Last Couple of Months from Jeff's Perspective
Trip to Puerto Montt
One of the real pleasures of working abroad includes the opportunity to travel around the country a little. I recently had a working trip to the lake country of Chile, to the town of Puerto Montt.
Chile is an amazing country, but it is hard to fit on a map in any detail because of its shape. However, the red arrow on this map depicts Puerto Montt's location in Chile. It is about a 10 hour drive to the south of Santiago in a region called Llanqihue (pronounced Yahnkee-way, a Mapuche word for deep place).
Puerto Montt is primarily a port town that services the agricultural areas that produce beef, wool, timber, and lots and lots of fish. You can see why by this close up. It is also a very popular tourist area with the Pacific Ocean to the west, the inland estuaries, crystal clear lakes and rivers and the Andes mountains to the East.
So I won't bore you with work, but here are a few items from the local paper as well as a statuette that the Carabineros (Chilean National Police) gave me to commemorate my visit. The link is to the local newspaper interview I had about my visit. In there is a picture of my meeting with Juan Carlos Gallardo Gallardo, the Governor so nice, they named him twice!
Yes, it is pure cheese. But I figured it was pretty cool because they put my name on the uniform and made me a colonel. By far, it is the best present for showing up I have ever received.
I didn't have a lot of daylight with which to take pictures, but I did get some time at lunch at a restaurant called "Embassy" that had been recommended by my colleague, Camilla. It is located at the edge of the sheltered harbor of Puerto Montt and offers a local specialty called "curanto". These are my photos. this is my lunch story.
It looks like a lot of food. Well, okay, it IS a lot of food, but most of the mass that you see there is shellfish. The rest is a potato, dumpling, sausage, and chicken quarter. They also served bread and different types of sauces and a broth made from the stock used to prepare the curanto. Both Alethia, my erstwhile colleague, and I got one, as the waiter claimed they were individual portions. We suffered for our art.
So here are some pictures from the area. I took a Saturday after my two day work trip to explore a little. It was early May and I got lucky with the weather in an area famous for having more than a meter of annual rainfall.
The market at Angelmo, near the edge of Puerto Montt is very scenic and features fishermen bringing in their fresh catch to market.
While the market is picturesque, it is clearly not a purely tourist market at this time of the year after the cruise ships have stopped disgorging their passengers. Regular folks use this market to shop for food, buy second hand clothing, flowers, you name it. You can see plenty of indigenous people here selling fruits from what are likely to be subsistence farms (judging by the low quantity of the offers and the fact that they just plop down a crate anywhere and don't pay a stall fee.
So, later, I checked out of the Holiday Inn (yes, they are the same in Chile as they are everywhere) and went to the airport. I rented a Citroen (the latest in the line of humiliations at the hands of French automobile manufacturers) and headed for the lakes.
If you look to the north of Puerto Montt, you might notice a big lake. To the east of the lake are two volcanos. Yep, I'm from Louisiana and Texas and while I have seen mountains and even skied them, I have not been to a volcano, so I headed for Osorno...and the little village of Petrohue, which is in a national park, to the right of the big lake. Passing through Puerto Varas, I thought about stopping in that picturesque resort town to eat at La Olla but views of Vulcan Osorno beckoned to me across the lake. Still full from lunch two days prior and a delicious dinner at El Fogon de Pepe.
So, I drove on to these great views.
More to come.
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