Cruce de Lagos; the Lakes Crossing, Patagonian Argentina to Chile via Peulla (Part Two)

Room with a view; from our hotel in Peulla

Following from yesterday's entry where my mum Ann and I travelled from Bariloche in Argentina to Puerto Alegre, where we were stamped out of Argentina we pick up our plight, stateless in the Andes...

At Puerto Alegre, which is not a town but rather one shop & a customs building on the border of Lago Frias, we were torn between the mandatory stamping of our passports out of Argentina, and the delicious smell of hot chocolate wafting from the nearby sells-everything shop. It turned out the chocolate was cooked in saucepans and mixed with fresh hot milk by the store-lady on request; the shop also exchanges pesos for pesos (Argentinian to Chile) which is of utmost importance; there's little love lost between the countries and nowhere in Chile will accept the other kind of peso.

One thing I should mention is that on the short bus ride from Puerto Blest to Puerto Alegre, we passed a 700 year old tree, Alerce, which has the potential to join it's cousins in the nearby forest in growing to 4,000 years old. Just imagine!

Blue-eyed llama, Peulla

After departing Argentina officially if not literally, a 1.5 hour bus ride took us through a beautiful forest past the official border between the countries where we hopped off to photograph the moment. It may sound like a lot of bus-boat-bus-boat, and of course it is, but the guides are so informative and helpful, and the scenery so beautiful and interesting, that it never felt tedious. Travelling to Peulla past fields of alpacas, llamas, cows and horses, all in lush fields framed by the mountains, was truely fantastic. We passed the glacier of Mt Tonador, icy blue and sparkling in the sunshine, then broke out into the flat plain of Peulla with the tiny little town of 140 inhabitants in the distance.

A very serious customs process greeting, with bags searched for fruits, animal products etc that could harm Chiles delicate and important agriculture and native plant species, and we were officially stamped in to Chile. The country, because of it's excellent controls and thanks in no small part to the natural borders of the Andes and the ocean, is free of many diseases and pests such as fruit fly, bird and swine flus, mad cow disease.

Peulla is almost beyond description; a little Eden in the middle of the Andes with a lush evergreen forest on one side, and the beautiful snow-capped mountains of the Andes on the other. Because it is in a National Park and so isolated, there are really only people involved in customs or tourism in the town and it is an absolute gem. This is the place to get away from everything - or to treat yourself to a slice of nature's paradise.

TBC!! (sorry....slow internet connection + being somewhere so exotic leads to inconsistent blog updating)