Carretera Austral — The road liss traveled

Carretera just means Highway, so the Austral Highway is a 1,000 km stretch (600mi) that connects the scarcely unpopulated southern part of Chile. The project wasn’t completed until 1988 and the last 60 miles weren’t finished till 2000, so it’s really not that old. Due to the geography of the area: thick forests, fjords, lakes, mountains, etc it was a massive undertaking! Even now many sections aren’t paved, just gravel. From El Chalten I had two options, take a bus-ferry-hike-ferry-bus combination to Villa O’higgens, the southern tip of the route, or bus further up north on the Argentinian side and connect at Chile Chico (lots of bus time!). Neither were good options, but the Villa O’higgens sounded like such a pain in the ass I went with option 2.

I took the red route to join up with the Carretera Austral from El Chalten

So a solid 17 hours after I had left El Chalten I had arrived in a tiny town called Rio Tranquilo in Chile. You can literally walk the whole town in 10 minutes! It’s mostly known to be the jumping off point for the marble caves, as well as a good place to do some glacier trekking – at a lower price point than some other places in the more touristy parts of Patagonia. So that’s what I was going to do! I checked into a hostel and then booked my glacier trekking and kayaking tour of the marble caves. Maybe less expensive than other parts of Patagonia, but definitely not cheap!

General Carrera Lake, the largest in Chile

I learned very quickly that in this part of Chile, as opposed to the vast majority of more touristy South America I’d visited, basically nobody spoke any English. Usually the hostel receptionist would speak decent English, or at the very least speak slowly in Spanish and annunciate their words cleanly to help you out. Not here though! It was very frustrating. Chilean and Argentinian Spanish is not like the rest of the Latin American Spanish and when they speak it quickly I was pretty hopeless. There were two German girls at the hostel, but they were living in Santiago now and seemed to have zero interest in speaking English. That night I was relegated to the couch while all the other hostel guests sat around the dining table and chatted, bummer.

I woke up at 6am the next morning to get ready the glacier tour. We met at 6:30 and drove 1.5 hours to get to the trailhead. Our tour the guides asked if everyone was fine with them speaking Spanish, I was only person in the whole group who wasn’t fluent/near fluent in Spanish! Of course I wasn’t going to have them speak in Spanish AND English solely on the account of me. But at this point I was questioning whether or not I made a poor decision to do the Carretera Austral.

As for the glacier, we hiked an hour and a half before it got too slippery and we had to put on our crampons. Despite doing lots of hiking in the mountains, I’d never actually hiked/climbed up a snow covered mountain or crossed any snow/icy passes that would require crampons. So this was my first time wearing these metal spikes that you attach to the bottom of your boots. You stick into the ice much better than I would have expected! Like you can literally walk up 50 degree ice faces without a problem. So it was a lot fun of to walk around on the ice with the crampons on. And it wasn’t just walking on top of the glacier, there were also a few ice caves that we were able to explore, which were stunningly blue and shiny. I just had no idea what the guides were saying. But overall it was definitely a worthwhile trip!

I borrowed some sunglasses for the glare ha

The next morning I did the kayaking tour of the marble caves, with surprisingly, two Americans. They were from Boston doing some traveling during gap year (what Europeans call the year in between HS and college). Apparently gap year is becoming more of a thing in the US! I mean its not for the overwhelming majority of college aged people, but these two girls were now the third and fourth Americans I’d met so far doing a gap year trip. When I was going to college I don’t think I knew a single person who took time off to travel in between high school and college. Good to hear!

We got set up in our kayaks and had about 20 minutes of paddling to get out to the caves. Gliding through the lake with the mountain scenery in the background was very tranquil. We reached the caves, even though ‘caves’ is a bit misleading, it’s three rock formations, two of them sitting like islands in the lake. Very cool looking! On their undersides you can see the colorful green and blue striations that have formed over thousands of years. The main formation, the Cathedral, you can actually kayak under, but ever since someone carved their name into the rock a couple years ago, they’ve made it illegal to go completely underneath, which was a shame. That’s the whole point of doing it in a kayak instead of a boat!

To be honest I thought the caves were somewhat underwhelming, as I was expecting some actual caves to paddle through and not just a handful of small structures that you can see within a matter of minutes! It’s one of those places where the photos look cooler than the experience itself, so very instagrammable! The girls used our guide as their professional photographer while I was happy to paddle around by myself. But still, it was a nice morning, better than freezing in Chicago!

It would have been cool to paddle underneath, but this was as close as they’d let you go

looks like it could topple over at any second

I was done by 11am, and the one bus to the next city on the Carretera had already left, so I decided to do a bit of hitchhiking. With hitchhiking there’s kind of an implicit agreement that if you get picked up you should be able to provide conversation/entertainment to whoever is driving, so I felt kind of bad I wouldn’t really be able to fulfil my end of the bargain. I bought a 4 pack of beer to help compensate. To my surprise there was already one couple on the road trying to get a ride, followed by another, and so I took my place in line a bit behind them.

Picking up a ride was certainly not as easy as I had read it to be online! The couple in front of me gave up after an hour, I called it quits after about 2.5 hours, and the one couple who was the first in line was out there for at least 4 hours. I saw them walking around in town later that evening, so looks like everybody got blanked. I’ve hitchhiked quite a bit in remote mountain areas where it’s pretty common, and judging by the amount of open seats in the cars of people driving by, picking up hitchhikers is just not a popular thing to do in Chile! Or maybe we just got unlucky that day, but it was not encouraging! I bought my bus ticket for the next morning.

