Valle de la Luna / Atacama Desert

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Rent-a-car Adventures to Isla Lemuy

Where has the week gone? It is saturday already and we have not yet finished with last weekend's adventures before we are off on some new adventures this weekend. Yikes! Espera un ratito, ya vamanos. (Wait a second, here we go.)

Monday we rented a car for 24 hours, 10am Monday morning till 10 am Tuesday. Oh the places we can go! For those of you following by Google maps, we headed south past Chonchi, took a short ferry over to Isla Lemuy, through the town of Puqueldon, out to the very southern tip where it takes a hook north east. In short, it was a day of blue sky views across the Gulf of Corcovado to the Patagonian cordillera, ie the big, tall, snow capped volcanoes and mountains.

We found our newest favorite spot, the tip of Isla Lemuy. On one side a beach as perfect as perfect can be. And at the literal end of the road, a campsite on a 300 foot bluff looking straight across to the Andes. Those white things on the horizon are snow capped peaks. And from the beach...

As we gazed out to the pointed peak of Corcovado and the volcano that buried Chaiten, a school of dolphins swam past. Of course you will have to take our word on all of this as no photo shop magic could make the dolphins jump at the moment we were pressing the digital shutter. We took amusement from the Chilote style 'kayak and kayak paddles' on the beach. Hunks of styro-foam watched up from the fish industry and a stick with pieces of plastic nailed to the end. As for the mountains in the background, well, you will have to see it for yourself because the photos washed the mountains out with the clouds.


Whule we were walking on the beach, we struck up a conversation with a family who was collecting seaweed. They lived in a town at the other end of the island. When they saw a sunny stretch of days they decamped on the beach for three days to collect, dry and bag seaweed. Lisa's day was made when they said that they could understand her Spanish better than other gringos. Or, was it that they thought she could understand their Chilote Spanish better than other gringos?

On our way home we stopped in Puqueldon to see where we could buy some seafood for dinner. After three stops for directions, we finally homed in on the spot to buy fresh mussels. And fresh they were. Mike and Berto got to ride out in the boat to the mussel beds and watch our dinner get harvested.
Mussels grow in long sacks that look like mesh stockings. The mesh tubes hang down from a horizontal rope that is strung between the bouys.
The captain/ mussel farmer plucked the mussels off the hanging stockings and filled a 20 liter bucket. Berto, who claims to only like salmon, was pleased to be part of the action.

Lastly, as if the day had not been full of fun already, we had dinner guests. Our Boston friend, Eugenia, who is originally from Buenos Aires, told her brother that we were on Chiloe. So when brother Esteban and family came for vacation to Chiloe, they looked us up. What a small world! We had hours old mussels with the family of a friend from Boston, in Castro Chiloe.

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