Leaving El Chalten after four
days of sybaritic eating, drinking and hiking was difficult, and it was made
more difficult by the wind. We rolled
out in the early afternoon of December 6th, with only 38 km
separating us from Lago del Desierto, the site of the first ferry section of
this backwoods backpacker border crossing.
How hard could it be to ride 38 mostly flat kilometres? The answer was that when the Great Patagonian
Wind Machine kicked into high gear with hammering katabatic winds dropping off
the huge Campo de Hielo Sur and gusting down the valley into El Chalten, it was
more or less impossible. We made the
first 7 kilometres with gritted teeth and hard work, but as soon as the valley
opened up a bit and we lost the trees that had been lining the road, progress
slowed to a crawl, and then stopped altogether.
I could just about make headway, pedalling hard in lowest gear and
wrestling the handlebars forwards whenever the winds gusted from the side. Terri could not, and spent long minutes
standing with her head down, trying to keep the fully loaded bicycle from being
picked up and thrown backwards with her on it.
The air was full of flying bits of gravel picked up from the road
surface, and I felt like a Gothic cathedral being sandblasted clean. We got to a tiny estancia, Bonanza, had a
drink and sat in a shelter to escape the wind, then fought our way another 4
kilometres to a second estancia, Ricanor, where we pitched our tent in the
shelter of a dense copse of trees, admired the views of the back side of Cerro
Fitzroy (except the summit, shrouded in perpetual wind pennants of cloud),
cooked up some dinner and slept soundly, worn out by a day of 18 kilometres.
The next morning we set out
early, and with the wind disappearing as suddenly as it had sprung up, we made
the remaining 19 km to Lago del Desierto campground without incident, arriving
there by 10:30. The gravel road was deserted
and ran through pristine, dense forest cut by tumbling rivers. Partway along the road we passed a memorial
to a Chilean carabinero killed in a border clash with Chilean forces in1965. Lago del Desierto was one of the
last border disputes between the two countries to be settled, in the late
1990s, and some Chileans are still bitter about the loss.
In the campground we met Silke, a
solo German cycle tourer whom we had first encountered in El Relincho
campground in El Chalten. She was also
waiting for the next day’s ferry, and after we had set up our tent, we chatted
for a while about her 2-year cycling odyssey across North Africa, Europe, Asia
and New Zealand.
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| On the way up to Glaciar Huemul, above Lago del Desierto |
Terri and I went off to
hike up to the snout of a big glacier, Glaciar Huemul, a very pleasant 45-minute walk affording
sweeping views of the valley we had just cycled, with the Fitzroy massif
behind. We came back in time to cook up
another roesti and bacon feast for lunch, followed by patching a slow leak in
Terri’s air mattress, writing, yoga, juggling and guitar, before it was time to
have beer, sausages and roast lamb from the campground grill for an early
supper.
The next morning we rolled out to
the ferry landing in plenty of time. In
addition to Silke, Terri and me, Ralf (the cyclist we had met at Daniel’s road
maintenance station at Tapi Aike) showed up early in the morning, followed by
two Belgian hikers, Hans and Els, and, just before the boat sailed, two more
French cyclists, Vincent and Melanie, very lightly loaded, appeared, pedalling
furiously, having left El Chalten that morning.
And that was it; the entire ferry, with a capacity of 60 or more people,
was given over to 6 cyclists and our bikes, along with 2 backpackers.
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| Bicycles on the Lago del Desierto ferry |
No wonder the ferry crossing is so
expensive: 20 dollars for a 45-minute
cruise. It was a spectacular route,
passing under tumbling glaciers, raging waterfalls, steep cliffs and dense
forests, and although it’s not technically part of the Carretera Austral, I
felt that as soon as we had left behind the pavement and the buses and traffic
that lead to El Chalten, we had started the isolated road-to-nowhere feeling of
the Carretera Austral.
By 11 am we were getting off the
boat at the tiny Argentine carabinero station at the lakeshore and having our
passports stamped. From there the crux
of the crossing began, a 6-kilometre hiking trail along which we had to push
and carry our bikes uphill to the actual border.
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| Ralf muscling his bike up the track |
It took nearly three hours of unremitting
toil, partly because it was quite steep and partly because the trail has been
cut so deeply into the soil of the forest that it’s like a trench, almost a
metre deep, making it very hard to figure out how to place your feet in order
to push effectively on the bike. I took
off my front panniers and put them on the back, while I wore the big backpack
that usually lies across the back panniers.
It made the bike very back-heavy, but it allowed me to avoid being too
wide for the narrow trench. Terri had
been the most apprehensive of all the cyclists about making it up the hill, and
yet, perhaps because of sheer determination, and perhaps because of her newly
lightened panniers, she absolutely flew up the hill. The rest of us struggled to a greater or
lesser degree. Silke and Ralf, like me,
had heavily-laden bikes that needed a lot of muscle power to move, while
Melanie and Vincent found it hard to get enough purchase on their fairly low
bikes that barely protruded from the top of the trench.
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| Vincent pushing uphill along the trench |
Eventually the trail flattened a bit, giving
lovely views back over Lago del Desierto, and then traversed a forest which
gave sections that were almost rideable, interrupted by cold, muddy river
crossings.
