"Capitan. Vuelve El Don Baldo!"

Profuse apologies for the lack of recent updates.  Since our last post we´ve completed the final selection of the Carretera Austral from Coyhaique to Chaiten, and taken the boat over to Chiloe.

After five days loafing around Coyhaique and getting rather bored of haemorrhaging money it was great to go back into the wild.  The road out of Coyhaique follows Rio Simpson through a beautiful valley, before joining another valley and heading north.  We spent one night camping in a beautiful clearing on an estancia by the river, and one night at the Casa de Ciclistas in Villa Manihuales (which is highly recommended - it´s right by the river so is a good spot for swimming and fishing, and provides free beds for bikers).  

200km North of Coyhaique we reached Parque Nacional de Quelat.  The Carretera goes straight through the park, with a brutal climb up towards a huge glacier.  This section was as steep as anything we´ve been up yet, following a fast flowing stream with countless hairpin bends and with a surface that looked and felt more like a dry stone wall than a road.  At the top of the climb we came to a forest known as "El Bosque Encantado" which was well worth a visit.  The area below the glacier is very well watered and so we found vegetation growing from every possible surface.  It was full of incredible wild flowers and creepers hanging from huge trees.  Park rangers had cut a path through the forest but the vegetation quickly sneaks in to reclaim the space so all of the bridges and steps look like they are made out of moss and greenery.

 El Bosque Encantado

 

Ventisquero Colgante - hanging glacier

After a night camping next to the river we followed the road as it continued through the rainforest, past an immense hanging glacier, and on to Puyuhaupi - a welcoming German settler town at the end of a fjord with beautiful views.  We stayed by the lake in Puyuhaupi and then added to our collection of wierd camping locations over the next few nights by spending a night in the fire station in La Junta, and on a runway at Puerto Cardenas.  

The beautiful Fjord at Puyuhuapi

A week after setting out from Coyhaique we finally reached Chaiten and the end of the Carretera - at least the end as it currently stands with the road north of Chaiten closed due to landslides.  We´d heard all sorts of things about Chaiten, but I don´t think anything could have prepared us for such a strange experience.  In May 2008 a volcano went off in a valley 10km to the north of town.  The ash from the erruption poured into the Rio Blanco, Chaiten had been evacuated so nobody was hurt, but the river burst its banks and the force of the flood destroyed whole streets and washed many buildings out into the sea.  A few weeks later when people came back to try to rescue their posessions they found the whole town buried under metres of ash and sand.  The Chilean Government made the decision that it was too dangerous to try to repopulate the town and offered people the chance to settle elsewhere. 

The final stretch on the Carreterra Austral- paved road at last!

The majority of the 5,000 inhabitants seem to have taken their offer and relocated, but there´s a group of people who don´t want to leave and have tried to stay in Chaiten despite the fact that since the eruption nothing has been done to reconnect the telephone lines, electricity, or water supply.  Chaiten was a pioneer town, and the story of the lady who owned the hostel we stayed in demonstrates why some people just don`t want to take the Government´s advice and leave: her grandfather was one of the founders of Chaiten, and it´s the only place she has ever lived. 

Estimates vary, but most people will tell you that there are a couple of hundred people still living in Chaiten trying to carve out a living from toursists and passers-by.  Those who have stayed seem to have spent most of the last two years trying to salvage their property but now they are literally living in a ghost town and the main pastime seems to be binge drinking and eating Pichanga.  The population is gradually dwindling.  The streets are empty and shops, hotels, offices, and homes remain untouched since the day the volcano went off, submerged in ash, gradually corroding.  We passed a greengrocers with trays of fruit and veg that were fresh on the day the volcano went off and still sit there now, shrivelled and coated in silt.  In the Plaza de Armas there´s a tourist office with two desks visible through the dusty window.  The desk nearest the window is exactly as it was at the moment the town was evacuated with paperwork and a cup of coffee left unfinished.

