Traveling South

On Sunday February 2^nd we traveled 12 hours south to a town named Pucón. We spent the whole day driving. The highway “Ruta 5” or Route 5 runs almost the entire length of Chile from North to South and we spent most of our time on this route. It’s a great way to see the country. There were exits for every small town and major city along the route but we mostly just saw farmland as this route lies just outside of most of these towns and cities, Sita suggested this was done on purpose to allow it to be freer from traffic.

This is the only picture I took in Santiago that day.

We encountered these mountains shortly after leaving Santiago and Sita remarked that they looked a lot like the Sandia Mountains in Albuquerque and I agreed.

At our first stop there was a vineyard on the other side of the fence which surrounded the gas station, so I stepped up on something to get a picture of it. We were parked next to a Suzuki Maruti car and I had to take a picture of it, because it reminded me of India, where there are a million of these cars on the road.

These were the first mountains with snow on them that we saw that day. The farm in front is typical of the landscape of that region. The post right in the middle of the pic was an added bonus, to ensure that the least blurry shot I got of these mountains contained at least something blurry.
This was the first Volcano we saw that day, and I can't remember the name anymore. The second pic has a field of sunflowers in front.

Anybody want to go to Los Angeles? It's only 132 kilometers from here.
Sita did most of the driving that day, I took this photo of us with my right hand out the window.
The whole way down on Ruta 5 I saw these billboards for sugar with this strange monster character. At one point I saw three within less then a kilometer of each other so I decided to take a picture of one. The next thing that followed was some sort of processing or storage facility for this Sugar company and we thought the dome looked interesting so I took a picture of it.

We only had to get gas once on the way down, but we stopped a bunch of times, usually at the same type of gas station a Copec. Most of the gas stations, Copec, Shell and others, were new, like this one. To me this signifies more cars on the road and is a testament to the Chilean economy of the last few years. These Copec stations have free wifi, which is totally cool, I only know of one chain that does this in the US and you don't find those stations as often as you find Copecs here. I would have done this post from one of these, but while I could detect the connection, I couldn't get connected. It wasn't until we were returning to Santiago that I realized I still had my preferred DNS server set to my router at home, when I needed to select the option to obtain the DNS server automatically in order to connect to the internet on other networks.
This particular station was also a truck stop and a restaurant. Sita's parents wanted to eat lunch here but we didn't want to because it was crowded and it had too much of a commercial/fast food feel to it.
We convinced Sita's parents to continue on with us and look for something else. From here, I took the wheel for the first time in Chile. I only drove for a few kilometers before we found another place to eat, but never the less Sita managed to get this photo of me.
We found a much more eclectic and "Chilean" place to eat a few kilometers down the road. I tried to catch everyone off guard with this picture, but they still all managed to be facing the camera when I snapped this photo.
I caught Sita and her parents off guard for the next two photos. We were sitting outside the restaurant in this cool little area where the "roof" was composed of a few posts, a cloth over head to catch leaves and a tree and grapevines above that to provide shade.

Further on down the road we saw, many many tree farms. I assume these trees are grown to provide wood. These farms look like a pine forest where all of the trees are aligned. It's funny because every so often there'll be a plot that was harvested recently and replanted and the trees will be only a few feet high amongst other plots of varying heights.

This picture shows more tree farms in the background, but it also shows, the bluest sky I'd seen so far in Chile and it only took 8 hours of driving away from Santiago to see it.
This bridge is known as Puente Malleco. We passed over it by train last time we were in Chile (2 years ago), perhaps I'll put a picture of this up later. You can also see me in the position I was in most of the day. That is, taking pictures from the passenger seat.
More scenery. The first farm seemed to have been harvested recently.

Bye Bye ruta 5. This is where we made the turn from route 5 (a four line divided highway) onto a two lane highway for the rest of our trip. This exchange is located near a town named Freire which is south of Temuco.
One of the many rivers we crossed over. You can see some people getting into the river in this pic. From my experience, this is a pretty common sight at almost every river in Chile in the summer.
The highway to Villarica.
One of the first views of the volcano that we'd be enjoying all week.
Villarica looks like a typical ski town, like the type you'd see in New Mexico or Colorado.

The following two pics are of the lake in Villarica.

After Villarica comes a smaller tourist town known as Pucón, we stayed between this town and an even smaller tourist town known as Caburga. This is a picture of the airport just outside of Pucón. There were a bunch of people parked in front of this airport at this time and we couldn't figure out why. Later Sita's dad told us that the president of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, was arriving at that time to go on vacation in Caburga.
After making a million stops we made one final one on the side of the road at a place that would end up being only a few kilometers from the place we were staying. I took a picture of it because it represents very typical roadside stops. They were selling hand made and naturally dyed wool clothing along with typical Chilean foods: "pan amasado" (kneeded bread); tortillas; and "empanadas de horno" (Empanadas are like "hot pockets", "de horno" means these are the oven baked type rather than the fried type).