Carretera Austral 2 (January 1 to 9)

We started the new year with driving from the magnificent marble caves to Cerro Castillo, an impressive mountain massive, where we visited the "Paredon de las Manos", a place with hand prints from the Indians "Tehuelche" on rock from the ancient times approximately 3000 years ago.

After having food at a nice food truck the next day in "Villa Cerro Castillo" we found a nice place to buy vegetables along the road directly from a farm, where we got a free tour by the owner through all her greenhouses and a lot of information about the region and situation in Chile. One thing is that Chile sold some water rights to companies from foreign countries, with the consequence that people have to buy now the water, even if it is from a well on their own ground.

In the following we reached Coyhaique, a city with around 50.000 inhabitants which is a metropolis in this remote and less populated area. We had to clarify some mobile phone issues directly in a shop of the respective provider. After all the days before in calm and quiet nature, this was kind of a culture shock leading us to leave the city as quick as possible. We found a quiet place some 50 km outside of the city in company with two huge white dogs from a nearby farm, a situation we got used to meanwhile. Compared to Europe all these dogs are friendly, running around without a leash, and all the time curious and interested in one.

After a short trip to Puerto Aisen we went on in direction of "Puyuhuapi" and shortly before arriving there visiting "Parque Nacional Queulat", where the hanging glacier "Ventisquero Colgante" is located. This is still a part of the moderate rain forest and the two hour walk uphill to the viewpoint was subsequently filled with massive green, colorful flowers, and small streams running over the mountains and paths. Unfortunately, it was cloudy and foggy and therefore the glacier was not good visible from the viewpoint up in the mountains, but when coming down again, finally we got an impressive view from lower heights.

Moving on to Puyuhuapi the rain stayed two days with us. In the beginning we used the time for some social media activities in front of the tourism information using their wifi, before we decided to head for the warmer side of the Andes in Argentina again.

To go there we left the main stretch of the "Carretera Austral" to east in direction of the village "Futaleufu", which is also the name of the river the road is following most of the time.

We followed this river through a totally remote landscape, just sometimes interrupted by signs of civilization, where they are doing rafting and enjoyed the nature. Then we crossed the border to Argentina on Paso Futaleufu coming to "Los Cipresses" on the Argentinian side.