Pucón has to be the adventure capital of Chile, with perhaps more bat-shit crazy adventurous things to do here than you can poke a stick at. The snow-capped Volcán Villarrica towers over everything with a constant wisp of grey curling smoke pluming out of the top. It’s quite threatening really when you understand it is…

We left our rustic cabin in Chiloé at 7.30am in cold and overcast conditions, the complete opposite of the past few days, but I guess more typical of summer here. It takes around an hour and half to reach the ferry point at Chacao and just a 20-minute crossing over the grey choppy channel to…

  What is so surprising about driving around the island is the stunning views across the Golfo de Ancud, over to the mainland and beyond towards Argentina, where the towering snow-capped Andes almost reach down to the sea and snowy volcanoes loom large. This has to be one of Chile’s narrowest points as here the…

A truly stunning summer’s day dawned on Sunday, quite the contrast to the previous week’s cold, wet and overcast days, so we took full advantage of this apparently rare fine weather and hit the Circuito Iglesias de Chiloé (the Circuit of the Churches) which is confined to the central eastern side of the island on…

Despite it being high summer here in Chiloe it can still act and feel like winter, with extremely changeable weather turning around in a matter of hours. The days are long with sunrise at 6am and sunset pushing 10pm so yesterday’s cold, wet and windy conditions felt unrelenting, especially with the added inconveniences the day…

Not a lot of people know this, but over 90% of the modern world’s potatoes are actually descended from specific varieties native to Chiloé. There are some 400 varieties of spud here known locally as papas nativas or papas chilotas and they come in all shapes, sizes and colours with mixed bags of them sold…

What a gorgeous summer’s day here in Chiloé, though a chilly start at just zero degrees first thing this morning! Not a cloud in the sky but a breath of chilled wind drew some tendrils of fog across the sound, just enough for Ants to claim that he could hear music coming across the bay…or…

We enjoyed our first evening in the cabin, watching the light slowly fade (real slow mind you) until sunset at 9.30, but it was still light enough towards 10pm to turn the sound into a silvery blue shimmer with the wind shearing over the buoys of the salmon pens. Talk about magical. After a cold…

When Darwin came to the archipelago of Chiloé in 1835 he described it as ‘the end of Christendom’. He was referring in part to its location at the end of the world, but also drawing on what the Spanish Conquistadors had struggled with centuries before, the ancient pagan traditions of the native peoples. These involve…

“I pictured a low timber house with a shingled roof, caulked against storms, with blazing log fires inside and the walls lined with all the best books, somewhere to live when the rest of the world blew up.” – Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia No walls lined with the best books I’m afraid but thank goodness for…