The Carretera Austral is without a doubt one of the most spectacular and beautiful roads I have travelled in my life. This 1,150-km. long road, most of it "ripio", starts at Puerto Montt and goes all the way south along the Andes to Villa O'Higgins, near the Argentinian border, passing through jungle-like forests, emerald lakes, dramatic mountains, deep fiords, green rivers and breath-taking cliffs.
The road was a project started by Pinochet in the mid 70s. to connect by land a group of dispersed and uncommunicated villages that were only reachable by sea (or some, by traveling on the Argentinian side). Almost 30 years of work (the last section, from Puerto Yungay to Villa O'Higgins, was inaugurated last year) by 10,000 members of the army, many of whom lost their lives, have created the most important infrastuctural project in Chile in the second half of last century.
This road is certainly best travelled by car, so you can stop anywhere you want and reach the more isolated areas, but car-rental is very expensive here, so Uliano and I (Paul and Xavi decided to head north) had to use all imaginable means of transportation to make it through.
The traffic on this road at this time of the year is very scarce, so hitch-hiking becomes quite an adventure. Therefore, we took buses when available or would talk to truck drivers in the towns and some agreed to pick us up early in the morning and drop us in the middle of the road, literary in the middle of nowhere. We had Uliano's tent and bought food in case no one would pick us up and had to sleep on the open, but fortunately that never happened.
So we rode with a group of workers that were loading firewood and who stopped on their way to try to catch salmons on one of the many rivers we crossed; with an American who was a manager at the gold mine near Chile Chico, his Vietnamese wife and their two friends; we were invited to dinner by Patricia, a very nice woman we met on a bus to Cochrane, and her husband, who was a Crime-Scene Investigator with the Carabineros (Chilean police); we met Jordi, a true hippy that had been living in "comunas" in El Bolsón, making handy-works and working as a statue and who was a friend of another Catalan I met in Buenos Aires (incredibly, coincidences like this have happened to me a lot in this trip); we camped in people's gardens (well, just once),...
This has certainly been the most adventurous part of my trip. At least, so far.
The same way the sceneries we saw were absolutely spectacular, the villages themselves were not very much so. They were chaotic, old and with not very nice looking houses (except for the new "cabañas" being built for tourists). You can tell that these villages have lived in the most absolute isolation for most of the existence.
From Puerto Chacabuco north, the landscape along the road changes dramatically. Instead of steep and rocky mountains, now it was softer mountains covered by thick forest who become rain forest by the time you reach Parque Pumalin.
At Chacabuco we took the weekly ferry that brings provisions to those villages that still have no, or very limited, terrestrial communications. Uliano decided to go all the way to Chiloé island, but I decided to step down at Puerto Cisnes, a nice (and uncommunicated) village, around 30 km. away from the Carretera Austral, so I could travel the north part of this road.
It took me three hours to find 2 extremely friendly "chilenos" who dropped me at the cross-road with the Carretera (where, again, there was nothing at all and this time I had no tent). It started to rain and no cars had passed by in an hour, so I stopped the first micro-bus that I saw because the situation was not looking very good and I finally made it to El Chalten, my final destination, under a heavy rain (that didn't stop for many days).
And there came another surprise: when I went for break-fast at my lodging the day after, I run into Paul and Xavi, who were also there! Incredible!
We decided to visit Pumalin Park and then take a night ferry to Puerto Montt. The park, property of US billionaire Douglas Tompkins (founder of the The North Face and Esprit empires), is incredibly beautiful and it's one of the most important conservation projects in South America. Many centenary "alerces" (huge trees similar to Sequoias that were almost exterminated because they're used for construction work and ships) have been saved in this park.
Then we took the ferry to Puerto Montt, where we met 3 Canadians who had been bicycling from Ushuaia to El Chaltén (a few thousand kilometers, many in "ripio" roads). When we reached Puerto Montt, Paul decided to go straight to Bariloche while Xavi and I decided to head to Chiloé island, what you could call the "Galicia" of Chile.
But more on that on my next posting.
No comments:
Post a Comment