Avoiding false economies

A peculiarity of Pucon is that, unlike almost all other places I've thus far been in South America, there was no element of breakfast included in the dorm price. The upside of this (at least from my point of view) is that there is no incentive to get up early in morning, and so I could take full advantage of the incredibly comfy orthopaedic mattresses and fluffy duvets with which the Treehouse had equipped its dorms. Once I finally did drag my lazy carcass out of bed, I headed off to make arrangements to go white-water rafting the next day. This actually involves slightly more effort than might be thought, as there are numerous agencies, respresenting the different actual rafting groups in town, usually with different prices. This would also be a good example of where some people occasionally make a false economy - some of the groups in town (particularly one group) are quite a bit cheaper, but a few questions brings to light the salient fact that the cheapest operator actually had a fatality on the river on New Year's Day. Suddenly, saving five pounds or so doesn't seem the most important thing.

After making my arrangements with a French-run combine called Aguaventura, I met up with Ross and Steve and took them to Volcamburguer, where I had some truly delicious salmon and rice. Ross then needed to get to an internet cafe to sort out some stuff back home, so Steve and I lounged around in the hammocks at the Treehouse for a bit, then we all ended up going to the beach. In Pucon, this translates to sitting around on a field of black gravel watching the more intrepid of those in attendance take a bracing dip in the lake. Once we had satisified our thirst for sun for the afternoon, we headed back to the hostel and slaked our thirst of the more regular kind with a few beers, before going on to a little local restaurant called Coronado for dinner. By now both fed and watered, we went and had a drink in one of the most popular local bars, which for its sins has been saddled with the name of Mamas and Tapas. Truly cringeworthy (in fact, almost as disturbing as the Escape-Goat...)

The bar itself is a nice enough setup, but I remember it now principally as the first place I sampled Chile's national cocktail, the Pisco Sour. This is another one of those marvels of simplicity which Latin America does well, consisting of Pisco, the local spirit (basically a kind of clear grape-based brandy-like drink), lemon juice, sugar and sometimes, a little bizarrely, egg-white (a small amount of this is apparently used to produce froth on top...). Personally, I'm not too keen on the egg bit, but the drink itself managed to fill a small part of the void in my travelling lifestyle left by the absence of caipirinhas since leaving Brasil. Mamas and Tapas also introduced us to another Small World moment, as Ross bumped into an Irish lad called Killian, whom he'd met in Torres del Paine and who was travelling around South America with his kayak. As you do.

Mamas and Tapas was pretty quiet, though, surprisingly so for somewhere that was reputed to be the most popular bar in a major tourist destination, so we headed along the road to the Krater Bar, which turned out to be roughly as dead but did at least have the joys of pitchers of Kunstmann beer to make up for it. We decided that we were simply unlucky enough to have turned up in town just after the last weekend of the school summer holidays, so all the locals had headed home, and there weren't many gringos as a lot of them had headed east to Rio for Carnaval. At any rate, we engaged in a wee bit of people-watching and marvelled at one of the town's legion of stray dogs, which regarded part of the road opposite the bar as its own, and barked and jumped around if any vehicle tried to park in it or drive away again - the best moment was probably its showdown with a pickup truck which ended with the dog chasing the truck down the road for a block, barking as if its life depended on it. And then tiredness kicked in, amplified for the other lads by the fact they had to be up bright and early for their bus down south in the morning.