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One of the biggest reasons to come to Pucon is the opportunity to climb the Villarica Volcano. Volcán Villarica has one of the world's most accessible lava lakes in its caldera - and when the conditions are right, you can climb to the top and look right down into it. The main shopping street in Pucon is lined with sports outfitters and touring companies - all of similar degrees of reputability - all of whom will outfit you with a full cold weather climbing kit and lead you on a climb up to the volcano caldera. The tour leaves extremely early in the morning and is not an easy climb - five to six hours slogging up a snowfield, climbing at an angle often above 45 degrees.
On a scale of tourist-wranglers, the Pucon fellows are extreme professionals. My dad and my sister have both made the climb and reckon that it was a positively exciting and majorly memorable experience. Their group took five hours to climb to the caldera, but the return trip took scarcely more than an hour – the climbers all slide down the trail on the seats of their pants! Dr Tabubil even saw one guy climbing up with a snowboard on his back, prepared for a seriously awesome return trip. There's an excellent description of the climb here on the Go World Travel blog. As for Dad and Dr Tabubil, their only regret of the climb was that the day they climbed Villarica, the lava pack was too low in the caldera to be seen. Like any volcano, Villarica plays by its own rules. Some days the lava glows brightly, some days it does not - but always, the view from the summit is spectacular.
The lower reaches of Volcán Villarica belong to a small ski resort - when the lifts are running, they cut an hour off of the climb. One evening, Mr Tabubil and I drove up a deeply graded road to the base of the ski lifts, and turned out onto a rutted service lane.
We'd passed through a conifer forest into a lava field - a land of ash and stunted twisted trees and low, badly-growing bracken. The weather was close and clammy - and we found it an almost sinister experience, as we drove the vegetation petered out and we were driving through a wrecked and shattered landscape; cold and damp, gray ash underfoot, and the only foliage scattered spikes of livid orange flowers. Our imaginations were boundless. The flowers were like flames, licking out of the ground. Thick mists curled and wraithed. It was a landscape straight out of Tolkein. We'd driven out of life and into Mordor; nowhere could be more like Mordor than the slopes of that volcano, not even the landscapes inside Tolkein's own head.
Abandoning the car, we climbed on foot. I sat down on a small rise and let Mr Tabubil go on ahead. He disappeared into the mist and I imagined that I was sitting outside the Gates of the Dead, watching the Dead armies pass before me as shapes in the murk - and heard, behind me, a sharp crack. I turned. Mr Tabubil stood about 5 feet away, frozen in mid-stealth. He had spent a good ten minutes, crazy man, working his way silently back toward me across the moss, planning to sneak up behind me, gargle “Got you, my Precious!” and hopefully watch me jump off my rock and fall into a ravine.
I do wish he hadn’t stepped on that twig!
We felt rather guilty for hiding in our own little patch of paradise instead of going out and exploring all of the other paradises around us. But hiding was what we needed, and the splendid people of the Cabañas Azul del Parque let us have it.
In my defense, a couple of years back I came here with my family, and we did everything then. We rode rapids, floated down rivers, and spent days driving through towering mountain forests, climbing to waterfalls at the top of tumbling mountain rivers, and following hand-lettered signs reading "kuchen" to remote farmhouses in high hanging valleys, where German-speaking grandmothers would serve us home-made apricot and blackberry pie in their front rooms.
That time, we had stayed right in downtown Pucon, a beautiful little lake-side town, small and alpine picture post-card-y and green and pink and blue and yellow and red with growing things. Spring arrives late in the South and the whole world seemed like one enormous flower garden. Not only in the town; wild rambling roses and hydrangea and gladioli and bright coral colored wildflowers sprang out of every roadside cutting and the bank of every wild mountain river and stream. In an extremely unexpected way, The place reminded me of Papua New Guinea – in the way that every space and crack that could hold soil was blooming and flourishing and EXPLODING with life.
We had taken rooms at the Gran Hotel Pucon - the sort of grand lake resort popular in the United States in the first part of the twentieth century. It was an ancient, rambling building with equally ancient and saggy beds and manicured lawns running down to a black sand beach. There were salsa classes and volleyball matches from dawn to dusk and little children EVERYWHERE. It was entirely delightful, and Dr Tabubil and I shared a room with a perfect clear view up main street to the volcano. We’d sit in our room in the evening and watch it smoking.