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| Terri and I relieved to make it to the Chilean border |
It was an enormous relief
finally to reach the ruins of the old Argentine border post where Ralf, Vincent
and Melanie decided to camp after 6 very hard-earned kilometres. Meanwhile Terri, Silke and I set off downhill
on the rough but rideable jeep track leading 15 km down to the estancia of
Candelario Mancilla on the shores of Lago O’Higgins.
The ride was spectacular, through
dense forest, down a rough airstrip, across huge landslides, up and down a
roller coaster of gravelly hills, and finally steeply downhill to the
lake. The views over the greenish waters
of Lago O’Higgins and the steep mountain cliffs behind, all in a golden
late-afternoon light, were magnificent and made us forget our tired shoulder
muscles.
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| On the way downhill to Candelario |
We rode down to the Chilean carabinero
post, just before the estancia, ate our remaining fresh fruit in an
orange-gnawing frenzy, then checked ourselves back into Chile. Ironically, this must be the one border
crossing into Chile at which the border authorities are sublimely unconcerned
about bringing in fresh fruit and vegetables.
We rolled along the last kilometre to the campground at Candelario, a
desolate little plain with little in the way of shade or wind shelter, put up
our tents, cooked up dinner and fell asleep, excited about the next ferry
crossing to Villa O’Higgins the next morning, and the cruise to the mighty
Glaciar O’Higgins along the way.
Have you ever seen the play
Waiting for Godot? The next four days
were a bit like living through that play:
a couple of tramps waiting for Mr. Godot to show up, which he never
does, although they are always hopeful that he will show up tomorrow. We packed up our tents and rolled down to the
dock the next morning at 10 am, ready to load our bikes onto the boat that
would show up at 11. At about 10:15 a
man who was fiddling with the engine on a small Zodiac wandered over and
mentioned that there was no boat that day.
When we replied that we had tickets for that day’s boat, he said that
the port outside Villa O’Higgins was closed because of high winds, but that
probably the boat would come the next day.
When Silke rolled down with her bike, we shared the sad news. After sitting in the pleasant (and largely
wind-free) sunshine on the dock for a while, we pushed back up the steep hill
to the campsite, put up our tents again and settled down to wait.
Over the course of the day, more
would-be travellers came down the hill:
Ralf, Vincent and Melanie, and a number of backpackers who had crossed
Lago del Desierto the previous afternoon. Many of them hadn’t brought any food, and now
they were all stranded without supplies.
Terri and I had bigger problems.
The wind had indeed kicked up in sudden, unexpected gusts of tremendous
fury that roared down the slopes behind Candelario like avalanches of air. The biggest gust of all, erupting out of
nowhere, almost flattened Silke’s tent with her inside it, and it was only
saved by her reaching up to push the tentpoles back up off the ground. Terri and I were outside, and when we had
finished watching Silke’s successful struggle, we turned around to our own tent
to find it destroyed, a pole broken and scattered and the fly shredded by the
jagged edge of the pole. We quickly
knocked down the remains of the tent and surveyed the damage. It took a while to find the missing bits of
pole that had flown away when the elastic holding the pole sections together
had broken. With the aid of a short
length of repair tubing from Silke and lots of duct tape from Ralf, we were
able to reassemble the tent pole (although it was definitely bent out of shape)
and patch the huge tear in the fly.
Amazingly, this cobbled-together tent has now been working well for over
a month. Spooked by the experience, we
didn’t dare put our tent up again to be torn apart a second time and slept
outdoors under the stars, being buffeted by the wind and occasional spits of
passing rain. It was not a restful
night.
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| Not the worst place to be trapped for four days |
The next three nights, with the
wind still raging, we paid to sleep indoors in one of the guest rooms of the Estancia. The wind slowly died away, although even on
the third day there were still great roars as huge tsunamis of wind descended
on us from above and then tore spray from the lake surface. It started to rain fairly regularly, though,
so it was good to have a solid roof over our heads at night. Terri came into her own in terms of survival,
as she bought big chunks of beef from the farmers along with onions, potatoes
and carrots and made roast beef over an open fire one afternoon, then created
sumptuous stews the next two days. We
ate better than anyone in Candelario for those four days.
 |
| The Copa Candelario soccer match |
One afternoon we went over to the
border station to play soccer with the carabineros and the geographers who were
busy surveying the bottom of Lago O’Higgins (the fifth-deepest lake in theworld, at 836 metres, and the deepest in South America). It wasn’t a highly skilled game, but we had a
lot of fun and burned off some of the frustration of being stuck waiting for a
boat. We were imprisoned, but it was a
pretty enough spot to be imprisoned, with the jade-coloured lake waters, the
mountain cliffs and the morning snow on the peaks combining for some vivid
colours. If we had known for sure that,
for instance, the ship would come in two days’ time, we could have gone for a
couple of days of walking around the shores of the lake, but instead an
umbilical cord of uncertainty kept us confined to the immediate surroundings of
the dock.
At least it was an eclectic and
interesting group of interesting travellers to be trapped with. In addition to the cyclists, with whom we
spent a lot of time, Hans and Els proved to be very interesting, with a taste
for off-the-beaten-track exploration and trekking. There were a couple of exchange students, Alex
and Katarina, studying in Santiago who had good stories of living in Chile
these days. A trio of Australian science
students who had been at El Relincho in El Chalten with us made for good
conversation as well. An older Swiss man
on a bicycle, Jorg (aka Jorge), had spent his career running cement factories
all over Africa and South America and was a fount of great stories.
