Home Away From Home: A Tiny Chilean Cabin With a Big Heart
A tiny cabin. My unexpected home away from home in southern Chile. No bigger than most people’s kitchen, but housing more than just kitchen utensils. Bedroom to the left, kitchen and living room to the right. Bathroom? Straight ahead. Everything painted white with perfect full-bodied red details.
Windows facing the front with a terrace looking across Lago Rupanco and onto the Osorno volcano in the distance. One could say that we are now just north of Patagonia, with Osorno forming the unofficial gateway to this magical place on Earth.
I wouldn’t be honest with you if I told you that arriving here was easy. It most certainly wasn’t, so let me start at the beginning.
Still in full limp mode (see previous blog), and after a long riding day and a tedious border crossing, we still hadn’t received confirmation of our Airbnb booking. We, being who we are, decided to go and look for the cabin anyway and figure it out from there. On Airbnb you never get an exact location before the booking is confirmed, but using our best detective skills, we narrowed it down to one little cabin on a hill in the middle of nowhere.
The fact that the cabin exactly matched the photos on Airbnb obviously had nothing to do with our superior finding skills.
With nobody around and without the modern tool of the internet (just having re-entered Chile), we had to figure this conundrum out all by ourselves, the old-school way. Random walking around, enthusiastic shouting in our best Spanish towards houses with an open window and waving at people walking in the distance.
Eventually all our efforts paid off. Our beautiful Spanish had caught the attention of an elderly man walking his dog. As luck would have it, he knew a friend of the mother of the owner of the cabin.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how we arrived at our home far away from home. The mother of the owner, together with her husband, greeted us as if we were family. They cleaned the cabin from top to toe and gave us some delicious cake and a bottle of red wine, matching the full-bodied red cabin details.
Having spent a few days here I knew this was a place I could live for a while. Tiny, yes. But efficiently organized and with a view that would take a long time to even remotely bore me.
Far away from everything, yet close enough that we didn’t have to worry about logistics. Peaceful. Silent at night. Brimming with a changing landscape throughout the day. Everything that, in my mind, matches the concept of home.
El Cantate. My far away home. My home I will mentally return to when life feels a little overwhelming. Yet another place engraved into my soul.
