Chiloé: An Island Paradise

Hola everyone!

As I left off on the blog with Fiestas Patrias, I figured I would continue the adventures from that point forward. Since we get Fiestas Patrias as a vacation from school (Wednesday-Friday), my friends Kelsey, Erin, Marietta and I knew we wanted to take a trip somewhere else in Chile. Now during our month and a half so far, when we asked where we should adventure to in Chile, everyone said “Chiloé.”

I had no idea what this was, and to be honest, the first couple times I just thought I was mishearing “Chile” and that maybe they were making fun of us or something. However, upon further research, we discovered that Chiloé is a little island in the south of Chile that is known for its special “souther Chilean charm” so of course we had to go!

When we finalized the plans, the travel included a 6am flight to Puerto Montt, then a 4 hour bus ride (with a ferry ride in the middle of that) before we finally got to the actual town we were staying in, Castro. This long travel day was made infinitely longer by the fact that we were leaving Thursday, September 19th at 6am and since it was Fiestas Patrias, we were up all night drinking terremotos and eating empanadas before we rushed home to get our taxi to the airport at 3:45am.

Thursday was kind of a crazy day because by the time we took the flight, bus, ferry and bus again, it was only 12pm when we arrived in Castro. We did not do much on Thursday except wander around Castro, bask in the sunlight and buy some sustenance for dinner that night. To cap off the day of traveling, we had a glass of wine on the little balcony of our Airbnb and watched the sunset!

These are all photos from the first day we got there!

The next day, Kelsey and I went to find coffee (sort of hard to come by in a tea country but we found some) and during this search, a very nice shop owner told us about a “feria” in the next town over -called Dalcahue- that we needed to visit. We figured out the local bus and found said (adorable) market where we all bought souvenirs from Chiloé (so much wool) and looked around the town for a bit! After that, we took the 20 minute bus back to Castro and found a boat tour around the bay, which was an awesome way to end our first full day!

Photos from day 2! Feria and boat tour included 🙂

Day three – Saturday. This was our biggest “exploring day” that we had planned before, which included a bus ride across the island (to the Pacific Ocean side) and a hike to an art installation that honored Mapuche (Chile’s indigenous people) oral stories tradition. This particular art installation is called “Muelle de las Almas,” meaning Pier of Souls. The story goes that there is a pier where your soul goes when you pass away to get picked up by an angel to bring you to heaven, the afterworld, etc. I recommend looking up more of the stories if you are interested!

Anyways, the hike was absolutely gorgeous – it actually looked a bit like Ireland to me, even though it is about the farthest from there that you can get – ha ha! It was so incredibly MUDDY and I will not lie, there were a couple of wipe-outs but overall it only added to the fun and adventure of it! We ate our lunch of sandwiches, bananas and chips when we finally got to the Muelle, and then headed back the way we came from there. Altogether an amazing day!

Muelle de las Almas hike!

Sunday was the day we had to take the bus back to Puerto Montt for our flight the next morning, so we said a sad goodbye to this incredibly special island that we had found.

However!! Our vacation got a bit longer than we expected, because when we woke up Monday morning, we discovered that our flight had been delayed 11 hours with no reason why! So our Airbnb host drove us to the airport where we tried to get on an earlier flight, but when that produced no results, she so graciously offered to host us for the rest of the day until our flight left at 10pm that night (it was 9am that morning). Our host basically saved our entire trip from falling into a tragedy with this delayed flight. She even went to far as to make us a delicious lunch and take us to another beautiful Chilean town before we got on our flight back up to Santiago. Success!!