wants to much repeat. But an adventure none the less.