After a strange two days in Chaiten we were more than ready to hop on the ferry to Chiloe.  We got up early and were cycling over to get on board the Don Baldo at the advertised hour when we suddenly noticed the boat edging away from the dock.  The captain had inexplicably decided to leave a whole hour early and the next boat wasn´t until a week later.  The thought of another week in a ghost town was too much to contemplate.  As the boat disappeared towards the horizon we rushed to the booking office and remonstrated with the man who had sold us the tickets.  Happily, after 45 minutes, he saw our point of view and picked up the telephone to the Captain:  "Capitan.  Vuelve El Don Baldo a Chaiten!"  We couldn´t believe our luck as the ferry swung round on the horizon and headed back to Chaiten to collect us and five other passengers who had been left high and dry.  This is possibly the coolest thing that has happened to us so far, if not ever.  The Don Baldo is not some glorified fishing boat, it´s a fully grown car ferry.  And it turned back to collect us.  Safe to say, once we´d finally boarded we weren´t the most popular passengers (at the very least the crew spat in our coffee) but we were on our way to Chiloe!

Moments before we saw the Don Baldo disappearing to sea directly behind us!

The infamous Don Baldo

A quick footnote on the Carretera.  In Rita´s hostel in Chaiten we found some amazing photos taken at the time of its construction.  Building a road through 1,500km of rocky wilderness was an insane project.  But we had a wonderful time cycling along it so we´re very grateful to General Pinochet for deciding to build it.

Another sunny day on the Carreterra

Puncture news!

We have an update on the puncture sweepstake, and it´s not too late to enter if you still haven´t made up your mind how many flatties we are going to get by the time we reach Lima.

Ben has managed to pick up four punctures in the last few weeks. Laura still has none (touch wood).

The first puncture came about because Ben cycled (with disdain) over a large thorn that was visibile from a long way off but ignored.

The second, third, and fourth were more like flats than punctures, and were all the result of Ben´s hasty approach to puncture repairs: not putting the right patch on, not putting the right patch on the right way, putting the right patch on the right way and then dropping the patched tube on concrete. You get the picture. Incompetence all round...)

Another flat tyre on the path to Lago O´Higgins

From now on incompetence is banned. Come to think of it so are haste and disdain.

Ben 4 - Laura - 0

Backlog on the blog

We´ve been really bad about keeping up to date in the last few weeks, but it´s not entirely our fault - we´ve been in the middle of nowhere and it´s hard to find a shower, let alone an internet connection. Most people are still communicating with CB radio round here! Anyhow we´ll try to give a rundown of the last few weeks:

We spent a few days in El Calafate having made it there from Torres del Paine. As well as treating ourselves to a nice hotel for a couple of nights we went on a hike up the Perito Morreno glacier. The glacier was incredible but the highlight of the trip was a Japanese man who had forgotten to pack any warm clothes and so decided to wear a hotel bathrobe and some flannel exfoliating gloves to keep out the cold!

                                          The Perito Moreno Glacier

From El Calafate we rode north to El Chalten to walk amongst more glaciers and get some incredible views of Mt Fitzroy on a bright sunny day. Then we took the virtually untrodden path between Argentina and Chile through a border crossing that can only be done by bike, on horseback, or on foot and involved two boat trips (across Lago del Desierto and Lago O´Higgins) and crossing several raging rivers with no bridges...

And since then we´ve covered the first 300km of the Carretera Austral, picked up a new cycling buddy and sustained one injury that´s left us grounded for a week in Coyhaique. We´ve done and seen so much that it would be difficult to capture it all but a run down of a few of the wonderful/bizarre places we´ve slept in the last few weeks might be the best way of summing it up:

1. The Kitsch Lounge

On leaving Torres del Paine we stumbled into Cerro Castillo (a small collection of huts and a rodeo stadium that sells itself as a buzzing metropolis) at about 11pm after cycling blindly in the dark for an hour over some very shoddy road. Needless to say we were exhausted and starving and very much hoping we´d find a bed after a long stretch in the tent. Sadly Cerro Castillo didn´t offer much in the way of hostels so we found ourselves sleeping on a local cafe owners´ living room floor surrounded by an extraordinary array of trinkets, including a diamante encrusted sombrero, at least 100 rodeo trophies and a life-sized model of a flamenco dancer.

2. The Sheep Pen

On the road to El Chalten we passed up the opportunity of sleeping with a pile of animal carcasses that were scattered amongst the only group of trees for hundreds of kms to bed down in a sheep pen on the shores of the spectacularly beautiful Lago Argentino. This was a truly incredible spot, miles from anyone and anything.

3. Butch Cassidy´s hideout

On the road to El Chalten there is an historic Parador called La Leona (Lewis) where we camped the night and Butch Cassidy once hid for a month having robbed a bank in Rio Gallegos. Presumably that was before it became a popular stop for coffee and cake and sold a range of souvenirs. Still, it was a great camping spot and made all the better by their herd of pet guanacos.

