After climbing up to Lago Cerro Castillo, I was sore all over. As it turns out, cycling and hiking don’t really use the same muscle groups. It hurt to swing my leg over the top tube of my bike.
I was also simmering with barely contained self-righteous anger as a result of the unwanted video mentioned in the last blog post. And I woke up with vaguely flu-like symptoms – a pounding headache and a scratchy throat.
I thought about taking the bus.
But the sun was shining! And the gas station had pizza and Nescafé lattes! And so me and my vaguely flu-like symptoms and my leaden legs headed down the road on my increasingly dirty bicycle. As it turns out, self-righteous anger can be a very productive emotion. It can give you energy when you have none left, kind of like caffeine.
This was the day when the pavement officially ended and the gravel (ripio in Spanish) began. This didn’t sound so bad in theory, but it seems that the preferred method of road maintenance on the Carretera Austral is just to dump a bunch of gravel on the road and call it a day, making for a lot of very loose rocks. As you can probably imagine, this can make cycling quite tedious.
The weather also couldn’t make up its mind. Although I started out in brilliant sunshine, it didn’t take too long to start pouring rain. Then, in the late afternoon, it was sunny and raining at the same time. Get a climate that can do both, right?
But in that strange afternoon weather, the clouds cleared enough to get the most amazing views across Valle Rio Murta. It was one of the most dramatic stretches of the whole trip. The road clung to the side of a cliff. Lush vegetation tumbled down the mountains on all sides. Golden shafts of sunlight illuminated a vast landscape. A car pulled over and the elderly folks inside gave me a nectarine.
When I finally pulled into a wild camping spot beside an abandoned house, a number of other cyclists were already there.
“The sun comes out and we get the Patagonia we come for, eh?” Haggay said in greeting.
We certainly did.
The highlight of this particular camp spot was Tango the bike puppy. Tango’s owner, who I’ve forgotten the name of, is a cyclist from Spain. He started his trip in Colombia and is headed for Ushuaia. In Argentina, he found a street puppy and ended up keeping her. Tango is about five months old and rides in a milk crate on the back of the bike. She has a little rain coat with a hood, and she is an absolute delight. When they get to Ushuaia, Tango is going home with her owner to Spain where she will live out her days as a European doggie. Lucky Tango.
The next day took me to Puerto Rio Tranquilo. Just after I arrived, the clouds burst open and a torrential downpour began. I sat with Alex from Germany and drank horrendously overpriced Nescafé while we debated what to do next. In the end, Alex carried on and I opted to find a guesthouse in Rio Tranquilo.
The next morning, the rain had not stopped nor even slowed. Instead of improving, my flu-like symptoms had gotten worse. So I decided to stay in Rio Tranquilo for another night in the hopes that I would get better. Unfortunately, the rain had also knocked out the water pipes to Rio Tranquilo, so there was no running water (and therefore no showers or coffee) in the whole town. It didn’t take long before all the non-sparkling bottled water sold out too.
So in the face of such adversity, I decided to go for a two hour boat ride in the pouring rain!
It wasn’t just a boat ride for the sake of riding in a boat – I was going to see the Marble Caves, one of Chile’s Patagonian wonders. These caverns are made of black and white marble, eroded by the aquamarine waters of Lake General Carrera, the second largest lake in South America. The lake straddles the border of Chile and Argentina, and in Argentina is known as Lago Buenos Aires. Same lake, two names.
Not surprisingly, viewing the Marble Caves in the pouring rain while ill was not a particularly enjoyable experience. I didn’t even take any pictures, because it was raining too much to use my camera and my hands were so cold I was worried I would drop my phone in the lake. So if you want to view to splendour of the Marble Caves, you’ll have to use Google.
It stopped raining the next day, but I still felt like crap. At the same time, I really wanted to take a shower (remember: there was no running water in Rio Tranquilo at this time). I wasn’t feeling up to biking down the street, let alone to the next town.
I admitted defeat at the hands of germs and pipe-destroying landslides. And I bought a bus ticket.
A few hours later, I was in Cochrane.
I was pushing my bike lackadaisically down a road that I had chosen at random when I heard my name being called. I turned around and saw Brian, one of retired guys from Washington State, running towards me in a long johns and a thermal shirt. And before I knew it, I was checking into Hospedaje Ana Luiz, a modest guesthouse on a quiet residential street. Brian’s companion Tom and Alex (from Germany) were also staying there.
Brian and Tom rode off the next morning, and Alex and I set ourselves on a mission that didn’t seem too ambitious – get laundry done and wash our bikes.
The only obviously advertised laundry place in town was closed. Our host, Ana, informed us after the fact that it had been closed for a while. But she knew another place, so she sent us there. It was also closed. Infrequent and nonspecific opening hours had struck again.
So we wandered the streets – first together, then separately. I had given up and was contemplating some good old fashioned sink laundry when I got a message from Alex.
“There is a lady here who will wash your clothes for 7000.”
I was out the door like a shot, practically running through the streets of Cochrane toward the promise of freshly laundered clothes. I burst into the yard of the place Alex had sent a location pin for.
“Wow, you got here fast,” he remarked.
And then began the search for a car wash to clean our bikes. The one everyone sent us to was A) Closed and B) Looked more like a Car Dirty than a Car Wash. So we rode across town to a place that had Lavado De Autos (Car Wash in Spanish) written on their wall in big bubble letters.
“We’re not a car wash,” said the man inside.
Chile. Why.
