Week 3 : Final Week in Patagonia
- Mary Kate gKing
- 18 hours ago
- 10 min read
Weekly Recap: (Can click the Underline Week Recap for the previous week's blog post)
Week 1 Recap: Flew into Punta Arenas from Santiago. Adjusted to the camper van life while creating some funny memories. Amazing boat tour with glaciers & very active whales.
Week 2 Recap: Punta Arenas -> Puerto Natales -> Torres Del Paine National Park (completed W Trek), crossed from Chile into Argentina: El Calafate -> El Chaten (cutest little mountain towns).
Week 3 Recap: El Chaten (Mt Fitz Roy) -> Long drives along the famous Carretera Austral -> Chile Chico (Marble Caves) -> Chaiten (to catch ferry) -> Puerto Montt -> Puerto Varas (adios van) -> Santiago (via plane)
Hitchhiking: A way of traveling by getting free rides from passing drivers, usually by signaling with your thumb or a sign. It’s an informal and often spontaneous method of transportation used by people without their own vehicles.
Our journey this week involved making more international friends by picking up some hitchhikers. It only seemed like the right thing to do after benefiting from being picked up as hitchhikers ourselves during the previous week. Turns out, hitchhiking is very safe and a popular form of transportation in Patagonia!
This week was spent driving North and exploring more of the Patagonia region. We have explored via camioneta (van), boat, and plane. (Boat and plane were not planned for this week originally, but when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade and enjoy it while being surrounded by cows… yet again! More on that later!
The end of week two meshed into week 3, with us staying in El Chaten, an adorable mountain town with incredible hikes and restaurants all accessible within a ten-minute walk in the town. We completed one of my favorite hikes ever, the Laguna de Los Tres, which had us reach the base of Mt. Fitz Roy.
The Mt. Fitz Roy hike was gorgeous, challenging, and checked off my goal of seeing the Patagonia logo
mountain range. (Yes, you will see at least 15 dorky photos of me pointing to the Patagonia logo on my apparel in front of Mt Fitz Roy. No, I will not apologize for being such a dork about it, lol).
Mt. Fitz Roy: At the top, the best way to describe it was, complete and utter madness.
Our time in El Chaten was extended due to two days of poor weather - did someone say, snowday?! This apparently was a direct cause for the large crowds on our popular hike in the fall. I overheard a guide explaining to his group that in the summer, it is this crowded every day, but this is unusual for the fall, which is only explained by the snow-day effects.
In L.A. fashion, Nick and I did not think about potentially needing crampons to attach to our shoes when we inevitably entered snow at the top of the hike. Despite being warned in the past of higher altitude hiking conditions by our Colorado cuzzies, Madeline and Jacques, we entered the hike without a thought of how our normal hiking boots and lack of poles would serve us in the snow. Good news, neither did anyone else, which had us blend right in with the rest of the ill-prepared hikers trekking through snow with heavy gusts of wind, just to take a photo with their Patagonia gear.
Snow, slush, sliding every which way. People are going rogue, creating their own paths up and down. Every couple of minutes, hearing the gasps as someone slips and slides down part of the mountain. The internationally renowned hike invited people from all over the world, so you can hear at least 5 different languages at any given time, often with a panicked tone as they were sliding through mush. I did my best to capture some of the comical parts of this hike, but was limited due to the fact that I, too, was trying to keep my ACL intact. In the moment, really, the only thing you could do was laugh and pray that no severe injury came from this hike.
A glimpse into this madness can be seen in the video below. You can also enjoy a story about a Russian abuela who surpassed our expectations on this hike in the week 3 section of voice memos.
... but it was TOTALLY WORTH IT!
There were two times that I gasped during this hike. Luckily, neither of them was from an unexplained fall. The first was 2.5miles in, when I actually got to see Mt Fitz Roy for the first time. With the weather having been so bad, and our lack of luck seeing the Las Torres, I had mentally prepared to see almost nothing on the hike. This is what led to my excitement when I first realized that, throughout the 14.5 miles of this hike, we’d be able to catch breathtaking views of Mt Fitz Roy. Nick joked that we could’ve turned around at 2.5 miles once this picture was captured…
While the idea of turning around after 2.5 miles was inviting, we continued on. Across the river, through the valley, the forest with leaves turning, snow, and finally a rocky ascent, straight to the peak viewpoint of Mt Fitz Roy. While panting a little bit more than in round one, I found myself gasping again once reaching the base viewpoint of Mt. Fitz Roy. It was even more fantastic than I had imagined. I’ll let the photos take it from here. If you look closely, you can also notice a glacier we spotted along the hike.
