Pom explores

Thursday 26th November 2015

We left the hostel around 1pm and started driving on the Carretera Austral.

We stopped after 10-15 minutes to take pictures of the surroundings. It was stunning and we could already understand why the Carretera Austral is so legendary.

We kept driving and passed this sign telling us we were at the centre of the world. Nice.

We entered Pumalin National Park.

Kept driving on this road.

We arrived at the thermes.

It was really nice to get in, the water was really hot.
It rained on and off while we were in the water.

We had some fruits and veggies and peanuts there that we had brought with us as a lunch snack. There were lots of nalca plants around.

After the thermes, we continued driving inside the Pumalin National Park.

We stopped to check out the river.

The water was of a strange silver grey colour.

We could see snowy peaks in the distance.

We reached the end of the road.

There was this unusual Chinese Apple piece of truck right next to the road.

In the distance above the river, we could see a glacier.

We were disappointed and wanted to go further. We could see a farm in the distance and started walking in its direction to go ask if we could go further on the road, in particular if we could drive on the wooden bridge above the river. While walking, a car arrived and did it. We asked them and they said yes, we could drive. Daniel went back to pick up the car and drove on the bridge.

In reality, we could not drive that much further as it was really muddy afterwards and the owner of the house told us that it would be better not to try to go through as we could get stuck. So we stopped the car and decided to go explore by foot further on the road. Here was the muddy bit we could have got stuck in.

We walked and find a path next to the river and started walking on it.

It was a very pretty area, it seemed to be an encanted wood. I could definitely imagine trolls and fairies living in it.

Here is a mosaic of photos of our walk.

We reached the river.

Smurfette posing.

It was 7pm so we decided to walk back.

Flowers we saw during the walk.

We ran into a woman and a man horse-riding back to their house in the wood.
We chatted a bit with them. Elcida, the woman, told us she was 83 years old!

Her son.

Walking back.

Before to get into the car, we saw a mum and her really cute baby horse, just born.

We got back into the car and saw some goats also with their baby one.

We passed some cows.

Driving on the way back.

We arrived at the entrance of Pumalin National Park again and we could see that Daniel was hesitating to take right.”Let`s do it!” was the feeling we all had and off we went to the right.

We saw the beginning of the Charles Darwin`s trail and later the beginning of another trail.

We saw lots of nalca.

There was this bird of prey at some point walking around.

We drove until the end. It was such a long ride. We could really get a feel for the size of this park which is incredibly huge. It is owned by an American, Douglas Tompkins,  and is one of the biggest private park in the world. At the end of the road, there was a huge empty campground. I could easily see myself pitching the tent here! Mmm, where could I put it?? Tough choice. 😀

We hanged around art this campground for a bit. Trying to take photos of a group of Patagonian gooses which flew away and kept flying around afterwards.

We left and drove back to the hostel. We cooked and had a nice dinner together.
What an incredible day we had! Pumalin National Park is just magic, so well maintained.. and no one there!

Tomorrow, let`s go check out the Chaiten volcano from closer!