Yesterday it rained most of the day which did not matter too much as we were driving the 200 miles from Chiloe Island to the Lake District. The Lake District in Cumbria is nearly always wet so no different from home. The mountains are a bit bigger (7,000ft) and there are a number of volcanos some of which are active so potentially a little more exciting. We are spending two nights in a little 1960's style apartment next to a lake, it is part of a small cluster of chalets and rooms but we seem to be the only guests. In fact it all seemed very quiet until we turned up at the local waterfall this morning, there were lots of coaches whose passengers were each labelled with numbers as they can't be trusted to get back in the right coach on their own.
Most of the tourists were American but there were a few Japanese and French and I did hear one eastern European accent. These tourists were victims of the "do Chile in a fortnight tours", we are fairly close to an airport so I think they are flown in, spend two nights in the lakes then flown onto the next must see spot. After the waterfall they do a boat trip on a lake which is the Chilean equivalent of Lake Windermere, we didn't take a boat we just had a pleasant walk along the shore, once we were 500 yards from the tourist zone it was lovely and peaceful.
The forest is quite dense so finding the right path is important. We did not see any pumas but we did encounter a fox. I would like to say we carefully stalked it to take this photograph but it had come down to the car park, probably looking for discarded chips.
Tomorrow we move to a more remote part of the lakes and a slightly posher hotel where we hope to do a bit of cycling.