Mr Tabubil stayed at the Gran Hotel Pucon for a conference last year (Because conference organizers are extremely savvy people and know where the beautiful places are.) and reports that the beds are just as low-slung as formerly, and while the windows need a new coat of paint, the view is everything that it ever had been - unbeatable.
One day, Dr Tabubil and I left Villarica and drove to another lake, and took a pedal boat out to a rare “white beach,” whose sand was made of limestone instead of basalt. The water was clear as glass, fathoms deep. We'd forgotten to bring swimsuits, but it was terribly hot, so Dr Tabubil and I nipped round the point of a little white bay and found a small secluded cove and stripped to our underwear. Almost simultaneously - and please remember how glassy-clear the water was - a huge pedal boat full of teenage Chilean males rounded the point and hove to alongside. Shrill whistling. LOTS of it. Tabubilgirl sank into the water, groping for her bra. Dr Tabubil turned her back, which accentuated the delicate lapping of the water across her posterior. They had a video camera. Thanks, guys.
In all seriousness, the cultural mores in play here are fascinating, aren't they? We were wearing more clothing than makes up most Chilean swimsuits, yet the different fabrics made them verboten underwear and indecent for public exposure.
Huh.
Mr Tabubil and I did go hunting for that white lake, but our directions to the "white sand beach" led us instead to Lake Caburga- a happy little holiday town set on a stretch of grey muddy sand buried under about seven and a half thousand sunbathers, and a shallow, sandy lake, the water tepid from the sun, and the bottom half sand, half-slime. Past and present Presidents prefer Caburga for their holidays, but we looked around and drove back to Lago Villarica- where the water was cleanly cold and the beach our very own.
In the daylight, lake Villarica was wide and blue, and the mountains across the lake were green and sharp-tipped. We walked out of the cabana onto the terrace and looked up to see the snow-capped cinder cone of Volcán Villarica rising up behind the trees. We would spend much of the next week sitting on our terrace and watching it smoking - exuberant puffs of white smoke. Puff. Puff. Poof!
It gave a certain frission to a peaceful holiday breakfast.
All that week we kept to a rigorous schedule. We slept late, waking half a hour before a very nice woman arrived at eleven to service the cabana. While the beds were made and the bathroom swept, we lay on lounge chairs under a tree and watched the light shift over the lake.
When the nice woman finished and gone, we went back to bed for a nice hearty nap, then lunched, swam in the lake for an hour or so, and drove into Pucon to buy groceries for a BBQ dinner on the terrace. After dinner we wound sit out by the lake until the light died, then we would come inside and read to each other until it was time again to go to bed.
It was an utterly splendid place for a holiday - lazy volcanic frissions and all. We had arrived just before the season opened -the season opens the week of the new year, more or less, and the beach and the lake were all our own.
But things were happening. One day a row of floats appeared in the lake to mark a swimming area. The next day, a row of freshly painted wooden benches was laid out on the shore. A lifeguard tower was trundled down onto the beach. The next a pack of teenage boys and girls arrived at the little swimming beach - hooting and splashing distantly, jumping off the jetty, adding a touch of holiday gaiety to the scene.
We swam in the lake every afternoon. The water was very clear and the lake slopes so steeply away from the shoreline that a short jetty can make for splendid diving - straight into water the color and consistency of bottled ice-cubes.
I love me my fresh water - any way, any how, and any where, and I could stand Villarica for a good hour or so before i started to feel a little nippy. My Canadian Mr Tabubil, who can handle temperatures staggeringly below zero if they occur on the other side of a parka and good set of thermal underwear, is not quite so comfortable with water. That man can - and has- caught a nasty chill off of a reef in the Hawaiian islands. Down at Villarica, he'd stand on the jetty, working up the courage to jump, then rise up vertically from the depths at a velocity only slightly slower than the one he'd taken going in, and spend the rest of my vivid, brisk and breezy hour sulking in the sun complaining about chilblains and yelling when I dripped on him.
One day, we dragged ourselves away from our quiet beach and drove to the hot springs at Los Pozones. There are many volcanic hot springs in the region. Some of these hot springs have decadent lodges built around them, with saunas and plunge pools and café-bars. Others are nothing more than natural pools in the forest.
“Los Pozones” is at the au-naturel end of the spectrum. A chain of natural springs strung along a tumbling mountain river at the bottom of a narrow mountain valley, it posesses marked paths, and wooden staircase reaching down into the water, and a wooden change-house built over the topmost pool, but otherwise, it feels much as Volcan Villarica made it.
