Puerto Montt

We recently finished a port visit to Puerto Montt, Chile, where we got some nice rest and relaxation after transiting through the straits without issue. The town was pretty small, with the downtown area encompassing only about 10 square blocks, so we got to exploring the town pretty quickly to find the cool bars. After talking with the Chilean pilot, (In nautical terms, a pilot is somebody who knows a certain area of water very well. Our Chilean pilot embarked onboard our ship for the straits of Magellan to help us navigate it. It’s useful because pilots know currents in certain areas, weather patterns, and changes on charts that we use. Though the Navy doesn’t pay them for this, an ancillary benefit is that they also know local bars that are cool.) we decided to camp out at a rugby bar, “Haka” named after a rugby dance that a certain team (whose name escapes me right now) does before each match. It had couches and lots of local beers, so it was a fun spot.
The next night, we went to the nearby town of Punta Varas. This was even smaller than Puerto Montt. The main attraction here was a casino, but we walked about some and stopped at a delicious dessert place for some local pastries, followed by walking into a random restaurant, Mediterraneo, for a nice dinner. We’re on vacation when on liberty, so having dessert before dinner is perfectly acceptable.
Mediterraneo has been the highlight of my port time thus far. We were the only people in this tiny restaurant that was warmed by a fireplace right next to our table. The food was probably the best I’ve had in the last decade, and it was all dirt cheap. We bought a nice bottle of Camenere, a unique Chilean wine. Camenere grapes were originally indigenous to France, but a plague in the late 1800s wiped out their crops. Years before the plague hit, some Chilean farmers exported the grapes to Chile, mistaking them for Merlot grapes. They flourished, and now Chile is virtually the sole provider of Camenere wine. It is also very cheap here. An 8-year old bottle is about $20. It’s a red wine, but has a lot more flavor than most reds, and it is a lot less dry. It’s quite good.
We ended the night back at the casino. While some people decided to go update their iPhones (my phone isn’t that fancy) I sat down with some fellow officers to play a game I’ve never won at: Blackjack. I began to understand the intricacies of the game (with some help from more experienced players) and by the end of the night I had won over 200,000 pesos. Don’t think too much about it though, because that’s about $400. It still felt good to finally win one, and $400 is nothing to sneeze at. Plus, it made up for all the money I lost on roulette in Punta Arenas, the previous port.

A final note, the Chilean volcano that is erupting right now was just outside Puerto Montt, and it started erupting the day after we left, so unfortunately we couldn’t see it. But we had taken pictures of it, not knowing of its impending eruption. To the right is a picture of the volcano itself, back when it looked like just another mountain. (Our Chilean pilot told us all about it as we were driving by.)