Pucón? Colorado? Heaven?

Here we go. Day 1. 

After an evening in Santiago learning the cueca (the national dance of Chile-- why doesn't the USA have a national dance?), the 7 of us met up at the bus station for our 11pm southbound bus. We hopped on, found our semi-reclining seats, and settled in for the 10 hour ride ahead of us. I (Madeline) slept just great, but some others (Abby Long-Legs...) had a less restful night. We had no idea how many buses were in our future.

We rolled into Pucón around 9am on Wednesday morning, more or less awake and so excited to begin our week of adventuring. After a quick stop at the tourism office, we headed to our first hostel to drop off our bags, and then headed back out to explore.

The hostel. Oh my goodness. This was my first experience ever staying in a hostel, and my expectations were verrrry low. I thought hostels were scary, dirty places where we would all be robbed. But école was far from that:

Our most exciting plan for Pucón (and our main reason for stopping there) was to climb a VOLCANO, called Volcan Villarrica. So we went to the ecotourism company that was going to take us up, to get fitted for helmets and snowboots (that's right, the volcano is full of hot lava, but covered in snow... that just doesn't make any sense.), and to finalize our plans to meet up with them at 7am the next day. At this point, we were told that there was a chance we wouldn't get to go, depending on the weather.

Full of hope for the next day's adventures (and full of delicious food from the café where we got breakfast), we set out on a local bus to Lake Caragua, and told by the bus driver to "walk along the shore until you get to the white beach, and then you can hike to these super cool waterfalls" (loosely translated...). 

Abby LOVES the lake!!!!!!

So we walked and walked and walked...

And we were chased by some extremely aggressive sheep...

And we even encountered some beach hippies, playing the bongos. But we never did find the darn path that allegedly led from the white beach. Pucha. So we headed back to the main road to catch a bus back down the Ojos de Caragua (the super cool waterfalls our previous bus driver had lied to us about). 

And then we saw a sign pointing us to the "Blue Lagoon" (that was actually green, by the way):

 

 

Then we headed back into town to eat wayyy too much cake, do some grocery shopping, and head to bed with our fingers crossed for the weather to cooperate for the next day's volcano hike...

We showed up at 7am with peanut butter sandwiches and trail mix in tow, totally ready to dominate that volcano. After much deliberation between the volcano-climbing-people (who were French? Spanish spoken a French accent might just be the funniest thing ever.), we were told that the only way to know for sure would be to actually go to the base of the volcano and see for ourselves. When we got there, we saw pretty quickly that it was just not gonna happen. Huge bummer, but we saved 40,000 pesos ($90), and we still got to play in the snow!

So we were left with a whole day to fill... Villarrica, anyone?