We spent a quick few days around my birthday in a sleepy little town on Lago Llanquihue called Puerto Varas. There isn’t much to do around town except for wander the town center, which has a lot of German influence in the architecture and culture, and walk out to the lake shore for views of Volcano Osorno. Most people come to Puerto Varas for easy access to national parks and outdoor excursions just outside of the town, and that was our plan as well. The weather was very typical for this time of year, with spurts of gloomy clouds and rain, mixed with warm sunshine and puffy white clouds. We set aside one day for a fun excursion, but had trouble deciding on what kind of excursion we wanted, but since we had just come from rafting, biking, hot springs and hiking, we wanted to find something a bit different. I think we chose wisely….

Puerto Varas highlights…

• Amazing birthday! We went “canyoning” with this crazy French guy, Philippe, who somehow has permission to take groups out of bounds in a national park. For those of you unfamiliar, “canyoning” is basically hiking up to the top of a mountain and following the “canyon” created by the water flow from the top. Picture a canyon with walls that tended to be about 10 to 20 feet on average. Give it thousands of years and flowing river, and a virtual waterpark/obstacle course filled with rapids is created. Dressed in about 4 layers of wetsuit, special shoes and a helmet, we slid down natural rock slides and waterfalls forwards, backwards and upside down, jumped off rock ledges into deep crystal clear pools, and then rappelled down 75 feet of a 100 foot waterfall (my first time rappelling), stopped to take in an amazing view of the surrounding forest, then jumped the remaining 25 feet into the waterfall pool! It was quite a day! The group was just us, and another couple around our age from Australia. It was one of the coolest things I have ever done. Lots of adrenaline rushes and trusting a complete stranger who knows the river inside and out. We don’t have many pictures from this day, since it was a full day in water, but we do have video from Philippe’s GoPro, just need to figure out how to get it off a DVD. The pic below of our full group in front of the waterfall was taken just after our final waterfall rappel and jump. We climbed out of the water and a group of tourists taking pictures of the falls looked at us like we were crazy, having just climbed out of the waterfall into the tourist lookout area.
• Treated ourselves to a delicious dinner out for my bday, with fresh fish, wine, and delicious desert.
• On the day we didn’t go canyoning, the sun unexpectedly came out after a gloomy morning, and we walked around the lake shore, visiting a few old churches and German homes.
• Danny explored the old train station across the street from our hostel and took some great photos.
• Hunkered down on the last day, taking advantage of the rain to do a ton of planning for what will be a busy next month. We are heading right into high season the further we head south, so we need to plan a little bit ahead to ensure buses and accommodations.

We didn’t take a ton of pictures in Puerto Varas, so I took some time to try out a few fun photo filters and treatments on our nifty iPad photoediting app (Snapseed).  All of our photos from Puerto Varas are below.