36.3 mi / 10.3 mph / 1841 ft. climbing
Home: America’s AirBNB

It was hot. Already by the time we had loaded up and left our little holiday house, shorts and a t-shirt were all I needed. We had extended our original 14-day booking to 16 days, mostly because that’s when there was space on an upcoming ferry (though partly because a couple more days of stationary living sounded nice), but a downside of that was we were now leaving on a day with extreme heat warnings.

Due to our AirBNB’s location above and north of the city, it was possible to catch a bypass route that angled eastward to join the Carretera Austral, rather than going through the center of Puerto Montt. It was fine, even with the crazy curving downhill that took us down the second “step” of the city’s hills, and with the usual annoyances of the off-street bike-path that ran for miles on the bypass road. But Rett was disappointed to learn that we wouldn’t be starting at Kilometer 0 of the 1240km Carretera Austral, and she was probably right. I had forgotten that it was Sunday, and traffic tends to disappear on Sundays in Chile, so riding through the heart of the city wouldn’t have been anything like the chaos we had seen around the holidays.

We made our unceremonious connection at Kilometer 5, and began our clockwise path around Reloncavi Sound, that would take us from 11am to 4pm on the dial. Early on we had our fair share of close-passers, but traffic lightened nicely about 20 miles into our day. The Carretera Austral didn’t open until the late 1980s, and ferries are still required in several places to connect across unroutable areas. We hit our first one 30 miles in, a relatively-short and simple crossing handled without reservations. When we rolled down to the dock, a boat was sitting there, and workers cheerily waved us forward to make it on-board, but apparently the captain thought differently and he took off without us while we were paying (~US$3.20/person, paid to a clerk with a mobile credit card reader walking up to approaching vehicles). But before we could even break out our sandwiches, we could see the next ferry approaching (it seems they might be running 3 or 4 boats right now!), so we waited to eat lunch during the crossing.

We were joined on the ferry (which had a small indoor seating area where we ate) by Eduardo, a Mexican currently living Germany. He said he had about 200 miles of bike touring experience in Europe before deciding to come to Chile to ride the Carretera Austral, on a rented bike (that the company would pick up for him at the far end). Hmm. After more than 20 years of bike touring, I’m not even sure that I’m ready for the Carretera Austral, but they say fortune favors the bold? I hope so!

Up until this point it had just been a nice warm summer day of bike riding, but when we left the fresh boat-induced breeze of the upper deck and went down into the sun-baked, wind-blocked “pit” to retrieve our bikes, the heat hit like a hammer. It got slightly better once we were moving in the open air again, especially when we would catch a burst of “air conditioning” from a patch of shaded water, but the general temperature was probably over 90°F for our last six miles into Contao. We passed another cyclist (likely heading northbound) who was stopped at a drink stand, and then met a third just outside of our AirBNB. And then saw another group of four huddled in the shade of a building when we went out to look for dinner. So yes, the Carretera Austral remains an incredibly popular cycling route in the Southern summer of 2026.

Unfortunately the first restaurant we checked for dinner was closed, and the two blocks we had walked to get there was about all Rett could manage without collapsing in the heat. I sent her back towards the town’s small grocery (thinking we might be forced into cooking our own dinner) while I searched out another restaurant option. This one was open (and relatively cool inside), so I picked up Rett at the grocery where a cold drink allowed her to slowly step the two blocks back to the restaurant, where the hostess showed that their menus could be used as fans (and they had ice for our drinks!) Salmon ceviche was the obvious choice, both for its coolness, and because the salmon (hopefully!) came right from the nearby farms we had passed.

I think the high temperature was probably around 92°F, and if that’s not a record, it must be close. It’s certainly the highest temperature I could find in the records from the last three years, a full 10 degrees hotter than second place. During our 16 days in Puerto Montt, it only broke 70°F twice, along with two days when it didn’t even reach 65°F. So this was an extreme anomaly, which places really aren’t used to dealing with. Our booked-through-AirBNB room was essentially a motel room, in the interior of a building, and while that kept it from heating up too quickly, it also prevented it from cooling off. When we arrived and saw the two twin beds, our initial plan was to push them together before we went to sleep, but by the time we were ready to turn in, our desire for coolness overrode our desire to be close to each other, and we went to sleep in separate beds for the first time in years.