By Brent
Our first stop after Valparaiso brought us to Pucon, Chile, where we walked to a small vegetarian restaurant partially owned by our hosts. After a delicious breakfast, we caught a bus out to the farm.
When we reached the farm, we were greeted by a small pack of dogs. Two were brought from the US when the owners moved to Chile, and three were rescues from the surrounding area.
Dana taunting Sophia with her yogurt.
Sam was the WWOOFer dog. Even when it was pouring all day, he would hang out with the volunteers, and one night, he actually slept under the cabin in the rain to stay by us.
Sophia and Kohlie were both rescues. Kohlie had been hit by a truck and had a surgically repaired hip and leg.
One of the first jobs we had was wandering down to the gardens to pick fresh veggies for our dinner. We had sausages, a salad, sweet peas, and faba beans (habas en Espanol), and of course a handful of delicious red and golden raspberries from the berry garden.
Part of our delicious spread on the first night.
Our home for the first night. After that, a different volunteer left and we moved into the cabin up the hill.
The next morning, we watered the plants around the house, in the three greenhouses, and in the gardens before getting a tour of the grounds from Lance, one of the owners.
Back view of the owners' house.
View from the deck - there's also a bathtub up here, so you can soak in the warm water and admire the distant volcanoes (there are two others you can see from here as well).
The back porch of the owners' house.
The main garden - berry garden is just behind this one.
After the tour, we ate breakfast - cereal, milk, and fresh berries.
Remember how I said there was a berry garden? This was part of our breakfast on the first morning.
Post breakfast, we took on the task of finishing up the kitchen. When we arrived, the floor was partly concrete, and none of it was level (two different slopes in fact) because the volunteer in charge of pouring it was remarkably incompetent.
Before picture - I also liked the door being off the hinges here. For some reason, the area under the sink never even got a layer of concrete. Guy must've been brilliant.
The solution for the floor was to haul gravel and sand in to level it. I had to patch a hole on the left-hand side of the kitchen so rocks didn't just shoot under the door, which meant Dana was hauling sand and gravel all day. She did pretty well except for avoiding low-hanging eaves...
Post-gravel hauling. At this point, the floor is actually getting close to level!
That night we moved into our new home.
Dana's favorite part of our new room! We only really had this burning once or twice, but it kept the whole place much warmer than it would otherwise have been.
The next day, another volunteer arrived. I continued working on the floor, Mac hauled wood, and Dana went into town with Tracy, the other owner.
Until the kitchen floor was done and the sink was hooked up again, our kitchen was in the carport. Here, Mac and Dana are preparing food while Delilah, Jack, and Sam wait for someone to drop something.
The next day, we had the floor finished, and everything was moved back into the kitchen. Dana and I were given a day off to hike through Parque Nacional Villarrica. We walked across a lava field, up a large hill, and were able to view a fantastic glacier with Volcan Villarrica in the background.
The best part is that the park was within walking distance of the farm, so we were able to walk up and back in one day and enjoy a community get together.
A lot of the glacier is covered in volcanic ash, but you can still see the ice faces where it's been melting.
Our view of Volcan Villarrica
The party that night was a blast. We had some fantastic food (ribs, steak, sausages, fresh veggies, salads, etc.) and met a lot of the neighborhood residents.
The community center was a gorgeous building with a very eclectic assortment of decorations and two huge fireplaces. There were people from Britain, the US, and obviously Chile, so there was a not insignificant amount of charades going on during most conversations. Well, I played charades a lot...
The party was for someone's birthday, so we got to enjoy cake with fresh berries.
The next night's postre. It's pretty nice having a whole berry garden to plunder whenever you need to.
It was quite rainy the next day, so we basically hung out in the cabin and read, caught up on sleep, and ate delicious food.
Breakfast with berries fresh from the garden.
Cooking in the now much-improved kitchen! There are slats of wood covering seams in the plywood walls, rubber tiles on the floor, and the opening where the door used to be is now covered.