                                          Swirling clouds above Butch´s hideout

4. The best view in the world

On leaving El Chalten we cycled 37km along a staggeringly beautiful valley to reach the boat crossing across Lago del Desierto. The sun was shining, the wind had gone and for the first time we were surrounded by trees and streams, rather than flat and arid scrub. We´d been thinking about this leg of the journey with a mixture of excitment and trepidation. This marked the start of the difficult and somewhat untrodden border crossing to Villa O´Higgins in Chile where we would begin our journey up the Carretera Austral.

The border crossing involves two lakes, a 20km hike through mud, rivers and along horse tracks that had been described to us as trenches. Every cyclist we´d met coming south had an even worse horror story about the crossing. One couple had done the crossing in 5 inches of snow, another had ripped his panniers on the thorn bushes that lined the paths and others just said it was exhausting, muddy and hellish and involved relaying your bags up first and then your bikes.

Anyway, we set out from El Chalten in high spirits, boosted by the beautiful weather and wonderful scenery. We arrived on the southern shore of Lago del Desierto and took the last boat across arriving an hour later on the northern shore.

Looking back at Mt Fitzroy from our camping spot on the shores of Lago del Desierto

We camped that night on the shores of the lake and felt like the luckiest people alive as we had the most unbelievable views of Mount Fitzroy and there was noone there besides a couple of other cyclists and two carabineros keeping a vague eye on the border. We swam in the freezing lake and watched the sun set behind the huge peaks of Fitzroy. It was a brilliant start to the most adventurous leg of our journey so far.

5. The car park/dock

On making it safely across the border after an amazing and exhasuting hike with the bikes we caught the boat across Lago O´Higgins, the final part of the crossing. Unfortunately the boat picked us up at 8pm rather than 5pm which meant that by the time we finally reached the northern shore it was pitch black and too dark to cycle the 10km into Villa O´Higgins. Added to that we were now soaking wet after being rained on all day and we had no option but to pitch our tent on the concrete dock. This was definitely an anti climax after our spot on the shores of Desierto.                                

6. The Mosquito farm
After a brief stop in sleepy Villa O´Higgins we rode north to Puerto Yungay and had our first taste of the Carretera Austral. The road carves it´s way over mountains, beneath glaciers and along enormous valleys. The size of the landscape is hard to take in, we just have nothing comparable at home. Although the road is completely unsurfaced, and resembles a quarry more than a road at times, the scenery more than makes up for the bumpy ride and the ridiculously steep climbs. There are streams and waterfalls around every corner so there´s no shortage of fresh drinkng water and freezing cold showers.

Day one on the Carretera was brilliant and we were still feeling so lucky to have avoided any prolonged bouts of rain. After about 60kms on the hard-going surface our legs gave out and we happened upon what looked like a pretty good camping spot in a protected spot by a stream and decided to bed down for the night. As the sun went down a cloud of mosquitoes appeared and had a banquet at our expense. Our only defence was to build a fire and literally smoke ourselves in it, oh and eat all our chocolate for the next 4 days and down a huge carton of wine.

As well as it being our first day on the Carretera it was also our first day with our new friend Danny, a Californian medical student with the same interest in Choripan, bargain red wine, chocolate and fishing for wild salmon with crude fishing equipment (an old sweetcorn can and a fishing line). Our fishing attempts have so far been fruitless but it´s a good excuse for lengthy fish-spotting breaks after a hard stretch of cycling.

Ben and Danny contemplate the fishing situation

So that pretty much brings us up to date. Now we´re enjoying a break in Coyhaique while Ben´s back recovers and are looking forward to taking on the next stretch of this epic road before heading across to the island of Chiloe where we´ll need to re-think our route north in the aftermath of the terrible earthquake.

A typical day on the Carretera Austral

Emerging from the wilderness

Thanks to everyone for your messages and donations to our Just Giving page.  Just wanted to reassure everyone that we are ok and luckily are nowhere near the area that has been affected by the terrible earthquake.  It has meant that all of the phone lines are down as far South as we are and that we´re unable to get hold of any money as the ATMs are all out of service but apart from that we are unaffected.

