A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I snuck away from our kids and day-to-day to celebrate our 10-year wedding anniversary (1.5 years after the fact, but better late than never!). It was SO much fun! A full week of relaxing, sightseeing, eating delicious food and talking about 1 million things other than our daily routines.
When we were deciding where to go without the kids, we decided to go far. Somewhere we wouldn’t necessarily want to fly with our young kids any time soon. With flights to Chile not being astronomical, we booked our flights to Santiago. And then debated on where we wanted to go in Chile for weeks… Chile is crazy long and so diverse, from the desert in the north to glaciers in the south.
We settled on staying around the middle parts of the country, because we felt like it was a good choice for what we wanted to do. Flying into Santiago, we stayed here for the first few nights and really enjoyed this city. It was very warm so we were able to spend some time just reading and relaxing by the pool when we weren’t eating or sight seeing. I did take one of my cameras on the trip, but I have to be honest: Some days I carried it around with us without ever taking a single photo.
We hired a guide one day, who drove us through the Casablanca wine valley to Valparaiso to Vina del Mar and Renaca. We had debated on driving ourselves to and from Santiago, and we were both so happy that we decided against this. I’m pretty sure, we would’ve never been able to get around Valpo.
Our guide, David, was super nice and informative. He insisted on taking a photo of us next to a sign at a winery we visited… Not really our style, but we couldn’t say no. The thing is my camera is not a point and shoot and is set up to how I shoot with it… And despite detailed instructions on how to focus, these are the only real photos we have of us from the trip.
From Santiago, we flew south to the Lake District and based ourselves in Puerto Varas. Our hotel was walking distance from the center of the town, and we also rented a car for excursions to Frutillar, Petrohue and Chiloe. On the day of our Petrohue and Lago Todos los Santos trip, we drove all the way around Lago Llanquihue. The scenery around the lake is incredible, and Volcano Orsono is visible from almost anywhere.
I should tell you that neither one of us really speaks Spanish, and most Chileans don’t speak English (apparently only something like 5% do) so we had a few good laughs at ourselves during our trip. One thing that really gave us a chuckle was that some main roads were crazy bumpy dirt roads and explained why our rental car’s hubcaps were attached to the car with zip ties. And somehow we were able to get around without a GPS or a map. Thankfully, one of us has a great sense of direction (hint: It’s not my husband).
The Lake District gets a lot of rain, especially in their Fall and Winter months, but we lucked into only 1 hour of rain during our whole trip when we were in the car driving to the ferry for the island of Chiloe. I really wanted to see the penguins on Chiloe, but, first, we had to get to Ancud. It was hard to get a photo of the many sea lions that tagged along for our ferry crossing.
Obviously, this had to happen:
From Ancud we drove to a small beach town, where you get loaded up onto boats by a pretty clever system.
Unless your trolly gets stuck in the sand and has to be pulled out by a tractor. People were jumping up and down, because the waves were literally crashing onto them and soaking them.
The boats then took us out to a series of islands, where tons of penguins (and a few sea lions) are hanging out on the rocks. I was really hoping to see a penguin climb out of the water, but they were happy to lazily hang out in the sun.
I have a ton photos of penguins doing just this, but I decided to spare you from too many.
Since traveling is all about food for us, I have a few restaurant suggestions if you’re planning your next trip to Chile! Stay tuned for a full post on that next week.
