Chile '25 • Day 4: Puerto Varas
- Bob Aron
- Jan 20, 2025
- 2 min read
FLIES, FLIES, FLIES
What a spectacular morning view of Volcan Osorno and Volcan Calbuco.
Today we had originally planned on driving around part of the Lake Lianquihue (the lake in front of the volcano photos) in a counter clockwise direction and then the other direction tomorrow. But, the Oscalata horse fly got in our way and our planned longer hikes were shortened. Like, really shortened.
Oscalata - the coliguacho or black horsefly - in search for mammalian blood before laying eggs - dang, they are a nuisance. The females only are in blood sucking mode once a year, I guess that must be in January. Interesting fact, they behave the opposite of mosquitos. These flies don’t like the shade and are worse in the warm sun.
PETROHUE FALLS
The popular Petrohue Falls - not much in the way of ‘falls’ when you’ve grown up going to Yosemite, but fantastic views of the surrounding volcanoes. It was here we had the first hint of these massive horseflies. Luckily not enough to ruin this stop. That’s for later!
Next stop, just up the road a bit: Lago Todos Los Santos - OMG the flies…..I seemed to get to the worst of it, so we thought that maybe they were attracted to my blue SJSU shirt. This turned out to not be true. It was bad, really bad. We had to give up in the first 200 yards. Too bad, this looked like a promising place to take a hike. Revise plans:
NO PHOTOS - TOO BUSY RUNNING FROM HORSE FLIES
Salto de Prego Falls - more flies but the switches kept it tolerable enough to walk the short trail to the falls. It was humorous with everyone us (not just the 4 of us) using branches to swish away the flies. As we passed our fellow hikers there was often an ‘Hola’ and a knowing smirk of our mutual annoyance. I don’t think we expected the region to be so tropical. It’s pretty humid and there is a lot of tropical vegetation everywhere.
Since our hikes were shortened, we decided to just finish the loop around the lake and it turns out that there wouldn’t have been too much to fill tomorrow’s activities anyway. So we’ll chill around town tomorrow before another flight southward to Puerto Natales and Patagonia activities.
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