Puerto Varas, Chile – a 3 day delay on Lago Llanquihue

Total Miles Traveled: 10,126

On a friend’s (Joey L.) recommendation, we flew from Punta Arenas to Puerto Montt in southern Chile with the plan to do the Lakes crossing over to Bariloche in Argentina, but first staying in Puerto Varas for a couple nights.  Here’s a map of the journey:

Puerto Varas is the “beginning” of the Lakes district, overlooking Lake Llanquihue and is flanked by two dormant volcanoes, Osorno and Calbuco (above).  It’s a pretty touristy town with brand names like North Face, Benetton, Orvis and other big brand name shops, a large modern casino with signs promoting Texas Hold’em (too bad we’re not really in to poker), and expensive restaurants lake side.  You can see that it’s definitely a summer vacation town because there is an abundance of lodging and restaurants, but when we were there, very few people.

Anyway, it rained for 3 days so we decided to delay our trip in to Argentina.   Not unusual for the area though, because they get 36 inches of rain per year.   So, not much to report outside of a couple of dining experiences below.

Before we get to that though, we’ve decided that in writing this blog, we’re going to be making some mundane notes about the places we stayed, just in case folks ask us about it later, because we probably won’t remember the details after some time.  Skim as appropriate!

To keep costs down, we stayed at a B&B called Tradicion Austral, which was literally someone’s house.  That said, John and Teresa were gracious hosts – John is originally from Indiana and lived in Fiji and Tahiti as a horticulturalist before moving to Chile to start a cranberry bog.  No joke.  The business opportunity was there because Ocean Spray owned most of the market in the U.S.  And he’s been in Chile for 10 years because he met his wife, Teresa, a native Chilena, who is super nice and helpful with travel arrangements.

As for food, we ate at Donde El Gordito one night, which was featured on Anthony Bourdain’s show at one point.  Here’s what we tried – first we had the Camarones al Pil Pil, because we were craving seafood after having meat almost every night in Argentina.

Then, because there’s a lot of salmon (farming/catching) in the area, we had salmon “gordito” style, which was super rich – poached in butter with a butter-based salsa – very representative of the owner’s namesake, literally translated, “the fat one”.

The lakeside restaurant, Mediterraneo, while OK, was overpriced (U.S. prices, if not more) and I suspect many of the lakeside places were also.  The other place we tried, Dominga, was a Japanese/Peruvian fusion place tucked away on the edge of town.  We had a couple rolls, which were kind of meh, and pricey for what they were.  Maybe Chile’s just more expensive than Argentina or maybe we went to touristy places.  Here’s a fried pork, ham, egg roll with a creamy sauce of some kind:

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Next up, we cross the Lakes district in to Argentina.