Valdivia, Chile

Once again, quoting from Paul’s mass email:

Valdavia was an interesting town on an island of sorts in between three or four rivers. Back in 1960 there was a humongous earthquake, supposedly the largest in recorded history, registering a 9.5 on the Richter for three and a half minutes. The earthquake supposedly caused a couple of huge tidal waves, one of which hit Hawaii 12 hours later and was still 24 meters high or something. So there wasn’t a whole lot of historic stuff to see there. We us and the cali girls, Jenny and Rebekah did go on a “three hour tour” on the river, to see some birdlife and lovely scenery- no shipwreck, no island, but it was fun to speculate about. There was also an old fort outside of town that we went to see, basically a few cannons and a couple of walls, but it was interesting. We also visited a Kuntsman (excellent German style beer) brewery and took a short tour and sampled a few of the local beverages. Much of southern Chili around here was settled by Germans back at the end of the 19th century, so there is a little bit of a cultural difference here- German beer, architecture, etc. The girls headed off on Friday, up towards Mendoza, Argentina, and we continued on south to the town of Puerto Varas. I should mention that it is starting to get a bit colder the farther south we go, and pretty much everyone we have met is going in the opposite direction and thinks we’re crazy to be heading south right now. So we might cross over to Argentina earlier than we had planned on, leaving Tierra del Fuego and the southern Patagonia for another trip, or we might tough it out, and freeze for a few weeks. We shall see…

Thanks Paul for the text.