Finally.

It’s been a week of rain, roadworks, long delays, rain, pot-holes, ferrys, rain, a walk through an enchanted forest to a lake and the truly beautiful Parque Pumalin. Ruta 7 is 1240kms long, but we did the first/last few hundred kms twice, down to Villa O’Higgins and back. It’s taken us 9 days to do it, including a couple of really long driving days.

On Wednesday it took us nearly 10 hours to drive 250kms – a combination of long delays at roadworks, road in really terrible condition in places and rain. Yesterday we spent the day waiting for ferries and catching ferries, then driving the last stretch of Ruta 7 towards Puerto Montt, and finally (FINALLY!) stopped at a Copec Service Station on Highway 5 well after midnight. We ate burgers in their fast food restaurant, then parked the van in a corner near the truck parking and slept there for the rest of the night. Amazingly, we did both sleep, in spite of the lights, traffic noise from the highway and the comings and goings of the 24 hour fuel stop.

Highlights of the week were the Enchanted Forest walk we did in Queulat National Park on Wednesday, and our 2-day stay in Parque Pumalin Pumalin Park. The walk is 3kms and goes through the closest thing to Fairyland I’ve ever seen – dense rainforest full of tiny ferns, mosses, fuchsias, lichens – ending up at a glacial lake fed by several hanging glaciers and a few waterfalls. We had to cross a river and a couple of creeks by stepping on stones, and I was very impressed that we both got across and back without falling in! Parts of the trail were very muddy and a ‘path’ had been made out of sliced logs and bits of timber – it was like that game kids play, going from one place to the other without touching the ground. It rained lightly for most of the time and we were a bit wet by the time we finished the walk, 3 hours later, but we were back in the car when it really started raining, around the same time as the busload of tourists were starting off. Many of them were wearing $2 ponchos, and a few women had strappy sandals and leggings on. Negotiating their way across those river stones would be …. challenging.

Parque Pumalin is a large wilderness area that was set up by Douglas Tompkins, the US businessman who started North Face adventure gear in the 1960s, and who co-founded Esprit with his wife and one of her friends. Mr Tompkins sold his interest in the clothing company in the late 1980s and devoted his life and fortune to conserving large tracts of wilderness in Chile and Argentina, and lots more projects, which you can read about here. He died in a kayaking accident on Lago General Carrera south of Coyhaique a couple of months ago.

Ruta 7 goes through Parque Pumalin, and there are several campgrounds within the park. We decided to stay at Volcan Campground, which is close to Chalten Volcano. On rare clear days you can see the volcano from the campgound. It rained the whole time we were there, and most of the time the surrounding mountains were completely covered in mist, but I think I might have caught a glimpse of the volcano once. Maybe.

So we rolled into the campground at 10.30pm and couldn’t find any empty sites in the dark, so we sort of ‘stealth-camped’ in plain sight outside one of the toilet blocks. We found an unoccupied site the next morning and settled in. Each of the 10 or so sites has its own shelter, and there are also a couple of walk-in group sites for backpackers. The whole campground is beautifully set out, definitely the nicest place we have stayed at on this trip. Cold water showers, but we had Greg’s wonderful water heater, so we were able to have warm showers in a tarpaulin cubicle in one corner of our shelter. We did some washing, which is still drying, strung up in the van, days later!

We have just been to Villa O’Higgins, which is as far south as it is possible to get in Chile, without crossing over into Argentina. A couple of hundred kms south of Cochrane on a narrow, windy unsealed road, with a 7km ferry trip across a fjord about halfway down. There’s an interesting village, Tortel, on the northern side of Routa 7 which is vehicle-free – it’s accessible only by steps and boardwalks. We went there today as we headed north.

So it was all going without a hitch until we met a bus on a narrow bit of the road, plus there was also a rock on either side of that particular bit, making it impossible for the 2 vehicles to pass without some manoeuvering. We backed the van down the road and to the side to let the bus pass, and couldn’t get out of the very soft edge of the road. In fact, the rear wheel was pretty much spinning in the air, and the front wheel had fortunately got wedged on a rock that held it in place and stopped the van from tumbling over the edge. This was the downside of the slope, which just went down the mountain into a river. So we stayed put and hoped that someone with a hefty 4WD and a rope might come along and help us out. We grabbed our passposts, some cash and a couple of credit cards out of the van ( and afterwards we remembered all the other things we should have grabbed, like the van’s original registration papers and the extensive record of all the border crossings it had done with us). One car stopped and the driver spoke English, so he was able to organise other people who also stopped to help. One guy got out his brand new snatch strap (I hope it’s the only time he ever has to use it), a guy with a 4WD Nissan ute offered to help pull the van out, and 3 guys got behind the van and pushed. Success! I hooted and hollered like a mad woman, someone praised God en espanol, we were profuse in our thanks to everyone, told them how much we loved their country, and we were all good to go our separate ways. I guess it’s some kind of measure of how serious it all was that we didn’t even think to take a photo until we were some way down the road. We stopped on the way back today and got some.