The water was extremely hot. The weather was also extremely hot - it was a good 30 degrees C in the sun, but the temperature differential was still great enough to have steam billowing from the pools. We've done this rodeo before, and thought it pretty good, all things considered. Los Pozones, however, puts a twist on the formula. The idea was to alternate sitting in the hot spring with jumping into the icy river next door, and THAT water made Lago Villarica feel like a tepid bath - those tumbling rapids must have topped out at a neat 4 degrees C. After plunging in once and making a hellofalotofnoise before I got out in a hellofahurry, I sat on a rock on the riverbank and let Mr Tabubil gallantly splash me. This ridiculous regimen was supposed to open your pores and fill you simply to the brim with sulfur and minerals and healthy vitality. On a more temperate day the pools would have been an utterly sybaritic luxury, and we have decided to return mid-year, in deep winter, and spend a week sitting in hot-springs when the weather is sensible. As it was, between the extreme cold and the extreme heat, all I got was a sniffle.
Humph.
The week before Christmas, Mr Tabubil and I flew south from Santiago to Pucon. Pucon is a small town at the head of Lake Villarica, a very long, very deep, and very beautiful lake some 800 km south of Santiago. We took a late-evening flight from Santiago to Temuco, the nearest large city to Lake Villarica, and rented a car to drive the last hundred-odd kilometers.
In Temuco, the air was very deep and very fresh, and as we always do after a long spell in the capital, we stood about swallowing it in in long, deep gulps - we could have eaten it, it tasted so cool and crisp and invigorating, and, after all the renovation chaos of the past few months - needful.
It was full night by the time we were on the road, and we drove along the 199 in the dark. It was very dark – a terrible deep dark, compared to Santiago with its all-night haze of sodium-yellow light. We drove with our headlights on high-beam, feeling terrifically dangerous as we sped along the country highway through the black night. There were no other cars with us on the road, and it was very black and very lonely and terribly, terrifically, dark. Periodically, a long-distance bus came roaring out of the night toward us, and its own high beams - brighter than ours - would catch us full in the face. We'd flinch and pull further into our own side of the road, crowding the verge as it came blazing toward us, its forehead lit up with Castro, Puerto Montt, Valdivia – the names of cities impossibly far away to the south, and at the very bottom of the list, Santiago. These buses would roar on all through the night, their passengers sleeping behind drawn curtains in their long-haul cushioned seats; they would miss all of this incredible blackness, waking in seven or eight hours to the sodium-vapor haze of a Santiago dawn.
Lake Villarica is very deep and very beautiful and - at Christmas time - very cold. On its western shore the small resort town of Pucon, and Pucon sits directly on the feet of the Villarica Volcano. Volcán Villarica is a snow covered cinder cone, very much alive and stupendously spectacular as a view. In the mountains around her are hiking trails across mountain ranges and hanging valleys, swift-moving mountain rivers for white water rafting, slow, lazy rivers for floating and fly-fishing, caves for spelunking, hot springs for soaking, blue lakes for boating, and long lake shores for lying in the sun –
We had booked a cabaña (holiday cottage) at the Cabañas Azul del Parque - a property of a dozen or so holiday cottages half-way down the lake. We arrived there just on midnight. The manager was waiting up for us, dozing in a pine-wood office under a yellow desk-lamp. He led us down a narrow grassed lane, lighting the way with a torch while we bumped in our car behind him with our lights on dim.
He unlocked our cottage door and led us straight through the cabin to a terrace facing on to the lake. We stepped out into silence, and lake sounds and a huge yellow moon. Unnoticed on the road, the moon had risen and it was riding full and heavy above the water. From our feet a wide white moon-trail stretched out across the lake to meet it. It was so wide and white that we could have walked clear and confident all the way across to the mountains that stood sharp and silhouette on the other side.
Mr Tabubil and I looked at each other and we looked up at the moon and all the sharp, heavy things we'd been carrying for last few months slid loose under our skin and fell away into the lake, and were lost in the big water.
We thanked the man for bringing us here. He smiled, and we thanked him again, and asked how long we could stay -
He smiled again, and said that we could be here as long as we cared to stay.
We went to sleep in a wide double bed with the water on the other side of the window, and in the morning we called the airport and changed our flights until the very last minute possible before we had to be at work -
And it was a good day.