In the end, Ana hooked us up with a random family who owned a pressure washer and washed stuff for people as a kind of side hustle. And voila – clean bikes.
After Cochrane, I hit the first stretch of clear skies I’d had in weeks – since before Puerto Montt. It was cold at night, and I was biking into a full on head wind, but there was sunshine! Glorious bluebird skies and clear, perfect sunshine. There were mountains in the distance. There were horses on the side of the road. Sparkling rivers flowed under bridges and sheep ran from me in a wild panic.
Up and down I went, over rolling hills. After a lot of gradual up, I came to a huge, dramatic descent – I switchbacked along the side of a mountain, heading for the valley bottom. I kept stopping to take pictures. It was one of those moments that doesn’t quite seem real, that even after the fact feels more like a dream than something that actually happened.
That night, I set up camp on the side of a river. I watched the sun set behind the hills across the water. I curled deep in my sleeping bag and listened to the sounds of the river and the birds, while freezing my butt off the entire night.
And then, there it was – my last day on the Carretera Austral. From my wild camp spot to a little seaside village called Caleta Tortel.
Technically, the Carretera Austral runs all the way to Villa O’Higgins, about 120 kilometres from the turnoff to Tortel. But I wasn’t going. I’d made the decision to book a ferry from Tortel to Puerto Natales in Chile’s far south, because I was worried about time. After O’Higgins, you have to do a crossing on foot with your bike from Chile to Argentina, then bike through about 500 kilometres of windy pampa. It was a hard choice, because I did want to see El Chalten and Fitz Roy in Argentina, but in the end I decided on the ferry. So this was my last day on Ruta 7.
I started the day watching a group of cows pass by while I ate mushy leftover pasta. I pedalled down the road and filtered water from a waterfall. The sun was high in the sky and I was feeling pensive. By the end of the day, I would have biked 1000 kilometres on the Carretera, and it hadn’t been an easy ride.
Not long after leaving my camp, I ran into Alex while I was eating banana chips on the side of the road. He’d made it a lot farther than me the day before, but had slept a lot later, so now we were caught up. As per usual, he pedalled off into the distance quickly after we stopped to chat. I’m not the fastest cyclist out there, especially on gravel.
But that day, I may have been the happiest. I stopped at a teeny tiny middle-of-nowhere shop and bought some coffee and a sopapilla. I met some motorcyclists and had the one conversation I’m very good at having in Spanish:
“Where are you from?”
“Canada.”
“Did you bike all the way from Canada?”
“No, from Santiago.”
“Wow, Santiago! Alone?”
“Yes, alone.”
“Alone????” (words now accompanied by gestures of shock and awe, and sometimes they take a picture of me.)
Soon after this encounter, I came to the turnoff for Caleta Tortel. This was where my journey on the Carretera Austral would end. If I turned left, I would go to the ferry at Puerto Yungay, which would take me toward Villa O’Higgins. But I went right, cycling 20 kilometres down the side road to Tortel. And just like that, the Carretera was over.
But before I could head further south, I had a few days to kill in Tortel. Luckily for me, Alex had made a side trip to Tortel even though he was headed all the way to O’Higgins, and we coincidentally once again ended up at the same guesthouse (this was guesthouse number 4 where one of us had wandered in and unexpectedly found the other).
Caleta Tortel is a very unique village. Only the very top edge of the town is accessible by vehicle, and the rest is entirely composed of foot-traffic-only boardwalks (including a whole lot of stairs). The houses are sort of jumbled up and down the sides of the steep hills, and on one end stretch out into a tidal flat and stand on stilts. It’s situated at the end of a fjord, and the water around the entire town is a unique green colour because of the glacial till flowing out from the nearby Rio Baker. There is also an abundance of friendly dogs.
On the one full day we spent together in Caleta Tortel, Alex and I decided to tackle the town’s scenic hiking trail. It wasn’t especially long, so we figured it wouldn’t be too hard. However, we underestimated the sheer quantity of mud we would find on the trail.
The first part of the hike was on a skinny little elevated boardwalk. We went up and up until we could see the peaks, glaciers, and waterfalls across the valley, as well as the Rio Baker winding off into the distance. As we climbed even higher, the mouth of the Rio Baker came into view – where it meets the ocean and the saltwater mixes with the fresh. That’s about where the boardwalk ended and the mud began.
The rest of the hike was equally scenic but much trickier to execute. Every step required a careful weighing of which spot was the safest to place your foot – both of us miscalculated on occasion and sank ankle-deep in thick grey mud. A few of the local dogs came to join us, and ran circles around us as we tried to pick our way across the miniature swamps.
But it was all worthwhile. The views were stunning, and it was nice to spend a day hiking with a friend. When we finally got back to the guesthouse, we took naps. Eventually, I made my way to one of the local stores, which was actually open for once. The old man running the place asked me my name and then, upon learning I was named Laura, played me the song “Tell Laura I Love Her” on his phone. It was very sweet.
The next day, Alex left for O’Higgins. I was sad to see him go, and felt a flash of regret at having booked the ferry from Tortel. In that moment, I wanted to keep biking south, to stay with my new friend and to meet back up with other people I had encountered along the way, like Tom and Brian and Haggay. But my ticket was booked, and it was non-refundable, and I was running out of time. So Alex and I went our separate ways, as so often happens with friends you meet while travelling.
As sad as I was to see Alex go, I was also excited to board my ferry and head for Chile’s far south. The towering peaks and desolate landscapes were calling my name – but first, a journey through the fjords.
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