My lodging didn't provide breakfast, mostly because I'm the only person staying there. So I went out for a look around a bit before 9 - specifically, looking for somewhere I could find some breakfast. There's two cafes: both shut. Three bakeries: only one looked legit, and it was shut. Supermarkets/shops: there were a handful and they were all closed.

Chaitén is a quiet small town, but it's a Thursday and this seems unusually quiet. And the reason is that today is a holiday: the "National Day of the Evangelical and Protestant Churches", but most people say "halloween". Tomorrow is "All Saints' Day", but the day is also known as "Day of the Dead".

So my breakfast search didn't work out.

I've got three full days until the day I need to go to the ferry, so I have a bit of flexibility. It's 144km to Chaitén so I can ride there today, and then have two rest days there. Komoot estimates 9.5h so it would be a long day. Or I can stop along the way and have two light days and a single day off in Chaitén.

The road to Chaitén is mostly low-key ups and downs ... except. In the middle is a big mountain with a 400m climb, and the way up is mostly a nasty 10% gradient.

So the question is, where should I stay the night? There's a few possibilities.

The first option is Villa Santa Lucía, a tiny village at the junction between the Ruta 7 and the 235. It's just before the big climb starts and about halfway along, so it's a natural place to stop.

The next is Hosteria La Cumbre, which is a bit further along. Turns out it's quite high up in the mountains - in fact it's just before the peak. Very tempting if the climb is too much work...

There's another option after that, in Puerto Cárdenas. This is a group of houses, I don't think it can be called a village. On Google Maps there's six accommodation options, and five of them flyfishing lodges with prices in US dollars like $750 per night or $8000 per week. There's also "Hospedaje Lulu" which looks like a normal guest house but given the neighbourhood I worry that if I look American or use the word "fishing" another zero would go on the end of the price. It's 2.5 hours from here to Chaitén so stopping here means today a bit of light exercise tomorrow.

Puyuhuapi turned out to be underwhelming. I'd been thinking of staying two nights, but it didn't work out - it's before the tourist season and the town is not yet open for business. The only available tourist attraction was the hanging glacier, which I'd seen and got photos of yesterday - albeit from a distance. There was exactly one restaurant open which was OK, but not good enough to stay a second night. (There were a couple more interesting ones but they looked closed until the summer season.) The place I was staying was thoroughly nice, but also was the only option in town.

There's so few options that most of the people I saw at the restaurant last night, were also at breakfast...

So it's time to move on. The next stop is La Junta, which is 50km up the road. Not far, mostly flat, Komoot thinks it'll take a bit over 3 hours.

I left late-ish since there was no rush. The route started with a sneaky ride down a walking route, over a pedestrian bridge, and then a surprisingly big climb out of town. The wind was not an issue; this is a nice change so it's worth mentioning!

I was feeling a bit unwell yesterday and went to bed early, but was feeling better this morning. After two cups of tea, anyway. I'm staying at a hostel and breakfast is eggs, with four pieces of toast with jam and/or cheese. I eat everything. It's enough but it's not a breakfast buffet...

Today's route is more down than up. Which is great, but has the slight downside that I'm starting high up in the mountains, and it's cold when the sun isn't shining. Fleece or not? No fleece, I'm sure I'll warm up once I get going. In the meantime: brrr. Cold sunscreen, also brrr.

I loop around the town to see if I can find something to take for lunch. The supermarket is closed - it's not long after 8am in a tiny mountain village, that's not a surprise. There's cafes but they're not just closed, they're not opening until summer. So lunch is going to be museli bars.

And then it's onto the main road, out and down. The roads are quiet but not empty. I'm not going to complain about downhills, but they do mean I don't have to work and so I'm still cold. The scenery is spectacular but taking a photo means stopping and I really don't want to do that, I'm cold. Apologies, scenery: you do deserve better.

This is the offseason and lots of places are closed. Last night when coming into Villa Mañihuales I passed quite a few hospedajes, but they were all closed. (Happily the place I had picked out was open.) Likewise, Google Maps shows quite a few restaurants in town but all the nearby ones were closed and I needed to walk to the other side of the river, where three out of four were shut. Had an average burger, but picked up dessert from a bakery and it was so good I wondered whether I should stay longer.

