Joachim and Siemen in South America: november 2012

We dont want to bore you with endless blogposts, but our trip has just been too exciting to not post anything now we have the chance.

The sprouting metropolis of Villa O Higgins, population 500 brought us 13 other cyclists and supermarkets full of bread. Its not more than a couple of houses.

We re only 200km south of Cochrane now and have reached the end of the Carretera Austral. Its about time we take a turn after taking the same road for over 1300 kilometers.

So now we re in the Southernmost town of the Aysen region. The road stops here and tomorrow we ll take a ferry accross the lake to Argentina. We ll have to push/carry our bikes to yet another lake across the border, but first we re doing a very fancy boat trip to the largest body of ice outside the polar regions.

We made Pancakes 2 days in a row in Cochrane. Its hard to say it, but for vegetarians in Chile, the best food is still the food you make yourself.

We stayed 2 nights in Cochrane and bought food worth 80 euros. Not many supermercados between here and Argentina.

Dont know what these birds are called. We call them alarm birds. Their weapon: screem as hard as they can. 9/10 nights they were doing their best to keep us awake. As long as there are cows around you can count on seeing or hearing them.

So we left Cochrane and suddenly one old timer after the other was passing us. Just as I am writing this a sports car ferrari style passed the hostel. Gives you an idea what kind of pussies we are when we can complain about the road conditions if these cars can make it. Hard to believe they did.

These guys spoke French and the one on the left served as a fighter pilot. No wonder he remembered us his general Pinochet build this road.

Everything behind those mountains is a glacier.

We met the old timer guys again. They invited us to their barbecue. The owner of the cars was the guy we re posing with. He also appeared to be the owners of Chile s biggest bus company, turbus. He has already and will make more money on us than we got in return from him that day.

We rode 56km that day. More than enough with the headwind we had that day.

A nice evening at the riverbamk turned into a great "nightmare" when in the middle of the night a herd of crazy horses was running around and screeming like they were being chased by a puma. We had to move our tent to safer grounds to make sure we were not run over. It took some time to catch sleep again.

Rio Baker again, close to its mouth. 900 something cubic meters of water per second.

This junction brought us to Caleta Tortel where we stayed for 2 nights. We were not in a rush, because the ferry we will take to Argentina only runs on Saturdays.

Nice campfire.

We walked to the far side of Tortel that morning.

Joachim was happy, but I got lost in the forest and had to slide down some steep hills.

Dont know where this was, I was still lost in the forests putting cookies on signs while thinking Joachim and Team Austria were somewhere behind me.

While my friends were exploring Tortel I was still following orange arrows, but eventually I found them again.

Tortel, also known as the Venice of the Southern Hemisphere. Impressive village, very aware of the tourist industry, but luckily so far not that many tourists yet.

We met Nat and Anita, two Belgians and their supercool car at the Tortel parking lot. We met them a couple of more times during the next days and camped with them that night.