We are now in a place called Coyhaique about 500km up the unbelievable Carretera Austral - a road that connects the most remote parts of Southern Patagonia with the rest of Chile.  This is the first time we´ve been somewhere with a total population larger than about 300 for the past 3 weeks and we are enjoying some rare treats like a bed and a shower.  At last count we´d done 14 consecutive nights of camping and managed only 2 showers in 11 days although we have found some freezing waterfalls to jump into at the end of a hot day`s cycling.

The blog is so out of date now, I think we must be almost 800km north of our last blog entry so we have lots to update on.  The change in climate and terrain since we last posted is almost unbelievable, we have left behind the desolate Patagonian Pampa and the awful winds and are now cycling up and down huge mountains, through lush forests and passed dazzling blue lakes and rivers.  The weather has been amazing and we are feeling so lucky to have had a week of sunshine on the Carretera.  Every cyclist that we met coming South told us to stock up on waterproofs because they got constantly rained on but for us it finally feels like Summer.  We were beginning to wonder if Summer actually existed in Patagonia but it definitely does and we are now working on some excellent cyclist´s tans which mainly involves very brown hands and fairly leathery looking faces.

We´re going to be in Coyhaique for a couple of days so we´ll be making sure we get the blog fully up to date before we head back into the wilderness.

Let the beauty outweigh the pain...

North of Puerto Natales is the Chilean national treasure of Torres del Paine.  It´s a Unesco World Heritage Site and a Biosphere Reserve, and a British backpacker nearly burnt the whole lot down with his camping stove a few years ago, so all in all we felt priviliged to have the chance to go there.  We toyed with the idea of going on an organised trip but in the end rather liked the idea of being able to get around under our own steam and see what we wanted to see without having to cosy up with the GoreTex clad zip-off trouser brigade who insist on filming their every waking second with a Handycam.

So we stocked up on food and drink (and plenty of fuel for our camping stove) and wobbled out of town up Ruta 9.  After about 20km we left the main road and followed a back country road towards the park, past La Cueva del Milodon (a cave where the Chileans once discovered the skeleton of a rather large bear with a dinosaur-like tail and a keen interest in dancing.  The remains were subseqently pinched by an English cad who attempted to smuggle them back to the British Museum in some barrels of rum.  Doing so destoyed the remains and so now there´s nothing left of the Milodon.  It´s a bit of a sore point, like the forrest fires.  But now tourists can visit the cave where the Milodon once lived and meet a talking fibreglass replica, and the Chilean Tourist Board gets to charge $12 a pop.  But talking fibreglass replicas are just shit, aren´t they?  So we didn´t bother stopping.)

The road on towards Torres del Paine was our first experience of the ripio that covers a lot of the roads in Patagonia - a loose surface of stones and small boulders with nothing to hold them together except dirt and dust.  On a bike it feels like you are cycling on ball bearings.  Suddenly going downhill becomes very unnerving as the road slips away from beneath you and stones ping out from under your tyres.  You never really feel in control going downhill, and waste a lot of energy wheel-spinning on the flat or going uphill.  There are potholes and ridges everywhere making it more or less impossible to travel in a straight line for any great distance.  Every passing car disturbs the surface and throws up a new cloud of dust.  After five minutes your mouth is full of grit and everything tastes like Rennie for the rest of the day.

Fortunately you get used to it fairly quickly, and when we returned to a normal paved road a few days later it felt a bit tame...

The park itself was incredible.  The range of mountains at the heart of it all (Las Torres) is as imposing as anything you´ll ever see.  Enormous black stacks of granite dominate the skyline everywhere you go, and even seem to control the weather, dishing out downpours to the surrounding area.  On the Western side of the park you can see the edge of the South Patagonian ice sheet that stretches North for over 500km.

Torres del Paine

We saw some amazing wildlife too - guanacos, Patagonian foxes, rhea, flamingos, all kinds of exotic ducks and geese, Caranchos (big hawks), and Condors (who make Caranchos look like small hawks, they´re more like aeroplanes than birds).

Getting around Torres del Paine on a bike was quite hard work, but it was an incredible place to visit and well worth the pain.  And best done without the GoreTex/zip-off trousers/Handycam bunch....

Battered and bruised but nothing a pizza won´t fix

It has been a seriously eventful three days since we left Punta Arenas on Thursday morning.  I´m sure you must all be sick to death of hearing about the wind but it is literally becoming the focus of our lives.  We thought the Fuegian winds were bad but we have now felt the wrath of the Patagonian wind and it ain´t pretty.

