I thought of Chaiten as The Big City — I’d been told it was the only place between Puerto Montt and Coyhaique with a cash machine, and the place most likely to carry my camp fuel.

So I was surprised when I rolled into a tiny-looking place with half the buildings boarded up, clearly abandoned, some with broken windows. What the hell happened here? I wondered.

I asked as soon as I found a place to stay.

A volcano, the manager told me. In 2008 the town was washed away. It happened slowly enough that no people were hurt, but everyone was evacuated, and it was two years before people started moving back and rebuilding.

A few houses have been left untouched, still buried up to the roof:

The volcano also rerouted the river, which used to run next to the town, but now cuts right through it.

The place I stayed (Las Nalcas, and not Las Nalgas (butt cheeks) as it’s apparently listed in one of the regional directories), was a hostel and a campsite — basically there were a couple of beds available in the house, and then a big yard where people could pitch their tents, while still taking advantage of the house’s bathroom, kitchen, wifi, etc.

I was planning to take a rest day and stay for two nights, so it worked out well that there would be partying. I could tell that right away — it was only four but already (or still?) a group of young people were sitting around the fire pit, laughing loudly, drinking beer, and listening to music off someone’s cell phone.

I claimed a spot in the corner of the yard, away from the noise, then went to take a shower. On the way out I passed one of the partyers, and he handed me a pack of cookies. No thanks, I said, I just had some. “Keep it for later!” he replied, and went back outside.

Once I was clean and settled, I went to the fire pit, where people kept offering me beers, and then offering to walk me to the store to buy rum, since I don’t like beer. On the way there, someone offered me his last tab of LSD. I was almost tempted, but ultimately declined.

I started to buy food along with my rum but Leo told me, no no no, we’re cooking tonight. We’re roasting meat on the fire.

It was a really fun night. There were maybe six different groups of people, all of them quite lovely and generous. There was a German girl who liked talking to me because she barely knew Spanish and needed a break (she did know English) and then two Russian guys, one who spoke a little English but no Spanish, and the other who spoke neither, but who wound up playing and singing Russian folk songs on someone’s guitar. And the meat was absolutely amazing.

Leo – a Chilean traveling with the cook and the guy who gave me cookies – got increasingly flirtatious as the night went on. I didn’t say anything; he’d put his arm around me and I’d just smile and gently step away. But after I went to bed, I heard a voice outside my tent. “Katherine! Invite me into your tent!”

“No!” I said.

“Invite me in!”

“No!”

“Do you want a massage?”

“No.”

“Do you want a kiss?”

“No!”

“Katherine! Tell me how to get into your tent!”

“Go away! Leave me alone.”

He left.

Some time later — two hours? Three? — I was awake again, having that debate with myself about how badly I needed to use the bathroom and whether it was really worth getting up or could it wait until morning, when suddenly a light was shining through my tent.

“Katherine! Invite me into your tent!”

Jesus Christ, I thought. “Go away! I’m sleeping!”

We proceeded to more or less repeat the conversation from earlier, with more irritation on my part and the new argument of “why do you want to sleep alone? It’s sad!” on his.

I got up, thinking I could go tell his friends to call him off, but everyone had gone to bed. I used the bathroom, came back, told him to go to hell, and climbed back into my sleeping bag.

I slept soundly. It’s not like I was scared; there was an entire campsite of people well within screaming distance, and he hadn’t made any move to touch me or actually come into my tent.

And then I was yanked from sleep once again. “Katherine!”

My eyes snapped open. Motherfucker! I thought. I could hear rain slapping against my tent.

“Katherine, invite me in! It’s raining! Give me refuge!”

“I told you, leave me alone!”

“But you’re pretty!”

I told him if he didn’t go away I would tell the owner and he’d be kicked out. He made some angry comment, basically calling me a rich bitch, and finally left, but I couldn’t fall asleep after that. I started to worry. He could be slashing my bike tires, or peeing into my bags — who knew what sort of drunken idiocy he might be capable of. After half an hour or so, I gave up on sleep, climbed out of my tent, and made breakfast.

My stuff in the garage was completely untouched, and Leo seemed to have finally gone to bed. It was six in the morning. I read for awhile and then went back to sleep.

When I got up again, Leo’s friend (the one who gave me cookies) apologized profusely on Leo’s behalf and promised to talk to him. The manager also apologized and told me I should have woken him up. Everyone seemed to feel really bad, which was comforting — no one took the attitude that this was acceptable behavior or ‘boys will be boys’ or anything like that.

