As everyone who has ever camped knows, we woke up early in Lican Ray, hehe. That’s fine by us as we will be leaving Lican Ray today to continue our “whirlwind” tour of southern Chile. You can already see where we’re going, but we will get to that later. For now we get up, get ready, and walk down towards the lake for one last look.

Now, it looks pretty impressive, and we love to look out over the lake… but with our actual eyes we can see things that you just can’t see in the above picture. Like the volcano off in the distance. Luckily, we can fix that.

We’re pretty sure that that is Mocho-Choshuenco Volcano, about 50 kilometres away.

Very beautiful, just like all of southern Chile with all of the lakes, volcanoes, mountains, rivers, etc. If you want to explore natural beauty… then southern Chile is a nice place to visit. But, we wanted to keep relaxing at the end of the dock, but we can’t. We have to get back up to our campsite to take it all down and get moving.

We shower, pack up, and then it is time to leave the campsite. Although it was a short stay, it was a nice one. We can see why there were quite a few people here (and a few of them did as we did and only spent one night here).

Well… we start walking. We’re hopeful that maaaayyyyybe someone will pick us up as the ladies did yesterday, but no such luck. Instead we piled our tent and bags onto our backs and headed off down the long dirt driveway, then the “long” walk back to Lican Ray. Luckily we had some company and could split all of our things.

In “no time” we’re back at the main square of Lican Ray. Here we go and ask which bus will take us to Coñaripe. The process is really easy and the busses leave very frequently. The time between the two pictures below was only about 30 minutes, not bad at all! And the bus fares are not very expensive either (for people that have currencies that are strong against the Chilean peso).

As you can maybe assume, we made it to the central square in Coñaripe where the above picture is taken in front of the information centre. Here we entered to ask where we could possibly set up a tent for the night. As in Lican Ray, our travel partner had previously looked up potential campsites, but it is always best to ask the locals. They gave us some options and we called ahead before deciding on where to go. From the information centre it was not a far walk (~10 minutes) to our campground where we quickly set up our tent and were on our way. No time to rest!

So, what is there to do in Coñaripe? Well, the information centre has a lot of information. As we have previously mentioned, the main draw to this area is the natural landscape. The information centre had information about fishing, geothermal springs, waterfalls, etcetera but we don’t have time to do all of that, so instead we just go for a calm walk along the lake.

This is still Lake Calafquen, the same lake we stayed on the shores of in Lican Ray, but where Lican Ray is on the northern coast of the lake in the Araucania region, we are now on the south eastern tip of the lake in the Los Rios region (translated as “The Rivers”). That means that we are still able to see volcanoes from the beach of the lake with the first one (left) likely being Mocho-Choshuenco Volcano (almost 40 kilometres away) and the second still being Villarrica Volcano (just under 20 kilometres away). Add that and the black volcanic beach and this is a beautiful walk along the lake. As with all the other towns we have been in, there is a municipal beach that is right outside of “downtown” where there are quite a few people, vendors, and games that is pretty full but if you walk in either direction you will quickly feel pretty isolated, and that’s great for us! Hehe.

(Obviously we hadn’t walked far enough in the above picture, but we would, don’t you worry). We keep walking until we come across a wetlands on the side of the lake.

However, it’s closed off. It says that it is a protected area and they are trying to rescue it. Fair enough. We can understand trying to preserve nature, even if we are curious to physically see it with our own eyes. Especially when you put it all together… Lake Calafquen in front of us, the Wetlands of Coñaripe behind us, the Linoico River to our left, a nature preserve with a lot of birds just beyond that, green hills in every direction we look, Villarrica Volcano 20 kilometres to our right, and Mocho-Choshuenco Volcano 40 kilometres behind us. It really is a place that is absolutely beautiful. And no pictures would do it justice… unless it is a 360-degree picture, hehe. So, shameless plug, you can go look at this area of Coñaripe on our Kuula site, hehe.

My partner and friend also spend time taking pictures and filming while around here. See? Everyone agrees that it is beautiful! So much so that they both forget to take pictures to show you, haha. But that’s okay, you can see videos and those are better after all. After walking around down here we go back to the information centre to ask some questions about what to do tomorrow with the next leg of our adventure. As we get that information we also see that there is information for an international crossing that some of you may be interested in. We didn’t do it on this trip, but we can fully recommend that it is a beautiful crossing if you want to try something a little “different”.

We always talk about the fact that we are in “southern Chile” but we never talk about how narrow Chile is. One fact that many people know about Chile is just how skinny it is, well, here is some “proof”. We are in southern Chile but the boat we talked about above is a boat that goes to Argentina. The boat leaves from Neltume (about an hour away from Coñaripe) and crosses the Pirehueico Lake to drop you off just 10 minutes away from Argentina. Wouldn’t be a bad ride, huh? In the below picture the lake we are talking about is to the right of the green natural park you see at the bottom of the highlighted area. You probably can’t make it out, but it is there, haha. And the lake we’re on is at the very top of the highlighted area. Again, probably can’t make it out, haha.

Well, we go to the grocery store, get a few things that we need for tonight, and then head on back towards the campground passing through the main square again. Here we take a picture of a tree that is endemic to this part of the world, the araucaria. Also, you can notice that the name is very similar to the region where Lican Ray, Villarrica, and Pucon are all located, the Region of Araucania. It is also known as the Monkey Puzzle tree in the English speaking world. These can get gigantic and are common at higher elevations (this one is purposefully planted here). You may be able to make them out in some of the far off pictures of volcanoes that we have previously posted, but probably not, haha.

And that’s it! That is our day. We go back to the campsite, make some food, eat, and then just settle in for the night. Or so we thought… we were curious to see just what the lake and surroundings looked like as the sun was setting… so of course we went and took a look! Hehe.

It was very nice, but, we decided to stay even longer. The campsite is literally on the lake, so it takes us about 30 seconds to get back there from the beach. It was well worth staying. Coñaripe has a population of just under 1,500 people, so you can imagine that it is VERY dark at night and we could clearly see all of the stars. That alone was great! But…

That’s the Villarrica Volcano. Now you can clearly see why it is in a yellow warning. Every night it just has this red-yellow glow about it as the lava moves around inside its crater. It was so cool! If only we were professional photographers… We used our bigger camera and zoomed in on it and everything, but my travel partner never managed to get a usable picture out of it. (He should probably actually learn to take pictures rather than just point-and-shoot!) But that’s okay. We don’t aim to show you absolutely everything, just a lot, haha. The other bit is for you to come and experience as well! With that we were getting tired and walked our 30 seconds back to the campsite and settled in for the night. Good night from Coñaripe!