The weather has turned. Overnight. I woke in the small hours of the morning dreaming that I was being force-fed ice cream and not liking it much. Trying to snuggle in against Mr Tabubil, I found that he’d he had taken his half of the blankets and rolled himself around and around like a caterpillar, so I climbed out of bed and padded barefoot across the icy floor and to drag the rug up onto the bed with me.
Morning dawned sunless and sullen, with a dark, heavy sky. Cold, dark days inexorably bend my mind to thoughts of cooking. Hot food. Comforting food. Scones.
The pantry being unaccountably bare of clotted cream, I took my mother's scone recipe and swopped the sugar for mustard powder and tipped in a cup of grated parmesan cheese(a canny pantry keeper NEVER being short of a good nippy cheese) and set to stirring.
The scones came out hot and steaming and vaguely redolent of pizza, but something was missing so we peeled half a bushel or so of vegetables and whipped up a tureen of fragrant, autumnal,pumpkin soup.
By now, we were on a roll. The bit between our teeth, we turned out a batch of Chocolate-Guinness Ice-Cream (courtesy of David Lebovitz' A Perfect Scoop), a loaf of Gramercy Tavern Gingerbread and no less than two Madeira cakes.*
Between Madeira Cakes One and Two, Mr Tabubil made a run to the shops for more eggs and came back with an incidental sack full of whipping cream, so we shrugged our shoulders and whipped up a metric lake (give or take a liter) of that as well. With sugar and vanilla.
All of this sweet stuff was starting to jangle on our taste buds, so we rounded out the afternoon with a batch of Oatmeal Raisin Cookies. The oatmeal sounded healthy, and cookies looked granola-ish and virtuous, but as they stood steaming on the counter. Mr Tabubil began to swear that he could hear them begging to fulfil their true destiny as the world’s greatest ice-cream sandwiches. He even pulled The Perfect Scoop back off the shelf and searching the index for vanilla ice-cream, but it was dinnertime, so we stopped. And looked at the trays and tureens all around us, and began to wonder who might be available to help us eat some of it. And possibly begin to sweep up some of the flour on the kitchen floor.
The weather boffins are promising us a cold, wet winter, but if it doesn't clear up and let us out of the kitchen once in a while, what this winter is going to be is spherical.
*That old canard about opening an oven door on a rising sponge cake on a cold day? It's true. I opened the oven door a squeak to toss in a last dusting of sugar glaze and that sponge opened up like a Florida sinkhole on the first day of the rainy season and sank without even a sigh.
Cheese Scones
Ingredients
1 3/4 cup self raising flour
1/3 tsp salt
2 tsp mustard powder
80 grams butter - diced
3/4 cup buttermilk*
1 cup strong cheese, grated (Cheddar is best. Parmesan is also good.)
extra flour to dust ledge
*If you can't obtain buttermilk, use the same amount of regular milk, stirred with 2 teaspoons white vinegar.
Topping
15 grams butter - melted
3 tblsp whole grain mustard
1/2 cup extra cheese
Essential Equipment
Small scone cutter (>2 inches diameter)
Pre-heat oven to 220 degrees C.
Mix the topping ingredients together in small bowl.
Sift the flour into a large bowl and stir in the dry ingredients. Cut the butter into the flour with a knife, and use your fingertips to work the butter into the flour, working quickly until you have a bowl of fine crumbs, without any loose unmixed flour at the bottom of the bowl.
Add the buttermilk and stir gently with a spoon until the mixture is just congealed and no further.
Note: There is no yeast or extra baking powder in this recipe - scones require a delicate touch to preserve the springiness of the dough, otherwise they will come out of the oven like rocks and knives will not avail you.
Accordingly, turn the scone mixture onto a lightly floured surface and with your hands, form the dough into a mound and knead lightly. Bring the dough together, flatten it down, turn it over - for no more than a minute perhaps, until the dough is springy and one defined mass. If the dough is wet and refusing to form, add flour a spoonful at a time until the dough coalesces.
Spread a sheet of baking paper on a baking tray. Press dough gently until about an inch in thickness. Starting at the edge, wasting none of the dough (the less re-kneading and reforming of scraps you do, the better!) cut small scones. One by one, cut and lay on the tray.
Spread the tops of the scones with the topping recipe.
Bake at 220C for 9-12 minutes, until they are risen and lightly golden on top, but not scorched.
Back in 2012 I did some physiotherapy at the Clinica Alemana for something extremely boring and muscle-related. Things were silly there. Recently, the something boring and muscle-related returned and I am back in physio again. During the year and a half since i was out of it, things have gotten sillier.