Absolutely incredible, right?
We even had a final surprise when departing from El Chaten, looking in our side mirrors.
You can actually see the entire mountain range from the town. Due to the cloudy weather while we were in El Chaten, we did not realize how incredible the view was until we departed. So cool.
On to the next activity, we were able to give our legs a break and enjoy nature through a nice kayaking trip along the second-largest lake in South America, General Carrera. Well, that is the Chilean name of the lake. This very large, crystal clear lake stretches between Argentina and Chile, and the name of the lake is different for each country. Argentina’s name for the lake is Lago Buenos Aires (no, we weren’t close to Buenos Aires… yet). Anyways, we did an amazing kayak trip to the infamous marble caves of Chile. They were beautiful, and it was so nice to see how they were preserving nature.
As always, no edits were made to any of these photos. The color of the water did change depending on how the lighting shifted on the water, amazing.
On the road again…… (I hope everyone sang that in their head when reading) ….
Driving through Patagonia is like nothing I’ve ever experienced. While very much it’s own unique place, it carries elements of Alaska, Hawaii, Colorado, California, the middle of nowhere U.S. (Kansas, etc), and the similarities to the fall foliage of the Shenandoah mountain range. Every couple of hours, it felt like we passed through a completely different terrain. New animals to observe, new flora and fauna, and even different seasons. While I tried to capture the drastic changes of scenery, it was often difficult due to my abilities of capturing while on the move. In some areas, the roads did not have any pull-off spots, which led me to snap blurry pics on the iPhone. Speaking of the roads… this leads me to the lessons learned of the week.
Lessons Learned of the Week: Google has no idea about the roads in Patagonia. (Neither does Apple Maps nor any other map app). The best way to describe the scenery along the infamous Carretera Austral is the quote, “all great things require working for it.” We would find ourselves driving hours, never exceeding 20km/hr due to the extremely bumpy roads. Every once in a while, we’d find ourselves grateful to be back on paved roads, only to have surprise gravel sections every 100km or so, with no true warning… leading us to shift from gear 6 to 1 REAL quick. These dancing roads became even more interesting when we picked up our first set of hitchhikers from Germany. They were appreciative of the free, three-hour drive, but there were times I was concerned they were going to join us in the front seat with my abrupt stops and swerving. We quickly learned how inaccurate maps truly were. Our plan for a 10-hour drive day seemed simple compared to the lengths at which we drove across the U.S. about a month ago. We were mistaken. Our first full day of driving had us making it barely 6 hours of distance in about 11.5 hours of driving.
This is when we knew we had to pivot. My brilliant husband pulled some strings, coordinating with the rental van company and user-friendly websites of AustralFerry and JetSet. We pivoted from having 5 days to make a “35-hour” drive to Santiago, according to the inaccurate Google, to 4 days of making a “10-hour” drive, 9-hour ferry ride, and 90-minute flight to Santiago.
Plan B was definitely mejor. But don’t worry, we were still able to get plenty of experiences with the van in plan B. For example, we now have a nomad friend from the Czech Republic who also experienced the dancing roads of Patagonia through the back of our van. Our plan B also led us to the FSTOFT……
Funny Story of the Week: “Podemos usar tu ducha?”.
In natural MK fashion, this will probably be at least 3 stories within one story, so take another sip of that coffee and buckle up!
We survived the driving and arrived in Chaiten, the 4-block mountain town. Greeted by friendly elderly locals on the streets, we appreciated this quiet town to rest in before setting sail on our ferry ride. In desperate need of a shower, Nick had seen a note on the iOverlander app of this one woman who charges $4 to use her shower. I was letting Nick take the lead, blindly following him to the cutest little blue house with a sign reading “La Madre”.