Thursday, Friday and Saturday
came and went, each day like an iteration of Groundhog Day, but finally on
Sunday, December 13th we got word that the ferry had set sail from
Villa O’Higgins that morning. It was an
anxious wait, particularly as the vessel was half an hour late and wasn’t
visible until quite close to the original sailing time. As the ship landed, a stream of backpackers
and cyclists poured ashore, keen to start hiking and cycling, including a
French family on interesting tandems, with the back half conventional and the
front half (where the children sat) being recumbent. Those of us who had paid extra for the glacier
tour went aboard and settled in for a few hours of scenic wonder, aided by a
perfect, cloudless day. Silke and Ralf,
who had not intended originally to go to the glacier, signed up at the last
minute in order to get something memorable out of the long wait.
 |
| Glaciar O'Higgins |
The glacier tour was well worth
it. We steamed west along the main body
of the lake before turning south and heading towards the distant snout of
Glaciar O’Higgins. We started passing
large icebergs almost immediately and had huge glaciated peaks to the west to
feast our eyes on for quite a while.
Long before we reached the glacial face (almost 15 km, according to the
captain of the ship), we could see the unmistakeable signs of recent glacial
retreat (the glacier extended this far as recently as 1938), with bare, scraped soil separated from the lush surrounding vegetation
by a sharp line. This glacier is retreating enormously rapidly, apparently because it is coming from a lower
section of the Campo de Hielo Sur that is seeing decreased snowfall. Perito Moreno, in contrast, flows from a
higher altitude and is showing no signs of retreat at all. We cruised to within a few hundred metres of
the imposing ice face (some 60 or 70 metres above the water) and watched and
listened as occasionally bits flew off under pressure into the water. The ice was a tortured, twisted shape that
looked like a sculpture created by a sculptor on psychedelic drugs. A zodiac was despatched to collect a chunk of
floating ice, and in a few minutes we were all served generous glasses of
whisky on the glacial rocks.
 |
| Whisky on the glacial rocks |
We returned to Candelario, picked
up the remaining passengers and set off from Villa O’Higgins, relieved to be
making forward progress at last. It was
an uneventful crossing with more spectacular views of waterfalls and cliffs,
and by 9 pm we were ashore at the ferry port 6 kilometres south of town. We put together our bikes and set off, with
Vincent and Melanie setting the pace, Terri and Silke following closely and
Ralf and I bringing up the rear. Ralf
turned off to camp beside the lake before town, and the other three settled in
at El Mosco, the best-known backpacker joint in town, but by the time Terri and
I got there after raiding the local grocery store, they were full and we went
across the road to Los Nires, another campground which proved to be an inspired
choice. We paid for camping but as we were
the only guests, the owner told us we could sleep in the dining room to keep
warm (it was a very chilly night).
Shortly thereafter another set of cyclists, Mikael and Pauline, arrived
on very neat bamboo-frame bicycles, and bedded down on the other side of the
dining room. We stoked up the fire in
the wood stove and Terri kept it burning all night, keeping us toasty warm.
The next morning the Bamboos set
off north, but we were seized by an attack of the lazies. We wanted to use the internet, but could not
connect, except at the public library on one of their four computers (wifi did
not seem to work anywhere). We also
wanted to eat, so we bought two kilos of beef from the campground owners to
grill and to stew up, and I baked a cake in the well-equipped campground
kitchen. We had the place to ourselves
that night, and cooked up a huge feast before retiring to our sleeping bags
near the fireplace.
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| What ten dollars worth of beef looks like in Villa O'Higgins |
Finally, around 11 am on December
15th, after another grocery store run and more library internet, we
rolled off onto the Carretera Austral, with at least a kilo of cooked steak in
my panniers to have on sandwiches for lunch or to spice up our suppers over the
next few days. Somehow it had taken an
entire month to get from Ushuaia to Villa O’Higgins, far longer than
anticipated, but we were underway at long last along what most cycle tourers
rate as one of the best adventure cycling trips in the world. That first day was cold and intermittently
cloudy, and it started to rain not far out of town. The road was in reasonable condition for a
dirt road, perhaps because there is almost zero traffic on it. All that day we were passed by fewer than
twenty vehicles; this section of the Carretera Austral makes almost no economic
sense, and is more a reflection of Chile’s determination to impose its
sovereignty on a remote area than on the need for the road. The scenery was wild, with lush forests,
rushing rivers and a handful of economically marginal estancias lining the
road. Chilean flickers, a type of
woodpecker, were everywhere, pecking away at dead standing trees. We meandered up the lovely Mayer river, then
crossed a bridge and circled a small lake (where it started to rain).
We stopped in after 30 km at a
government-built refugio beside the road, next to a tiny estancia, to dry off
and eat some of our leftover stew. Two
of the estancia workers, Maria and Jorge, stopped by to ask if we wanted to buy
some fresh hot milk, and we said yes.
They returned with a litre of piping hot milk and a basket of
firewood. Maria lit a fire in about 30
seconds with a single match and no kindling, and within a few minutes we had a
roaring flame going that dried out our soggy clothing while we drank hot chocolate
and ate stew and chatted with Jorge and Maria.
Jorge was from Villa O’Higgins and was an itinerant farmhand, working at
a new farm almost every year. He was
full of stories and information, including a (true) story of a puma attack on a
cyclist the summer before about 30 kilometres down the road and a (not so true)
rumour that the American eco-millionaire Doug Tompkins (who had just died in a kayaking accident on Lago General Carrera a few days before) was responsible as
he had been breeding hybrids between mountain lions and African lions and
releasing them into the wild in secret.
