This is the second in a series of articles by Vicki Lansen regarding life in Futaleufu, Chile. Vicki and her husband Greg recently relocated to Futaleufu after years of living in Panama and Central America.

A walk around Futa is an easy stroll, and if you get lost, you should be ashamed! The town sports a fastidiously kept central park, a radio station, a police station with extremely friendly, helpful police (who seem to often serve as information officers), a small, but tidy hospital, a large, fabulously new school, two internet cafe/call centers, fly-fishing and rafting/kayak guide companies, hospadajaes, restaurants, two in-home laundry services, a seamstress and a bank with an ATM (warning: Master card only) - while still keeping it's other-century charm. One end of town is blessed with Lago Espejo (Mirror Lake), a great place to have a picnic and relax. There is no place to rent a car here, and no gas station if you've ventured here with one. Your nearest pump is in Chaiten (four hours away) or Trevelin, Argentina (a little more than an hour).

By Vicki Lansen

Starstruck, moonstruck, landstruck, struck, or just plain stricken - by the beauty. Screaming mountains, thorny rhubarb, snaking rivers, crashing waterfalls greet us just 3 kilometers outside of Chaiten on the four-hour bus ride to Futaleufu. And even at the end of summer, laces of snow drape higher mountain peaks, skirted below along the road with wildflowers. We cannot "not" come here. The pavement ends several kilometers from town and becomes a carefully graded gravel road. The awesome scenery never ends and four hours is gone before we know it (Bus ride from Chaiten to Futaleufu is 6,000 pesos).

Futaleufú is one of the small towns where an international event like the Cruces de los Andes race can easily double the population for a day. In fact, there were almost as many participants as there are residents of Futaleufú, with more than 800 runners from around the World.