21.1 mi / 6.8 mph / 1900 ft. climbing
Home: Hotel Natura

Today we were crossing back into Chile by a very unique route, one essentially developed by a company called Cruce Andino, and they’re the sole operator that will ferry you across three different remote mountain lakes (connected by two essentially “private” gravel road segments) before reconnecting with the road network in Chile. Even better, this isn’t a passage that some intrepid cyclists hacked together independently; someone at Cruce Andino has clearly made an effort to cater to cyclists. While most tourists ride buses between the lakes, the “Bike and Boat” option is listed on their main web page, with plenty of details explaining the distances and timings, and a significantly cheaper price (still not “cheap”, at ~US$250 for the two of us). It’s possible to do it in either one or two days going westbound (two days is the only real option for eastbounders due to a big hill). We think we’ll probably take two days, but are leaving open the option to complete it in one.

We were up at 5:30am, which gave us plenty of time for the short ride to the ferry after cooking up an outdoor-kitchen breakfast and carting our bags and bikes down the jungle stairs of the enchanting AirBNB property we were sad to leave. Shortly after we arrived at the Puerto Pañuelo ferry dock, Landon, a cyclist from Indiana(!) also rolled up. His fluent Spanish was a nice bonus when figuring out what was going on with boarding, though it was the English of the clerk inside the National Park office that eventually helped to figure out that we only needed to pay the port fee, and not the much-pricier National Park fee he’d initially included (which, unlike the port fee, is presumably part of our ticket).

But Landon’s Spanish didn’t help him too much when he needed to argue with the overly-strict crew members requiring him to remove every last bag that he had strapped to his bike. Normally we love how bikes and ferries work so easily together, but since this catamaran didn’t take vehicles, the bikes would need to be lifted over the rail. And even though he explained how long it would take him to undo all the complex straps of his “bikepacking” setup, making the ferry late, they wouldn’t budge. It was a little bit satisfying then when he explicitly expressed his jealousy at our “old-school” pannier setup, since our bags pop off quite easily compared to his (there was even an airport-style conveyor-lift that delivered bags from the dock and onto the boat). Eventually the captain let him lift it over to the crew with a couple bags still attached, but I bet it was already lighter at that point than mine was with its water bottles and two heavy locks still attached!

Once we set off (right on time at 10:00am), I was glad to see that Rett was enjoying it as the sightseeing trip I had intended it to be, rather than just a means-of-transportation. But the fact that it could be both simultaneously certainly helped make the cost worth it. We motored for an hour along the narrow, most-westward arm of Nahuel Huapi Lake to Puerto Blest, a place that doesn’t even really deserve a name since there is nothing but a hotel there.

While all the “normal” passengers on the boat wandered over to the hotel (many of whom had needed assistance stepping off the bus that brought them from Bariloche), we started out immediately to make sure we got to the next ferry in time (Landon was a bit behind us since he needed more time to re-attach his bags). On the two-mile gravel road we passed a few other “adventurers” who had wisely decided to walk through the incredible forest, rather than riding in the bus. It was an amazing feeling to be on this remote road that was only traversed by two vehicles per day.

Landon was relieved that when we arrived at the next dock, the crew was much more-relaxed about the bikes. They simply held the gate in the rail open and we wheeled them on, bags and all. Then we all climbed a few stairs to the benches on the upper deck of this much-smaller boat (I guess it had to be towed along one of the remote roads to get to this lake!) and waited for the rest of the passengers to be delivered by bus.

The far end of Nahuel Huapi Lake had felt remote, but green Frias Lake felt like a literal hidden gem. Unlike most glacial lakes (especially ones that somehow have boats in them!), this one has no trails or campsites surrounding it, so it’s a place that would essentially be unseen by human eyes without this crossing.

At the south end of Frias Lake, now separated from any other civilization by two lakes and one remote road, there is an Argentine border station! And, maybe it’s just because they let the cyclists go first, but there were two workers in the office ready to process the three cyclists! That meant we were back out in just a minute or two, and starting the climb of the much-longer road that would eventually connect us to the third ferry.