I started my course of treatment with an an evaluation with a physiotherapist. I arrived, I took a number and I waited to be called up. And eventually, I was.
"I have an evaluation today." I said. "At eleven o’clock. Name of Tabubilgirl.”
The receptionist looked at me strangely and tapped her computer keyboard. She pointed to a chair against the far wall and told me to go and sit. Obediently, I sat. And waited. And waited some more. After almost an hour, I heard my name -
“Tabubilgirl!” A woman cried. “Tanto tiempo! (It's been so long!) So good to see you! But-” and her face took on the same puzzled look the receptionist had worn – “What on earth are you doing here?”
I blinked. “I have an evaluation at eleven. With you.”
“But the receptionists called me yesterday to tell me you’d cancelled.”
“The receptionist called me yesterday to confirm!”
She squinted. “What time did they call you?”
“Around eleven?”
“They called me in the afternoon. You weren’t coming. They said you were very definite about it. So I filled your slot with someone else. But that person cancelled, so you got lucky.”
And I had my evaluation after all.
After the evaluation I went back out and took another number number and waited to speak to a receptionist to schedule times for my physio sessions.
“My physio said 9:30 on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays." I said. "For six weeks."
“That’s complicated.” The receptionist said. “Let me write that down. What did you say your name was?” She turned over an invoice and wrote in pencil on the back 'Tuesday, 9:30. Thursday. 9:30. Saturday. 9:30.' Laboriously, she entered each one of the eighteen dates individually into the physiotherapy calendar, asking - and forgetting - my name and RUT (national ID) number for every single one.
On my left a young woman had arrived to sign in for a session. Her receptionist frowned at her. “You don't have a session today. You’re here for an evaluation. Have you ever been to the Clinica Alemana before?”
“I’ve been coming here for three weeks! My physiotherapist is inside waiting for me!”
“That’s impossible.” The receptionist said. “I have you down for an evaluation this morning. There are no other records-”
My receptionist cleared her throat. “I’ve entered all your dates.” She said. “Now you need to go downstairs to the main accounts department and pay.”
"Can't I pay here?"
"Of course not."
"But I just paid you for my evaluation."
"That's different."
I opened my mouth to ask why, but she scowled at me, so I went downstairs to the main accounts department and took a number and queued there for a while.
When I came back to Physiotherapy, my receptionist must have been feeling magnanimous, because she beckoned me right up to her desk and took the invoice from me with a pleased sigh.
“Now that’s done,” she said, “I can enter your hours in the computer. What did I do with that paper?” She fussed with the papers on the desk in front of her. “Tuesdays – and Thursday – and Wednesdays? No. Fridays? Where DID that bit of paper go?”
“Didn't you just put me in the computer?” I said.
“Not formally." She said. "That was only informally. Now I’ve got your invoice, I can put you in again. Formally. Starting next Tuesday, is that right? Tuesday at 9:30. And Thursday at 9:30. And Saturday at 9:30. And Tuesday at 9:30- This is complicated. I'd better write this down first.”
On my right, an elderly man was checking in for an evaluation.
“No you’re not.” His receptionist said. “You’re booked in for a session with Sandra. She’s waiting for you.”
“I don’t know any Sandra. I’m here for an evaluation.”
“Your evaluation was LAST Thursday. It’s right here in the computer-”
“But I’ve never BEEN here before-”
I left the Clinica smiling peaceably and feeling much better about the state of the universe.
Today I watched while a little white poodle stopped at a cross light next to a great big German shepherd. The little poodle attempted to make the acquaintance of the big dog, with all of the most polite wag-and-sniff etiquette that well intentioned little dog can show. But the Shepherd was wearing a great big opaque plastic cone of shame around his neck, and the little dog was so little that the big dog couldn’t see him.
He could hear him, wherever he was, and as the big dog turned his head from side to side, and turned himself around to see behind, and wagged his tail hopefully, and turned around again to try in front to see if the mysterious other dog had gone around the other way while his back was turned, the little dog trotted along right behind him, padding desperately on his little poodle legs and remaining perpetually in his blind spot.
Around and around and around, two willing dogs running in circles and never ever going to meet. Chuffing with bewilderment, the big dog shook his head in his great big plastic cone and gave up. He straightened himself out and shook his head and trotted away up the block, and the little dog sat down and cried.
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