And this is a very real option. What's going on is that I've got tickets booked for a ferry to Hornopirén in about a week. I've planned out the route there and it includes one rest day. I was thinking of spending it in Puyuhuapi, which apparently has good desserts and also a hanging glacier. But from what I've seen Puyuhuapi looks overpriced and without much to do... on TripAdvisor's top five things to do the hanging glacier is listed twice and items 3-5 are hiking trails without descriptions. So I'm starting to wonder if this is best place to take a day off.

Got a route choice today. Stay on the Carreterra Austral, or take another quicker route? The Carreterra Austral option includes a good 40km of gravel, and the estimate is 6 hours instead of 5. I decided to take it: I've got the time, it should mean less traffic, and as it's more remote the views should be better.

Despite it being gravel and slower than the asphalt alternative, there was a surprising amount of traffic. A few stock trucks with trailers - they gave me a lot of space when passing, and I was deep in the gravel at the edge of the road. Regular utes. A few small delivery trucks. The road was wide but the best surface for cycling is where the cars go so I had to keep an ear open and slide over to the deep gravel on the shoulder when I heard something coming. Everyone was going slow so it was all very low-key.

The scenery was spectacular. The road did a fair amount of climbing up front - and climbs on gravel aren't that much fun, especially if the surface is large stones - but after that it was high up and there were some great views. The Carreterra Austral is threading its way up the Andes, surrounded by mountains until close to the end.

It's far enough north that everything is green, so all the mountains are covered in trees and there's grass trying to grow on any unattended spot. Definitely an improvement over the Patagonian desert.

Coyhaique was very nice but is not really a tourist town. I arranged to spend two days here, then Googled for things to do. This was the wrong way around; as far as I can see the main Thing To Do in Coyhaique is the regional museum. Google showed a few other things to see but it's a stretch to call them tourist attractions so I won't list them because it would be insulting. It's not really a tourist town, and that's absolutely fine. That being said, there are a lot of hostels around so there must be a lot of visitors - but what for? Presumably not tourism...

One big perk of this sort of cycling trip is that you can eat everything. And probably should. This is a great reason to take a trip in Spain or France where bad restaurants are not permitted to survive, by law.

But in rural South America it's not always a benefit. I've been through a lot of days where the only options are beefsteak, hamburger or pizza. Being hungry makes any meal better but even with that adjustment, I've had a lot of average burgers.

And in smaller towns the list of restaurants is mostly pizza places or burger places. It's like this the world over, I remember one Swedish town where finding something that wasn't a pizza place was like playing Where's Waldo.

Today's ride starts with a straight-up 1000m climb. I guess Villa Cerro Castillo is right at the bottom of a valley; there's about 500m of climbing just to get to the turnoff to Puerto Ingeniero Ibáñez. Yesterday when I came through I was tempted to go straight on to Coyhaique - the route to and from Villa Cerro Castillo adds a bit of distance and quite a bit of height, so skipping it is tempting. If I'd matched today's pace I would have got there about 9pm, which is a long day but not unreasonable.

Anyway. Today's climb is unusally long and high. But it's not especially difficult: it never gets too steep, so there's always lower gears to use if needed. There's a bit of traffic; some buses and trucks labouring up in a low gear so I give them space. There's plenty of steep cuttings with rockfalls in some places. Later on there's a bit of snow in sheltered places. The road doesn't get quite up to the snowline but it's close.

I suppose that means that the climb was a bit uneventful? There wasn't any wind worth mentioning, which is now genuinely good news to me. The views are worth mentioning - clear views over the valley behind, and I got progressively closer to the implausibly vertical rock columns on the mountaintop I saw yesterday. Eventually they fell out of sight behind another less wild mountain, and all I can see are more realistic mountaintops which is a bit disappointing.

Having reached the peak, the elevation profile says there's a bit of a dip, then a long downhill, and as far as I can see this will be a nice simple low-effort day.

I'm in the Andes now, surrounded by snowy mountains. I didn't go far after the ferry: 35km up the road, but it was enough to go from a flat lakeside countryside to the middle of a hard rock mountain moshpit, all unreasonably steep and high and close together. The peaks are rocky and implausibly un-eroded, there's near-vertical columns up there which doesn't seem right.

I'm not going anywhere near there though. The road winds carefully around the mountains but it's all steep uphill or downhill, so far it hasn't ever followed the contour and gone flat. There's a bit of a westerly but in comparison with the Patagonian gale this is a mere zephyr, a forgotten half-open window. I suppose this is a taste of how it's going to be for the rest of the Carretera Austral...

