Well, our dinner with nice wine had a few set backs at our first night camping at Lake Caburgua: first the only cork screw we have on a pocket knife (came as a free gift from some catalogue my Dad orders from – made in Chiba) broke off with the metal screw part inside the cork – I managed to crumble enough of the cork away until the broken metal but was exposed and we used our tools fir the first time – the pliers did the trick to get the cork out and we could enjoy the very nice red drop from our friends from Puertocillo. The next problem of the evening was that the MSR stove would not fire up properly and we could not get a blue flame and tge water we tried to boil to cook the pasta took 2 hours to heat up to luke warm – meanwhile the temperature had dropped to 5 degrees and the only thing keeping us warm was the red wine 🍷😉 I added the pasta when it looked like some bubbles appeared at the bottom but the pasta never cooked – so we had starchy just slightly softened spiral pasta and cold tomato sauce with it – quite disappointing and we got to bed frozen through the bone well after midnight.

The next day we had a sleep in, then discovered that I had forgotten to buy milk for the cereal the other day in Villarrica at the shops – oops 😳 but luckily there was a little kiosk at the campground and we hit fresh milk and then enjoyed a very nice breakfast (without coffee or tea – as we were not keen on giving the stove another go without cleaning it first. We used the rest of the day for clothes washing, bike maintenance ( checked tyre pressure, lubed the chains and mounted the go pro on Andrew’s bike and my little “Mum” teddy bear on my bike). I cleaned the fuel stove and Andrew went to town and bought a gas cartridge – luckily we brought our gas adaptor and we had a nice cuppa late in the afternoon – cooking with gas 😂 literally 👍 I went for a late swim just before the sun set behind the mountains and discovered that the volcanic rocks were very very sharp.

We had nice hot pasta cooked on the gas stove, finished the wine and had a chat with new neighbours. Then we were gifted the most delicious tasting meat (chicken and beef) that the large family next door had cooked – we gave the kids stickers with Australian animals and had a great last night sleep in Chile.

We finally got all the paperwork for our insurance sent through and we were preparing for crossing into Argentina on Saturday.