Pucón: Chile’s Summer Camp
Pucón is to Chile as Colorado is to America (she says, never having been to Colorado)—a veritable mecca of geographical phenomena converging in one place to create incredible beauty and an eco-loving adrenaline junkie’s paradise.
Volcanos, mountains, forests, rivers, lakes: Pucón has it all (and all within only 500 square miles—1/20 the size of Colorado!). Even before it was valued by tourists and adventure-seekers for its natural bounty and location in the middle of Chile’s Lakes District, it was key to the Chilean military, who set up a base there in the 1880s to protect its border and control a pass into the Andes. Timber and cattle merchants followed, displacing most of the local Mapuche population farther upstream (a common occurrence in Chile, as I’ve been learning). As the town grew, vacationers—especially German settlers from nearby Valdivia—began frequenting Pucón, staying in the hotels that began popping up in the 1930s and 40s, and as the Chilean infrastructure improved through the 1970s and new roads and railroads were built that made getting to the southern lakes easier, Pucón transitioned to a tourists’ haven above all.
Nowadays, Pucón beckons all types—Chilean families looking to engage in some wholesome bonding (nothing brings a family together like trying to bail out a raft while navigating whitewater rapids, yeah?), affluent European couples trying out homeopathic remedies (squeaky joints love a good hot spring, and Pucón has plenty), and backpackers seeking adventure (at least as much of it as they can afford—there’s canyoning, paragliding, windsurfing, hiking, biking, skydiving, and more to choose from)—and I guess I fall into that last group. You can do Pucón in luxury, but you don’t need to, and I didn’t—the natural settings are beautiful enough. Grab a pack and a bunk and let’s go.
I took a bus from Concepción to Pucón and it felt like entering God’s country. I could so easily imagine an almighty being dragging His or Her fingers through the dirt and forming the valleys and mountains, scooping mud up in Their hand and squeezing a piece of the sky into the hole it left, then watering it with clear, clean vapor from the clouds. There are sprays of hydrangeas everywhere so bright they’re almost obscene—vivid blue against all of the greens and browns, a cerulean even brighter than the water.
I went to Pucón to start to push myself physically in preparation for the hiking I want to do in Patagonia. Over my four days, I went whitewater rafting (of sorts), climbed an active volcano, hiked / hitchhiked to a waterfall and dove into its glacial-runoff pool, and kayaked across a lake to private beaches where I stretched out on the hot black sand, and I now know: I am stronger than I thought, nothing brings people together like good beer and thrill-seeking, and this world is meant to be seized and marveled at. Pucón is adult summer camp and everyone should go.
Chili Kiwi, a hostel on the water run by a Chilean/New Zealand team, is home camp. Its main building is almost Bavarian on the outside, with whitewashed walls, brown trim, and a swooping roof, and definitively cabin-inspired on the inside—four big dorm rooms of wooden plank walls and knurled pine bunk beds, with the reception desk, the communal kitchen, a dining room, and the bar on the ground floor. Almost every room has a view of Lake Villaricca, but the lake looks best from the treehouse outside.
Behind the main house, where I stayed, are the other sleeping areas: one mini cabin, with 9 beds—the bunks there go three high, stacked like crates in an attic—and its own kitchen, two private cabins, two habitable treehouses (each featuring a full-sized bed, a picture window, and a shelf), and two rusting VW buses that have been converted into bedrooms, the mattress sliding over rows of storage. Everything is a little worn, but still entirely functional—even the bathrooms, with their constantly lingering mildew scent, feel well-used, not run-down.
A camp can’t run without counselors, and Chili Kiwi’s are all foreigners doing 3-month stints working in the hostel as part of longer trips. They happen to be mostly couples, which made me wonder—is that a precondition of employment or a side effect of close work in a sleepy town? I asked, and it turns out, neither; all three couples were together before arriving in Pucón and happened to all start at the same time.