We headed straight for the free army-run ferry across to O’Higgins. It runs 3 times a day at this time of the year, with the last one for the day going south at 6pm. We joined a long line of cars, more than one ferry-load, but we found out that if there is more than one ferry-load, the guys will take another trip. So we got across to the other side with the second load just before 9pm. The possible camping spots near the ferry dock were taken, and we headed further south. Found one possibility, but after our recent near-disaster, Greg was reluctant to drive on soft ground, so we went another couple of kms and found a great spot in a dry creek bed. We would never, ever, ever have even considered such a place in Australia, but what can I say? We were tired, it was getting late and anyway, what were the chances that it would flood?

Well, er, excellent, as it turned out. It rained all night and I woke just before 8am to Greg yelling ‘F@^K! Wake up! We have to get the car out of the water!’ He never swears, so this was serious! He had got up for a wee just before 6.30am and it was all fine, but later on the sound of water where it shouldn’t have been made him look out the window, to see a raging torrent of water in the previously dry river bed. It was around a foot deep when he moved the car … and The One Time we needed the car to start, it did!

Dumb, dumb, dumb, but we were so lucky that we managed to get out when we did. We lost some stuff that we’d left outside overnight .. 20L container of fuel, our Ice Box cooler with food in it, and the previous night’s washing-up – some plates, cups, cutlery and cooking pot that were on loan from Wicked Campers. Greg waded in freezing thigh-deep water to rescue our shadecloth/groundsheet thing and our folding sink, which had caught on bushes at the side of the water, but the rest would have floated a long way down.

Anyway, we drove to Villa O’Higgins. The surrounding mountains had white stripes of waterfalls rushing down to join all the other floodwater. Rivers and lakes were full and flowing fast, and the lakes had lines where their usual blue water had been joined by tannin-brown flood water. And it kept on raining. V. O’Higgins was awash, and there were some very bedraggled-looking hitchikers walking along the road, trying to get a lift anywhere! We went to the only shop that was open, walked through the cloud of tiny insects hovering around the boxes of rotting fruit and found a cooking pot to replace the one we’d lost. It’s the same brand, but a bit bigger.

Headed 8kms south to the end of the Carretera Austral Southern Highway, then turned around and drove north. Caught the last ferry of the day, at around 7pm, and pulled off the road several kms north of the dock, on a nice, solid, not-too-windy viewpoint by the side of the road. No vehicles passed us until around 9am this morning.

In the afternoon, we headed north-west to Torres del Paine National Park. The road was pretty ordinary, but we’re used to that, we’ve been on a lot of crappy unsealed roads by now. We paid the admission fee plus a fairly extortionate fee ($20 per person, per night!) to camp in one of the campgrounds within the park, but the view of the Torres towers was almost worth it. Greg may not have thought so, as there was no hot water in the mens’ bathroom, even though there were 4 gas hot water systems in various states  of dis/repair. It rained overnight, but cleared the next morning and the view really was stunning. I think I’m going to run out of adjectives and superlatives to describe the places we’ve visited over the last week.

There’s a boat cruise to Grey Glacier, running 4 times a day. We missed out on the 2pm cruise, but got seats on the 6pm cruise and were really happy about that. The afternoon cruise had almost 100 people on it, but the later one that we did had just over a dozen people, which suited us just fine. In addition to providing sightseeing to the 3 arms of the glacier, the boat takes hikers to and from the starting/finishing point of one of the very popular hiking trails in the park. Loads of people hike in the park, we didn’t realise how many until the following day when we watched a boat taking about 100 hikers with gear from another launching post further north in the park.

The cruise to Grey Glacier was excellent, we were able to get close to all 3 arms of the glacier, and the guide spoke good English and was able to tell us a lot about the Torres and the glacier. We dollar-cost averaged the previous night’s expensive campsite by sleeping in the car park near where the boat was moored. Free camping is very common and acceptable in both Chile and Argentina, and easy to do, especially when it doesn’t involve a tent.