Tompkins is a figure of wild rumour in Chile, hated by nationalists and the political right and loved by environmentalists, all stemming from his
purchase of huge areas of southern Chile to make the privately-owned Parque Pumalin and Parque Patagonia and save these areas from logging.
After lunch, we set off again
into the intermittent cold rain and did another 20 kilometres up the Rio Vargas
and around Lago Vargas to the point where the Carretera Austral starts its
first climb. Vincent had told us about
another free government-built refugio for cyclists, the Refugio Arroyo La Luna,
hidden just off the road; a bicycle tire wrapped around a pile of rocks was the
sign, and we turned off gratefully to find a twin of the place we had had
lunch, a sturdily-built structure with a good roof and benches along the side
for sleeping or sitting, along with a fireplace.
 |
| Refugio Arroyo La Luna |
After 53 kilometres, we were glad to find a
roof over our heads. The doors and walls
were covered with the graffiti of years of cycle tourists who had stayed here,
including the French family on the recumbent tandems that we had seen
disembarking in Candelario a few days previously. We added our own names and also availed
ourselves of the spare gear left behind by swapping my battered and bent water
bottle holder for a shiny new one left on the wall. There was no readily available dry firewood
in the sodden swamp, despite some in-depth searching on my part, and we lacked
the fire-starting skill of Maria, so that our attempt at a fire didn’t last
long enough to dry our clothes very effectively. We cooked up supper, glad to be in out of the
rain, and I played some guitar as dusk fell.
The rain stopped as we were
heading to bed, but resumed with a vengeance around sunrise, and we stayed in
bed for a while hoping that it would die down.
We got up around 8, had a hearty breakfast of oatmeal and cocoa and set
off by 10 o’clock. We climbed up over
our first pass, then afterwards over two ridges to avoid gorges on the Rio
Bravo. As Terri was apprehensive of
cougar attacks, I had to bring up the rear.
It started to rain partway up the pass and the rain strengthened into a
torrential, frigid downpour that made cycling a misery, especially as our
fingers went numb in the 4-degree air and even colder rain. We finally made it over the last ridge and
the rain stopped, allowing us to have a picnic lunch of hard boiled egg and
cheese sandwiches beside the Rio Bravo.
Refreshed and no longer cold and miserable, we rolled easily along a
fairly flat track to the ferry port at Puerto Rio Bravo, 47 km from where we
had slept and 100 km from Villa O’Higgins, where we discovered that we had
three and a half hours to wait until the next ferry. We waited, reading, drying wet clothes and
looking out at the pretty fjord that we were about to cross. As 7:00 approached, a few vehicles gathered
and Terri had me ask a truck if they would have room for her the next day to
take her over the steep pass out of the ferry port on the other side, but they
were only crossing to pick up a load and then catching the morning ferry
back. Once the (free) ferry was
underway, we got into a conversation with the neatly-dressed group at the next
table who turned out to be Jehovah’s Witnesses who were keen to convert
Terri. One of them was assigned to save
her soul, but Terri handled the young man’s spiel with diplomatic tact and
managed to say no without offending him.
At the other end, the few cars
disappeared and we settled down to sleep at the ferry terminal. It seems to be expected behaviour for
cyclists, and the man who operates the overpriced little café made sure that we
got enough water to cook as there was no water in the terminal building
itself. We made the acquaintance of the
captain of the ferry who took Terri’s wet clothes to dry on his cabin
heater. We cooked up supper and then
turned in on our air mattresses and under our sleeping bags on the waiting room
floor for a good night’s sleep.
 |
| Morning view in Caleta Yungay |
We awoke to brilliant sunshine
and calm water that made for great views over the fjord. We got some water from the captain on board
the ferry and cooked up breakfast and evacuated the waiting room before the
first cars of the day arrived.
 |
| Breakfast outside the ferry waiting room, Caleta Yungay |
With no
trucks likely to head towards Cochrane for several hours, Terri decided to try
to cycle over the pass rather than waiting for the uncertain prospect of a
lift. The climb, almost 500 metres, was
steep but straightforward, through very pretty woods with wonderful waterfalls
visible beside the road and across the valley.
 |
| At the top of the hill out of Caleta Yungay |
The road had some remarkably steep bits that had Terri off her bike and
pushing, and which had accounted for a truck that had gone off the road going
downhill the previous day; a group of men were gathered trying to dig out the
truck and rescue the front end loader that had been its cargo and was now mired
in a swamp. The descent down the other
side was spectacular, through a series of narrow gorges providing glimpses of
the mighty Rio Baker at the bottom. Just
as we reached the bottom, 20 km from the ferry, a bus from Villa O’Higgins
drove by and we saw Hans and Els waving happily from the back seat. A few minutes later we came across the bus
stopped to pick up passengers at the Tortel junction and we had a brief chat
with our Belgian Candelario survivors before a toot on the bus horn sent them
running for their ride.
 |
| Terri riding along the Carretera |
We rolled easily up the broad Rio Baker valley for 8 more kilometres and had lunch (the last of our steaks on
bread; the cold weather at least had the virtue of preserving food well) in an
idyllic meadow beside the green waters of the river, the most voluminous river
in all of Chile. Afterwards we raced
along nearly perfect dirt roads for another 15 km, averaging 20 km/h, until we
hit road maintenance work which turned our lovely firm dirt into a mire of
soft, wet, fresh gravel into which our tires sank. We pushed, we rode at walking pace, we were
passed by gauchos on horseback, and finally the road work was finished and we
were back on our old dirt, to our great relief.
