We arrived early on Friday morning, and explored Castro. Castro is the capital of Chiloé and is quite nice as city/towns go. It's quite small but then it is a small island. It's about the same size as Lautaro though with much better shops. We walked to the plaza and saw the giant yellow and purple church.
The saw the palafitos which are houses on stilts over the water.
We saw a plaza with old trains in it.
And lots of other weird buildings. It's generally quite a pretty little town. If you're down by the water and look up at the town it's just cute little wooden houses, apart from the giant mall that sticks out. Apparently the mall is a bit of a contentious issue. The locals all want a mall because Chiloé has never had one before, but all the people that move from Santiago or other cities to Chiloé want it to stay all pretty and traditional.
The palafitos
We went to the smaller island of Quinchao which is near Castro. Went to the little town of Achao. It's very lovely. There are so many little islands around there. We sat by the sea and ate our lunch. Amina made friends with a stray dog. We walked around Achao and saw an old church. Churches like it are very traditional on Chiloé. Apparently they didn't know how to build anything other than boats, so they built boats and turned them upside down. It was really sunny on Friday which was apparently really lucky as usually it just rains. We walked up to a mirador before catching a bus back to Castro.
The view from the ferry
Even a stray dog made it onto the ferry
Amina and her new friend
An old church
Looks like Scotland
We found a really nice little hostel for the weekend. Marta the owner is lovely. Straight away calling us hija and mi amor. I think I'm really going to miss Chilean friendliness. We met up with Evie and Emelia, the two PT vols on Chiloé. We were on our way to eat when we saw that a dance show was about to start. Seeing as entry was free we thought why not check it out. It started a bit wobbly. A strange interprative dance which I really didn't follow. But the dances got better and better and I ended up really enjoying the show. The four of us went out to a famous restaurant after the show. Had some really tasty food.
Saturday we relaxed and caught up on sleep the bus journey had stolen from us. At midday we caught a bus to the National Park of Chiloé. It was really nice there. Quite open but very green. Chiloé reminds me of Scotland because it's very green and has lots of hills. Also it has clouds. Saturday was less sunny than Friday but it still didn't rain. For lunch we had milkao which is traditional Chilote food. It's like a potato circle with pork inside. It was very heavy and quite greasy but they filled us up.
We walked through a little forest-y area. It was nice to be out in the countryside. Chile's weird because there is so much countryside around, but it's quite hard to get to it. There are no public footpaths so if you want to go out walking you have to walk along the road so you always have big trucks going past. So in some ways it can feel quite claustrophobic to be here because you can't just go out walking out of a city. We ended up by the sea. It was quite windy and very cloudy by this point. Looking at the mist covered beach it was quite easy to see how so many legends had been made about Chiloé. I could just imagine a mysterious ship pulling up to the beach.
We found loads of these berries and they were really tasty. Don't worry we saw people with loads of them in a bucket and asked if they were safe to eat.
In the evening the girls came to our hostel and we made a great meal together. It was really nice to chat to they, seeing as we haven't seen them that much since being in Chile.
Just the front of a palamito
On the ferry back to the mainland
The only time we'll ever see Chile from the sea
Sunday we just walked around Castro a bit with the girls before taking our bus home in the afternoon. We were slightly worried that we were going to miss the last bus back to Lautaro but we didn't and we arrived home at half 11 to a nice warm house and some food. Also to the surprise addition to our family. Our host sister Lilli has a puppy! She's so cute! She's called Lulu and is a one month old Schnauzer. This morning she was trying to eat my slippers as I was making porridge and we keep accidentally knocking her over. Aww she's adorable. Although she's going to have a hard time of it when Eli comes to visit Agustin in a couple of weeks. She's bringing Nanito (the 2 year old who loves cats and all other things).
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