Image borrowed from the internets, talesfromthehelens.com

Originally I had wanted to make a stop off the Carretera and do this hike to another scenic mountain lagoon, but IF I got off and did the hike I’d have to attempt more hitchhiking to get to the next town, which now I had decided was a bad idea. So it was off to Coyhaique, the largest town on the Carretera Austral, nestled nicely in the mountains. And as we passed Cerro Castillo (the place I’d wanted to stop off at) there were multiple groups of hitchhikers looking for rides. So I think I made the right decision. In high season there are just too many hitchhikers around and I think maybe that turns off potential picker-uppers, because I feel like some people are happy to pick up the one off person, or a couple, but when you have a whole group of them waiting, no thanks.

What I missed out on by not having my own transport :(

In Coyhaique the first two hostels I tried were full, so I found what they call a hospedaje, which basically means someone is renting out some of the rooms of their house, which was fine. The weather was clearing up, so it was a nice afternoon to sit outside and have a beer. But I literally hadn’t talked to anyone since being on the Carretera and it was getting a bit lonely.

The next morning I was a on bus to Puyuhuapi, which is a very small town, but it’s close to the hanging glacier, which is a popular stop on the Carretera. They had one public bus from town to the park, so I was able to get a ticket on that. It’s a 2 mile walk to get up to viewpoint where you can see a waterfall with the edge of a glacier sitting right on top of it. Very cool, although a shame you can’t get even closer. Besides that, there’s another viewpoint from the lake, and that’s basically all you can do in the whole park! I found a nice flat rock on the riverbank to catch some sun and wait for the bus to come back and pick us all up.

Back in Puyuhaupi that afternoon they had a little festival going on, a few live bands, all of which featured accordions! It was kind of fun, it was right on the lake, the weather was gorgeous, and people were dancing and having fun. With this type of music it sounded like we were in Swiss Alps or what I imagined the Swiss Alps to be like! I was kinda surprised a town this small could even host such a thing; I mean the town is absolutely tiny!

After the festivities that evening I went back to my guesthouse because they had Direct TV (thank god), to watch some NFL playoffs. I caught the end of the Chiefs game (boring), then panicked a bit because I couldn’t find the Packers anywhere on the TV guide, but eventually found it on FoxGo in Spanish! I was pretty pumped to be able to watch the game in such a small town, which going in, which I had highly doubted I’d be able to see. Of course my excitement did not last long. I turned it off at halftime. Such a pathetic game. Welp, back to traveling!

The next day was a thorough travel day, 3 hours to one city, wait a few hours for a bus, and then another couple hours to a small town called Futaleufu, which is named for the river that runs along it, one that is very well known in rafting and whitewater circles! I decided to stay at a campground, set up my tent, and went looking for rafting companies to book a trip for the next day. I did find a company that had an American guy on staff, which was nice because I was having trouble understanding exactly what they were saying in some of the other tour offices.

Although I didn’t get great news, the water is dam controlled, and this year for whatever reason the water was unseasonably high. Which meant that only small sections of the river could be safely run until the water went back down. So you could still do daytrips where you’d run the same section twice or others where you’d have to get out and portage around the biggest rapids. Hmm. I still booked a trip the next day, as I didn’t really feel like just waiting around in Futaleufu just praying that river controllers in Buenos Aires would pull their magic lever in the next few days.

We met the next morning, it was two South Africans, a few American NGO workers from in town, and two Chileans. We did the standard safety briefing, and I guess due to the continuous nature of the Futaleufu they’d have a guy on a mini catamaran thingy and a safety kayaker downriver of us at all times in case someone fell out. It sounds like in the rare case you go swimming in the Futa and don’t get picked up, you’re going to be swimming for a quite a while because the water is moving so damn fast. But there’s also very little that could potentially kill you, so that’s good!

We set off in the bright midday sun. The water quality is spectacular, a nice bluish turquoise hue, very clean and clear. You can, and SHOULD drink from it! It turns out the NGO girls were also experienced rafters/kayakers so our raft was moving like a well oiled machine. Basically the opposite of my raft in Colombia! The rapids were mostly 3’s and 4’s, very fun rafting with very little time in between them. I was in the front so I was getting blasted constantly with white walls of water, as it should be! Unfortunately some of the biggest rapids we had to take ‘chicken lines’ around, missing the meat of them, but we still hit some big waves.

The water is so fast that it only took us an hour to get to our pullout point, but it was a good time. We’d lose the three NGO girls and do the same trip in the late afternoon with just 5 of us. That actually ended up being more fun, I think because our paddling was weaker and we got knocked around by the rapids a bit more! So all in all a good day, although it’s hard to not to think about the huge sections of the river that we weren’t able to run with the really high water, sigh... But what can you do?

And after that it was back to the Argentinean side of Patagonia the next day, the side that I like better as it’s cheaper, has more interesting food options, and better beer. If only it weren’t so hard to get money out from the damn ATM’s. The city I was heading to was called El Bolson, which is supposed to be a laid back city with a lovely mountain backdrop and good hiking – like most places in Patagonia!