Mountains, thorns and hitchhiking

4.-18.3.2024

The morning sun shone on town of El Chaltén and its tent on the mountainside. I woke up as usual when the sun started to warm the tent and I had to get out of the sleeping bag.

I pedaled during the day to Lago del Desierto. The road followed the river winding between the mountain slopes like a snake. There were many fly fishermen by the clear turquoise water. Patagonia is said to be a world-class fly fishing place. There are a lot of streams of waters here, so that information did not come as a total surprise. At the airports, you can see flocks of American tourists already dressed in fishing clothes, with bucket hats and multi-pocket fishing vests.

In the afternoon I found a sheltered tent spot on the bank of this same river, where I could be completely alone, again as usual.

In the morning, I headed for the Chilean border, which can be accessed via a rather adventurous route. Although this fun is not necessarily very cheap.

I saved 55 euros because instead of a 10 km long boat ride, I pushed my bike for 7.5 hours in the forest. I was well rested and ready for a tough and stupid adventure. Sometimes I had to carry the bike on my shoulder when I was balancing along the steep and narrow forest path uphill. The path was also often so narrow that it was impossible to fit through. The Calafate spiky thorns scratched my clothes as I pushed myself through them with the bike. Along the way, I met a few hikers following the same route. I even got a few pieces of cake from one of the visitors. Maybe it was a compassion because what I was doing seemed desperate.

Without the bike, this would actually be a really charming half-day trip, with all the wonderful scenery. Now I spent a whole day struggling. It was an interesting experience.

Hopefully this will be the most demanding hike-a-bike in my life.

On the opposite bank of the lake was the border station of Argentina. My passport was stamped and I set off to ride my bike over a low valley and a forested mountain pass. There was some pushing, but it was a really comfortable and fun trip after the recent experience. A lot of cyclists say that this is a very challenging section, but I couldn't relate to it myself. I guess I'm probably too rugged to consider this a breathtakingly daring adventure. Thanks goes to Mikko Mäkipää's brutal Ruska cycling events.

I also saw ripe berries along the path for the first time in the wild Calafate bushes. I collected them to fill my 0.7 liter pot. These delicious blackcurrant-sized berries taste like a combination of crowberry and blueberry.

Finally, the prickly and scratchy bushes gave something back in return.

I rolled along a rocky dirt road down the mountain to the Chilean border station. On the way, I saw big hairy pigs and little piggies that were free right next to me. They ate very greedily grass from the side of the road and did not care about good eating habits.

When I arrived at the Chilean border, I was nervous that there might be difficulties from the previous border crossing. The last time I rolled into Chile at such a speed that I

passed the entire border crossing without noticing. Now, however, the border official was just a delicately smiling sort and happily welcomed me to the country.

I had now arrived at Candelario Mansilla. From there, the only access to Villa O'Higgins is by boat. If there doesn't happen to be too much wind, one boat travels the route a couple of times a week.

I had to go to a campsite for the night, and put my name on the waiting list there to get on the boat. This place was really great. It was located on the shore of a huge lake that resembled the sea. The color of the water was velvety turquoise. Over the lake there was a beautiful view of the snow topped glacier mountains. Here, though in simple conditions, I would be comfortable even longer. Maybe later I'll come back here in retirement to live a slow life.

There were a total of 15 of us hardened travelers at the campsite. Nine backpackers and six cyclists. I spent the evening with others in a shed-like wind shelter, which also served as a cooking shelter. Some of the travelers were French, who didn't speak much English and were therefore more comfortable in their own company.

You could feel the rudimentary nature of the conditions when you only managed to get a warm outdoor shower when you chopped firewood with an ax and heated the water boiler.

As the evening darkened and my stomach was full of warm food, I concentrated on listening to the speech of the French guys. I didn't understand anything about the talking, but its poetic and sweetly harmonious nature was a good sleep aid.

The boat was already coming early in the morning. We packed up all gear after a quick breakfast in the dawn. However, we ended up waiting a couple of hours for the boat in the harbor.

I then sat with a few others on the dock observing the lapping of the waves and we watched how the rays of the morning sun gradually descended the slopes of the mountain, revealing its many details.

The boat finally arrived and it felt more like a submarine as the waves kept splashing over the entire boat. The boat also made a couple of extra laps around the nearby iceberg. The trip was 50 kilometers and I gladly paid 55 euros for this fun combined with benefits. It was excellent value for money.

We now arrived at the legendary Villa O'Higgins. It is a 1247 km Carretera Southern terminus of the Austral road. However, the city was completely deserted and I was there almost alone with the other 14 travelers who arrived by boat. We finally found a couple of small shops and I was able to do the grocery shopping. Backpackers started hitchhiking on the edge of the village and everyone who wanted to, got a ride in 5 minutes.

