Pucón Is Dangerous, But Is It Dangerous Enough?

1,400 miles on a bus over the last week have brought us to Pucón, in the Araucanía region of southern Chile.  This little tourist town on a lake is vastly different than anywhere else we've been in South America.  It's clean, orderly and quiet.  Stray dogs still roam the streets, but even they manage to look well-groomed.  Many of the buidlings are built out of wood, instead of the much more common South American materials of adobe and cement.  Despite the heavy tourism, it still maintains a quaintness that reminds me of some of the tourist towns in Quebec's Laurentians region, as I posted on Twitter yesterday.

Pucón is more dangerous than its nicely manicured lawns would have you believe, however, for it lies at the base of one of the most active volacnoes in the country, Villarica.  Since the first recorded eruption in 1568, it has erupted at least another sixty-five times, and is only one of four known volcanoes to have an active lava lake in its crater.  What are we going to do with this volcano?  Climb it, naturally.  I don't mean climbing it halfway just to get a better view, either.  We are climbing it all the way to the crater, weather permitting. We're supposed to be able to see the volcano from town, but the weather's been bad since we arrived, so we'll have to settle for a closeup view when we ascend on Monday.  Keep us in your prayers.

Because climbing an active volcano may not be enough of an adrenaline rush, we are I am thinking about supplementing our Villarica ascent with other activities such as canyoning (essentially rappelling down waterfalls) and hydrospeeding (like whitewater rafting, except you're on your own little board instead of on a raft with a guide).  We'll keep you updated on whether or not we actually make these excursions, how many bones we break, and how many times Magge yells at me for getting her into this.

The lake, with black volcanic sand

There's a volcano around here somewhere