Bianca and Austin, who live in one of the VW vans, are Aussies; she’s tan and bubbly and he’s tan and teasing and they both wear their sun-streaked hair in buns at the tops of their heads. The two Americans, Terese and Mike, are basically REI models—lanky and very into doing things like climbing cliffs and skiing down volcanos—who may be wearing on each other (Mike seemed annoyed at Terese when I was there, though in truth that’s an observation gleaned only from his vehement but ultimately unsuccessful refusal to eat her leftover mushroom lasagna for dinner, so what do I know). Collum and Brianne, from the United Kingdom—him, Scotland, her, England—are my favorite couple; she is Princess Merida from Brave brought to life, 90% a thousand auburn curls and 10% a tiny frame that supports them; he is tall and skinny and throughly courteous (will give you extra popcorn when he’s working the bar).
There are two single people—an barrel-chested Australian guy and a mousey French girl—but they seemed to have started after the couples, which made them feel less like all-knowing counselors (with their unreachable levels of culture and crunchiness) and more like guests who sometimes sat behind the desk.
These mother and father hens look over us, the guests, the campers. Some of our motley crew:
- Markus is pretty much the epitome of what I would think of asked to conjure up a German 20-year-old dude. He looks, more than anything, like a young psychoanalyst—like he’ll grow up to push his John Lennon glasses down his sharp nose and purse his lips dissentingly, stroking his wiry blondish-brown beard. He says things like “Oh, you spell Joghurt with a ‘y’ in English, don’t you? So strange,” and says them with extra-enunciated vowels. He wears an embroidered, almost Rastafarian fanny pack across his chest like a baby sling, which he started doing at electronic festivals, where he was tripping and/or dancing too hard to keep track of his phone (a cracked Nokia that pings unobtrusively—polite, even in ringtone selection!—when he gets a message), and which he now uses to keep his passport and money safe as he travels. He’s a stickler for rules and always happy to debate why his interpretation of them is the right one—we had many a fun argument over the right way to play Scattegories (the German version takes away a lot of the silliness of the American one, as you might expect), and then he went on to crush the game, playing in his second language, to boot. He’s never without his clipboard of graph paper—the first page of which is a mapping of the Spanish preterite tense conjugation; subsequent pages are texts and emails written out in English or German or Spanish that he then painstakingly keys into his Nokia—and a sleeve of cookies to share with whoever’s around.
- I thought Markus was as German as they come, and then I met Lenard. 18 years old, hailing from Berlin but the product of English boarding schools and summers abroad, his blonde hair is cut in the exact same style as Rolfe from TheSound of Music (yes, I know Rolfe is Austrian). His eyes are blue and constantly slanted not into mirth but into judgment, and he’s immensely proud of his long, tan legs; his quads are exactly the same dimensions as his calves, but with a more defined roundness—like the curve on a scoop of sherbet served from a shallow spoon—which he shows off by wearing only short Adidas shorts and micro-bathing trunks (even when it’s 50 degrees and we’re sitting outside drinking beer). His English accent is posh; his German accent is probably also posh, but I don’t know enough to tell.
- Gloria, who hails from Toronto, flushes when she drinks and when she talks, making her seem as if she really shouldn’t do as much of either as she does. She’s always a few beats behind the conversation and wants to squeeze maximum fun out of every moment, which instead just makes things feel insincere and turns her into a caricature of a backpacking 20-something. She left Pucón a day before I did to follow a Brazilian man to Santiago in what felt like an attempt to cross “have a crazy on-the-road romance!!” off her list. Good luck, Gloria.
- There’s many a kind Canadian man present: George, whose hair sticks up so sharply and in such a shape as to imply that he takes an axe to it in lieu of a comb, and his co-astrophysicist Alex, with his baggy fishing trousers and surprisingly sculpted abdominals, who out-kayaked me by a mile; there’s also Ken, who hikes in denim shorts and is a bit of a know-it-all, which I suppose he’s earned because he’s been at the hostel for almost two full weeks (he’s already extended his reservation 4 times—it‘s like being a super-super senior).
- And lastly, there’s Payal, an American with tattooed forearms (and side and back), shiny black hair, and brown-black eyelashes so long I had to do an actual double take when I was helping her to rub sunscreen onto her forehead. She seizes every moment to do exactly what she wants to do—whether that’s quit her job, pursue a relationship, tell off someone who’s in her way—and she’s as warm and lively as a shot of rum in your coffee.
