Crossing into Chile: a lesson in possibilism

There are several ways of crossing into Chile from Argentina, many of which are quite simple. But easy is often inversely proportional with fun, so, after much deliberation, we chose what the guidebook described as "the most beautiful but by far most logistically difficult" route. Come on, who wouldn't? There were two 50km long lakes to get ourselves and our bikes across with a 12 km stint of gravel road and an international border between them, just to get ourselves to the edge of nowhere in Chile. And we had heard from other cyclists that the ferry that usually ran across the second lake was broken down and that the small passenger-only boat that ran once a day wouldn't take them and their bikes. Sarah was sceptical at first that this was the best route but Chris and I convinced her that it was POSSIBLE that we could still make it this way and, if not, we would see some beautiful scenery and come back and try another way. A last minute brainwave convinced us that we should maybe take some Chilean currency with us.

The first lake had a hilly, gravel road running beside it that we didn't really want to ride, so we thought we'd go down to the dock and see if there just happened to be someone sailing up the lake that wanted to take us and all of our gear. Well, of course there was!

His name was Daniel, and he took Chris and I, while his friends took Sarah. He was excited that I knew the basics of how to sail and immediately put me at the helm to steer into the wind while him and Chris put up the mainsail and genoa.

This was a brief fairly calm moment cutting between a little island and the mainland but it was REALLY windy and the boat was constantly heeled over twice as far as we ever had Selkie, which was scary but super fun. This boat had all the same components as Selkie, but being half the length, everything was in miniature and really easy to use.

We tacked our way up the lake and chatted sailing in Spanish.

Chris even got comfortable enough to have a quick nap.

I had the ultimate Argentinian experience of sailing while drinking maté.

Sarah has accused Chris and I of dressing her up funny and taking photos to embarass her. I admit to buying her the power skirt (as any good friend would do) but she put together this little sailing ensemble herself.

We camped at the far end of the lake, were invited onto another boat for pizza, and woke up to a lovely morning.

We then rode 6km or so of dirt and gravel road towards the border.

Before crossing, we stopped to buy bread and Rosa, who had made the bread that morning in her wood burning oven, informed us that if we were planning on crossing the border with fruits or vegetables, the Chilean officials would chuck them out. So, she invited us to use her kitchen to cook up all of our food. We had a wonderful few hours with her, but weren't able to convince her that she liked Indian curry.

When we went to leave Argentina, the border officials informed us that the boat left at 3pm instead of 4pm, as we had heard, and that we had just missed it. So they invited us to stay for dinner.

Then they invited us to set up our tents on their property.

The next morning we crossed into Chile. I hope I never have to try to explain why my passport says I left Argentina on December 2nd but entered Chile on December 3rd.

If we were at all worried that Chileans might not be as helpful or generous as Argentinians, that fear was quickly put to rest. The border police quickly offered us a ride the rest of the way down the gravel road to the second lake.

Yay! Now we just had to get ourselves onto the "no-bikes boat", as we had come to refer to it...

The small boat pulled up and we got to work helping people and their luggage off of it, all the while practicing in our heads how to plead in Spanish for them to let us and our bicycles on. But we needn't have - as soon as they had unloaded everyone, they picked up our bikes and started tying them to the front of the boat. Phew!

On the boat, people told us about some hotsprings that were about 30km down the road, and we decided to make for them that night.

Upon starting out down the bad gravel road, we pretty quickly realized that there was no way would make it before dark. That's when we noticed something strange and wondrous in the trees...

We stopped to see what the heck it was, and were all astounded...

incredulous...

and happily surprised.

It was 'the magic mountain', a volcano-shaped
hotel with rocks on the outside, a waterfall pouring down it, and grass growing on it.

It was a bit out of our budget, so we decided to flip a coin to see if we should stay. The coin said we should continue to the hotsprings, which disappointed all of us, so we decided to stay anyway.

The suspension bridge coming out of the right hand side of it is the emergency exit!

It was both posh and fantastical inside. This is the 'skywalk' to the restaurant, suspended in mid-air and with live trees growing through it.