It was about 12:30pm when we set out, meaning we had three hours to cover the 18 miles to the third ferry. On a normal road that would be easy, but on gravel, with a steep 800 foot ascent followed by an equally-steep 2200 foot descent, a lot would depend on the quality of the gravel. Our approach was to just take it easy, and if we happened to make it, great, otherwise we would find a way to spend the night between the lakes.

Rett didn’t seem to fully understand the assignment though, because she took off while Landon and I were still getting our bikes together, and I began getting worried that she somehow found a wrong path to go down, because we had gone quite a ways up the hill without catching a sight of her. But no, there she was, just powering away with unexpected strength and energy! Eventually we hit bits steep enough where she needed to get off and push (that’s where we let Landon leave us behind), but we made it to the top much more-quickly than I expected. Some of that was because the gravel was in pretty good condition, but it was also of a muddy/wet variety we don’t have much experience on, so it was good to see that our relatively-slick tires handled it well.

The way down started equally-well, especially since it seemed like Chile cuts their trees back a bit more from the road than Argentina does, allowing more sun to reach the surface to dry it out. But halfway down, Rett’s bike started thrashing, and as hard as she tried to bring it to a controlled stop, she couldn’t keep it from sliding out from under her. She nearly was able to leap free at the last second, but her legs got tangled in the frame, contributing new bruises in places the rocky ground failed to. Luckily none of her limbs were irreparably damaged, and after some breathing to relax and stretch and let the pain dull a bit, she was gamely back on for more gravel downhill. The cause of the crash hadn’t even really been the gravel directly; it was because she hit a set of washboards in the gravel, at a speed that matched their resonant frequency, so each bump just amplified the air her bike was catching, until it became impossible to control.

At the bottom of the steep hill, we saw our first sign of civilization, a wooden building housing some Caribineros (Chilean police). One of the officers waved us over and asked to see our passports. After flipping and flipping, he says there’s a problem. We don’t have a stamp for our exit from Argentina. Without that stamp, the Chilean immigration officers (still 10 miles down the road) might not let us in, he says. WTF?! Thankfully he is using Google Translate on his phone to communicate this all to us, but it’s impossible/pointless for us to respond and say that we did check out of Argentina, we just didn’t get a stamp. My understanding was that Argentina had gone all-electronic, but a guy whose job is to guard no-mans-land probably knows more than me! Do they still do stamps at this border, and the Argentine officer just forgot? Well, we sure as hell aren’t riding 2200 feet back of the hill to find out, so I guess going forward and taking our chances is the only way? The caribinero says that we’ll need to talk to an investigator once we reach the actual border situation, and he will decide what to do with us. And, he at least did literally say “for your peace of mind”, he’s never actually seen someone in our situation turned back.

But my mind was definitely not at peace! Even with Rett’s crash, we’d been having a pretty great day, and then this asshole came and wrecked it. My teenage arrogance would have immediately decided that I knew more than this idiot cop and dismissed anything he’d said, my 48-year-old brain is no longer quite that full of itself.

So I was glad that Rett seemed to be able to put it out of her mind, and as the flatter bottom of the valley opened up around us, we were both blown away by the views. That was the point where we decided that it was no longer worth it to push to make the crossing in one day. Instead, we would stop along the river and enjoy the views with our lunch.

We set up our chairs and started assembling peanut butter sandwiches, but Rett began getting annoyed by the giant orange-tufted horseflies that started swirling around us. And then more than annoyed. Thrashing her arms around and running to avoid them, she soon decided that eating lunch was out-of-the-question. They didn’t really bother me, and I needed to eat, so I told her to just continue down the road, or pace back and forth, while I finished up. But she couldn’t even do that, and, screaming and crying, she began running down the road with her bike (dropping her jar of peanut butter along the way).

As I was packing up, I could hear her wailing somewhere down the road, and assumed it was just more of the same, but no, in her panic she had dropped her bike, spilling most of her handlebar bag out onto the road, and was unable to pick it back up. At that moment another bus came by, and the driver, seeing the chaos in the road, was kind enough to stop and ask if he could help. He even offered to load her bike in the bus somehow. But Rett, in a sudden calmness, assured him everything was ok (everything was not ok).

