La Carretera Austral

From Puerto Montt (near Puerto Varas), my family and I rented an awesome pickup truck, outfitted it with a flashy tarp to waterproof the bed, and boarded an overnight ferry to Chaitén, a major starting place for the famous Carretera Austral, or Southern Highway. Chaitén itself was largely destroyed by the 2008 eruption of nearby Volcán Chaitén. Today it's an eerie sight, still littered with abandoned and destroyed homes and covered in volcanic ash. It's very much a ghost town and reminds me of the descriptions in Cormac McCarthy's book "The Road" if anyone has read that (or seen the movie). A little background on La Carretera. The farther South you get in Chile, the harder it becomes to navigate. The country starts to become a multitude of islands instead of a continental mainland, and the mountains make the terrain very rough. But during the 1970s and 1980s, the Chilean government decided to connect the small isolated towns with a major highway. But lets be honest, the "highway" is just a glorified dirt road through the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen.

The road meanders through mountains, over rivers, past waterfalls and glaciers and through ancient forests. It's a very windy road, full of pot-holes, and rarely wide enough for two cars to pass comfortably. The combination of the dangerous road and beautiful scenery force you to drive slowly both for safety and for an opportunity to draw all the sites in. Although I had anticipated slow moving on the road, I had been overly optimistic and we soon realized that for the next 5 days we were going to be driving about 10 hours a day, a pretty major undertaking. Our first day of driving brought us down to Coyhaique, the largest city within hundreds of miles with a whopping population of about 45,000. As the major draw for us was not the cities/towns, we didn't spend much time in Coyhaique but instead continued down to Chile Chico the next day. Set on the southern end of Lago General Carrera, the biggest lake in Chile, it sits just a couple miles from the Argentinian border. The drive into town is easily the most incredibly driving I've ever done. With a steep cliff up to your right and an equally steep cliff down into the lake on your left, the windy and narrow road requires every bit of concentration you have as a driver. We spent a day of rest here, visiting a nearby national park with ancient hand paintings before heading back north. This is also where we spent Christmas. Let me tell you, it's strange to celebrate Christmas without snow, but even stranger for it to be the summer. Something just didn't feel right. Especially since most of the decorations are based off of Christmas in the Northern Hemisphere, so Santa is dressed in a winter jacket and is surrounded by snow. Whatever...

Thanks to the kindness of a Chilean man we met at our hostel, we were able to take his spot on a car ferry and save several hours of driving and see a slightly different part of the landscape. We continued north past Coyhaique to Puerto Chacabuco, a major drop off for cruises in the area and spent the night in 4-star luxury at the only real destination in the port town. The town wasn't much to see, but it fell on a good spot on our route and let us sleep well for a night and gave us the first internet access in several days (something very important when I realized the ferry company was about to cancel our return trip from Chaitén to Puerto Montt!). After sorting that mess out, we set off the next morning to a highlight of the trip, Parque Pumalín, a monstrous private park founded and owned by Doug Tompkins, the founder of North Face. He bought the land to protect it from further development and has created an absolutely amazing place. Despite suffering damage from the same eruption of Volcán Chaitén, the park was just recently reopened when we visited and was absolutely amazing. From ancient and gigantic alerce trees (Chile's version of the redwoods) to dolphins and beautiful waterfalls, it's an incredible area where we all wish we could have spent more time.