Having spent 9am-9pm on the WAFA course for three days, and one day finishing at midnight I was pretty shattered. As I explained before, this Tuesday was a public holiday so everybody got Monday off too. With a four day weekend to look forward to I headed off to my friend Roberto's family home, about 2hrs from Pucón, to relax for a while. We didn't really have a solid plan for the weekend, my only plan was to get a good night's sleep! Sunday morning we woke up around midday and headed off with our rucksacks full of overnight trekking and camping gear. Ironically, the plan was to head back to Pucón and get a local bus to somewhere to go exploring. As many of my journeys in Chile, this one also began by hitchhiking, or at least trying to. We spent over an hour walking along the side of the road waiting for someone to pick us up and finally someone offered to take us, he even gave us drinks and snacks in the car!
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| What a nice guy, saved us a loooong walk! |
Arriving in Pucón, my two friends decided that we'd go to a place called Caburgua, about an hour from Pucón. Caburgua has two beaches, 'La playa negra' and 'La playa blanca', that border a really beautiful lake. We arrived at the beach at about 6pm when everybody was starting to leave, I was told that in the summer it's crazy busy but this day it wasn't too bad. We went and had a chat with the campsite owner, who had a small space for tents at the side of the lake, unfortunately for some reason he was trying to charge ridiculously expensive prices per person.I suggested we walk a bit further down the beach and try to find a discreet place to put up the tent. After quickly putting up the tent, we started a campfire and went swimming in the freezing lake, having the campfire ready to warm us up after the chilly swim was definitely a good shout.
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| Who wouldn't have enjoyed this? |
It turned out to be a perfect couple of days on the beach, chilled beers from the lake, countless stars in a clear sky. food cooked over the fire and great company. Even the driving rain that soaked us on Sunday didn't put us off. Our friend Conzu headed home on Monday evening and Roberto and I spent Tuesday finishing off some studying before we took a night bus home. I always enjoy spending time away from home, meeting new people and exploring new places, so I was pretty happy with how I spent this long weekend.
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| Battered and bruised, but a good start |
Returning back to normality at work this week was a bit of a drag, work is never as much fun as traveling. However, two things have made this week a little more interesting. Firstly, Roberto gave be various parts from old skateboards of his and we got round to putting them all together this week, so now he's been teaching me to skate which has been a laugh. Secondly, there was an earthquake that measured 6.5 on the Richter scale about 300km north of Conce. This meant that we felt the tremors in Concepción, the first that I've felt whilst I have been here. It's a weird feeling, the ground moving beneath your feet! The tremors felt in Concepción were pretty small and only lasted around 10 seconds, and given that all the buildings here are designed with earthquakes in mind, you can forget the traditional image of things falling off shelves and bridges collapsing, at least this time... This coming week I'll be heading to the capital city, Santiago, to accompany the English debate team that I have been training to an INACAP debate competition. They will be spending two days debating against students from other INACAP campuses in English, the topic being social media and its influence in society. The team is flying there, but poor me has to take yet another night bus of 6hrs to get there and a second one to get back. Hopefully I'll be able to update you all when we return with the trophy!
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