The hottub was a hollowed out tree trunk, complete with a welcoming pisco sour. We decided that, although we were going to miss Argentina, we were going to like Chile.

We were the only guests, so we had the run of the place, including the games room. We hadn't played cards yet on the entire trip, so decided it was time to play Euchre. We didn't have a fourth person, so a giant conch shell filled in. Here is me showing 'Joe' his cards.

We really didn't want to leave the paradise of the magic mountain, but the clock struck noon, our carriage turned back into bicycles, and it was time to go. It was a hard, hilly gravel ride to Liquiñe, the small village with the hotsprings, but it was punctuated with pretty spectacular views.

In fact, we spent so much time looking at the scenery and pushing our bikes that we only made it about 20km and had to ask a nice family on the way if we could set up our tents at their farm. They invited us in to cook our dinner and chat, and we learned that they had been at a meeting that evening regarding a hydroelectric project that was being proposed for the area. The people in their village were generally supportive of the project but she told us that the people of Liquiñe were generally opposed to it.

It wasn't until we were making hot water for coffee the next morning that we realized we had set up right next to a cow skull.

We finally made it to Liquiñe, and this nice man rowed us across the river so we could get to the hotsprings.

Besides the hotsprings, there wasn't much to do in the town. We heard that the community consultation meeting for the power project was happening there that night, so we decided to go.

The mostly Norweigan-owned company had just begun their powerpoint presentation when a large group of Mapuche, the indigenous people of the southern part of Chile, came in with banners and took over the meeting to voice their opposition to it. It was pretty powerful to witness. The project proposes to divert part of several rivers underground through turbines in order to generate power, which is much less harmful to the local environment than a large dam would be, but it seems that the major issue is the lack of inclusion and respect for the Mapuche in their consultation process, which we certainly witnessed at the meeting.

It's obviously also part of a larger historical and political process, where the Mapuche culture is used to bring in tourism dollars at the same time that their rights and culture and use of their traditional lands are being eroded.

A double shot of culture as commodity. This billboard was on the way into Pucon, where we are now, and which we barely made it to on the little Chilean money we had.

Our last morning in Liquiñe, we had to count up all of our change to see if we still had enough to have a coffee.

We did. Luckily Pucon has a bank.

We're headed north next to cycle around wine country.

The Patagonian Lakes District: and then there were three

Our friend Sarah joined up with us in El Bolson, a little hippie town in the Patagonian Lakes district.

To start with, she got her bike all put together and we did a little maintenance on ours.

All the bike tools a woman needs!

Sarah also got herself a power skirt, a necessary part of every good bike trip.

El Bolson was really cute, so rather than taking off right away, we ended up staying a week.

The river right near our hostel.

We had to cross this crazy suspension bridge with our bikes to get to town every day.

We stayed at the most wonderful place. While we were there, American Thanksgiving arrived and the two Americans staying there decided to cook up a feast.

At one point in time, there were twelve of us girls waiting for the two guys to finish cooking and bring in the bird. I like that everything is the opposite down here in the southern hemisphere!

I made pumpkin pie, which went over really well.

We finally managed to tear ourselves away and head north out of town towards Bariloche.

On the way, a whole bunch of old roadsters passed us.

From Bariloche, while Sarah and Chris went rafting, I went on a hike up to a "refugio" up in the mountains. These ones are a lot more posh than the ones we saw in Spain, and include someone making you breakfast, if you want.

It was really gorgeous up there.

We continued north to Villa La Angostura.

From there, we headed to San Martin de Los Andes, through an area called the Seven Lakes route.

It's been pretty hilly in these parts, but very little wind, which is such a treat!

Lots of beautiful sights, too.

Camping lakeside along the way.

We finally started seeing other cyclists, which were a great source of information about road conditions, provisions, camping, etc. As Steph and I learned in Quebec, a drivers' or locals' idea of "not very hilly" is very different than a cyclist's!

We were proud of riding almost the whole way. But when we hit 50km of dusty gravel road, we gladly accepted a ride.

The yard sale afterward. We're getting pretty good at putting our bikes back together, though.

