The Art of Relaxing



Miniature Golf Course

The last weeks have been quite turbulent and relaxation from our Santiago trip did not last too long. After a lovely springlike period weather turned rainy and cold again. The children were quite uneasy and so Inés and I got stressed again for a while. For being stressed is not exactly the best thing to do living in an extended family we decided that this has to be changed and each of us needs his time to relax - either for himself or the two of us together. After some weeks of recurring discussions we managed to do it and now the whole system seems to be stable and calm again. One of the reasons for it may be that Inés found work as administrator of a restaurant a friend of her is going to open. That gives her the chance to earn some money herself and we now can be quite tranquilized about our shop and how it will work. At least for the season we will have a proper income. Our plan now is to shift the shop down to Pucón and run it beside the restaurant, which will bring it closer to the customers.

Nevertheless the opening of the shop, we celebrated on 26th of October, the Austrian national holiday, still took place at our house. We invited some friends and made an Austro-Chilean Barbecue. Lots of meet with lots of salads. It was quite a success and funny evening that lasted until after midnight.

I myself will have to work as well quite a lot this season because I started guiding canyoning  too. Because I have a waterproof camera I serve as a photographer in the canyon as well. So I already had my first canyoning trips. It is, as meanwhile I was not that surprised anymore about it, quite different of what we understand under canyoning in the Alps. You follow down an amazing gorge at the foot of the volcano and in four hours of activity you have three waterfalls to transcend. The rest of it I would call ´jungle hiking´. It is a tramp through dense thicket of ferns, spiny bushes and trees. The most important tool is a big machete we have to take with us and the faces of the customers when they see it the first time is one of the most amusing things. But that for you are rewarded with four hours of pure, awe-inspiring nature. Sometimes the gorge is just one metre wide but thirty metres deep just to abruptly open up into a broad valley with rainforest-like vegetation. A tremendous scenery!

If I do not relax working Inés and I do regular ´relaxation-exercises´ now, to stay calm in between our small turbulent world. So one day we went to the sauna which is just a small wooden hut in a private lot. We had the whole thing just for ourselves and so it really was convenient walking out into the rainy night in between, breathing the weeping air. Another day we went playing miniature golf on one of Pucón's courses. Or we just have a romantic dinner in a restaurant with a good bottle of wine and an amazing view of the volcano or the lake.

What really mainly affected anyone here in Chile these days was the drama of the 33 buried miners and their rescue. For weeks the media hardly did report on anything else. ´33´ was the new ´word of the year´ ,the number most frequently marked in the national lottery, printed on t-shirts and being used for far-fetched comparisons. When the last miner was rescued (which for sure was broadcasted live in all major TV and radio stations) sirens sounded all over the country and immediately people started to sound the horns of their cars and wave their Chilean flags which they seemed to have prepared already. The miners itself  now have to undergo their next martyrdorn being handed from one talk show and interview to the next undergoing a real running the gauntlet. While scenes during the rescue have been really touching and you just could not be not affected what is going on now is partly far away from quality journalism. Hopefully for these traumatized people there will soon happen anything that takes them out of floodlight.

Vacations in Santiago

Skyscraper in central Santiago

Living together with nine children means living together with nine children. This indeed can be very stressful and to be honest I just can cope with it sometimes for two reasons. First Inés supports me with her patience (often more with me than with the children) and her 18 years of experience. Second I can always leave to a bunch of lovely places close to Pucón to relax whenever I want to. So it happened some time ago when I was fed up with anything and already even started to discuss with Inés (what we sometimes do for several reasons like the children, Chilean manners, etc. but fortunately never for ourselves). I took my bike and went to 'Río Plata' just across the big bay of Pucón on the northern shore of Lake Villarica. The journey first led me to 'Pasarela Quelhue' an amazing hanging bridge crossing River Trancura due to its appearance called the 'Golden Gate of Pucón'. (See my photo link to the right to understand why.) From there you follow the mouth of River Trancura which is a lovely swampy area overgrown with thousands of willows. Finally you reach at 'Rio Plata' where from you have got a lovely view over the lake and the surrounding hills. I had a small picnic over there and went on following 'Río Plata' upstream on a small path that soon lost itself in dense thicket of  'coligue', the Chilean species of bamboo. I bushwhacked throug it to finally reach a small waterfall descending into a pool of amazingly green-turquoise water surrounded by serried vegetation of coligue, ferns and other bushes. In summer one can take a bath over there but these days it was still to cold. Anyway I surely will come back when conditions allow it to take a bath. Maybe in a sea kayak rowing over the lake, which is the second way of reaching there. When I came back to my bycicle I was calmned again but still worries went on this day. Driving back to Pucón I soon had a flat tire which meant I had to drive back about nine kilometres on gravel roads with a broken front tire. Besides it already got dark and for sure I did not have lights. It was quite an exhausting trip and reaching the paved main road I entered the first restaurant to satisfy my hunger. It was a fish restaurant and so I ordered swordfish which tasted well but obviously wasn't because it caused me diarrhoea later on.

You may imagine that sometimes you really feel ready for a holiday which Inés and I decided to take in Santiago for a week. The plan was to look for a car over there whith which we could carry all the children, goods and even tourists to make some extra money. We went with Lucio, Inés' youngest son, to her sister, living in 'Puente Alto' a southern suburb of Santiago. We searched for a car a few days but did not find anything convenient. It is interesting what people here call 'very well maintained'. For any of the 'very well maintained' cars we had seen, in Europe you would have to pay something to dispose it of. Fed up with that we decided to postpone the buying until we saved the money to buy something proper and finally to enjoy real holidays. The following days we lingered through Santiago, ate in nice restaurants, visited comfortable cafès and bars and when we where in the mood to we bought materials for our shop we needed.

One day we went to the zoo with Lucio. Because I have been there before with Inés so the zoo itself wasn't that overwhelming for me but it was a nice, relaxing day and anyway very interesting and funny to watch Lucio, who saw most of the animals over there the first time in his life in reality. He almost went crazy about all the lions, tigers, elephants, giraffes, zebras and so on. In my photoalbum you can watch some animals you (at least theoretically) could find in Chile's great outdoors. Among them the 'Pudu', the world's smallest hart, which lives in the woods around our house. (Although the chance to see it over there is close to zero because it is almost exterminated and on top of that very shy.)

The rest of the days we spent relaxing with Inés' family, visiting the new takeaway of her sister in another suburb of Santiago, having common dinner and just staying together without any appointments and things to do. So finally we had our holidays and relaxation. Now back in Pucón we are motivated again to work for our shop and the daily routine with the children. Apart from that I have already been rafging on the river once these days which definitely is one more reason why I am here because each time it is a great, tremendous adventure.