First things first... we have clean underwear!! After our worries yesterday, Laura at the hostel came up trumps and collected our two bags of laundry for us. She refused any payment even when I tried to persuade her to get a treat for her fluffy white poodle. What a lovely lady - I think she knew how pleased we were even if our Spanish could not convey the correct words!
That was this evening. Earlier today we headed off at 8am in a minibus with an Australian couple who have a business in Chile (he is a geologist) and a young Spanish couple from Santiago - she is an accountant and he is in the army, their English was at my level of Spanish but somehow we all got on and were even chatting over lunch, in a somewhat stilted fashion. We were headed to Chiloe Island which has a reputation for witchcraft and folklore. To be honest there was less of this than I had hoped but we had a great ferry trip across the straights, seeing Imperial Cormorants, seals, pelicans and lots of other birds (no idea what).
We seemed to visit a lot of churches all built in wood as this survives the frequent earthquakes and tremors in the area. My favorite place however was actually a deconsecrated church which houses examples of little models of the churches and wooden joints used to create the buildings. There is one church that has been constructed not using a single nail. The sun was shining through the stained glass windows and the colours on the ground were stunning. I spent quite some time photographing the pools of coloured light - no filters just a fairly fast exposure to darken the wooden structures and highlight the saturated colours. (I made an entire album from these images - https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1010287779023903.1073742023.186301661422523&type=3 )
We did not hear too much about the ‘Trauco’ (mysterious troll like creatures who live in the woods and apparently get women pregnant) or the witches although we found quite a few besom brooms in the local market!