Not far to go today: just a jaunt over the border from Los Antiguos in Argentina to its neighbouring town Chile Chico in Chile. Since the two are so similar except for the country they're in, I'm going to extrapolate from every small mismatch, a deep and profound difference in the culture and economy of the two countries.

Fave features of Los Antiguos and Argentina: great wall art and having nice doggos everywhere.

This trip is so short and simple I didn't even bother to set up a route in Komoot. Say farewell to the hostel, sail off down a sidestreet, past the tourist trap place that wanted 10 euros for a milkshake (not kidding), and out towards the border.

The wind is westerly, and it's strong, but I'm only going a few kilometers so I don't care. It's been a calm few days, and I'd forgotten about the Patagonian wind - but the wind maps show winds on the route: there's probably going to be headwinds until I'm properly over the Andes. This one isn't too bad in comparison - I would like it if I can say that about the next few days.

The Argentinian half of the border crossing is pretty quick: hand over the passport, get a receipt, out in ten minutes.

The Chilean half of the border crossing is much more complicated.

Today's the trip to the Marble Cathedrals. 0730 pickup, an hour spent leaving Argentina and entering Chile, then a hundred kilometers of increasingly hairy gravel road.

In fact it's so hairy I should describe it. The route to the Catedrales de Mármol is in the gallery below, and the section between the lake and the mountains is the hairy part. The mountainside is steep and mostly rock so this road has to cut through it. Since it's solid rock the slopes aren't just steep, they're basically cliffs ... So the views are great! But the road is basically a single lane taking a creatively winding route up and down the mountainside, so it's complicated. And passing other cars can get interesting.

When planning my cycling route I looked at going this way; the map gave no indication that it would be this dramatic. I ended up choosing the Chile Chico ferry option, and I have no regrets; this route would have been quite hard work.

Bit of a short day today. You know what's better than a short day? An even shorter day! Originally I was planning to go to Chile Chico, to take the ferry north over the lake, but I'd heard recommendations about the Catedral de Marmol and wanted to visit, and the best plan was to go to Los Antiguos instead.

So the Catedral de Marmol (=Marble Chapel) is a limestone formation sculpted by the waves of the lake. There’s a kayak tour of them that is especially recommended and I’d really like to go on. Unfortunately they're a few hundred kilometers to the west of my route, it'd add a few days to detour there and I'd rather not do that.

There's a few bus tours going there; one passes through Chile Chico so I got in contact asking if I could be picked up from there. No, they only pickup in Los Antiguos (in Argentina), which is a few kilometers away on the other side of the border... so that's why I'm staying in Los Antiguos.

An actual rest day so I didn't go far and did actually rest. Still, there was some drama: for the first time, a place didn't take cards or contact payment. And since this is my second to last day in Argentina I've been trying to use up my cash. I was carrying my last $11000 cash (about 11 euros), but lunch was $14000 and there was a problem. I'd seen it coming; they had a sign saying cash or "transferencia", but I'd only seen it coming after I'd ordered - seriously, this has never been an issue so far so I've got acclimatized; you can say "complacent" if you prefer.

I'd done a bit of Googling over lunch but that word is a derivative of "transfer" which makes Google a little bit unhelpful. Maybe it means a QR code and everything will magically work? No: they have no payment gadgetry (or maybe my Spanish failed) and I guess I actually have to find some cash.

Today was a weird trip. Ate croissants at the breakfast buffet, got on the road before 9. But my seat was comfortable. The sun was bright but I couldn't feel it. The plants were blown by the wind, but it didn't touch me. I was passing things from yesterday: the weird junction with restrictive lanes. The truck stop. But yesterday's S-bend downhill was now an uphill. I cruise up it effortlessly ... and there is no wind noise. Instead a long and very sincere lecture in Spanish.

Have I started retelling dreams? Did I inadvertently have some maté with interesting active ingredients? Did this actually happen?

Well: not yet, not yet, and yes: this is a fully honest retelling because I'm taking the tourist bus to go visit the Cueva de las Manos. It is a thoroughly disorienting experience to recognize things that yesterday were milestones on a day-long struggle, but now are scenery unworthy of notice. Then, the direction of a curve will take you into or away from the wind and it's very important; now, it's hard to even tell if there is any wind.

If you're going through Patagonia take a car, it's is definitely better than a bike.