We climbed slowly and steadily up a side valley, then rolled down the
other side looking for a good camping spot.
Terri rejected the first proposed spot, and it was a good thing she did,
as about 10 km further along (63 km from the ferry terminal), we found a
perfect wild campsite not far from the road, nestled amongst shrubs above a
tributary of the Baker with expansive views of the snow-capped mountains
surrounding us. We had a dip in the
river to clean up a bit, and then cooked dinner while admiring the views,
coloured vivid shades by the setting sun.
I had time to stretch my sore back, play some guitar and do some
juggling until the gathering dark drove me into the tent for another good
night’s sleep.
 |
| On the way downhill towards Cochrane from our camping spot |
We awoke to brilliant sunshine
and more great views, and after a leisurely breakfast, we were on the road by
10:15. We lumbered down the valley to
its junction with a larger river, then putzed along through pretty scenery
marked by reed beds before leaving the main valley for a climb up another
tributary. I gave Terri a head start and
did some stretching before setting off in pursuit. There were some seriously steep sections, but
I only caught Terri just before the top.
We descended onto a lake-filled plateau and made slow progress along a
road that wove up and down into a headwind.
At 3:00 we finally stopped for lunch after our final climb, and we had a
relatively easy downhill all the way into the neat and tidy town of Cochrane
after a ride of 61 km. In San Carlos campground
we saw Silke’s tent, and in the main Plaza de Armas in the centre of town we
met Vincent and Melanie. We treated
ourselves to a dinner out, then retreated to the campground where we met a
young British cyclist, Ben, who was trying to repair a broken luggage
rack. We slept poorly, kept awake by
crowing roosters and the loud fights of the bands of feral dogs that infest
most Chilean and Argentine towns.
For the first time since El
Calafate, we finally had reasonable internet connectivity in the campground,
and we lingered the next morning, having a long breakfast, going out to buy
food supplies for the road, and doing laundry.
It was almost 2 o’clock by the time we cycled out of town, climbing
steeply and then crossing back into the main Rio Baker valley which we had left
behind three days earlier.
 |
| Back to the Rio Baker north of Cochrane |
The valley
was dramatic, with steep gorges and frothing rapids that make the Baker one of
the prime kayaking rivers in Chile. The
intense green-blue colour of the water was so vivid that it didn’t look real;
it was like cycling through a Van Gogh painting. We ground uphill and flew downhill repeatedly
until it was time to stop for the evening, only 34 km from Cochrane. Terri spotted a great wild campsite
overlooking the Baker, and we settled in, cooking up steaks while gazing down
at some of the biggest rapids on the entire river. It was a far better place to sleep than in
the campground in Cochrane, and I was pleased at the quality of the camping
spot we had found.
 |
| Steak dinner overlooking the Rio Baker |
The following day, December 20th,
was the first day of summer in the southern hemisphere, but it didn’t feel very
summery. Neither was it a lucky day for
cycling. We got out of the tent around
7:30, having been awoken in the night by rain.
We had a great breakfast of oatmeal seasoned with cinnamon, raisins,
walnuts and candied orange peel, once again with a prime view of the churning
green rapids of the Rio Baker. We were
just packing up when another rain shower started, and we ended up having to pack
up a very wet tent and fly in a hurry.
We continued upstream on the Rio Baker, and on the first big uphill of
the day, I was waiting for Terri at the top when suddenly the familiar figures
of Melanie and Vincent appeared behind her.
We spent the day leapfrogging each other along the road. The scenery continued to be excellent, with
more rapids and lovely shades of water, first green and then, upstream of a big
river confluence, a profound teal that looked very unreal. The Rio Baker was dotted with upmarket fly
fishing lodges and a couple of rafting and kayaking outfits, along with a
handful of summer houses, but there were still wild stretches along which it
would be possible to camp. We spent a
lot of time taking pictures of the artificial-looking water colour before
finally rolling (under a fine mist of persistent drizzle) into Puerto Bertrand
where the Rio Baker starts flowing out of Lago Bertrand.
 |
| Azure water in the Rio Baker near Puerto Bertrand |
It’s a tiny little tourist town, and we had
difficulty finding a grocery store that was open. We bought supplies and ran into Vincent and Melanie
again. Terri took advantage of a land
line at the store to call a bus company and reserve a ticket for two days later
from Puerto Rio Tranquilo to Coyhaique, having decided that we would not make
it to Coyhaique in time for Christmas unless she did that and left me to cycle
a few longer days on my own.
After a steep climb out of town,
we cruised along a flattish section before I suddenly became aware that I had a
flat back tire. I replaced the inner
tube with the spare tube that I was carrying while Terri made us
sandwiches. I have always had issues
with putting the tire on my back rim, as it’s a downhill mountain biking rim
designed for tubeless tires and it’s a very tight fit getting the tire’s bead
back onto the rim. I wrestled for a
while and then finally got the tire back on.
We continued for a while to the junction where the road to Chile Chico
branches off along the south shore of Lago Carrera, took a few photos of the
unreal blue of Lago Carrera and then headed north along the main Carretera
Austral. The riding was fine, but soon
enough I realized that the back tire was flat again, perhaps due to damage
inflicted by me while wrestling with the tire.
