"Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans"

When this is written, we are in Salta, Argentina(north). It is hot, we are beeing eaten alive by mozzies (well me at least) and the trip to South-America is coming to an end. We have four days here, and then we go back to Buenos Aires to fly to London and from there to Cape Town, South Africa where we will be on the 22. january. There we are taking a 41 day trip to Nairobi travelling thru: South Africa, Nambia, Botswana, Malawi, Zambia, Tanzania and Kenya. We especially look forward to Kenya as it is supposed to be a very "exciting" country to travel thru at the moment ;).

To tell the truth, we have heard nothing from our tour company about how they are going to handle the situation or if they have any alternatives planned. My gut feeling is that Kenya will probably be dropped and ppl. given some money back or a different route will be taken.

Well, back to the travel story:

We stayed in Puerto Varas 3 nights and would have liked to stay longer. Not because there was so much to do there but because it was a nice place to just take time of and relax; sit outside at a café-bar and sip Café con leche (which is not so much coffee with milk but rather coffee in milk) or a nice beer. Having said that, I must admit that Chileans don't really seem to have mastered the art of making beer. It is not bad, don't get me wrong...I will still drink it. But it is missing that last "aaaahhhh que bueno" if you know what I mean. They can though be very proud of their wine and we made sure that the average wine intake per person per year went up at least one percent.

Puerto Varas looks like a town in Switzerland. Founded by Germans "back in the days" ( a good sentence to use if you have no idea when or can't be bothered to look it up). It has an abundance of old houses that many of which are in dire need of restoration. It is located on the shore of the Lake Llanquihue, one of the largest natural lakes in South America. And from the lakefront you can clearly see the snow capped cone of Volcan Osorno. On the second day of our stay we rented a car with our swiss friends Pierre and Anna and drove around the lake. Stopping at a hot springs on the way. We had to cross a river to reach the hotsprings so a local woman Shella, about 70 years old rowed us across the river. The current was pretty strong but Shella was in full control. The hot springs were just by the river and there was no-one else there. They were muddy so we had to rinse off in the icecold river afterwards(iiiks!). To get back we had to call the old woman´s name across the valley and after about 15 minutes 2 young men appeared. The young man who was rowing us back seemed to be struggling a bit but made it in the end (hats off to Shella). We drove up to the volcano and hiked up a to crater in the side of the mountain (at the snowline) which also provided us with some wonderful views. The rest of the way we stopped mostly to take pictures and get refreshments. Had some wonderful Kucken (German cheesecake) at Puerto Octay. Our next stop was Valdívia. A big town close to the pacific coast. We took a bus to a place called Niebla from where we took a boat to see an old Spanish fortress. The next day, after walking around the town we observed the fishmarket on the banks of the river Calle-Calle. It was the most amazing sight as there were sealions, comerants and seagulls fighing for the fish scraps that the fish mongers threw in the river. And some of the sealions were huge.

Next we were going to Pucon, one of the most touristic places in Chile and one of my big favorites since last time I was there. Christmas was coming and we decided to take a break for the holidays...

Next: Christmas in Chile