Beauty, Isolation and Hard Work on The Carretera Austral

Sunset in Villa Cerro Castillo.
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Puerto Chacabuco to Villa O'Higgins (Chile)

The Carretera Austral was a demanding ride, but absolutely worth the slippery gravel, steep hills and searing winds.  We arrived by ferry to Puerto Chacabuco, a tiny port town buried in fjords, but we can't recommend staying there.  We checked out one place where a large dead mouse was just lying in the entry way.  Others looked of similar quality, save the one real hotel, but it charges $300 a night!!!  Best to continue on to Puerto Aisen or Coyhaique.

snowy jagged peaks and startlingly blue and turquoise glacial lakes

Streets of Villa Cerro Castillo.
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Our first day was an easy and beautiful ride on pavement from Puerto Aisen to Coyhaique, the largest town in Chilean Northern Patagonia.  About 100,000 people inhabit the huge, mountainous Carretera region (1/6 the area of Chile), and 50,000 of them live in Coyhaique.  Before the Carretera was constructed, the only towns in the entire region were on bodies of water and were accessible only by boat.  In the 1970's, Pinochet became infatuated with the idea of building a road here, to link this remote and ruggedly beautiful southern region with the main body of inhabited Chile to the north.  The 1240 kilometer road was constructed over 20 years through what seemed an impossible landscape, but at the cost of many workers´lives.

Sunset on the lake, view from our cabin in Puerto Guadal.
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Today, the Carretera Austral towns have undeniably embraced their more modern incarnations.  But while there certainly are tourists in the region, mostly busing or hitchhiking their way down the road, it doesn´t really feel touristy.  Even the towns are small and sleepy, pitched improbably into the rugged landscape.  On a bicycle in particular, you often feel like you are very isolated from the world.  The difficulty of getting to and from the Carretera certainly has a lot to do with this feeling, but you truly embrace it when riding for hours without seeing anyone through the snowy jagged peaks and startlingly blue and turquoise glacial lakes.  The hours of views of the Rio Baker are particularly striking; the river is as turquoise as the best of the region´s lakes, and snakes its way south right alongside the Carretera.

Tole at the Cascada de la Virgen, near Puerto Aisen.
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We took a fantastic detour off of the actual Carretera, which we would highly recommend to other bikers.  We took the ferry from Puerto Ibanez to Chile Chico, then rode a gorgeous route hugging the southern coastline of Lago General Carrera, with views of mountains and the northern ice fields across the turquoise lake.  An added bonus of this route is that there seemed to be less traffic than on the Carretera Austral.  We did encounter ludicrous, bike-stopping wind between Chile Chico and Puerto Guadal, though - so be warned!  The road meets back up with the Carretera just north of Puerto Bertrand.  We can point out some great wild campsites and places to stay along the way, for anyone that´s interested in taking this route.  On the practical side, anyone going should be sure to fully appreciate that there are no functioning ATMs outside of Coyhaique and no one will take a credit card.  We learned this lesson the hard way, and had to spend 3 days in Cochrane waiting for the bank to open, eating only at our guesthouse since we knew they wouldn´t require payment until we checked out!

A small temple to the virgin.
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The most isolated stretch of the Carretera was undeniably that at the end, from Cochrane down to Villa O´Higgins, where the road reached only in 1999.  A free government ferry about 120 kilometers south of Cochrane shuttles drivers to the last 100 desolate kilometers of the road, and provides a short but beautiful ride through more fjords and mountains.  We have to mention the ferry captain, a kind soul who, upon seeing our wet cold figures board the ferry, promptly served us hot chocolate and bread, and told us we should camp out in the ferry refugio on the other side rather than trying to set up our tent in the rain.  That was so awesome, and we did just that, as you can see in the attached pics.

The virgin with her flowers.
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The morning after our ferry station campout, we began what became a marathon through the final 100 kilometers to Villa O´Higgins.  We meant to camp along the way, but the marshy, wet land offered us no hope, so we plodded on.  We reached town only after it was properly dark (not until about 10 pm this far south in the summer!).  As it didn´t look like there was much to do there but take some day hikes, we immediately signed up to leave the next morning for El Chalten, in Argentina.  The crossing would require two ferry rides divided by a horse trek, and take either one or two days, but the nearness of Argentine steakhouses had us salivating to return to the promised land of meat and malbec.  Plus it sounded extremely interesting.