Chiloe Island & The Carretera Austral

As soon as we set foot on dry land, after the Navimag journey, in Puerto Montt (not the most picturesque place in Chile) we were inspired to blow a ridiculous amount of cash to rent a pickup truck (or in Australian, the ute). We took a quick ferry across to the island of Chiloe (beloved by guide books and known best for its fishing culture, buildings made of wooden shingles and palofitos-or houses on stilts).

We were more impressed by the Parque Nacional Chiloe where park rangers took pity on us and told us stay in a primitive refugio because of the soggy conditions.
One of the rangers invited us to dinner and I reckon she must have been a bit lonely to welcome the company of two gringos who speak spanish like a couple of five years olds.
There were some beautiful walks out to the dunes through forests of blooming fuschia trees, gigantic nalca plants and other equally unusual foliage.

Darryl made the mistake one night on Chiloe to order Curanto, described as a regional seafood specialty. He found out too late that it comes in an iron pot big enough to take a bath in.

From the busy port of Quellon on Chiloe we took yet another ferry due east to Chaiten on the mainland.
For us, this was the beginning of the Carretera Austral, a mostly gravel road that was motivated by Pinochet to connect the remote areas of south-eastern Chile. It winds through the most incredible scenery we have ever traveled through.

To compensate for having spent so much money on a vehicle we ended up camping most nights. Our first stop was Parque Pumalin, where we camped on Lago Blanco. Instead of a puma we spotted a pudu (the world's smallest deer). In Pumalin we found muddy wet hikes to hidden waterfalls.

Hikes through Alerce forests, trees that live for up to 4000 years and have ferns, moss, lichens and flowering vines growing on every inch of them. Also frogs.

And hikes to retreating glaciars, like Yelcho, through broad river valleys with no discernable path.

On leaving Pumalin, we drove south to the Amarillo thermal baths and had a good hot soak in the middle of a rainforest on a wet cold day, where Darryl could practise his backstroke.

The Carretera Austral, translated as the Southern Way, is a different kind of road. Instead of other cars there are,
gauchos

livestock

flooding

and landslides.

Further south we stayed in the relatively large city of Coyhaique (220 kilometers south of Chaiten), and then pushed a little further to Cerro Castillo. On the way, there were forests of every imaginable autumn color creeping up the slopes of some unusually pointy mountains.

The pickup was due back in a week, so we had to meander up north again, passing through La Junta, Puyuhuapi, and Parque Nacional Queulat, camping below its hanging glaciar.

Through Futaleufu, where a Spanish company wants to build a hydroelectric dam on this perfect river. Whitewater rafters the world over reject this idea unanimously, as do many Chileans, +2 gringos.

One week after leaving Chaiten, a volcano 10 kilometers away from the town erupted, blanketing parts of it in 15 centimeters of ash. Some scientists are calling it a potential Pinatubo, and Darryl was disappointed we hadn't stayed longer to revel its geological glory. I was happy to be safely tucked away in Santiago at that point. And that's where we've been for the last week, watching the Chaiten news updates intently.