When Leo finally woke up — around four in the afternoon — I confronted him, and he apologized and assured me it wouldn’t happen again. For the rest of the day he would barely look at me, even when we were in the same room.

Friday
I did a stupid thing. After the long ferry ride, I started pedaling, without stopping to buy food. I’d half forgotten and half assumed I’d get to a town before I’d have to worry about it. Which might have been true, had the road been flat, but it was all treacherous hills, so we made it less than 15 kilometers.

Fortunately there was a we; I was riding with the two other cyclists on my ferry, Diego and Cesar, both from Chile. They grew up together in Santiago but now Diego lives in Puerto Montt, where he works as a tattoo artist. (He is also so much a vegetarian that he wouldn’t even eat the honey pouches from the gigantic flies.)

They had plenty of food but no stove, and campfires weren’t allowed where we stayed, so it worked out well for everyone. We cooked their rice and vegetables on my stove and life was good. It was raining but the campsite had a small shelter with a table and benches so we and all of our stuff stayed dry.

Santa Barbara
We biked together on Saturday through light rain and up and down many, many hills. There were no towns to stop in until Santa Barbara, and we didn’t get there until about three o’clock. I was super happy because a) we could finally eat lunch and b) I knew the road would be paved the rest of the way to Chaiten.

I was ahead of them so I stopped as soon as the ripio turned to pavement, to wait for them and adjust one of my front packs that had come loose from all the rocky, bumpy, downhill coasting.

The road was strange — it was the width of three roads, paved all the way across, but cones blocked entry to the middle section, turning it into a divided highway.

A car pulled up and the driver asked me if I was resting. I explained that I was fixing the bag that was starting to fall off my bike. He asked if I could move back just a few meters, as an airplane was about to land.

I looked back and saw Diego and Cesar a ways back behind a flashing bar that had come down blocking the road right after I passed. I rolled my bike a few meters back onto the dirt and pulled over to the side of the road, and the guy in his car went back behind the barrier — but I was allowed to stay.

A minute later, I was certain the tiny plane was coming right at me. Why had he let me stay here? The plane was buzzing like an army of angry flies and I could feel its breath; it felt so close there was no way it could pass over me without at least knocking my head off, if not crushing my whole body.

Obviously the plane came nowhere close to hitting me, still meters above as it passed on its way to the runway, but it was an exhilarating moment — and such a random and unexpected thrill.

We ate lunch in Santa Barbara, Cesar adding avocado to my usual meat and cheese sandwiches, which was delicious, and then it was just another ten kilometers to Chaiten, on smooth roads, though still infested with hills.

Loading the ferry is quite an endeavor and I arrived early enough to catch the whole show. They start with the biggest trucks (one, according to its label, was carrying cows) and they all have to back in down the ramp and into the boat. There are guys in front and behind, shouting or talking on walkies, telling the driver when to turn, when to pull forward and adjust, when to back up again, until he’s safely on the ferry. Meanwhile these crazy dogs are running in circles, playfully jumping and fighting each other and dashing to and fro like they have a death wish. I asked one of the loading guys if the dogs ever get killed. Of course, he said.

After the huge trucks came some smaller trucks, and after that, it seemed like they were going through the line of cars, deciding which ones were the biggest and inviting them to come first.

Then a garbage truck passed by and I thought, how will there be space for him this late in the game? He’s huge! But he didn’t go on the boat; he was just passing by to collect garbage.

It was a three hour ferry ride, mostly in the rain, and then the sun came out just in time to attract flies for the otherwise beautiful ten-kilometer ride to the next ferry. Though while waiting for said ferry, I did get some justice — I finally tried one of the uberfly honey pouches. It tasted just like honey. So weird.

At the end of the second ferry, I started riding again, the task before me now clear:

P.S. It has come to my attention that for some people the photos are appearing sideways or upside down. I have no idea why this is happening and it looks perfectly normal on my ipad, so, weird. I will investigate further when I get home, but until then… Sorry?

A river in Hornopiren

Trekker thinking
When I was washing my clothes earlier, I accidentally spilled a quarter bottle of my camp suds soap. My instinctive reaction was, ‘sweet, less weight!’

