Pucon - el fuma Volcan

After spending most of the day at a border crossing between Agentina and Chile (everything that they say about South America being slow slow slow is true, these guys are VERY laid back!), we finally arrived in glistening Pucon. Pucon is a small town in Chile, with the active and smoky Villarica volcano in the distance. We stayed in a Chilean family-run homely hostel, where they insist that everyone speak Spanish there - so it was a good opportunity to practice some of our new phrases and see if we're understood! The Chileans are lovely people, very friendly, happy and genuine but speak this quite peculiar slurry Spanish.
We met a good group of people at the hostel and ended up in a local pub until 5am...we finally had a night out! whooopeee The next day we headed to Parc Huaquehue for some more trekking, although this time we decided to spoil ourselves with a stay at a refugio overnight, and so left the tent behind. Luckily for us, we had the whole place to ourselves, so we cooked dinner, had a sauna in the forest (!!) and parked ourselves by the roaring fire with a glass of red wine before our big hike up Cerro San Sabastian the next day. Now this was a big and challenging hike - it was just the two of us and we had a time limit to make it back to the bus by 5pm. The map indicated that it would take 5 hrs each way and the refugio owner recommended 3 1/2 hrs, however we'd still need to shave off an hour to make it in time. So Tom kicked off the morning with a cracking pace straight up the mountain. It was a really diverse trek with lots of clambering over trees and rocks - in fact the last hour was almost vertical, and we were surrounded by ice and snow. Always interesting when your best shoes are Nike trainers and you're wearing jeans!! We certainly did not look the part. The view from the top of the mountain made all of the wheezing, puffing and panting worthwhile. At almost 2000m in height we had a 360 degree view over the Andes and 2 volcanoes - Lanin in Argentina and Villarica in Chile. Needless to say we did make the bus back to town with an extra hour to spare - go us, we shaved a good 1 1/2 hrs off the trek time. We're finally starting to get our confidence back after the Torres Del Paine (rather painful) experience!!