Book - Chile and Argentina (Carretera Austral)

Chile & Argentina

By Simon Taylor & Isabelle Bedard

Carretera Austral slideshow

Photos taken along the route of the Carretera Austral between Ralun and Villa O'Higgins

Carretera Austral route

The Carretera Austral

This is a crazy road built to unify Chile under orders from Pinochet. The most recent section to Villa O'Higgins was finished in 1998. The way we did it (from Ensenada via Ralun) was about 1300km long.

You can find out more info here:
Crazy Guy on a Bike (Carretera Austral page) - all sections described - really useful
Wikipedia  - Carretera Austral - loads of history and context

Below are files that you can open in Google Earth. The kmz file can be expanded to see the separate sections in Google Earth and you can import it into the free Garmin BaseCamp software to send it to your gps:

The last 21km section across the border into Argentina involves a boat, pushing up a farmers track for 5km, 11km of OKish riding, and 6km of pushing, lifting and carrying your bikes and bags through a forest, over streams, roots, rocks and for the last 2km, down a heavily eroded gash in the earth 'just' wide enough for your bike.

Finally some pictures of us cycling

Down near Puerto Rio Tranquillo along the Carretera Austral we met a couple on a campsite. Carolina, had some British roots and had worked as a photographer in the past in Santiago. As they drove past us the following day she took some photos of us struggling on the ripio and sent them on to us yesterday.

Finally we meet Dan, Alice, Koby and Ava Fei

About 6 weeks ago at a Conaf campsite above Cerro Castillo in Chile, we met an English couple who told us about a Canadian family travelling in the opposite direction who we would meet the following day. We didn't! We never saw them and we were left wondering what had happened to them? Had they found another route? We assumed we would never see them as we were going South and them North.

Amazingly, yesterday we pulled up at a supermarket in Villa la Angostura and were approached by Dan and Alice with Koby (6) and Ava Fei (4) in tow. They had crossed into Argentina at the end of the Careterra and we had flown North to almost exactly catch up with them. The bad weather had made them stop in the town and we just happened to cycle through as they went shopping. Coincidences are great!

We sat and had lunch with them for a few hours before leaving. It was nice to hear how they were doing it, with a tag-along bike for Ava Fei and an attachment that allowed them to pull a small bike with Koby on it that could be removed at the end of the day! Behind Koby they also had a Chariot trailer to carry luggage.

It would have been nice to have ridden with them for a while but we need to get to Santiago and time is gradually running out.

Reaching El Chaltén the hard way

Once in Argentina we still needed to get from the customs buildings across the wonderfully named Lago del Desierto and with the weather deteriorating there was some uncertainty about whether the twice weekly (maybe more often - uncertainty rules here!) boat might be able to reach us. Sitting on the shore with Jefferson's binoculars (a Brazilian travel agent checking out a new route) we could see huge waves on the lake and a storm blowing down from a glacier to our West making it hard to even stand on the shore.

We were really relieved when we finally saw the boat coming an hour and a half late with a slightly stressed looking crew. The bikes and trailer were quickly tied down at the back and the boat aimed for some sheltered water. Later on the captain offered us a lift the 37km to El Chalten in the back of his pick up to avoid the bad weather - Argentinians are really friendly! I sat in the back surrounded by bikes and bags while Leo and Isa squashed in the front seat.

We finally found a room in the dark at about 10.30 in El Chalten and crashed out feeling wind burned and exhausted.

Incredible border crossing to Argentina

This is the weirdest way we have ever crossed a border, and also the most physically challenging.

It involved a 3 hour boat journey on a boat that goes twice a week until April when it stops for the year, to a small harbour called Candilario Mansilla above which one family have some land, a house, a campsite and some solar panels. Two people live there all year round and the rest of the family leave for the winter. This is a hard place to survive! We arranged for a horse to carry our bags over the pass the following morning and that we would push our bikes and trailer containing Leo.

1km from the harbour there is a seasonal Chilean border post reached via a steep, rocky, 'road' which allowed cycling for about 5% of the time, the rest involved just pushing. After the border post the road climbed steeply for 4km and was more or less impossible to cycle. For the following 10km we were able to ride as the track improved and passed through gently sloping fields and forest.

