Chiloé National Park
It was time for a trip out to the west side of Chiloé, to visit the National Park. Unfortunately it was also time for torrential rain.. 🙁
Nonetheless, we headed to the bus station for a journey of around 90 minutes, as the weather forecast promised it would stop raining in the afternoon…
When we got there it was still pouring with rain, so we delayed a while and had a snack at a cafe by the entrance. Then it eased off and we headed to the visitor centre – of course it started getting heavy again while we were in there… 🙁
We procrastinated as much as possible, and then eventually decided that it was just about bearable – and therefore we should start on the trails…
AND then GOOD FORTUNE smiled upon us, with a gift of a parrot…. I imagine this photograph hanging on the wall of a gallery – titled ‘Parrot in the rain’, it symbolises the hope of brighter weather ahead… you can see it in his face… 😉 🙂 🙂
From a more accurate point of view, it should be called ‘Wet slender-billed parakeet’…..
But I digress, it was indeed a good omen – as not only did the rain stop, but the sun actually came out – YES 🙂
So we walked the five short(ish) trails in the park, which sort of join together, and they were very pleasant – but after the spectacular scenery of southern Patagonia, it felt a little average – but I guess this was bound to happen! It was nice though to see lots of greenery, and new types of vegetation.
Halfway along one of the trails, we heard a chirping noise, and a bird jumped out in front of us. It was very fast-moving and very hard to get a picture of – but we managed to get a few blurred pics.
The bird is called a Chucao, and it’s only found in these types of forests in Chile and Argentina. It is said to bring good luck if you hear one in the forest off to your right, and bad luck if it is to your left… well.. ours was in front, so who knows what kind of luck we’ll have… but it turns out that we were lucky already to even get a picture – as just afterwards we ran into a French birdwatcher, who said that he had spent the WHOLE DAY trying to get a picture of a Chucao, and still hadn’t got one. We told him that we just got a photo just now, and he looked at us suspiciously… we had to show him the photo to prove it, and he said we were VERY VERY LUCKY. Yeah, skill I call it 😉 😉
Anyway, the picture isn’t great, but better than what the French guy got… 🙂
Our time on the forest trails was soon over, and the last two trails that we walked went to a beach on the Pacific Ocean and back.
And that was it… time to go back to Castro on the bus after a pleasant day out.