The following day, Mac and Dana made some amazing stuffed pancakes with a weird little cast iron stuffed pancake maker. I guess it was Dutch or something, but Tracy thought it looked like a cool cooking utensil, so we got to benefit from its maiden usage. Stuffing them with jam and apples made fantastic little snacks.
We then headed into town with Tracy for a while, and we got to wander down to the lake for a bit. It was a decent view.
Dana really likes taking pictures of volcanoes. Here's just one of the dozens she took of Villarrica:
Villarrica towers over the towns of Pucon and Villarrica.
We went into town to get reusable shopping bags at a festival in Pucon. The opening act was a Zumba group, and it attracted a ridiculous number of people. I can see why it would appeal to some people. I can also see that I am not one of those people.
Unfortunately, I was unable to find a good picture of that group, but here's the following act. The bass player has dreads, a bandana, a cowboy hat, and a three-piece suit.
In the morning, Dana finally found some time to photograph the greenhouse with all the sunflowers. Once in a while, Tracy would have Dana pick a handful so there would be a vase of fresh flowers at the store.
Later that day, she experimented with vampirism.
Meanwhile, I was working with fiberglass insulation. It's very itchy.
Making homemade tortillas. They turned out pretty good. The soy meat, not so much. Mac did everything he could to make it taste good, but the "meat" never really improved to the texture of food.
The exterior walls when we got there.
Mac and me working on insulating the cabin kitchen.
Mac and me cutting the siding for the kitchen. On this particular piece, our underwhelming circular saw was too small, so we also had to use a hammer and chisel. The board ended up being too thick to nail onto the wall, and we couldn't use it.
On our last days off, we went hiking in el Cani (again, no "~" above the "n" because I don't have a fancy Spanish keyboard). We had to fight our way past these terrifying devil cows to the first refugio.
We made it! It was quite warm on the ascent to the refugio...
Thanks to my favorite brother-in-law, we even had a working cat food stove!
These are pretty flowers, but, much like nettles, you don't want to touch them. They sting like crazy.
The mirador. We walked up here with our full packs because we didn't think we'd made it to the lakeside campsite yet, and then we were suddenly here. It was gorgeous.
Monkey puzzle trees were everywhere.
This is where we spent the night.
The elusive turducken. They swim like ducks, have the head of a turkey, and are about the size and shape of chickens.
We wandered through a series of lakes during our afternoon hike (post-nap of course). It's a lot like the Boundary Waters, but with slightly different plants.
You can't really tell from this picture, but the sunset from the mirador was fantastic. It was incredibly clear, so we were able to see everything for a long ways all around us as the sun dipped below the horizon. Our weekend was more enjoyable than yours.
Little waterfall on our way out of the park.
I'd never driven a car that had a manual choke to start. Tracy had one, and was going to ask Mac to drive us down on the morning we were leaving. Was. Turns out this particular vehicle won't stay running if you take your foot off the gas pedal, and you need to hit 4000RPM to get it rolling on flat ground. Mac didn't drive us down the hill.
While Mac and I were trying to get the car to move, Dana was rescuing lizards from compost buckets.
My table. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.
After picture of the kitchen interior.
Mac's shelving.
Close-up of the siding we put up.
Mac's bread - he was quite excited about it, and he made fantastic food.
On our last full day, we went to several local fairs with our new arrivals. At this stand, they're selling chicha - fermented apple juice that doesn't taste particularly wonderful, but is a traditional drink.
Some of the new WWOOFers. These three bought a puppy on impulse in Peru and are now traveling through South America with a dog.
Their dog is on the left. It has some of the strangest fur I've ever seen, but unfortunately, none of our pictures really show it well.
One of the places we visited had a tug-o-war contest, which was promptly lost by our American women representatives (Dana and three soccer players from Princeton). It was embarrassing.
The following morning, we got a ride to the bus stop and took a bus into Pucon to head to our next WWOOFing site.
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