Two women on the Carretera Austral

Carretera Austral  (Patagonia)

Silvia and Linda

www.ciclistepercaso.com

“Cicliste per caso” in italian means “cyclists by chance”. We chose this name for us because we ended up on the Carretera Austral by chance, never having  travelled on a bike for more than 3 days before this journey. We are not professional cyclists nor professional explorers, we are just two women that live in the city and use daily the bike to go to work, crazy in love with sport, outdoors adventures and travelling. When we heard about famous Carretera Austral we coluldn’t resist and we decided to go for it. We packed our hobo bikes with some used boxes and jumped on a plane to Puerto Montt. Having not too much time to cycle the whole 1.200 km of the Carretera Austral, we decided to go for the southern part of it, because it’s the wildest and most beautiful one.

So we catched a ferry from Puerto Montt and after 27 hours we arrived in Puerto Chacabuco, that’s where our adventure started!

For the first two days the road was paved, so we had time to get used to the huge weight of our bikes, that we packed way too mutch. The real adventure, anyway, started after 185km in Villa Cerro Castillo, where the paved road ends and nature takes over.

Riding on gravel was really hard both uphill and downhill: some climbs were so steep that we had to push our bikes, some drops where so challenging that we fell several times. The Carretera Austral is a long dirt road that runs into the middle of mountains, waterfalls and glaciers, through a wild territory of amazing beuaty. We spent whole days without meeting anyone, just getting water from streams and pitching our tent on the side of the road when we were tired.

The gravel, the heat, the strong wind, the horseflies slowed us down, we were cycling an everage of 60km per day, but we made it to Villa O’Higgins: the end of the Carretera Austral. Here it’s where the cars have to turn back, but with our bikes we managed to cross the O’Higgins Lake by boat, admiring the impressive clacier, and living one of the best adventure ever to cross the border between Chile and Argentina on a narrow mountain path.

Mount Fitz Roy welcomed us in Argentina, where we ended our journey in El Chalten. In total we cycled more or less 700km.

Cycling along the Carretera Austral has been such an amazing experience that now we can’t stay without travelling by bike.

We already cycled acrossing Italy, 1.630km from North to South, and we are now planning some more adventures on two weels.