Waiting for the sun in Pucon

The road to Pucon is well worn with little backpacker footprints. I however, would recommend catching a bus. The view is much better.

Way back in Mendoza, over pitchers of wine at Mr Hugo's we'd starting hearing about Pucon and it's volcano – Volcan Villarrica. A little further in our travels, every casual conversation that started with 'So, where have you been and where are you going next?' would lead straight to gushing over Villarrica.

In fact by the time we arrived in Pucon we had recommendations for where to stay, who to hike with, how many days to allow for weather and what to wear.

So what's all the fuss about? Well Pucon is a tourist village located 12km or so from the base of an active volcano – Volcan Villarrica – whose smokin' top you can see right from town on a good day, like the one we arrived on. But more excitingly, on a fine day like the one we arrived on you can climb Volcan Villarrica, peer inside its smokin' crater before bum sliding all the way back down to the bottom. Need I say more?

As it's an active volcano, climbing is only permitted as part of a guided group, so that very afternoon we set off to find ourselves a guide and a group. Pucon is fundamentally a tourist town, so every second shop on it's main street advertises guides for climbing, rafting, horse riding and everything in between. So finding a guide proved to be the easy bit, the weather on the other hand was intending to be less cooperative.

We'd been forewarned to allow enough time to wait out the weather. In fact some people had hung out at their hostel for 5 days straight waiting for the sun to come out. So we studied the weather forecast on 'mountain weather' with batted breathed and scuttled over to the guide's office each time it looked like the sun might possibly, maybe show itself. In other words we were down there daily.

So with the following day out for climbing we needed a plan B. It's a good thing then, that volcanic regions have something other than active volcanoes: thermal springs which happen to be one of my favourite things.

We'd often been disappointed with thermal springs that were either ugly or overcrowded or both. But Termas Los Pozones, despite being one of the most popular in the area was perfect. Set right next to an icy river, we could hear the rushing water from all of the 9 rock pools.

Between them, the neat gardens were bursting with colour and the scent of roses was in the air.

The mountains surrounding the valley were delicately enveloped by mist on what had turned out to be a rainy day.

While contemplating the fact that life wasn't so bad even though we weren't able to climb Villaricca that day, we were surprised by a chirpy 'hello' and looking up to see two familiar faces. The two German girls had drank pisco sours with us in Puerto Natales before setting off on the 'W' the day we had left for El Calafate. We figured we'd probably never see them again and yet here they were more than 2000km north of we're we'd last seen them.

Yes, the road to Pucon is well worn.