I sent Terri ahead to scout out a camping spot and then began working on
the tire. This time, with my spare tube
already in use and already punctured, I had two tubes with holes in them and
needed to patch them. I pulled out my
patches and glue and got to work. I quickly
realized, however, that my patches were very, very old. Looking at them, I thought they might date
back to my final Silk Road stage in 2009, or even back to 2004. Using Schwalbe Marathon tires, I rarely get
flat tires, and so these patches had been sitting in my toolkit for many years. I discovered that very old patches don’t
stick so well to inner tubes. I worked
away diligently, finding holes, scraping the rubber around them to make the
glue stick better, putting on the patch, holding it in place for 10 minutes,
but every time I then put the repaired tube back into the tire, the patch
popped off. After 2 hours I was out of
patches and still had a flat tire. There
was only one thing to do. I put my
luggage back on my bike (except for my backpack, which I wore) and started
pushing the bike along the rough road on the flat back tire.
It wasn’t great for my back tire
and rim, but there wasn’t much else to do.
I pushed for almost an hour and a half as the clock ticked towards 9 pm
when finally I spotted Terri in the distance.
She and Vincent and Melanie had run into each other again at an
apparently abandoned farmer’s shed where Vincent and Melanie (who had passed us
just before my first flat tire) had been cooking supper. A man who herded sheep in the area had just
evicted them, not because they were trespassing but because he was worried
about them catching hanta virus (the subject of a big education campaign in
southern Chile at the moment) from the mice that live in the old barn.
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| Our shelter under the verandah roof |
He offered us shelter on the porch of a house
for sale just down the road and we accepted the offer, putting up our tents
under the porch roof. It was a little
cramped for space, but given the rainy weather, we were very glad for any solid
roof over our heads. Vincent and Melanie
provided me with patches and Vincent also showed me an easy trick to put on the
tire by pushing the bead into the indentation in the centre of the rim (where
the spokes are anchored; this reduces the effective diameter of the wheel and
gives just enough slack in the bead to allow the tire to be pushed over the rim
just using one’s thumbs. We slept well,
and were glad for the roof as a truly titanic thunderstorm erupted in the
night, hammering down on the porch roof but leaving our tents dry. It had been a hard-won 47 kilometres of
cycling that day!
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| Bird-rich delta of the Rio El Leon in Lago Carrera |
The next day, Dec, 21st,
was a truly spectacular day. Vincent and
Melanie got away first, although they left behind their chain lube and a roll
of duct tape that I packed up to give them when next we met. After the torrential rain of the night, the
day was clear and sunny, and the sun lit up the wonderful teal of Lago
Carrera. The road led first into a stiff
breeze, but then after we turned a corner on the lake and started heading due
east, we were sheltered from the wind.
As we climbed a bit away from the lake, we looked back to where a larger
river, the Rio El Leon, flowed into the lake from the west and formed a delta. Unlike most of the lake, this section was
alive with birds of all kinds, presumably feeding on fish and crustaceans
nourished by the mineral-rich glacial waters of the river. From a distance, we could see geese, herons,
ducks, ibises and others thickly spread across the grass of the marshy
lakeshore.
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| On the way into Puerto Rio Tranquilo |
From this point on, the views got
more and more spectacular. The road
climbed steadily above the lake, lined by colourful wildflowers. The yellows and pinks of the flowers contrasted
vividly with the greenish blue of the lake, the grey cliffs of the opposite
shore and the white of the snows and glaciers of the distant higher peaks. I kept stopping for photos, but eventually we
turned the corner and pedalled north along the lakeshore into a raking cold
headwind that led us downhill into Puerto Rio Tranquilo, a surprisingly large
tourist town 38 km from where we had slept.
The first order of business was to have a large lunch, but beforehand we
arranged with Vincent and Melanie who, unsurprisingly, were also in town, to go
to see the Marble Caves by boat with them at 3:00. As we waited a very hungry half hour for our
churrasco sandwiches, with Terri about ready to tear the waiter to shreds and
eat him for lunch instead, Silke walked into the restaurant and we had a bit of
a reunion. She had been to see the caves
that morning and highly recommended them.
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| On the way to the Marble Caves |
I had heard next to nothing about
the Marble Caves before arriving in town, but they really are a wonder of the
world. Our boatman headed off from town
at a good clip into a fairly rough lake; luckily the waves were from astern,
but even so we were glad to get around a headland and into dead calm water near
the caves. The coastline was composed of
low cliffs of grey marble, and the water had eroded and dissolved the unusually
soft marble in the same way that happens with ordinary limestone caves. Our boatman claimed that this is the only
place in the world that marble caves can be observed, and I’ve certainly never
seen them before, but it seems hard to believe that nowhere else can they be
found. Whatever the case, all four of us
were open-mouthed with admiration at the colours and shapes to be seen.
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| Marble Caves near Rio Tranquilo |
We motored right inside a few of the larger
caves, and admired others from close range.
The shapes of the walls and the colour variations of the marble made
them look almost man-made, like Gaudi’s architecture but much more
beautiful. I took a ridiculous number of
photos, mesmerized by the shimmering reflected light that played across the
walls.
The boat ride back was exciting,
to say the least, as we were now heading directly into quite sizeable waves
churned up by the stiff wind.
