February 4, 2019 – February 8, 2019
El Chaltén is a small village full of outdoor gear shops, hostels, cervecerias, bake shops and restaurants, all focused on servicing the thousands of visitors that come during the short summer season to hike in the surrounding Parque Nacional Los Glaciares. It is a fun and friendly little town, whose existence is completely reliant on tourism.
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February 2, 2019 – February 4, 2019
Our parts arrived and Derek successfully super-heroed them into the camper, having to make some adjustments to get the new, different shaped electronics to fit into the old space. We hooked everything up, and all systems were go! We packed up the camper and got the heck out of Coyhaique! Cue Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again”.
January 14, 2019 – January 29, 2019….yes, 2 weeks and counting….
We got an appointment with the mechanic for a few days out, and then found a nice campground right on the edge of the town of Coyhaique. Coyhaique is the largest town in Chilean Patagonia, with about 50,000 people, and is a tourist hub. We were amazed at the number of people staying in the campground…sometimes there would be 30 tents set up and 4 or 5 rigs in the parking lot. It was a bit overwhelming with our after having wild camped for so many nights in isolation.
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January 7, 2019 – January 14, 2019
(Grab a coffee, tea or beer…..it’s a bit of a long post……)
We camped for a night in a small town called Puyuhuapi, situated at the end of a long fjord, in a small area behind a woman’s house. We were there with several other tourists, all of which were either travelling by bike or by hitchhiking. It had been very rainy, and I was thankful for our warm camper but felt guilty about our luxury when I walked by the chilled tenters on my way to the bathroom. But they were young, and they had a wood stove to gather around, and a little discomfort can increase the sense of adventure….ha ha, easy for me to say as I sipped my warm coffee from the comfort of our toasty camper.
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January 1, 2019 – January 7, 2019
The Carretera Austral is a 1,240 kilometre road that runs from Puerto Montt to Villa O’Higgins, through mountains and forests, around fjords, lakes and glaciers, and relies on a couple of longer ferry crossings where the terrain is just too challenging for road construction. Work on the highway began in 1976. It was opened to traffic in 1988 and the last 100 kilometres to Villa O’Higgins were only completed in the year 2000. The road winds through remote areas of what is know as Chile’s Northern Patagonia region and we were very excited to be finally making our way into this region that is so famous for its beauty.
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December 28, 2018 – January 1, 2019
At about 180 km long and 50 km wide, Isla Grande de Chiloe is the second largest island in South America. Our guidebook described the island as a home to fiercely independent sea-faring people, cut off from the mainland until about 50 years ago. It made the island sound mystical, with its shroud of early morning fog, its mix of Unesco World Heritage wooden churches and its local lore full of stories about witches and trolls.
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December 19, 2018 – December 28, 2018
We had an appointment for the truck in the town of Osorno for the 21st of December, so we camped for a few nights close by, then headed into town to the mechanic shop. After a few hours we were told that we had contaminated fuel, and that the system would need to be completely cleaned. The problem was that it was the Friday before Christmas, so they would not be able to work on the truck until the following Wednesday. We got the truck started, resupplied, and headed to a beautiful wild camp on Lago Ranco to await our appointment.
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December 14, 2018 – December 19, 2018
The town of Bariloche in the Lakes District of Argentina is a place that we had known about long before embarking on this trip. As we got closer and did more research, however, we kept running into one troubling piece of information….it seemed that Bariloche has had a bit of a problem with petty theft and vehicle break ins. Just a day or two before we were planning to arrive we had read about a couple who had parked on the street and went for a coffee in a nearby shop. Half an hour later they returned to find their vehicle had been broken into and the thieves took almost everything they owned. Overlanders, we read, were being targeted in Bariloche, as the thieves knew there would be computers, cameras, iPads and other goodies on board. We decided one lake town is as good as another, so we blew through Bariloche and headed to El Bolson, a town reputed to have a more relaxed vibe that had become popular with the “hippies” in the seventies.
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December 13, 2018 – December 14, 2018
We had read about a restaurant in the town of Villa de Angostura that we wanted to visit, called Tinto Bistro. It is run by the brother of the Queen of Holland (Queen Maxima is originally from Argentina).
The restaurant was great. For starters we had trout wrapped in pastry and a veal and salmon tartar. For our main dish Derek ordered ribeye steak, and I had lamb. We also had beautiful sweet deserts. We also ordered a very nice bottle of Argentinian Syrah red wine from the lower end of a list that topped out in the Cdn$1000s. We’re pretty sure that in Canada, the wine alone would have cost more than the whole meal. This all, after having washed up and put on clean clothes in the camper in our stealth camping spot in a parking lot close to downtown….we do what we can.
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December 8, 2018 – December 13, 2019
We camped for a night on an island in a river that runs through the town of Junin de los Andes, then headed to San Martin de los Andes, which reminded us very much of Banff townsite, with its outdoor gear shops and candy stores. The next day we headed out of town towards the border with Chile where we camped for a couple of nights in a free park-run campsite at the end of a mountain lake….I will let the photos tell the rest.
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