We then reached the actual marked border (where we had lunch between the Argentina and Chile signs so that Leo could have his first meal in no-man's land) and the track became a very difficult 6km single path into Argentina, up and down through forest, winding around roots and between trees, over rocks, crossing streams and even through occasional boggy areas. We had to lift the trailer to get it around and over obstacles while amazingly Leo either giggled or slept through the chaos. At times he was stuck in mud or sat in the middle of a stream while we grunted and swore, trying to stay dry or upright.

The last section down to Lago del Desierto was madness, a path deeply eroded into the hill, only as wide as the trailer, dropping steeply and winding constantly. We could let go of the bike and trailer and it just stood there wedged between the sides of the path. Leo woke up for this bit, and seemed very interested in some of the angles that he found himself at.

Finally after 4 hours of struggle we reached the shoreline and the Argentinian border post only to see a storm blowing our way across the lake, our only route to more food and eventual civilisation. The horse arrived a couple of hours later with our bags. We had done it!

Lago O'Higgins by boat

We got up early and cycled the 7km from Villa O'Higgins to the harbour on Lago O'Higgins to catch the 8.30 boat. Some people were there for the glacier tour, but there were 15 cyclists with their bikes stowed at the front.

The weather was perfect and the views stupendous!

It took us 3 hours to reach the small harbour at Candelario Manilla and 10 minutes to discover that we would need to wait for the following day to get a horse to help us get our luggage over the pass to Argentina.

Villa O'Higgins

What a strange town, 220km from Cochrane, 120km from the nearest Chilean village of Tortel on the coast, and with a road that was only built in 1999. The town was founded by English settlers in the 1914-1916, and got its name from the prominent Chilean hero Bernardo O'Higgins, the illegitimate son of a Spanish viceroy of Peru who fought in the war of independence for Chile.

The town is next to the amazing Lago O'Higgins with a glacier at one end with ice bergs falling off it, and a new route towards El Chaltén in Argentina across a pass only accessible at both ends by boat.

It's a puzzling, friendly place where each family seems to own a supermarket, a cabaña, a hospedaje and a restaurant, and nothing opens unless you find someone to open it for you. It took us ages to find a room because we couldn't find anyone, but eventually we settled in and went and bought tickets for the twice weekly tourist boat that would take us across the lake to the border route the following day.

We would have liked to chill for a few days but good weather was forecast for the next day and the boat, the aptly named Robinson Crusoe, was the first to leave for a week because of strong winds and there was a backlog of cyclists and trekkers who had been waiting for a while to get across to Argentina.

Bad weather, bad roads

Finally the weather broke and rain arrived to just make the last hard section even harder. We left Cochrane with 6 days of food to get us the 220km to Villa O'Higgins. The first 40km were hell, my main view was the road surface and top speed was about 8km/hr as we navigated the ruts, holes, rocks and grit. The weather stayed dry but the temperature was starting to drop. By the end of the day the road had marginally improved but overnight the rain arrived.

Obviously we stay dry but it makes everything harder. We have to pack away the inner tent in a dry bag, cook in the outer area of the tent and also occupy Leo. He has full waterproofs and wanders around outside while one of us follows him as he finds 'pik-pik' and makes them into bundles which he carries around (see other post), or dandelion heads which he treasures, or eats calafate berries from the thorny bushes that are everywhere.

In the morning this is OK, but at lunch after a hard, wet, cold ride, one of us again needs to go out in the cold while the other cooks underneath the hastily erected outer tent. We swap roles but it's not nice, and we are often desperate to get going again just to warm up.

As we got closer to Villa O'Higgins the wind started to blow, mostly a tailwind, but on some of the passes it was difficult to stay upright. When we finally arrived we had spent 5 days on the road, mostly in rainy weather and wild camped every night wherever we could find. Leo was covered in mosquito bites, several new teeth had come through, and we were both keen on some fresh food and more sleep. But we had reached the end of the Carretera Austral. 2400km after we left Santiago.

Cochrane - the middle of nowhere

Cochrane is a town that was only founded in 1954, and then only got road access with the rest of Chile in 1988. About 3000 people live here and thanks to a large range of mountains to the West the climate is much drier and warmer than the surrounding areas. Big rivers still flow through, but forests dominate the landscape and the town itself has a sleepy frontier-like charm with about 5 or 6 hospedaje (guest houses) a few cabañas and a leafy central plaça that comes alive in early evening. There are a few shops and a cafe, but the General Store is something to behold, chain saws across the aisle from washing powder, dried seaweed for toothache on the shelf next to wood burning stoves. Fantastic!

