We eventually left our “French Cabaña” after midday waiting out a few heavy downpours. I still wore my one piece full wet weather gear and we fuelled up in Futrono on our way out of town. We rode through more farm land on mostly good roads for 102km until Panguipulli on Lago Panguipulli, where we first stopped at the “Lider” supermarket to stock up on supplies because we planned to camp after our one night stay at Wincarayen Cabañas and also had been looking for razor blades for several days and we could only get the disposable razors but not the refill blades. The carpark to this Lider shop was through a gate with a ticket machine – never had encountered that before – we were eventually let through after a lady kept yelling instructions through the intercom and I took the ticket with a QR code on it. We managed to get everything we had looked for a while including razor blades, a fruit and nut mix, and a bottle of wine and some very nice ciabatta rolls and ham. After the check out was security and you had to show your receipt and the security guard then randomly took items and scanned them to see if they were on the receipt. This was the first time we encountered such strict security. We managed to pack it all in the cooler bag and I took my wet weather gear off as it had cleared up and was quite warm. When we left the car park we had to show the piece of paper with the QR code and then had to pay for parking 😳 – this is the first time in our entire trip we had to pay for parking at a shopping centre 😂

We left the shops, refuelled and hoped to find a nice place by the lake to have our bread rolls but in Panguipulli at the waterfront was no parking and we continued to Mirador Pulinque where we stopped briefly and then decided to continue straight to the Cabañas only a few minutes further. We turned at a sign of a Mapuche comunidad, up a steep gravel road and the cabanas were behind a locked gate. We waited until Hernán came to open the gates and we rode to where Valentina showed us to park the bikes. They welcomed us warmly and showed us our Cabaña which had a large window looking over the forest and was built over a stream and you could hear flowing water underneath. We had arranged for them to get an outdoor hot tub ready for us for the evening – same style as we did not get to use in Chaitén with the unfriendly old grumpy lady. It took 6-8 hours to get the water heated with a wood-fired stove. We unpacked and had our lunch outside and walked around the lovely garden and I found another Fuchsia bush with hummingbirds which they call “colibri” – same as the German word and I took more video footage – they are becoming my favourite birds on the trip so far – together with the pink flamingoes 🤗 And I am yet to see one of the colourful kingfishers🤞.

We then went to the hot tub in their nice and warm hoodies and slippers they provide and had to put quite a bit of extra cold water in before we managed to get in – it was so hot that our skin turned very red 😂 but we got the temperature right and enjoyed the hot tub until the late evening when the full moon was out – so relaxing and wonderful and we had the place to ourselves – no other guests. Hernán came and lit the wood fired stove for us in the Cabaña and we quickly decided that we would stay a second night here and also organised kayaking for the next morning at 9:00 am with our lovely hosts.

The internet was very good and we made good use of it. Andrew finally managed to sell his FJR1300 with the help of Seb 🙏 in Australia after it had been advertised for 3.5 months and we had a phone call at 3:50am to settle the deal.

After breakfast, we got a lift in the Ute of our hosts to the same lookout where we had stopped on our way to the Cabañas the day before where we put the open double kayak in the water. We had two hours to explore the lake on our own. It was magical with steam rising over the lake, autumn coloured leaves falling and we really enjoyed the two hours on the water. We paddled 6km in total and made it a fair way across the lake and we managed to get a glimpse of the top of volcan Villarrica when the clouds lifted enough to briefly see the peak. We were back by 12:00 noon and our lovely hosts came to pick us up.

We spent the afternoon relaxing and having warm soup and drying our clothes which had gotten quite wet during the paddling in the open kayak. We also organised having our bikes serviced and new rear tyres fitted in Concepción (~600km South of Santiago) and since they could only fit us in for April 9-10, we planned how to spend the time until then staying in the lakes region camping over Easter and then heading to Concepción via Temuco and Taiguén. I caught up on two more blogs but somehow the fb links are now not including the title or feature photo even though it showed them correctly in the preview 😡🙁 I gave up by 4:00am – hopefully it fixes itself for the next posts.