On a chilly morning with off and on drizzle which we are
getting used to we peddled the eight kilometres down to the ferry launch. The
night before someone came around and knocked on our door to tell us that the
ferry was leaving a half an hour earlier. It normally doesn’t run on a Tuesday but they
had high winds the day before and had to cancel the glacier tour boat trip. Apparently
they go around to all the inns to tell people of schedule changes. The ferry
sold out and had fifty passengers. Most of the passengers were from Santiago
and were returning to O’Higgins which would have ended up being nearly sixteen
hours mostly on the boat. The weather
cleared up a bit and we were able to ride up top and take in the views for a
while. The other two American cyclist
couples were there in addition to the Swiss couple. Having this many American
cycle tourists together is very rare down here.
The other couples had only seen one other American couple in at least a
month of touring. In the log book for
the popular hotel we stayed at in O’Higgins the number of American entries was
very statistically very low. There were quite a few entries from European
Countries. We are not sure what the
stigma is for Americans about South America but we have never felt safer
traveling for us and our possessions internationally or in the US. Someone that Laurie works with warned us how dangerous it would be once we left the big cities in Chile. We and the other two bike touring couples had a good laugh around the picnic table about that. If anything it is the otherway around. Generally like big cities everywhere it is the cities where you have to worry more about theft but even in Santiago we felt at least as safe as in a US city.
I forgot to mention that at the hotel a large Chilean group
from Santiago showed up with a half a dozen teenage girls. They had appetizers
prepared by their guides at about eight thirty. Dinner was ready by nine. They
had plenty of time to prepare food earlier but this just shows you what the
customs are for eating down here. These were family people not party types.
They were shushing the girls at about eleven thirty which is early by Chilean
standards.
The wind picked up on
one of the arms of Lake O’Higgins and it was high seas for the tour boat.
Laurie and a couple of other people got very sea sick. Luckily behind the
glacier it was calm enough to be outside. The O’Higgins glacier that comes out
of the Hielo Sur Ice field Laurie was told is the biggest in the world not on a
polar ice cap. It was pretty impressive where it met the water and looked to be
about seventy five feet of exposed ice that calved off every once and
while.
The ride back to the south shore was uneventful in terms of sea sickness and most of the passengers slept. The ferry droped us of on the south shore for what was for all the cyclist slated to be the most difficult bike adventure of the trip. There are no cars on the road and trail to the next ferry at Lago del Desierto. The first twenty kilometres or so were on a four wheel drive road that was steep enough to require a fair amount of pushing the bike uphill for the first five k or so. The 6 k at the other end that was trail did not seem to be as bad as rumoured although it had some erosional gullies made just wide enough for panniers by panniers. It would have been tough coming from south to north on that stretch. One guy we ran into coming up from that direction was not a happy camper as he had to hike his panniers up in a separate trip. Some of the trail was fun “mountain biking” at least for me anyway. The cyclists with the heavier loads had a more difficult time. At the start of this segment on O’Higgins you have your passport stamped by Chilean military and on the other end by Argentinian military but it was all very low key.
The forest about halfway over to Lago del Desierto became very nice and appeared to be the equivalent of old growth at least for the tiny leaved beech trees that I am assuming are the same ones we have been seeing for a while now. The forest continues to look very lush on the valley floor from here most of the way to El Chalten, Big trees in this forest though only get to be maybe two and a half feet in diameter and not much more than seventy five or a hundred feet tall. They look in size and shape the way the native oak trees look in Hood River. The little leaves of what I assume are beech trees do a good job of holding back the rain though. Plus they seem to be good for a lot of thing like house construction, building bridges, making tools out of and firewood. It is a much denser hardwood than fir and pine used for some of those things in the States.
We stayed at a nice campground at the other end of the lake with the Swiss and Kansas City couples. There was a popular short hike up to glacier through a beautiful forest with yet again, a most stunning view of my life moment, of the glacier and the valley to the south with a view of Mount Fitz Roy. It is 40 k or so to El Chalten on gravel and that is it for the gravel for us hopefully for as much of the rest of the trip as we can manage. We are all bracing ourselves for the amount of tourists we are likely to encounter for the next week from here to Torres del Paine. The last week on the Carretera Austral has been pretty remote with not much traffic.
One thing that just occurred to me is that it appears that
most of the couples touring have tents large enough to put their panniers
either inside their tents or inside the vestibules. We could not do that with
our little tent but I am not sure why that is necessary as the ortleib panniers
we and practically everyone else is carrying are water proof. On river trips
you would generally not put drybags inside a tent as they are often wet and too
bulky. Bike panniers inside a tent for a couple would basically take up the
room of a third person and they would not make for a very cozy roommate as they
have lots of stiff plastic parts protruding. We do carry a little cable lock to
lock them up but only once felt like that was maybe necessary when camping in a
jamb packed front yard campground in Chiaten. I think requirements like keeping
all your gear inside your tent cause the loads to snowball. You need a bigger
tent for panniers and then more panniers for the bigger tent and so on. Also in
terms of being cramped if the weather is real bad we opt for the hostels or
hotels which often cost only slightly more than camping so we have not been
miserable hanging out in the little tent for hours in bad weather like
sometimes happens when backpacking. Buy still I am not going to carry the
weight of a big tent just for that even in the mountains. When backpacking we
put our rather small ultralight packs in the tent as pillows but they are not
waterproof and have no internal frame. We keep our food bags up off the ground
to keep them away from rodents although curiously there do not seem to be any
here squirrels or otherwise. We also out of habit would not put food bags in
the tent as that would be a no no in the US for bears. It is nice not to have
to hang food in trees for bears.
We made it to El Chalten and have a faster internet connection so may have some pictures today.