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| Marble Caves |
Our
helmsman was an old hand at managing the lake, but the sheer mechanical
pounding that our backs received as the boat slammed down into the troughs was
enough to compact our spines a few centimetres, and we were relieved to stagger
back onto shore. Beside the road, we saw yet another billboard opposing projects to dam many of Patagonia's iconic wild rivers (such as the Baker). Opposition to the HidroAysen project has been fierce and sustained and seems to have won the argument (in 2014 the five-dam project was cancelled) but environmentalists are worried that it will rise from the dead once again. Terri and I decided to
stay indoors that night and after looking at a few overpriced cabanas we found
a friendly little hospedaje where we were able to cook up a big bean stew and
sleep in a big double bed for the first time in a long time.
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| Anti-dam billboard, Rio Tranquilo |
The next morning Terri caught a
bus to Coyhaique with her bike. She had
ridden hard and done well on challenging roads for seven days, and had ridden
particularly hard on the way into Puerto Rio Tranquilo. However, with three days until Christmas and
220 km separating us from Coyhaique, and with her strong desire to celebrate
Christmas indoors in the city, she decided to spare herself a punishing three
days and get to town early, leaving me to enjoy three longer and more
challenging days on my own. I waved
goodbye to her at the bus stop and headed off up the lake. As was the case the day before, bracing
headwinds raced down the lake from the north and it was a slow start to the
ride. By the time I got to the north end
of the lake, it was starting to spit rain, and it kept up for most of the
day. It was a cold, miserable, chilling
rain that left my fingertips numb despite my gloves. Head down, riding uphill on a rough stretch
of road, I missed a well-known stopoff for cyclists, a house with a welcome
sign in Hebrew where a couple of very religious Chileans invite in passing
tourists, feed them excellent home-made pizza and then harangue them about
religion for a couple of hours. I kept
riding, trying to stay warm by constant movement. There were lots of ups and downs, and by 6 pm
I was looking for a place to camp, but was foiled by estancia fences. Finally I found a spot just off the road but
hidden by a hill to put up the tent. It
had finished raining by now, and I had a pleasant evening cooking, eating,
playing guitar and reading. I had
covered almost exactly 80 km, the largest daily total so far on a day spent
riding entirely on dirt.
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| Snow on my bike in the morning |
That night I slept well, but was
awakened early by the sound of rain falling on the tent. I opened my eyes and was surprised that the
raindrops seemed to be sticking to the tent.
It was, in fact, snowing. I
rolled over and went back to sleep, disheartened by summer snow. I got up again at 8:30 when the dripping of
melting snow off the overhanging trees began to work its way through the tent
fly. I got up, cooked oatmeal for
breakfast and then lingered, reading and playing guitar, waiting for the fly to
dry and for the air to warm up. As I
loitered, first Silke and then Vincent and Melanie rolled by; they had stopped
for pizza and come-to-Jesus (and various jokes in very poor taste about Nazis
that had offended Silke) the day before and so had ended up behind me, camped
in an abandoned hut ten kilometres up the road.
I eventually followed in their tire tracks and had another long day,
riding down to a wide valley and then up a tributary. Lots of roadwork slowed progress (the asphalt
section of the Carretera is being extended south), as did some heavy
headwinds. On the bright side, though,
the skies slowly cleared and I rode into Villa Cerro Castillo at 3 pm to find a
school bus turned into a restaurant. I
ate a huge churrasco sandwich and talked first with Silke, then with Vincent
and Melanie, and then with a Basque couple cycling in the other direction who
had some good tips for camping spots along the road. I also chatted briefly with three American
reporters who had spent five long years trying to arrange an interview with
Douglas Tompkins, finally gotten a date with the elusive tycoon and then had
him drown in Lago Carrera only two weeks before they arrived. They were hopeful of interviewing his widow
Kris McDivitt Tompkins instead.
I left town at 4:30 with the
biggest climb of the entire Carretera Austral ahead, a 900-metre vertical climb
over the Portezuelo Ibanez pass (1120 m above sea level).
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| Highest climb of the Carretera Austral, just north of Cerro Castillo |
There were
wonderful views of the beautiful Cerro Castillo and also of the neighbouring
Cerro Las Cuatro Cumbres. The climb turned out to be
remarkably easy since the road surface was now perfectly smooth asphalt and I
was pushed along by a blistering tailwind, and I made very good time over the
top, reaching the top after only 2 hours.
The scenery at the top was open and windswept in the Natural Reserve of
Cerro Castillo, and I continued downhill in search of better, more sheltered
camping. Vincent and Melanie caught up
to me where the road turned uphill again up a tributary stream, and we rode
together for several kilometres, searching for a decent place to camp.
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| Scenery atop the Portezuelo Ibanez |
We had been told by the Basques that there
was a shelter in the national park, but as the kilometres passed by without
sight of any shelter, we eventually lost faith and decided to camp beside the
road, 78 km from where I had camped the previous night, in a tiny patch of bush
in a canyon swept by the strongest winds I had seen since Candelario
Mancilla. It was an uncomfortable night
as I was afraid to put up the tent as there was a real risk of it getting
shredded again. I slept out under the
stars, occasionally woken by tiny spits of rain, and was glad to get going the
next morning.