It's a 130km stretch from Baja Caracoles, going due north. The wind forecast showed a quiet, near-windless morning and then at 12 all the wind lines started going due south. So a northerly in the afternoon, and it got stronger towards the evening. (I'd have been fine with the usual westerly! But I don't get included in wind planning.)

So I wanted to get going early; it's so much easier to go places if there's no headwinds or sidewinds. Things got off to an inauspicious start when I couldn't unlock my door at 0730. After I got that figured out, I found the door to the cafeteria was still locked: I wish I'd asked about breakfast times last night, instead of assuming that it'd be OK! Maybe they'll open up at 0800? I packed up my bike and got everything ready in the meantime, 0800 rolled around, nope.

Plan B: make a breakfast out of the provisions I've got and get started ASAP. This included a very good green apple (from Gobernador Gregores) and a mediocre red apple (from Las Horquetas) and some average museli bars (varying but unknown provenance, they all look the same, maybe Ushuaia for all I know).

I really wanted buy some things from the cafeteria - lunch and some replacement provisions. But it's 0830 and it's time to get moving. So I finished packing up the bike, working through the usual list and I'm doing the last thing, which is to send a text to say I'm leaving, when the cafeteria opens! I zip in and pick up a sandwich and the rest, then get on the road.

Another horrible headwind. Komoot estimated today's ride to take 6.5 hours, I took 10, and it's all because of the wind.

Worst moment was about midway, when I saw clouds of earth being blown across the road. The wind here is continuously strong, so if anything's loose it gets blown away. So a cloud of dust means the wind is unusually strong! Why don't the forecasts say this? They're filled with "breezy" and "shifting conditions" and not "STAY HOME IT'S GONE UP A LEVEL".

After that dust storm the road went up a hill that wasn't especially steep, but the wind was blowing straight down with so much force I got off and pushed. The wind is pulling at my shirt and feels like it's going to dislodge my helmet and it's so loud in my ears I can't hear anything. At the top I tried riding, but had to use the lowest gear and could barely go walking speed. At this rate it'll be tomorrow before I get there, and I'm not kidding. It was not a good moment. It was so bad I was starting to plan how to flag down a 4x4 and ask for a lift...

Today's route was mostly northwest which is an invitation for the Patagonian wind to cause trouble, because it usually blows from that direction. I made an early start to try to get as far as possible before the wind appeared. Got some breakfast and a sandwich from the bakery and was on the road around 8, but there was some headwind even on the way out of Gobernador Gregores.

Today was just hard work. Find a good gear for the headwind, make progress. The route turned away from the wind but it was the start of the climb, up and over the pass. That wasn't bad though, no headwind! So I cruised up the mountain, enjoyed a bit of downhill, had the sandwich, the road got back down to the valley floor and turned back to the northwest...

This was about the halfway point: the entire second half of the day is northwest, with a difficult headwind. I was doing about 10km/h and with 60km left that means another six hours. Not good.

Woke up and got on the road early. Campsite breakfast was a bit small, so I was pretty keen to get to Gobernador Gregores for lunch.

The first 20km were gravel and there was a lot of uphill work but the surface wasn't too bad. The regular westerly started up, but I'm not going to complain ... because most of the route is to the east, so it should mean a good tailwind. And (if we skip over two hours of mediocre but not difficult gravel) the road promptly turned into asphalt, veered east and the day is looking great.

Two days in a row with enough tailwind to use the highest gear! I'm getting used to it, but it's probably the last time this'll happen - the next few days are northwest or north, then over to the Chile and the Carretera Austral where the wind should be much, much milder. Also more mountainous, but that's OK: the winds haven't been forecast reliably, but the hills definitely will be.

Last night's hostel was really good. (By hostel standards!) Tres Lagos is a tiny village, so having a nice big well-run hostel is unexpected. The only slight complaint is that the breakfast was one small croissant and a bite-sized muffin, which disappeared before you can say "morning". It's probably enough if you aren't cycling a hundred kilometers a day. So I also had a few snacks.

I was running a bit slow this morning and didn't get on the road until 10. I did a quick trip around the village to see if I could pick up some extra provisions - there were three small shops (mercardos) but all were closed, the sign suggested they don't open until 11 on Saturday. The provisions I’ve got will have to stretch.

On to Ruta 40. The turnoff is a bit out of town, heading northwest and it was 100% headwind. The Komoot forecast for today suggested 30km/h northwesterlies, and added "Be ready for gusty and tricky conditions". I've now learned that any threatening words in the Komoot forecast basically mean "you're better off staying in bed".