Every day, we wake up slowly, head downstairs to make breakfast (it’s not provided, and no one goes out for meals; the grocery store is just down the road and cooking is a fun, mostly healthy, communal activity), share plans for the day over tea and toast—some will have big activities planned, others will be spending the day pawing through guidebooks and lounging in the sun. New people arrive, and those of us who have been here for a few days (the equivalent of a few years at camp) will show them around—here’s the best-smelling bathroom, there’s the salt, remember to check the free-food shelf at night.
It’s like everyone at the hostel has agreed to operate in an alternate universe, even in the already alternate universe of long-term backpacker travel—one where anything other than full immersion in nature is secondary (including personal appearance—not a soul wears makeup—and language learning—everyone speaks English) and no one would think of sitting down to a meal without inviting the people around them to join. It’s warmer, slower, and more accommodating than anywhere I’ve been so far—you can almost feel the connective tissue between the place and the people start to weave you in.
My first full day in Pucón, I linked up with some of the Canadian guys, who were heading out to the waterfall a few miles outside of town.
The hike was around an hour and a half, much of it through hot, dusty streets and most of it uphill, though we did manage to hitchhike up the last few kilometers, avoiding some of the worst of the climb. The farmer who picked us up couldn’t speak English, and my Spanish was the best of the four of us (a potentially dire situation), but it was easy to communicate about where we were headed.
After we clamored out of his truck, we picked our way through gnarled roots and sloping boulders down to the base of the waterfall, took off our shoes, and started to wade in.
It took everyone’s breath away, first literally—the water comes straight from the frozen mountaintops and it’s ice-cold, without a doubt the coldest water I’ve ever been in—and then figuratively, as we craned our necks to watch the water crash down and realized how insignificant and tiny we were in its presence.
George and I were the only ones brave enough to actually go swimming. We went in with the intention of swimming through the waterfall to the other side, but once we got within 10 feet of it, the spray blinded us and our limbs were frozen and we splashed back hastily, banging our numb toes on rocks as we went.
Later that day, a group of us rented kayaks from the hostel and headed out into the lake. I had Payal and Pamela, a lovely Brazilian woman, in mine; neither had kayaked before and we turned in circles until we got the hang of it. Eventually we caught up with the boys and pulled ashore on a private beach (Terese told us that we could use the first 6 meters of any beach, even if it was posted as private, so long as we approached by water—seemed not quite legitimate but we went with it). We laid out, told stories, and drank the beer we’d brought in our packs, and it was a near-perfect summer afternoon.
That night, after I had made the giant batch of veggies, chicken, and pasta that I would end up reheating for every meal following, I sat on the patio, watching the sunset and learning a new card game from Markus. It was basically a slightly more complicated version of Rat-A-Tat-Cat, and I practiced my German—einege schwarzes König!—and laughed as the sun melted into the sky.
Have you heard of hydrospeeding? It was my day-two activity. It’s basically whitewater rafting, but instead of being in a raft—a big boat with oars and such—you’re in a piece of styrofoam. It’s thick styrofoam, maybe about 18 inches deep, and it’s sturdy, but it’s a glorified kickboard and it, aside fromyour wetsuit reinforced with plastic kneepads, is all that separates you from the water. You lock your elbows into grooves on the inside of the board, lay down flat (a lifejacket helps keep you buoyant), and steer with your flippers. We practiced barrel rolls in open water until our guides were confident that we could recover if we were flipped off by a rapid or an errant rock, or at least that we could float in one place long enough for our safety guides—who actually were in rafts, ahead of us and behind us—to come fish us out.
I did it with Lenard and a mini-Lenard, a French couple, a Dutch girl who almost quit when they wouldn’t let her hold her GoPro in her hand as we went, an American couple from San Francisco, and a Chilean father and son. Our guides kept wanting us to go in a line, following one after the other like letters of the alphabet, but our 15 minutes of instruction hadn’t given anyone the precision skills needed to successfully avoid ramming into each other, into rocks, into rapids…we ended up going through a few miles of rapids like the dice in the middle of the Trouble board, bouncing up and landing down and getting all mixed up with each other.