Cochrane and its General Store, a set on Flickr.

Amazing blues

The colour of the rivers and lakes in Patagonia beggars belief. It's unreal. Even these photos don't do it justice, just give a small flavour of how extreme it all is.

Wow, that was a bit challenging

Getting from Coyhaique to Cochrane, the next town with a supermarket, has meant covering only a distance of about 300km, yet 7 days later we have arrived after a really challenging journey on terribly corrugated (washboard) roads. It's not really hard, you just have to go slow and concentrate on the exact route that you will take to navigate the holes, ruts, rocks, sand and bumps, meandering across the road hunting for the smoothest line like a cursing drunk cyclist. I also have the problem that if Leo is asleep it's good to keep him that way, so bumps that I can bend my legs and arms to prepare for, he MUST avoid or take very slowly.

The pace adds its own pressure because we only do about 4 hours a day, so if we are only averaging 8km/hr all day then we don't go very far and we will never reach the ferry to Argentina before it finishes in April.The road is sometimes too steep and gritty to get grip on when you are pedalling, so we have done a fair bit of pushing, although never for very long as the hills down here aren't big, just a few 100m of climbing every now and then, but it does add up as the road skirts lakes and deep gorges on its journey South, regularly approaching 1000m of climbing every 40km or so.

The landscape is the redeeming feature and the lakes and rivers are almost scarily coloured, turquoise in a way that makes you take off your sunglasses to check if it is just an artefact of the lenses, or deep blue surrounded by snowy peaks.Just wish they graded the roads a bit more often, or even put down some tar, so I could look at the view while I cycled along rather than having to stop all the time.

We need a rest - thank you Coyhaique

We've been following river valleys in various zig-zagging directions, nipping across passes, through National Parks, or around the coast, and then up or down the next valley for what feels like forever, each day finishing with a wild camp whenever we feel as though we've gone far enough, or we see an amazing place to stop. It's been challenging but fantastic, and best of all our little lazy passenger Leo has been loving it......fires, camping, rivers, beaches, throwing stones, climbing, walking along all the huge dead trees that are everywhere and meeting new people constantly. We cannot imagine how it will all affect him in the future!

The only problem is that with such amazing scenery around us we've actually forgotten to have a rest. We're now completely knackered having cycled about 750km of the Carretera Austral with no breaks over the last 16 days, me pulling about 65kg of trailer, Leo and luggage, and Isa another 35kg, nearly all of it on dirt and gravel roads which really takes its toll. One 32km section before La Junta was perhaps the worse road we have ridden on in 37,000km all over the world. A fellow Dutch cyclist with around 50,000km under his belt voted it the worst he'd seen. It was hell, with big sharp slippy rocks, corrugations and loads of dust. Most cyclists seem to have hitch-biked to avoid it, we just didn't get the opportunity as it's hard to wait for a lift in hot sun, on a quiet road, with an energetic Leo. It just seemed easier to cycle. Then just after it finished we had the 600m climb up 19 hairpin bends, averaging 8% gradient, to really rub it in.

It crept up on us, one minute we were fine, the next we were aching and exhausted, desperate to reach Coyhaique, the only major town for hundreds of km, and to gorge ourselves on protein and be as lazy as Leo allows us. Now we are here we've done nothing, just shopped for food and taken it in turns to sleep. We've also eaten tins of fish and made burgers. YEAH!!!

Leo also seems happy with the new lazy routine, his new games are putting coins in bottles, or collecting flowers from the lovely gardens around our cozy cabaña. 'Tranquillo com una taza de leche', as the Chileans say about a good baby.

A devastated landscape

We've been noticing the number of dead large trees lying in the fields around us as we follow the valleys south. The river banks are covered in them and they even reach the sea. There is so much dead wood left on the ground with farm animals grazing around it, like the remnants of a colonising war that these majestic trees and the original wild forests quite blatantly lost to the pioneers who came here to settle.

We have read that the forests were actually burned and that the remaining stumps and cut trees were the ones that were left. Apparently settlers were given more land for each area that they cleared. Sadly much of the forest was only found in Chile and now that the dirt roads are being tarred there is a danger that more forest will be 'harvested'

How can this get more beautiful?

We are told by everyone we meet that the Carretera Austral route gets better the further South you go. We find this hard to imagine as the scenery is astonishing in almost every direction and we are only about half way along the road.