We begin our story in Chiloe, a beautiful little island in the mid-southern part of Chile with a history and food culture all its own.
The first thing you gotta know about Chiloe is how you get there. I got there by taking a bus. A 15-hour bus ride, folks! It was long, but not entirely disastrous. The three musketeers (Isela, Brian, and Michael) and I took a Cruz del Sur bus overnight to Puerto Montt, which is where the buses depart for Chiloe.
Now you may be thinking to yourself "Wait just a hot minute there Miss Anna Lee (you may call me your highness)! I thought you said Chiloe was an island?" (By the way if you're not thinking this you should really work on reading more carefully because detailed reading skills are very important and clearly yours are underdeveloped...but I digress)
To this I would reply "Why yes it is! But that didn't stop us from driving to it."
What I am taking forever to say here is that when you give a mouse a cookie... Just kidding.
To arrive in Chiloe they drive the bus straight onto a boat and navigate the whole system across the water to the island where they lower a ramp and the bus just drives right off. It's crazy and quite efficient.
So at around 7:45am the bus I had been peacefully sleeping in just drove right onto a dock and onto the back of a boat with me in it!
Here are the pictures.
early morning at the dock
Titanic: Pacific Edition
See? BUS on a BOAT!
Chiloe coming into view
Even though Chiloe is a small island it has various different cities. Ancud and Quellón are among the more popular ones to visit, but we stayed in Castro. It almost reminded of home.
their Castro
my Castro
:)
Castro is the capital of Chiloe, and we were lucky enough to arrive during the last day of a festival happening in the Parque Municipal. We immediately set our stuff down to go see what we could find out about Chiloean (I may have made this word up) culutre.
What we found was food...
drinks...
(that's apple juiced that I watched get hand pressed.)and, oh yeah, more food!
This last picture is of the most famous dish in Chiloe called curanto. Curanto is the term used for when a variety of things (potatoes, mussels, sausage, clams, abalone, and pork ribs, among other things) are cooked by burying them in earth with hot stones. Everything is carefully layered in then the whole thing is wrapped in these humongous leaves and left alone for about 2-3 hours. It takes about 6-8 people to pull off a big one like they had at the festival. We very much enjoyed the fruits of their hard labor.
In other news, Chiloe is turned out to be home to my favorite Chilean dish thus far. It's called milcao and it's pure magic. Let me break it down for you: It's salty pulled pork (á la carnitas only less crispy) inside a fried potato dough pocket. Picture a delicious jewish latke (if only I had the recipe for such a thing, [sigh] #dr.larryfeld) enveloping a tender salty spiced pork filling so that it looks like a round empanada. Is your mouth watering yet? My eyes rolled so far back in my head on account of the deliciousness that I was unable to snap a good picture of mine before I devoured it.
Luckily I stole this one off the internet to give you some idea.
swoon.
The other thing y'all should know about Chiloe is that it is very wet. The island gets some form of rain 300 days out of the year. Consequently there is very lush vegetation and a lot of it. We went to visit the Parque Nacional Chiloé to see all the different types of green Chiloé had to offer.
In order to enhance the appearance of anything always, always, always employ your sorority squat.
We finished our visit to the park at the beach, complete with sand dunes and a side-serving of (live) cattle (not shown).
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Tomorrow I'll show you my brief stop in Puerto Montt on the way to Puerta Natales, home of the Torres del Paine National Park. ¡Nos vemos!
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