Okay, yes, hydrospeeding wasn’t really good conditioning for hiking, but it was fun and exhilarating and I’m happy to have done it—though really, I don’t think I ever need to do it again—you can only bang your knee into so many boulders, be temporarily blinded by so many rapids, almost bite through your tongue so many times…
That evening we played Scattegories and drank pale ale and had our night-before-the-volcano-hike come-to-Jesus talk.
Chili Kiwi has partnered directly with a climbing company to offer guided trips to the top of the volcano. They go every day that it’s not either bad weather (rain or clouds) or in the middle of a volcanic explosion (last one was in March 2015). For 80.000 pesos, or about $130, they provide transportation, gear, guides, and first aid (as needed).
At 9 p.m., everyone who was going on the next day’s trip huddled up outside—Lenard again!—on concrete blocks arranged in a circle (kind of like a bonfire set-up but without the fire pit—just stones placed equidistant from each other, ripe for a Pagan ritual (or at the least, some time-travel—I miss you, Outlander)). Uber (“like the cars!”), our main guide, walked us through what we needed to bring (sunscreen, food, sunglasses, a good night’s sleep) and had us sign papers attesting we wouldn’t sue in case of death or dismemberment. After that sobering conversation, we picked out our hiking boots (well, I didn’t, since the mine are better than the ones they were renting) and went to bed.
I hadn’t woken up at 5:30 since before leaving for my trip, but my body remembered what it felt like to be up before the sun and I got up easily. Payal and I shuffled downstairs, grabbed our lunches from the fridge, and went outside to dress ourselves in gators (to protect our feet and legs from the snow) and redistribute our belongings into the packs they provided. Siobhan joined us outside, and our little crew of three (the only women of our 12-person group, aside from one French woman hiking with her husband) was ready. I felt deeply unprepared to hike all day, and not just because of hydrospeeding was bad practice—I haven’t ever hiked for more than a few hours, I’ve never really climbed high things, and I’ve only dealt with normal terrain (dry forests—never snow, never ice). I was equal parts excited and doubtful.
Volcán Villaricca is about 40 kilometers away from Pucón; we arrived to the base in just under half an hour of bumping along dirt roads in the van. We put on our helmets and jackets and hiked up to the ski lift in order to skip the first hour of trekking up ugly, rocky ground in darkness; some of the guys in our group decided to do it (and later almost didn’t make it to the top of the volcano, so we felt very vindicated by our choice). Thus, there we were, sitting in snow 3,200 feet up, strapping on our crampons and getting ready to climb 6,000 feet in 5 hours.
Our guides gave us our ice picks, along with a lesson in how to stop ourselves from sliding down the mountain and either tearing our ACLs or starting an avalanche (key tips: don’t use crampons for anything other than normal, careful, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other walking; if you fall, shove the sharp side of your pick into the ice and hope it catches). And there we were: ready.
For the first hour, my body didn’t know quite how to respond to constant movement in cold weather and snow 3,000 feet in the air during January but in the southern hemisphere when it was 70 degrees and warm just 12 hours ago. First I was freezing, then I was sweating, and eventually, after relayering into a t-shirt, my merino wool base layer, and wool socks (thanks Marta!), I was comfortable. Physically. Mentally, I still wasn’t sure I was going to make it—each step felt so, so small. So insignificant. It felt absolutely impossible that I’d reach the top of the mountain before nightfall by this method of poking a mental-enclosed foot into the snow, placing the end of my pick slightly ahead, and plunking the next one down aside it.
We stopped briefly for water and to reapply sunscreen (brief aside: I applied SPF70 to my face not one, not twice, but three times, and this saved me, nearly—I avoided the burnt nose of many of my compatriots, but I failed to apply it to the strips of skin directly above and directly below my eyebrows, and I accidentally brought Chapstick that didn’t have SPF—by the time we finished, my brows and my lips were both Christmas-red and puffy, and I went 3 days looking as if I’d had a brow wax and a lip filler injection both go very wrong).