I pedaled my bike onto the Carretera Austral. There were snow-capped mountains on everywhere, and there were hundreds of them. There would probably be thousands of mountains along the entire road.

I had waited a long time to get here, but soon the weather started to change. Day by day, more and more rain came.

During the days, the temperature was mostly only in the single digit Celcius degrees. Uphills it still got hot when sweating in shell clothes.

Socks and gloves were often soaking wet. My fingers and toes were therefore sensitive to cold.

The raincoat also slowly let water through from somewhere. I suspect that hood collected water while cycling, which wet the entire upper body.

The only way to dry clothes was to keep them on in the evening and overnight, while the body heat dried the wet clothes.

One morning I drove in the pouring rain to the nearest town, Cochrane, to look for indoor accommodation. I dried my gear there overnight, because even my passport had gotten wet during a few rainy days.

In addition to me, one other cyclist, Jesse, arrived at the accommodation in the evening. I didn't quite got where he was going, but we met the next morning at the traffic lights in the city. So we were heading in the same direction. We got along well and without saying anything we just started cycling together. Jesse is American, but has been living in Germany for a long time, europeanized and used to the metric system. He also had his significant other at home, waiting returning from world travels.

The weather had now changed to a great one and it was nice to marvel at the beautiful scenery together. The water of the big river was so beautifully beaded with a deep turquoise color that it was hard to comprehend.

On the second day, after a fast cycling pace, we arrived early in the day at Río Tranquilo. We checked into a cheap but good campsite for a couple of nights. We went to the lake to see the local marble caves by boat. The boat ride was so bouncy in the waves that it alone offered a great experience.

In the evenings we tasted local wines at the campsite. I think Chilean wines are the best in the world.

The weather forecast looked very bad, so we reviewed our plans for the future. Jesse decided to take the early morning bus off this Carretera Austral and continue in Argentina, where it is much drier. The mountains divide the rains so that here it is very humid like a jungle, and in Argentina there is a dry desert instead.

I also had Argentina as my destination at the time, but I still wanted to cycle here in Chile, weather permitting. After a slow morning, I pedaled to the edge of the village to hitchhike for a while. There was already a local cyclist with a thumbs up, whom I had met a couple of times in the last few days and he had also been in the same campsite.

Very soon two pick-up cars stopped by and next moment we were getting the bicycles on board. After that, it became clear that there are quite a lot of families in the cars and it would be better to travel on a cargo bed. It seemed like an odd proposition, but it was actually quite fun, if somewhat uncomfortable in bad weather. It was only after some time being on the ride that I came to my mind ask: where are we actually going?

After a bumpy 2.5 hour drive we were dropped off at Villa Cerro Castillo. The sun started to shine just before arriving and I started pedaling forward alone. The road was now asphalt and it went up a serpentine road over a mountain pass.

I didn't quite make it to the free camping area in the next village for the evening, so when it got dark, I pushed my bike to the side of the road for lack of a better one and pitched my tent in the ditch of the road. I couldn't get further because there were tall fence made of barbed wire.

The morning was rainy, but it was quite fast to get to the next town, Coyhaique, on asphalt. I drove to a pizzeria first to dry my soaking wet socks. The freshly squeezed pineapple juice was delicious and I can't even remember the last time I ate at a restaurant.

The weather started to improve and I drove to the outskirts of the city to the riverbed to look for a place to camp. I found a sheltered spot in the banks of the brown river and there didn't seem to be anyone on the shore. However, I didn't even managed to set up the tent when a man approached along the almost impassable path through the beach bushes. As he quickly passed by, he shook my hand with both hands very cheerfully, and I mainly understood from the sign language that this is a very good tent site. After that, no one else was seen and I was able to spend the night in complete peace.

I rode for the next 1.5 days mostly in good weather. Then the forecast for the future looked really bad. Riding a mountain bike on an easy asphalt road also started to get boring, so I decided to hitchhike as far as I could. The rain, combined with the fog covering the scenery and the chilly temperature, reduced the meaning of cycling considerably.

There were very few cars. After less than an hour, however, the pick-up truck stopped. I asked that where are you going and heard magically Futaleufu. It was a remote border town that I had estimated I could get to in maybe three different rides. Then I throwed bike to the cargo bed and sat to the warm car for the 300 km journey.

Hitchhiking seems to be easy here with a bike. Most of the locals own a pick-up car and in my cases almost the first car stopped that has been able to take a ride.

The driver said he was a motorcyclist and that explained the speed of the car. I gave him my sticker with my own logo as a thanks and he said he would stick it on his motorcycle.

The scenery was quite adequate when looking at it from the car, especially in the rain, and it was nice to get ahead. The cloud curtains opened shortly before arriving and now it was nice to continue cycling to Argentina towards new adventures.

Here is a fun way to make city name signs so big that they barely fit into the photos.