South American Honeymoon!

Found a lovely place to stay in Valdivia - met a nice old woman who didn't have room in her house so she took us to her friends house, who then took us to her daughters house which turned out to be the nicest place we've had so far....and cheap!!

A lovely town with a great Mapuche Craft Market.....

But the best thing by far was the fish market where there were loads of wild sea lions that came up from the river for scraps.

They were gorgeous and some of them were absolutely huge (from all the fish heads they get from the market!).

After the market finished they were all just lazing around on the pavement next to the river. Tried to get a close up of Steve with one of them but he scared us away!

Steve dragged me to the local brewery (for our one month wedding anniversary!) where he enjoyed a lovely big glass of beer....as you can see

He then tried to make it up to me by taking me to the cheapo students' hangout down the road from our hostel - quite nice but reeaally smokey!!

Took a bus to nearby Fuerte de Niebla - The ruins of a Spanish fort constructed in 1671 to protect Spanish interests against the Dutch, British and Mapuches.

Got to Pucon on 09/04 - Fantastic town full of wooden buildings overlooked by Volcan Villarrica.

The weather was absolutely poxy and it didn't stop raining from morning till night but we met loads of lovely people in our hostel and sat around the log fires chatting all day. Eventually the rain stopped (briefly), and the locals called us outside to see the volcano - apparently it was their first snow-fall of the year and the volcano was completely white as the sun was setting....

The picture isn't that clear but you can see the red reflecting off the snow.

We decided it was about time we got fit so we went hiking in Huerquehue National Park. The bus journey there was great - winding up and around the mountains looking down on the lovely views.

Nice park with a couple of good waterfalls but think it was a bit silly of us to do all that walking the day before planning to climb a huge volcano!!

Dragged ourselves out of bed at 4am for a sunrise climb up Volcan Villarrica (one of the most active in Chile we found out AFTERWARDS!!). Had a cup of tea and put on as many layers as we possibly could and then the proper climbing gear they provided us with...and got a chance to use the headtorch we bought for an occasion just like this!

Started out about 5.30am and it was really hard, the first part of it was sand-like and it was pitch black and we were ready to give up after about 10 minutes!

Here we are collapsed on our first break...

The guides were fantastic and kept us going and it got easier, especially when the sun came up. We were just getting into the swing of it when we reached 1800m and were told we couldn't go any further because it was too dangerous due to poor weather conditions (we wanted to keep climbing to the top, honestly!). So, after a choccy break and some photos we had to make our way back down again which was much more fun than the way up! All my fingers and toes had started to go numb while we'd stopped but as we moved down the volcano I said to Steve 'it's really starting to warm up nicely' and the guide told us it was actually -12C (must be toughening up a bit)!!!

When we got to the bottom there was a blizzard so we decided to get out of Pucon and move onto Santiago where the sun should be shining!!