October 22, Day 18: Chile Chico to Villa Cerro Castillo
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...
It does mean the views are epic. There's so many snowy peaks around I don't need to zoom in, even a wide-angle view has snowy peaks all the way across the frame. There's lush green grass and trees everywhere around, which is a nice change from the hardscrabble barren landscape further south. I've taken so many photos I think I'm starting to get a bit jaded already.
From left to right: my favourite mountain. Getting remote. Green everywhere! Getting closer. And this is the view from Villa Cerro Castillo. Town name in the central square.
I'm staying in Villa Cerro Castillo. It's a small and slightly rundown mountain village, but it has so many hostels and B&Bs and other not-quite-hotels that there must be a tourist monsoon coming in the summer. I went to a nice nearby cafe and two tour minibuses stopped in while I was there. And it's still the preseason. It's a matter of time before accommodation starts getting booked out and prices jack up... November is when the high season starts, according to the ferry timetables and opening schedules I've seen. That's in a week. Too soon. But for now the weather is nice and there's no crowds.
Backing up a bit. This morning I was on the 0800 ferry and was supposed to be there at 0700 which meant an early start. The hostel provided breakfast at 0630, it included guacamole! Breakfasts are bread and cheese and ham and things, I don't think I've seen guacamole at breakfast before but I happily added it to my bread bun.
I was on time at 0700, nonchelantly parked in the nonexistent bike zone that's just beside the front of the queue of cars. It's cold out here, I've already got my mittens on. The ferry doesn't leave until 0800 and they usually don't load until the last minute. So I figure I'll slide over to the lee side of a nearby building to wait ... except now I've moved I see there's a nice sunrise, and I could just take a minute to get to the end of the wharf where I'll get a clear photo. Done. I head back to the sheltered spot to find the cars are driving onto the ferry! I join the queue at the back and I guess I'm a car now.
One nice thing about this ferry is that there was an indoor area with seating - normally there isn't any, and while drivers wait in their cars, cyclist freeze beside their bikes. So the two and a half hour trip was warm, for which I was very grateful.
The ferry lands at a small town called Puerto Ingeniero Ibáñez, where I planned to get an early lunch and get changed for the ride to Villa Cerro Castillo. I'd lined up a few places on Google Maps, but even though this was a weekday ... wait: I need to explain the trip-ending deathtraps scattered around the streets. See the photo below - this is a grille in the street, and the gap between the metal is dangerously close to the size of my tyres. A bike whose tyres fit into that gap is going to fall in, there'll be a very hard stop, and the front wheel won't be the same afterwards. A thin wheeled carbon fibre race bike? Definitely gone. Are the gaps big enough to take my tyres? I saw the danger only a moment before I crossed it, no time to stop but I turned to try to get a bit of an angle ... I felt the tyres dip dangerously, but they didn't properly go in. I think I got lucky. I kept a very careful eye out after that, and gingerly navigated them at 45 degrees. Hope there's no more, ever.
From left to right: The sunrise picture. Bike just after I got on the ferry. Puerto Ingeniero Ibáñez. A shop there - not a supermarket, even if the name looks like it. Deathtrap!
But back to Puerto Ingeniero Ibáñez. It's a sleepy town, although Google thought a few restaurants/cafes were open they were all very closed. Quite often the address was someone's home. After circling the town and finding nothing open except the supermarket (and the gaping steel wheeltraps in the streets), I figured I should just eat some snacks, get changed and get moving: it's only 2.5 hours to Villa Cerro Castillo, not a big day.
So this was the first taste of the Andes. It was about a third of a regular day's ride, but there was 620m of climbing: 1000m in a day was quite a bit for Sweden and even Spain. Looks like I'm going to be seeing a lot of hills.
But that's OK. I finished the ride quite close to Komoot's estimate, which means it's correctly predicting how long the climbs will take. Something it simply couldn't do with the Patagonian wind.
And if that means I don’t have have any more brutal and unexpected ten-hour days, I’m happy.