The horseflies were definitely annoying (when I had 8-10 of them swarming me as I was packing up, vs. the 2-3 when just sitting and eating, I nearly lost it too), but it felt like there had to have been more causing Rett’s sudden breakdown. After her crash on the downhill, she had dug out a little dispenser of arnica tablets that her mom had given her years ago for pain relief. There had been only two tablets left, and her mom left this world four years ago, so my guess was that the symbolism of her mom really no longer being able to take care of her was finally hitting home. Along with the adrenaline crash following the crash itself.

Rett’s anguish quickly becomes my own, and I deeply regretted this monthlong push that we had been on, a push to get to a place where we could celeb-hate her December birthday and celeb-hate the December holidays, shortly after celeb-hating what would have been her mom’s 75th December birthday. December is just too much for her, and we should have just found someplace and taken the whole month off.

Things didn’t get much better after that. When the gradual downhill completely flattened, the quite-good gravel turned to loose, rocky garbage that we could barely move on, and we still had four miles to go. With the flies still tracking her relentlessly, the bike slipped out from under her two or three more times, none as bad as the one on the hill, but still enough to add more bruises. One silver lining is that we definitely wouldn’t have made the ferry even if we had been pushing hard the whole way, at least we had already decided to let up!

We were obviously the only ones at the Chile border station, so thankfully there was actually a worker there to process us. And…we had no issues at all, and within a minute were granted a fresh 90 days in Chile (60% of the whole reason we crossed into Argentina in the first place!) I find it hard to believe that the caribinero just likes messing with tourists, so my most-charitable guess is that Argentina only stopped doing stamps at this particularly-remote border station relatively-recently (once they got StarLink Internet?), and the carbinero hasn’t learned about the change yet?

A second guy then appeared to inspect our bags. He picked four of our ~12 bags and asked us to open them, and even though we’d learned that Chile is really strict about food, he didn’t care at all. One of the bags he asked to open is Rett’s “kitchen” pannier, which is 50% food, we told him that, and he made no effort to inspect further.

The third stop, one building down with a guy casually sauntering out to meet us while smoking a cigarette, was for our bicycles. We gave him the registration forms that we still had from when we entered Chile the first time, at Arica, with the idea being that he could just copy them to generate new forms for us. But…he just wanted to keep them. Huh? No, when we enter Chile, you give us the registration form, not the other way around! Why do we know more about Chile border procedures than these officials who live and work at the border?! Again we were stymied by the language barrier, and nothing we said could get him to generate a new form for us, or even give us back our old ones (the whole point is that we need the forms when exiting Chile, so if this guy didn’t give us new ones, we might have trouble on the way out…Landon had just told me that he hadn’t been given one on entry at Santiago, and he had to sweet-talk his way out of Chile, which we’d like to avoid!) When Rett asked if we could at least take photos of our forms in his hands, somehow that flipped something for him and he at least let us take them back. They’re now out-of-date, so it’s probably not as good as a new form, but hopefully better than nothing. My best guess is that the guy was just lazy and didn’t want to create new forms, and he saw that we already had some, that just sent him down a wishfully-confused path.

With our entry to Chile now official, we made a few more pedal strokes into the “town” of Peulla, which contains maybe 20 buildings. We had heard that it might be possible to avoid the insane prices at the fancy hotel by inquiring about overflow rooms at the “old hotel” next to it, but it was 5pm, and we were physically and emotionally exhausted, so I decided it was worth it to us to just take the US$190 room and be done with it.

We went to the hotel dinner when it opened at 8pm(!), partly calling it Rett’s birthday dinner, as it was reasonably high-end, and we had an incredible National Park Lodge view of the surrounding mountains. And as expensive as it was, it was still significantly cheaper than staying and dining in a National Park Lodge in the US. There only appeared to be about 10 other guests staying in the huge hotel, so it seems unlikely they would have offered us the old hotel anyway. With food, rest and recovery, and peace from the flies, and terrible parts of the day were already beginning to fade and quickly be filled by the surplus of excellence.