We set off from Punta Arenas after a lovely day visiting Isla Magdalena in the Magellan Straits where there is a huge colony of Magellanic Penguins.  The first stretch out of town was bliss we had the wind in our favour and were feeling like the weather might finally be on our side.  We were making great progress until we met a cyclist coming in the other direction.  He´d covered about 150km that day and was sailing with the wind behind him which meant that our luck was about to change - from now on we´ve decided to stop talking to cyclists on the other side of the road; they are smug, bring bad news and always seem to turn our luck.  Sure enough as we watched this guy sail off into the distance the wind picked up and we were soon battling against not only a head wind but a strong side wind too.  Still, we were determined to make it at least 50km that day.  We were forced to walk for long stretches as the side wind kept blowing us off the road and every lorry or bus that passed us sucked us into the middle of the road.


At about 8pm we started to think about finding somewhere to camp for the night.  It´s quite hard down here to find a spot that is sheltered from the wind and hidden from the road as you just get mile upon mile of flat grazing land.  After finding a few dud spots, including a creepy abandoned house by a lake the light was fading fast and we were beginning to think that the petrol station 5km ahead was likely to be our best option.

Luckily for us there was a small Estancia opposite the petrol station.  We pedalled up to the main farmhouse and asked one of the farm workers if we could camp somewhere. They were so kind to us and offered us a caravan to sleep in.  Actually this turned out to be more of a chicken shed on wheels with a huge hole in the roof and a bunk bed with two heavily soiled mattresses but after the day we´d had it felt like the height of luxury.  Best of all it had an ancient wood burning stove in it which Ben soon got going and in no time we had supper on the go.  Next morning it was hard to part from the chicken shed and the wood burner, it was so cosy.

The "Caravan"

I´m not going to go into too much detail about Friday, but to sum up it was absolute hell.  I had a breakdown every 3kms which poor Ben patiently dealt with, then I got picked up by the wind and slam dunked onto the road smashing my head and my hip. Luckily I had my gimp helmet on and there were no cars coming otherwise there might not be much left of my head.  It was at this point that it became clear that pushing our bikes was the only option, which we did for HOURS.  Frankly it was exhausting, slow and  f***ing boring particularly when you repeateldy jab yourself in the back of the leg with your pedal.  Anyway it wasn´t all bad, the scenery is getting more and more impressive and we made it to a roadside cafe that night and managed to wangle a hot dinner and a bed in a drafty shed for the princely sum of 5 quid. 

Let´s just say yesterday brought us more of the same but I´m trying to forget about it now.  We arrived in Puerto Natales feeling rather bullied and fragile.  We treated ourselves to a double room with a clean mattress and a huge pizza and after a long sleep we are both feeling repaired, refuelled and ready to take on the Torres del Paine National Park which will be spectacular.

Rio Grande is a hard place to leave

Not because it´s fun or anything, just because there´s a 70kph gale that keeps blowing you back. We left Rio Grande last Tuesday and battled for two hours against the wind.  Let´s just say that after two hours of fighting our progress was laughable. The road from Rio Grande to the Chilean border at San Sebastian runs directly alongside the Atlantic and is completely unsheltered so it´s hardly suprising that it´s a pretty blustery stretch.  It´s also a partly gravel road so we felt like we were being repeatedly whipped in the face with tiny pieces of glass.  It was becoming fairly obvious that there was no way we´d make it to San Sebastian in a day so it was with heavy hearts that we decided to retreat back to the nuclear bunker that is Rio Grande and assess our options.  Most depressingly of all, what had taken us two hours to cycle that morning, took 20 minutes in the opposite direction!  We were feeling slightly defeated to be heading back to our hostel and seriously disgruntled at being forced to spend another night in Rio Grande.  There is literally nothing to do in Rio Grande unless you´re a keen gambler - there are 3 casinos and not much else.  The one highlight of our stay was watching Rio Grande vs Ushuaia which given that there are a total of 3 towns in Tierra del Fuego is pretty much like watching Arsenal vs. Tottenham in terms of rivalry.  The only notable difference was that the pitch would have been more suited to either mud wrestling or swimming.
Luckily for us there was a bus first thing on Wednesday morning and we found ourselves crossing the Chilean border and the Magellan Straits by mid afternoon. We made it to our next big stop, the Chilean town of Punta Arenas, late on Wednesday evening.