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Puerto Varas is a fun adventure-oriented town, a stop for many backpackers who visit Chile, and often a jumping-off point for various types of treks into Patagonia. We actually scheduled our visit to Puerto Varas after our stay in Patagonia, on the way north to Santiago before heading home. And the most exciting aspect of the town for us? Not the lake, the volcano, or the German-inspired architecture. While all those things were nice, what was truly amazing was our first ATM in over eight days:

We were down to about $10, and damn, we were getting nervous.

Just across the water from Termas de Puyuhuapi (a 10-minute speed boat ride and a 15 minute bus ride) is the Parque Nacional Quelat, a beautiful park full of humongous nalca plants and large tepa trees and some nice hiking. The park is generally very difficult to access, as it’s somewhere in the middle of the Carretera Austral — dirt road for over 1000 km. But visitors to the Termas have easy access, and they run at least one organized excursion out there every day. Our excursion was a hike on the “Glacier Viewpoint Trail” — which took us to an amazing viewpoint from which we could see a hanging glacier.

Our second morning at the Termas de Puyuhuapi, we arose at 6am to board a catamaran down to Laguna San Rafael — a day-long boat ride among the fjords down to see one of Chile’s most spectacular glaciers. The boat itself was pretty darn classy — it felt like flying business-class, what with the constant meals and seats the folded all the way back. And the views were pretty amazing too:

When we arrived at the glacier, they took us out in little Zodiac boats so that we could get a closer look. I had never been so close to a glacier by boat before; our guide took our boat right up to some of the floating icebergs, so close that we could touch them if we wanted to:

We got to see some amazing instances of calving — when a chunk of the glacier breaks off and falls into the water below. The danger of a big calved piece of iceberg falling on top of you is the primary reason that you can’t take the Zodiac boats up even closer to the glacier:

Back on the catamaran, they had grabbed part of an iceberg out of the water, which they were using to serve whiskey and pisco sours:

And even on the catamaran, the driver wasn’t afraid to get really close to icebergs so that we could get a good look at them. No Titanic-like situations for us though, fortunately…

Coyhaique is home to 37,000 people, and is the capital of Patagonia. It’s a cute enough town, but one that few people have much reason to visit, especially considering that it is isolated from the rest of Chile — reachable only by a plane flight to Balmaceda or a 1,000 km drive on a dirt road from Puerto Montt. But you might want to make the trip for the amazing ceviche, at Hotel El Reloj:

Yum.

(Yeah, I know it’s weird to take pictures of your food. But this was pretty.)

Kenny and I had the amazing opportunity of attending Marcelo and Laura’s wedding in Buenos Aires. It was a fabulous affair, and in true BA style, the partying continued until 6:15 AM (unfortunately we had to leave just after 2AM to catch a flight to Santiago).

Here’s most of the Avalon crew at the reception with the happy new husband:

Still a bit shocked to be married, he shows off his wedding band: