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Published: February 24th 2009
The original plan for the island of Chiloe was to spend 2-3 days there before getting a ferry from Castro to Chaiten on Wednesday morning. When we got to Castro we found out that the ferry didn´t leave from Castro but from Quellon and not on Wednesday, but on Friday. So we hung around a couple of days only to find the ferry cancelled. This led to a pretty drastic rethink of the route we had to take!
We took a bus 2 hours back to Castro and managed to get our ferry refund without too much bother, then another bus, ferry crossing, a traffic jam and 6 hours later we got back to Puerto Montt where we decided to spend the night again.
On this bus, we bought a paper and read about the reason the ferry was cancelled. The town of Chaiten where we were supposed to be getting the ferry to is a few kilometres from a volcano of the same name. This volcano erupted last year in a huge way, leaving a cloud of dust and ash spreading east all the way over to Buenos Aires on the other side of S America. It had
calmed down since then but it decided to have another little rant the day before our ferry crossing. The story is quite big over here as there is an ongoing battle between the government, who want to relocate all the people of Chaiten to a different place out of the volcano´s reach but there is a group of about 100 residents who are refusing to leave the town. The experts are now saying that if it rains hard in the next few days, the river will drag thousands of tonnes of ash from the volcano down onto the town and bury it. These people aren´t going anywhere and the government have said it could end up being a mass suicide. So we decided to give Chaiten a miss this time.
In Puerto Montt, we treated ourselves to a 3 course meal and a few beers to prepare for the 22 hour bus journey the next day to Coyhaique. The bus took us a few hours to the Argentine border in the middle of the Andes and with spectacular views of the mountains and lakes. Then overnight for about 12 hours south down Argentina and finally back over the Andes
and back over the border into Chile. On the Argentine border, an old chilean couple who we had spoken to briefly on the way took great delight in pointing out the sign saying "Las Malvinas Son Argentinas" meaning "The Falklands Are Argentine". He wasn´t keen on the Argentines and got quite excited as we approached the mountains of Chile. His only words of English was pointing at me and saying "You are James Bond"
We finally got to Coyhaique (and a launderette!) It´s a nice town, surrounded by mountains and about halfway down the Carretera Austral. We visited a national reserve nearby to try to get a bit of trekking in. We need to practice a bit for the places we plan to visit in the next month. We ended up walking for about 8 hours and were absolutely shattered by the time we got back. It is now Tuesday and we are trying to plan the next part of the trip. The route we had planned to take to the end of the Carretera Austral about 500km south has been put on hold as we have been told the road is too difficult to get down due to
Sarah enjoying the bus
Should be the special busrain damage. This means we are having to have another rethink. We now plan to spend the next week visiting a couple of villages a couple of hundred km to the south and then crossing over to Argentina earlier than expected to get further south. There are no cash machines in any towns we are going to for the next week or so and probably no internet. We´ve got a few buses to plan so we´ll get off and update this thing when we can, probably over in Argentina.
Hopefully the buses won´t get cancelled.
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Pam and Sian
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ToDave and Sarah
Hello you two, enjoyed reading last entry the pictures are stunning it has surprised me how beautiful the place is. The volcano looks amazing, (sian) David stop talkin the mickey out of sarah your the one who should be on that special bus. We will all gang up on you when you come back. Barnett is fine and is not missing you only sarah (ha ha ha). (pam) Take care of yourselves keep blogging lots of love Pam and lots of love from Sian xxxxx