Pucon: Una Refleciòn (Wednesday February 16th--Day 99)

Any guidebook will tell you that Pucon is Chile´s capital of extreme sports and outdoor adventure. The surrounding landscape lends itself perfectly to this lifestyle. A small town surrounded by a series of lakes for boating and swimming, a network of rivers for fly fishing and rafting, an endless amount of beautiful dense forest for camping and hiking, a valley of rolling hills for biking and horseback riding, a galore of treacherous cliffs for climbing, and a few active snowcapped volcanoes for mountaineering. Once extreme sports enthusiasts from Chile, Argentina, and countries around the world began to flock to Pucon, other activities began to flourish. Canopy tours, skydiving, parasailing. The usual. Now a hub for tourism, Pucon´s entire is basically based on this exchange. In February, the month when all white collar Chileans receive for vacation, the town is packed with people from Santiago. For the rest of the summer months—the end of December, January, March, and the beginning of April—it is filled with international backpackers heading to and from Patagonia. It´s an absolutely wonderful place to see. A must on anyone´s agenda. And as usual, I have somehow managed to have the absolute best living situation.

Here´s my story. I am living about 30km outside of Pucon on a rather large plot of family land. I avoid the rush of Pucon, I can still easily get to the town through public transportation, and I have a fantastic view of a live smoking volcano. The family has owned and worked this land for nearly half of a century. On this fully functional farm, there is a small organic garden with a the basics: tomatoes, carrots, five varieties of beans, potatoes, peas, mint, rosemary, potatoes, onions, basil, and a mountain of cilantro. There is also a series of barns and fenced in land where the family raises animals. There are cows for milking and for selling, chickens for meat and eggs, geese for selling and eating, sheep for shearing and grazing, pigs for selling and compost, and llamas for selling and shearing. When the work is done (which it never is), there is time to explore the three rivers (Kila Leufu means three rivers in Mapuche), multiple streams, dense forests, and endless fields. It´s paradise. Essentially.

But, like the rest of Pucon, they too gain their primary income from tourism. The house functions as a hostel, and can accept up to 20 guests at a time. There is also a ruka in the backyard, which is a wooden hut where Mapuche ancesters lived and cooked (Irma is Mapuche, which is the native population here in Southern Chile and Argentina). So apart from the usual hotel guests, we also accept tours and private groups who want to see and experience true Mapuche culture. We talk about the culture, show them the fully functional farm, and feed them incredible Mapuche food that has taken hours and hours to prepare. We get a range of people, and have to be prepared for anything (for example Yuri, the internationally known Mexican singer, came for Lunch the other day). So in order to do my job the best possible way, I have to learn to cook all of the Mapuche meals (delicious) and get to know Pucon (naturally). So I have been sent to Currarehue, the last remaining Mapuche strong hold in Chile, to visit the museum and to eat delicious food. I have been given a free private mountaineering trip to climb Volcano Villarica (one of the world´s most active); so while guided groups of 15 to 20 scaled the mountain, my guide and I (fully equppied with ice picks, mountaineering boots, helmets, and crampons) raced up the mountain and slid down on plastic sleds. I have been given the morning to go talk to artisans in Villarica about their products. And I was given a day off from work to spend nine hours hiking through the backcountry of Parque Huerquehue, a beautiful gem of a national park filled with dense damp forests and beautiful lakes. I still have horseback riding, thermal baths, and a few more mountains to go before I can say with confidence that I know Pucon. But there is time, and I am off to a really great start for week one. It is not all fun and games. We work seven days a week, fourteen hours a day, without any break. But just think, I would have been perfectly content just to work in a warm house with a loving family and a ton of tomatoes to trellis. What a great bonus.

So go to Pucon. Live it up. Don´t be too threatened by the heeps of tourists in the center. Find yourself a place outside of town and learn to love this place.