We’ve seen these giant leaved plants all over Southern Chile. You know they grab your attention when your nearly 11 year old asks for a picture with one. Gunnera tinctoria, better known as Chilean Rhubarb, is an invasive species. The stocks, like regular rhubarb, can be eaten. Park rangers shared with us that the Pudu […]

My siblings gave us $200USD for Christmas to fund an excursion on our adventure through Chile. We used the gift to book a rafting trip down the Rio Trancura (wiki), a river just outside of Pucon. The 12-kilometer stretch of river we paddled has many small rapids and five Class III rapids. It was a […]

We visited Rosales national park today, only a 50 minute drive from Puerto Varas, where we’re living for a couple weeks. The park is easily accessible from many towns in the region, which we learned once we arrived. There were busses full of American and other foreign tourists in the park and at the well-traveled […]

Printouts of maps and other information can be hard to come by at many Chilean national parks. At Puyehue, the CONAF ranger handed us three aged but informative pamphlets about the birds, animals, and flowers we’ve been seeing on our hikes. He dug these out of a drawer in the park office when I asked […]

We drove a couple hours north around Lago Llanquihue to Puyehue national park. The drive held as much beauty as the park. Morning sunlight glimmered on the blue lakes of the Los Lagos region. The sharp peaks of snow-capped volcanoes towered over low clouds. And the roads were empty. We arrived at the park and […]

We arrived yesterday afternoon in Puerto Varas. Upon arriving at our AirBnB at an apartment building, we quickly found ourselves in a situation. Since we have the cargo carrier on the roof of the car, we had to carefully navigate the covered parking deck under the building to find our marked parking space. We weren’t […]

On our last night in Pucon, we stayed up late (for us) and drove into Villarrica national park for a nighttime viewing of the volcano. The orange glow of the lava-filled caldera and the Milky Way clouds overhead made for a magical sight. The iPhone managed to capture some of the scenery, but hardly the […]