There are two approaches to backpacking. Many people we meet simply turn up in town, reservation-be-damned, and ask around some hostels until they find one with space. The idea of being prepared for the next town is horrifying to them. Everything is an adventure in the chaos of the concept of travelling life, and most of your time is spent in a blissful state of unreadiness, probably without a back-up plan, unrestrained by the awful realities most other people languish in.
We, on the other hand, are those other people. Our route is planned, prepared, we understand the attraction of each and ever stop on our journey, which is pretty important when you consider this is stop 31 on our journey. Mostly the folk we encounter are doing about a dozen over a couple of months then going home (some are doing half a dozen in six weeks, in some of the most opposing corners of the country. Madness. Rio to Lima, seriously?) We are the people who cannot understand how people transversed the world before the internet. Did they fluent in all the languages? Did they phone ahead? Or did they have the devil-may-care attitude we find so difficult to adopt?
It really only becomes an issue for us when we have a destination in mind and the accommodation is out of our price range. We want to stop in the city of Chillán on our way north to Santiago. It's a six hour bus trip, we want to get our tickets organised so we can enjoy our time in Pucón, but Chillán is proving a little short of hostels (at least on hostelworld and hostelbookers it is). Hotels are usually a no-go for us, but in towns without cheap dormitory options they are almost always more expensive. We spend a few hours trying to sort out a route north. Every town we look at is limited when it comes to accommodation. The bus to Santiago is also twice the price on a Sunday. When booking a hostel is easy, its easy. When its difficult, its a nightmare. We start to get a little stressed about it. Even a walk out to the supermarket and back, to clear our heads, doesn't make a difference. Finally, after increasingly frayed tempers, we just say to hell with it and book the cheapest hotel in Chillán. Two nights for £50 isn't going to kill us, but looking at a computer screen much longer might.
Forgot to mention - not enough sleep was had because our dorm-mates were noisy children indeed. However, it could be worse (as you will see later).
The view from the front of the Chili Kiwi Hostel. A nice spot with no breakfast.
Not sure how much I want to be hanging around at the top of a volcano when this sort of cloud rolls in. Nor how much I want to drop £45 on it either. Activities in Pucón are expensive, and most involve being in the water or being very high up indeed. I would have considered the skydiving if it wasn't £150 a go.
On our wandering through the tiny town (which, fact fans, is not mapped on Google Maps, which made planning this a bit more complicated) we spot a statue on the side of a hill. I reckon there could be a good view from it. We head in that direction and find Pucón's cementario, all big serious graves with crosses askew. The path leads up through the centre, towards a small board sign labelled 'El Cristo'.
Somehow we get Sarah up the side of the hill in her flat sandals, and there we find three gravediggers on their lunch break, relaxing in the sun, and a big wooden statue of Jesus, sheltering a couple of indigenous children. Jesus had some pretty scary, staring eyes, overlooking the whole city. To one side, a couple of goths romanced each other. A fine setting, but far too hot for all that black clothing.
Why can't you see the volcano? Because its right behind Jesus. Surely some sort of allegory there.
Quite nice to have a parasol keeping the sun off your slowly decaying and worm-ridden corpse for a while.
Exactly how I want my grave to look, all cheerful under a blue sky.
Attractive houses in the nice bit of town.
That cloud got a whole lot worse for volcano-climbers...
...and I felt a bit better after finding these shorts. Seriously. If you wear this size of trousers, STOP DRINKING BEER AND EATING TAKE AWAYS. YOU ARE FAAAAAAAAAT.
Time to inject a little random into our lives. We make it to the black sand beach and I want a big ice cream smoothie. The beach bar obliges, and I have a pint of red berry, banana and ice cream goodness right in front of me. It could have killed Sarah stone dead if she had simply looked at it. Me? I just got Type 3 Diabetes. It's like Type 1 and 2 combined, but lonelier. Only joking.
Anyway, this pointless dog appeared at our table. Mostly the dogs just go away when you don't feed them. This one didn't. Sarah's love of dogs has been stretched many times on this trip, but this particularly creature nearly got a swift kick in the face and a sideswipe from her little backpack. The wee dug doesn't say anything, but as you can see, it does have the vacant expression of an utterly deranged psychopath. We walk away, but he follows, and what starts as amusing rapidly becomes an escape, Sarah increasingly disturbed by the mad mutt, slowly stalking us, and what she assumes is the impending bite of death from the crazed, rabid beast.
We sneak into a clothes shop and hide for ten minutes. When we leave, the little golden mentalist is gone, and calm is restored in Sarah's life.
Back to the plot. If you have never seen 'black sand', you might (as I did) have some unreasonable romantic expectation of what it might be. Fine speckles of black silicon resting aside the water, shimmering darkness that captivates like a moonscape. Except that its not. It's just about as disappointing as the correct name of 'black sand' would be, which is 'grey gravel stones which as very fine, almost without dust, which is a welcome bonus, but definitely not black and definitely not very sandy'. Talk about truth in advertising. If I didn't know any better I'd say Shifty named this stuff (and tried to see it to someone).
This exciting beach is entirely composed of black sand. Big Whoop.
At the hostel there is a little more blogging, a little chatting with the most cheerful South African couple we have ever met (expect a future story from Durban, that's where we've been invited to next), and are introduced to Dadi, the latest Jew making his way down the Israeli Trail. The banter is strong, the craic is ninety, and we haven't even looked at a beer. Nothing wrong with a day off the sauce every so often. Or today.
Sunset from Hostel Chili Kiwi. Imagine me and an awful lot of other folk jostling to take this photo. I should have just gone upstairs to the balcony. Sometimes obvious just isn't obvious enough.
PS - If, at any point, I felt a little aggrieved to be behind in my blogging, I feel better when Sarah tells me she has 31 days to write about. I'm not sure how she will remember every person who has eaten her chips, stood on her feet, or every dog which has barked at all from behind a fence, but I don't doubt she will.
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