It started off as some of the best riding we have done in Chile so far. Open sweeping corners, beautiful paving, just shy of 20 degrees, wind and a touch of cloud. Puerto Montt to La Arena to catch the ferry towards Hornopiren. We expected gravel once we got off the ferry, but the beautiful asphalt continued, until after a bridge it just stopped.
Gravel usually isn't a big deal, we slow down and take it easy, and usually the road has a consistency as to the conditions. Unfortunately, this section (40+ km of it) is under construction, and it goes from hard pack, to several inches of loose stone in about a foot. It changes mid corner, the track suddenly disappearing. For riders like Kyle and Trevor (Who have been riding like madmen since October), this sounds like fun. For my father and I, who much prefer asphalt, it is simply unpleasant.
We arrived in Hornopiren, and after some searching, managed to find the hotel we had booked, and coincidentally, met up with some bikers we met on the ferry. We left the hotel seperately only to stand in line for ferry tickets for the next day. It took a few moments, and them asking for Portugese from Google Translate before I realized that they were Brazilian. The two languages are quite similar which has thoroughly confused some of my spanish vocabulary.
The ferry office didn't open for an hour, and it is amazing the converstaions you can have through charades, google translate and our little bit of Spanish (They are functional, but not comfortable in Spanish from what I can tell). A lovely couple, we ate dinner at the hotel together, talked about football, and drank beer before heading to bed.
Up early, we packed the bikes so we could be at the ferry term... spot/ramp early, which turned out to be a waste of time as we were loaded last anyhow, but we wanted to catch the early ferry to give us more time on the other side.
The ferry runs a different route than it used to, it now runs 4 hours down a fjord where it lets everyone off, you drive 10km and catch a second ferry (Congratulations to the foursome on mountain bikes that managed to catch the ferry as well) to continue on. It used to go around everything, but took much longer. As the boat steams down the fjord it becomes commonplace to have towering mountains on either side, and I found that by a couple hours into the ride, despite occasional gorges and waterfalls to see, the mountains had become normative. There are also a large number of salmon farms on the shores, with houses usually perched nearby, a very remote place to live.
The ride after the ferry to Chaiten was decent gravel this time, as well as passing through some beautiful country, I kept stopping to take pictures.
Chaiten is a pretty town that was largely wiped out in 2008 from a landslide. Much of it has been rebuilt but there are still buildings with the first floor still half filled with silt. I wish we had more than a couple hours to wander around it, another day would have been lovely, but the ferry to Quellon only runs once per week, so we are lucky that it fit into our time table.
The short version is that the ferry left late, and this meant that when we arrived in Quellon, there wasn't enough time at the tide level to get the vehicles off, and so they delayed until just after 2000, meaning that we had an extra 5 hours to kill. The ride to Castro afterwards was great for the first kilometer, then we hit construction again. I'm beginning to believe that someone is ahead of us tearing up the roads we choose to take.
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