We knocked on the door. A few minutes later, an old man opened the door, “Hola”. “Hola”. Then silence. He looks at us. We look at him. Still silence. After another painful 35 seconds, which felt like eternity to me, I finally blurted out, “Podemos usar tu ducha?” The man just laughed. The volume of the laughter grew louder as we realized they were hosting friends for Sunday night dinner, and everyone had a front row seat to whatever that interaction was. With a smile, he waved us in, and we met “La Madre,” but I think the sign could now be updated to “La abuela”. They pointed us to the back bathrooms of their quaint home. Nick made his payment, and then we both departed to our respective showers with fuzzy toilet seat covers and charming bathroom decor.
I returned to the living room and kitchen, where Nick was practicing his Spanish with the older gentleman. No English was spoken the entire time we were there. I’m sure that family and friends enjoyed more laughs about our visit over their dinner once we departed.
Laughing at how… um…. Interesting… that situation was, we thought we were done with our funny story.
We moved our van to the gravel parking lot at the end of town. When we pulled up, we saw a few trucks and didn’t think much of it. Once settled, I realized there, in fact, there was some “moooing” coming from one of the trucks. Should we move our van? Nick had assured me that they won’t moo all night. Famous last words. An early rise of 4:20am, mooing still ringing in the background, we opened our curtains to find ourselves completely surrounded by about 10-15 trucks of cows, mooing in sync. Not the first time we had found ourselves surrounded by vacas on this trip, and ironically enough, not our last either.
Somehow, we made it out of the tight quarters of trucks to the port where we’d drive our van onto the ferry. We were one of the first vans on the ferry and found ourselves nodding off in the recliners to the sounds of mooooooo. Wait, no, that’s not right. We left the cows in the gravel parking lot. I must just be mistaking the sounds of the boats with moos after being surrounded for 8 hours the night before. That would make the most sense, but nope. Nick laughed, encouraging me to take a lap around the boat. Sure enough, we had 15 cattle trucks on our ferry, with vacas moooing for the entirety of the 9 hours. I’d like to say this will be my last time writing about cows on this trip, but who the heck knows.
This story leads me to our high, low, unexpected, and learned of the week:
NICK:
High: Getting Mt. Fitz Roy on a clear day.
Low: The general sketchiness of the roads
Unexpected: Finding ourselves in two more situations where we were surrounded by cows. Read week 1 if you don’t know about the first situation.
Learned: German carpenters go on a journey after their apprenticeship, wearing traditional attire, they cannot spend any money on transportation or lodging, this usually is for at least a year
MK:
High: Seeing Mt Fitz Roy (Really the whole hike, but specifically the breathtaking view)
Low: Driving on these challenging roads. Specifically, the long day where it rained on muddy, gravel roads the whole day.
Unexpected: Picking up not one but three hitchhikers along our driving route. They all safely made it to their destinations despite riding in the back of our van with no real seats or seatbelts on some bumpy roads. ~vagabonding~ am I right?!
Learned: Chile is the second most volcanic area in the world. There are 90 active volcanic systems in Chile. Volcano Osorno mimics the cone-shaped style of Mt Fuji but is almost 1,000 meters smaller.
Did I mention volcanoes in my learned and not share any photos?
In addition to the variety of terrain previously mentioned, Chile is also home to a few famous volcanoes, two of which we saw in the small, charming town of Llanquihue. Volcano Osorno and Volcano Calbuco can be viewed over Lago Llanquihue. Volcano Calbuco is smaller in comparison to Osorno, but is considered one of the top 14 most dangerous volcanoes in Chile, having its last eruption in 2015. We were able to enjoy the views of Volcano Osorno and Volcano Calbuco from our camioneta. Well, eventually we were able to enjoy the views. It started as a foggy day, which is why Nick thought I had photoshopped this picture of him. This photo was taken of Nick while he was working. He hadn't looked up from his laptop since the clouds had passed, and he was in disbelief when he received this photo then looked up.
Another incredible week! You’ve finally made it to the end where you get to enjoy a silly photo of me and this face as a reminder to make sure to sign up for email notifications when another blog post is published!
Subscribe to get email notifications with each weekly post by clicking HERE.
... Or else this photo might haunt you if you don't sign up.... your choice!
All jokes aside, thank you for reading and being such supportive friends and family!
Click HERE for more voice memo updates.
Thank you for reading! Te amo!
Love,
MK & Nick
Comments