December 24th was the
toughest day of cycling of the entire trip for me. Vincent and Melanie got away before me but
stopped to cook breakfast at the lake atop the pass, where the shelter and
campground that the Basques had told us about was, only 2 km past our windy
bivouac. If only we had toughed it out
for 2 more kilometres! As soon as I came
over the pass, the wind switched from a howling tailwind to a screaming
headwind and stayed that way all the way into Coyhaique. Any pleasure I might have had from the
downhill was destroyed by the sensation of having a wild animal tearing at my
face and at my bicycle, slowing progress to a crawl. Even the fact that I was on new asphalt didn’t
make the riding any easier. Just before
the Carretera joined the road to Balmaceda airport, Melanie and Vincent caught
up to me and we took turns in front breaking the wind while the other two
drafted behind. It was painfully slow
progress, only 11 or 12 km/h downhill on pavement, despite working at maximum
power. Eventually Melanie had had enough
and she and Vincent stopped to eat and shelter from the wind, while I pushed on
alone, determined to make it to Coyhaique as soon as possible and escape the
wind. There was quite a lot of traffic;
this valley, stretching to the Argentine border, is where almost everyone who
lives in Region XI (Aysen) lives, and the population density was surprisingly
high. There were almost no forest cover,
and big estancias stretched to the distant mountains. I kept my head down, my teeth gritted and my
determination alive. Slowly the
kilometres added up, and by the time I got to the sprawling suburbs of the big
city, the road finally had some shelter from the wind as it sank deeper into a
canyon. Just as I came into town, I had
the worst dog encounter of the entire trip.
As I passed a small property, two dogs raced out onto the road and gave
chase, teeth bared and making serious attempts to bite me. I stopped and confronted them, which usually
makes dogs back off, but this just spurred them on to further attempts to bite
me. I kept the front of the bike between
them and me, and looked around in vain for some rocks to throw at them. They continued to circle and dart at me, and
eventually I put the bike down and ran at them, screaming obscenities and
kicking at them. I finally found a piece
of spare lumber lying beside the road and started swinging it at them, trying to
hit them in the head. Eventually, after
a couple of minutes of close combat, the dog’s owner showed up and asked what
the problem was. I told him to control
his unspeakable dogs and waited until he had them by the collar before I cycled
off, letting him know what I thought of his dogs and his control over them.
When I got to town, I checked my
phone and found no messages from Terri.
It turned out she had sent messages on Viber, WhatsApp, Facebook, Gmail and
SMS, and I received precisely none of them.
We had bought Claro SIM cards in Punta Arenas, and had had no network
the entire time since, except for a single day in Cochrane. I would have to rate Claro as the least
useful mobile phone network in southern Chile; Movistar and Telefonica seemed
to work much better for other travellers.
I called Terri and got through, receiving directions to the wonderful
hospedaje that she had found run by a hospitable, funny city councillor named
Nina. I got there around 3 o’clock, had
a shower and settled in for a few days of eating and relaxing. Terri had been busy in my absence, getting a
snazzy haircut, buying lots of food to cook and getting in touch with all the
travellers who had shared our trip from Chalten. It turned out that Ralf had just left town,
but had stopped in that morning for coffee.
The Bamboos (Mika and Pauline) and Ben (the English guy with the broken
luggage rack—he had taken a lift in a pickup truck to Coyhaique—were in town
but staying in a distant campground. A
couple of hours after I arrived Vincent and Melanie showed up, shattered and
glad to be out of the wind. And even
later the doorbell rang and Silke showed up; she had left Cerro Castillo before
us, but had run into some German backpackers partway up the climb and had
stayed the night in a campground with them, leaving her a big 100 km day to
survive to get to Coyhaique. It was surprisingly emotional
seeing everyone safe and sound under the same roof, and we had a delicious
Christmas Eve stew that Terri had cooked up on the wood stove ahead of time.
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| Nina, our gracious and welcoming host in Coyhaique |
We ended up staying two full days
in Coyhaique, leaving on the 27th, and we cooked up big festive
Christmas meals both on Christmas Day and on Boxing Day. On Boxing Day, walking out of our hospedaje,
we ran into another couple of familiar faces.
Hans and Els had just gotten off a bus and were looking for a place to
stay. We directed them to Nina’s and
that evening we had an almost complete reunion of the Lago del Desierto boat
crew, with only Ralf missing. It was a
festive meal that evening, full of stories and reminscences, and for all of us,
on the road without family and long-term friends during Christmas, it gave us a
much-needed feeling of companionship.
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| Our Boxing Day dinner crew |
The ride from Villa O’Higgins to
Coyhaique was 564 km, and took us 10 days.
It was an absolutely wonderful bike ride in terms of adventure, views,
camping and freedom. The road surface
was surprisingly good most of the way, with a few intervals of horrible loose
gravel, and the traffic was almost non-existent south of Cochrane and pretty
light up until 40 km before Coyhaique (where we joined the Balmaceda
Airport-Coyhaique road). The views of
glaciers, waterfalls, lakes, fjords, forests, mountain peaks and spectacular
rivers were pretty hard to beat, and (for me) were the highlight of the
ride. Some of our campsites were
outstanding, and (despite the prevalence of barbed wire estancia fences) wild
campsites were relatively easy to find.
Despite episodes of heavy rain, cold and wind, this part of the
Carretera more than lived up to expectations.
The next blog post will cover the
northern half of the Carretera Austral, another wonderful 9 days of riding to
Chaiten and 4 more mixed days across the island of Chiloe. Thanks for reading all the way to the end of
this tome!
