Andrew felt much better in the morning after a good night’s sleep. We had breakfast and left Temuco by lunch time – it was only a short 85km trip to our next overnight stay in Traiguén. We had passed through Traiguén in January and took pictures of the town sign which appeared to have German speaking influence and one of Andrew’s work colleagues mentioned that his mother-in-law came from that town which is why we decided to stay one night there on our way back. We had booked a studio (Herco suites) in the middle of town and when we arrived at the address we could not see anywhere to park – we pulled over on the side of the road when a lady came out and directed us to a roller door around the corner which she opened for us and we were able to ride the bikes on the pavement against a one way street into a small enclosed courtyard where we could securely park the bikes. We only took the essentials off and the lady was going to show us to our room – as we entered the street, 5 highschool girls went passed and asked where we were from and got very excited when we said Australia and they wanted to take a picture – so we posed for our celebrity shot 😉🤗 with four of the girls while the fifth one took the picture of them with us.

We were then shown to our room which had a large window overlooking the busy intersection below. There was a common room with windows overlooking the town and with tea and coffee facilities and a microwave. Our room had an electronic keypad (no key required to get in just a number code) and in order to get access to the bikes we had to ring the buzzer on the front door and say in Spanish “open the roller door”. We got just the things we needed off our bikes and then headed to the main plaza of the town in the search for some lunch. We passed a fire station and Andrew started taking pictures of the fire trucks when a lady came out and we managed to explain that my brother in law is a volunteer firefighter in Austria and we take pictures of fire stations and trucks for him and so she invited us in and gave us a private tour of the fire station which also is a volunteer firefighter station with 3 separate volunteer groups – we showed her pictures and videos from the Austrian station in Hornstein. We thanked her and left the station to get lunch at the club social next door – we had a salad with smoked salmon and fresh raspberry fruit juice and on the way out took pictures of the names of the founders of the Club as well as the past presidents, which were from Germany, Switzerland and France. We went back to our room and sat in the common room, had coffee and worked on the blog until a guy with two young girls arrived who were quite excited and loud and tried the older girl tried to keep talking to us in Spanish. We went back to our room after taking pictures of a nice sunset over town and decided to try the “König Bierhaus” for dinner which was across the road. It was fairly busy inside and we got the last table in the middle of the restaurant. We had just ordered when a young woman came up to us and asked where we were from – it must be obvious that we are foreigners 😂). She was one of the owners of the place and spoke English and she told us that they had just opened the restaurant a few days ago. She introduced us to her brother and co-owner Tomás and her wife who was in the kitchen cooking. There was a beer garden outside with an open fire place and she invited us to join them after dinner. As they had forgotten about Andrew’s beer and only brought it to the table after we had finished our dinner, I ordered a mojito and we joined the owners and another couple outside around the fire. We had some great conversations and learned a lot including the story of the red wine Carménère – we had not heard about that type of red wine or tried it yet , so they brought us a glass of a good Carménère to try “on the house” – it was great to chat and learn more about the town, the region and their business and lots of insight and stories including the struggles with the indigenous Mapuche tribes. They confirmed that it was not safe to travel to the coast South of Concepción, which we had also been told in Frutillar. We stayed to the end of the opening hours of their restaurant and shared WhatsApp details and took some pictures of us together at the fireplace before returning to our room. We had had a great evening and enjoyed meeting more wonderful people who add to our great experiences in Chile.