Quick detour to the south

Initially the plan was to immediately head north after returning from Rapa Nui and travel to La Serena.
As it often goes with unplanned travel, though, you meet other travelers who really sell you the idea of something you haven’t thought about doing or has never been on your radar at all.

Being really proud with myself for having a rough skeleton of an idea for the next 1-2 weeks, I was quickly talked into doing a 180 and travel to Pucon in the south to spontaneously hike an active volcano (“Villarrica”) instead.

Traveling to Pucon took a 10-hour overnight bus ride and I arrived at 0630h the next morning. All of South America is asleep at that time and check in with my hostel was only possible from 1530h on, so I just roamed the streets and took in the amazing scenery.

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The first day I was busy with figuring out the hike for the next day, which meant finding a tour agency and getting all the preparations done.
I booked through my hostel and had to visit the agency for gear fitting – most of the gear, including shoes, gloves and waterproof pants and jacket, is provided by the agency.
The fitting took around 3 minutes. Talking to Sol, the agency’s front desk power woman, took another two hours. Turns out she is a big fan of Hundertwasser and Vienna in general, worked for a couple of years in France and Spain and recently fell in love with volcanoes. She fed me some nice information about the volcano and my further travels in general, as she’d visited a lot of the places on my itinerary in the past already. In exchange I showed her some pictures of Hundertwasser buildings in Vienna.

The rest fo the day was dedicated to socialising with my roommates at the hostel.

The hike

Pickup at 0615h in the morning, a quick gear check at the agency and then a drive to the base of the volcano.

The summit of the volcano is at 2.848 meters and you start in the Villarrica National Park at an altitude of around 1.400m, which means during your hike you gain around 1.450m.
My last hike I believe was last summer, took me around two hours and a 30 meter elevation gain. As the Australians like to say:
“She’ll be right, mate”

You can choose if you want to skip the first part of the hike and use 2 chair lifts, but as I had fun joking around with my hiking buddy Shannon, we both decided to walk the first bit as well, which added another hour to the hike.

The first 2-3 hours of the hike are on gravel and rock and do a good job preparing your body for the things to come. Because after this first part you cramp on your crampons (Steigeisen) and proceed to hike the glacial part of the volcano, covered in ice and snow. So, the next stage of the hike took us up a mixture of snow and ash/dust in serpentines and went on for another 2 hours.
This was also when I first started feeling a slight pain in my left knee, thinking “She’ll be right, mate”…

Around 200 people hike the volcano every day and I thought that it would be crowded all the way up, but our guides did a great job in making us feel like the only up there by splitting up the groups and choosing different routes.

After around 5-6 hours in total we reached the base of the summit and got rid of all the unnecessary gear to hike the last stretch to the crater as light as possible. Every group gets roughly 15 minutes at the crater, partly to avoid too much traffic up there, secondly because of the sulfuric vapors constantly being emitted by the volcano.

Had the views already been breathtaking on the hike up, they were nothing compared to what was waiting for us at the summit.

The descent

To speed up the descent a little bit, we found little plastic sleds packed in our backpacks for exactly that purpose. The first 45 minutes or 1000 vertical meters I used my legs mainly for braking instead of walking.

That was the second time I felt a pain in my left knee, this time nowhere near “She’ll be right, mate” but more in the direction of “AH GOD DAMNIT I CAN’T WALK ANYMORE!!!”
With quite some delay compared to the rest of the group I reached the top station of the chair lift and had to take it down, because hiking was out of the question for me.

After almost exactly 11 hours we got back to the agency, greeted with snacks and beers, to wind down and debrief.
By that time my knee had adapted a rather unhealthy look and was in desperate need for a day of rest and relaxation.

Next stop:
Santiago de Chile -> La Serena