Well, pretty good! I'm not allowed to say who did this.

And now we're off to cross over into Chile, we hope!! All the necessary boats may not be running, though, so we´ll see...

Punta Tombo: close encounters of the bird kind

We did it!! We saw penguins and so much more. But it wasn't easy.

During long stretches of riding, Chris and I each had different songs that kept recurring in our heads. Hers was "Country road, take me home" and mine was "Born to be wild", which probably says a little something about our personalities.

I thought it ironic that mine started with "get your motor running...", but it turned out to be just a little foreshadowing.
(And not just of how huge old rock songs are down here!)

The hills went up...










The hills went down...

It all felt pretty much the same because of the wind.

We have yet to experience the wind at our backs! Even one day when we left our stuff in one town and rode out to a little beach town for the day, we had a headwind on the way there and were pretty excited at getting a tailwind on the way home. But, no, the wind turned while we were having lunch and it was a headwind on the way home, too!

It's been pretty rainy at times, too. Here's me taking shelter in a bus stop...

People have been so nice to us, though. One particularly hard day, as we were stopped on the side of the road, a car pulled up and the man inside said that he had driven by us and thought we looked pretty tired, so he went into town and bought us Coca-Cola!

People have also offered us a lot of rides, as well, and sometimes we didn't say 'no'.

In fact, we decided to officially call this the "Planes, trains, busses, trucks and boats" bike trip.

We have ridden a little more than 500 km since arriving, which is pretty paltry for a bike tour, but we have worked hard for every single kilometer.

On the day we took this ride, I told Chris that the combination of the wind and the barren landscape that day had made me "tired in my soul". We laughed really hard in a "I can't believe we're doing this for fun!" kind of way, then felt a lot better.

We let go of our goal of trying to ride 100km each day, and decided that we had only one objective - penguins!

So we jumped on a bus to the Peninsula Valdes.

The bus turned out to be way more of a hassle than getting rides, though. I paid a ridiculous amount of money for this man to "box" my bike, which really involved just taping many pieces of cardboard onto the bike.

This is how it arrived in Puerto Madryn.
We rode our bikes out onto the Peninsula Valdes.

Sadly, we discovered that the only penguins on the peninsula were down a gravel road that had been closed due to recent torrential rain.


So we went whale watching.

There were mom and baby Franca Austral whales (Southern Right whales) swimming really near to the boat and putting on quite a show for us.




The whales were breaching (jumping almost entirely out of the water) in order to communicate with the other whales in their group about the annual migration they would all soon be heading off on. Usually the mom would jump first, followed by the baby. It was pretty breathtaking to be so close to such big animals. At one point in time, the baby was riding along in its' mom's back!

We heard that the largest colony of Magellanic penguins was a bit further south, so we headed as far as we could by bike, then hitched down the remaining gravel road to Punta Tombo, a world heritage site. We ended up getting a ride home with the park ranger, Miguel, which was great because he kept stopping to point out and educate us about animals in the reserve including maras (patagonian hares), choiques (small ostrich-like birds) and their young, a zorro (grey fox), patagonian weasels, eagles, hawks and a ton more birds.

He also invited us to come back with him two days later when the baby penguins were hatching. Of course we said 'yes'.

This is a penguin in its nest with an egg that the baby penguin is just starting to bust out of (you can see a tiny hole).

We could only see the baby penguins for a second at a time when the penguins would lift up, so didn't get any decent photos, but they were so adorable! They were only a day or so old and really little and grey and fluffy.

The male and female penguins take turns incubating the eggs and feeding the young while the other goes swimming and fishing.

Shift change.

Because we were the first people there in the morning, we saw a lot of other wildlife as well. These guanacos were running all around us, eating and snorting loudly.

There was some strange mixing of animals, as well. Here are sheep, guanacos and penguins, not the three species I most expected to be hanging out together.

I was pretty smitten with the penguins.

And in true Argentinian fashion, Miguel took us home at the end of the day to meet his family, eat homemade empanadas and drink maté before we jumped on an overnight bus for the Andes.