I looked behind us for the first time. You couldn’t see where we had begun. The guys who had skipped the chairlift, who were about an hour behind us as a result, were barely orange specks of helmet against the snow. I felt, in my knees and hands and feet, the distance we’d traveled, and I knew I could do it again, and again, and again (and that then, I’d be at the top, and could deal then with how to get down).
We ate half of our lunch and then packed back up to continue the trek. There wasn’t any talking, really—just everyone keeping pace however they could. I was practicing my Spanish and German numbers (I always get messed up once we get past 40) and I’m sure I had a grimace of concentration on my face, because one of the guides ran over to me (you haven’t seen grace in action until you’ve seen someone run, up a hill, on snow-encrusted ice, in crampons) and offered his extra ski pole, so I could have two balance points instead of just my pick. I assured him that I was fine, just focused, but then kept his pole once I realized how much faster I could go with both.
Somewhere around 12:30, after almost 5 hours of climbing, we reached the almost-top. Our guides had us take off our crampons so we could navigate the rocky mouth of the volcano better (it’s warmer up there because of the hot gas—and occasional lava—that the volcano exhales, so no snow) and we made our way up the final few feet, igneous rock crunching underfoot.
After taking pictures, peering as far as we could inside without falling in (no visible lava the day we summited, just gas), and ripping off our gas masks long enough to taste the sulfur, we climbed down a bit to a rocky ledge where we ate the rest of our lunch and prepared for the descent.
We had hiked up, yes, but we weren’t hiking down. We were sliding down.
Imagine an ice luge. Now imagine that luge made more of granular, icy snow than actual ice, and imagine a human being, with a giant nylon diaper strapped on, sitting down inside of it and pushing off, whipping down thanks to the powerful combination of gravity + reduced friction, using the dull end of an ice pick to steer. Whoo! That’s what we did.
Sliding down was my favorite part of the day. It wasn’t dissimilar to hydrospeeding—same general principles of trying to control yourself through a bunch of H2O with a little material—but it was many, many times more enjoyable. Until I was going so fast that I popped right out of the track and into the snow, and nearly forgot how to stop myself from sliding down the entire mountain on my face—but I got my ice pick in the snow enough to slow me down, and then was able to army-crawl my way back up and onto the track, where my guide met me with my pick.
I sat back down and began fiddling with other ways to control my speed. I figured I had four tools at my disposal: the pick, which was good for quick stops but was the least graceful to use; my two feet, which I could push, heel-first, into the snow to slow down a little, or lift into the air, abs clenched to remain balanced, to speed up; and my body weight, which I could move forward, to slow down, or move back, to streamline my angles and speed up.
At the end, I was nearly horizontal on the snow, shooting down the track and stopping smoothly, with a spray of snow to rival an Olympian’s, I swear, at the bottom.
It was an absolute blast, and the perfect end to an exhausting and wonderful climb.
I had fun at summer camp. I drank just enough wine, ate just enough pasta, pushed myself physically and expanded my social circle. I laughed, I didn’t cry, and I only got slightly fried. I left Pucón the day after my climb on a long bus bound for Puerto Montt, and I left content with the memories I’d made and the friends that I’d bring into the future with me. It’s not everyone, to be clear, and it’s not even all the people you’ve met in this blog—just like when we were little, some people are good camp friends and some people are good real-life friends, and I’m lucky enough to have found some of both in Pucón.
Goodbye, sunsets, goodbye, volcano, goodbye, trivia night and finicky shower and bunk number 5—you were wonderful to me. See you next summer. xo.
Writing now from Puerto Natales, where I’m working for a few weeks while I attempt to stop bleeding money (spoiler alert to first quarterly goals check-in: I am blowing by $50/day like that’s the suggested speed on the Autobahn), double-down on my Spanish learning, and plan the next leg of my trip. I have a few more posts coming for you in the next week or so, and lots of new stories to tell about the people I’m meeting here, the books I’m reading, and the questions I’m asking of myself and others. Talk soon!