DAY 2: OFF THE SURFACED ROADS (EL BOLSON TO CHAITEN)

Getting an orange juice before taking on the nature park on the way to Trevelin, Argentina

Getting really dusty

Houses covered in volcanic ash, washed in by the sea (tsunami?)

Deserted dark town with the volcano in the background

Sunset in Chaiten



Rio Grande on the way to the border post

 DAY 2: OFF THE SURFACED ROADS (EL BOLSON TO CHAITEN)

We left El Bolson in Argentina, traveling in a general southerly direction and took the gravel route through the Los Alerces Nature Reserve. The road followed the edge of Lake Rivadavia and provided scenery as beautiful as any that we have seen along the northern lakes. The weather treated us very well for the entire day and we had very warm sunshine weather in Argentina, cooling somewhat after crossing the border post into Chile.

The very friendly wardens at the entry to the nature reserve did their best to convince us to take a walk along one of the hiking trails (using their total vocabulary of 10 English words assisted by our collective Espaniol vocabulary of about 5).  She did however understand that we came from South Africa and jumped with excitement, being a great soccer fan. Unfortunately we decided to push for Chaiten and could not fit it in an already long day.

A long section of gravel road was under construction and the trip became quite dusty as the photographs will prove. While the newly surfaced road is probably OK for cars, the layer of loose gravel across the entire road surface made for some very challenging riding adding on to our experience.

Our route took us through the small town of Futaleufu where we had some difficulty in finding the route out of town with literally nobody that we approached speaking any English.

We arrived in Chaiten around 8pm after a long day in the saddle and were very relieved to find a hotel with rooms available. It turned out that we were two of three guests and only really realized why the next day. We had dinner at the restaurant next door where we were once again the only two eating guests. The options were given to us verbally and we ended up with a nice pork chop with fresh salad.

We managed to take some good photographs of the volcano, which is apparently covered in cloud most of the time. One can only see steam coming from it at this stage. The evidence of the disaster two years ago, when the volcano erupted and covered the entire town in a layer of volcanic ash is glaring with many houses still as they were after the eruption. People just left their homes and the town literally died. There are very few people left of which the owner of Hotel Schilling is one. She did her utmost to treat us well but one could not help having a lot of empathy with the efforts made with absolutely no means.

The experience in Chaiten was really worth the effort of travelling 160km of gravel road and we will post more photographs to illustrate the experience.