That's what the volcano looked like today. The day that, for Sarah, entirely revolves around watching Ireland beat England in the Six Nations. The plan is pretty straightforward. Go to Pizza Cava, a restaurant well known for letting sports fans more or less watch whatever they want. Have a beer there. Then the rest of the day is free.
Sounds simple? Saturday is a cool one in Pucón. Out of the direct sunlight and you feel the cool from the heights break through to your bones. Doesn't stop the bloody wasps though. Pucón is infested with the yellow and black bastards.
We call into Trawen, another wooden-beam exterior cafe that offers breakfast at 11am. I cannot imagine anything except the desayuno de la inglesa, the English Breakfast. I do not fool myself that they might have a soda farl, but at least scrambled eggs and 'artesian sausage' warm my heart.
Sure enough, it was pretty tasty, if sparse, but then it only cost a fiver and included a fruit salad. You don't see Springsteens handing out little bowls of melon and strawberry with every Superfry, do you?
I attempt once again to buy a new camera, but am thwarted at the gate by an infinite variety of model numbers that are MEANINGLESS, yet again. Damn you Sony, Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon, all the rest. After a mooch we realise its 12.30pm, and its time to get seats in Pizza Cava. The first people through the door, we set the tone, and the place fills up right and quick. This may be more to do with the excellent pizzas here than our company.
Beer in hand, we sit at the bar and manage to negotiate the rugby game onto the tv. Cue much screaming and swearing and general abuse at Farrell by Sarah (or 'Sailor Mouth' as she shall now be known). At barely twenty minutes in, we are joined by our friend from last night, Dadi, along with his new best mate, a wild Frenchman who goes by the name of Damien.
This, sadly, is where the story gets cut somewhat short for you guys, as our day took a somewhat unexpected and beer-fuelled twist and turn for the best (and worst). At the end of the rugby we threw this pizza into ourselves:
Otherwise the next day may have been even worse than it was.
In short, it goes like this : "So I have a friend from Israel, and he was down at Torres del Paine, and he met some Germans" says Dadi, as we chat about the Israeli trail "The Germans asked him 'How come there are so many of your guys down here, and my friend replied 'Because you didn't do a very good job'".
Honestly, I though we were going to die. Right there and then. You oughtn't to laugh like that in a pizza restaurant to a joke like that.
It got a lot worse, as we re-christened Dadi as Vlad the Slovakian, as an aid to him avoiding any sort of anti-semitic prejudice he might encounter down here from hostile hostel owners or aryan girls. He got into character by scowling, banging his fists on the table, and not really saying very much. But it was difficult for him, and soon he was back to protesting his sobriety and chatting up a girl in the supermarket, on our way to the barbecue in the hostel where he was supposed to be chatting up Hannah the Finnish Girl. I'm not sure Hannah would have enjoyed his banter too much, to be honest.
Damien was explicit in his feelings about French girls, which were similar to Dadi's feelings on Israeli girls (they looked down on you, spent all your money, and went with foreigners in a flash). They asked Sarah's about virgins in Northern Ireland, but Sarah was unable to answer as she didn't know any.
Back at the hostel we made our way through a single tin of beer before we persuaded Our Man From The Promised Land to dander round to the other hostel and chat up this girl he had met in the supermarket. We accompanied him for moral support, along with a girl from the US that I could be confident was anorexic. She, at least, carried her wine in a Coke bottle. We just took tins. I was classier still, walking the streets of Pucón with my stein of Cristal lager.
At El Refugio hostel we hung around long enough for the girl to get flirted with by both Dadi and another guy before she went to bed. That was our cue to go home and to bed. Our 7am wake up alarm was five hours away. Oh dear.
The Legends.
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