The Marble Caves

So, internet again today, the program goes a little further.

The tourist highlight in Puerto Rio Tranquilo are the marble caves. They even made it onto the Windows screen saver (best regards to Kerstin 😀). In good weather, after some back and forth about the departure time and with enough passengers, we finally set off. Here in Chile the holidays are over and the number of Chilean tourists is decreasing significantly. We booked the full tour, 2.5 hours by boat to all the sights the lake offers related to the caves.

The weather on the shore was great, sunny and warm. Unfortunately, we let ourselves be blinded by it. As soon as he got on board, the captain started. Sandra missed her rain jacket, Jutta her down jacket. It got pretty wet as the young man drove around the corners. We have to admit, we weren't that enthusiastic at first. The caves were ok, but somehow the real aha effect was missing. But things got significantly better towards the end. The colors became more diverse. The figures that wind and water had eaten out of the marble rocks were more spectacular.

And we were lucky to have our guide on board. She spoke English and was specially sent with our boat because the two no espaniol ladies were on board. She explained everything to us and put a lot of effort into it. In general, all the people here are incredibly friendly.

Besides all the marble, we saw a condor right above us. It is simply huge, with a wingspan of up to 3.2 meters. It's hard to capture that in the photos.

Towards the end of the tour we came to two formations: the cathedral and the chapel. The cathedral is large and has many arches on which the small island stands. Just like a cathedral.

The chapel is small and you can take a boat into it. A popular place for brides and grooms for the local Catholic residents. They went there to be particularly blessed. So they wrote to the Vatican asking whether they could officially get married there. Approval was granted, the Vatican gave its blessing and we can now officially get married in the chapel 🤵🏻‍♂️👰🏼‍♀️- that was definitely before Pope Francis was elected, because Argentines and Chileans can't stand each other 😀

On the way back we wanted to take a detour to another lake, Lago Leones. Completely naively, we turned onto the official road number X732, after 16 kilometers we came to the lake. We drove into the road for about 2 kilometers, first over gravel, as is often the case. Then we moved along at walking pace through deep, sandy ruts. As we tried to back out of the mess, two English hikers came towards us. They said we should just keep driving, the road would get better. We do that, but at the next opportunity we turned around. It's beautiful everywhere there, every branch leads to a river, a lake and so on. But it was too adventurous for us. A few more photos by the river and off we go home to our beautiful hut with a view 🏔️