Heading South

written 15, November,  2010

I know I’ve gotten pretty bad about not writing here over the past month, and I apologize for that. Right now, I’m getting ready to leave. I just had my last day of work, and to be honest, I feel some sense of nostalgia now that all that’s over. It was a good experience. But here we go. With what cash I’ve earned from that, I’m going to travel for about a month. Loosely, the plan is to head south. I have a bus ticket for Temuco, Chile. It’s a city in 9th Region, La Región Araucanía. Then I’ll head over to Pucón, where there is a large volcano. Then I’ll cross over from there to Argentina. More than anything, that’s the motivation for the trip. See, I have to leave Chile and return to renew my tourist visa. While I could do that pretty much anywhere, I thought I’d couple that with a little excursion to get to know the south a bit more. It’s supposed to be very different than here.

I’ve been lucky, here in the past couple of days, as everything sort of came together. I was supposed to go to Temuco to stay with some relatives of my host family, but the person called earlier this weeks to say that she had to go to hospital to have an emergency operation, something with her stomach. Fortunately, it’s not life threatening, as long as they operate. But that means she won’t be able to host me. So that means I’m just going to Temuco without much of a plan. We’ll see what happens.
But after that, in Pucón, I have a place to stay with the aunt of Marcela, my host mom. And then when I go into Argentina, it seems I’ll do some CouchSurfing in Neuquén province, in a town called Plaza Huincul. And then hopefully go down to San Carlos de Bariloche which is supposed to be gorgeous, right in the foothills of the Andes, before crossing over again to Puerto Montt, Chile, where I also have a place to stay, with the family of a friend and fellow UWCer I’ve met here in Santiago. From Puerto Montt, I’d like to swing down to a large island called Chiloé, but we’ll see how it all works out.