I need to start camping soon because I’m getting resentful of my tent and stove and all these other pounds of things I’m carrying but not using. Though I realized today, laziness isn’t the real reason I haven’t camped yet — it’s because I’m alone. If I connected with a group and they were pitching their tents, I would join them rather than spend the extra cash to have a bed and wifi, but I don’t want to be alone in my tiny tent all bored and lonely. So I stay with families or at hostels, where there are other people around, or at least a comfy chair to sit and read in.

Postcards
I’ve been looking, but I haven’t found any yet. Well, a couple in Puerto Montt, but they were tacky and/or of places I’ve never been and have no intention of going, at least not on this trip. But along the Carretera, I’ve seen nothing. Postcards just aren’t a thing here.

Or so I thought. Then today a store clerk told me that a local printing company burned down recently. They supplied all the region’s postcards and several tourist maps, which are therefore temporarily unavailable.

The picture above is not of that company; it’s of the big supermarket in Hornopiren, which also burned down recently. A guy in the main plaza told me there aren’t enough firemen around here.

Trutrucas
The guy in the plaza, Carlos, was selling these Mapuche instruments called trutrucas. You blow into it like a trumpet, so of course I was terrible at it.

Safety
You will notice that Carlos is not in the above picture. He is off getting lunch at this time — leaving his backpack and merchandise behind without a second thought.

People keep telling me that down here in southern Chile, no one steals anything. It’s hard for me to trust this, but then again, I suppose these are mostly small towns where everyone knows eveyone, and would notice if someone suddenly had something of someone else’s.

The hostel owners always put my bike in a barn or a garage or, in one case, a fenced-in yard guarded by a dog who barks at anyone who enters, but they all told me that around here you can leave things out and no one will mess with them.

As for physical safety, the travel advisory warnings for Chile, even in Santiago, are about pickpockets and scam artists; armed mugging isn’t even a thing.

Samuel confessed he’d been nervous about the trip before he started, but on his first day, he knew everything was going to be okay. I feel the same. And Samuel pointed out that when you travel alone, people are more ready to help you. When you’re with a group I guess people figure that someone else can take care of it, but when there’s no one else they jump in and do what they can.

So yeah. Though obviously anything is possible, at this point I’m much more concerned with physical injuries from falling while riding than I am about any dangers that come from people.

Except maybe people who are driving big trucks. They can still be pretty scary.

The coastal route was much longer than the regular Carretera road — apparently it takes cars an extra hour — but it was totally worth it. Gorgeous, along the ocean, with only a couple of big hills and hardly any traffic, plus the road was smooth dirt rather than rocky horribleness.

Here is me and Samuel resting on a bridge in the same place as that picture above.

It took Samuel and I five hours to get from Contao to Marilyn’s place, which is the longest I have ever biked in one day. He went on to Hornopiren but we exchanged contact info and might connect again in a couple of days.

I took a shower, then a three hour nap, woke up, ate everything in sight, and went back to bed.

I left at 10:30 the next morning, expecting a three hour trek to Hornopiren, and was surprised and elated to find myself pulling in just after noon, though also somewhat disappointed. Apparently I’d been misinformed about the distance, though also I was biking fast to outrun the goddamn flies. (These are not your normal everyday flies, but big stinging hellbeasts; think bumblebees on steroids. Marilyn showed me how you can catch them and kill them and eat the pouch of honey they carry inside, though I never got the opportunity to try. Which is just as well; I had very mixed feelings about that.)

Diego chases a flock of escapees back to their pen.

Diego tries out my gear. He also rode with me up the first hill when I set off ths morning.

Now I’m in Hornopiren until tomorrow’s ferry ride. It’s a longer one — three hours or so, then ten kilometers across a peninsula, then another half hour in a different ferry, though you pay for it as all one journey. I haven’t decided if I will rest on the other side or bike to the next town. From 5-8pm seems like a good time to ride; the sun isn’t harsh anymore but there’s still plenty of light. But we’ll see how I feel when I get there.

Hornopiren ferry landing.

Waiting for the ferry. Again. In different weather.

I left Puerto Montt around 10am, so two hours later than I’d hoped but not bad. The weather forecast was light rain, which was mostly accurate, though there was maybe half an hour in there I would never describe as “light.” I got to the ferry around 1pm, had lunch, talked to some hitchhikers from Argentina, took the ferry to Puelche, and then biked another 10k to the next town.

“Welcome to Blue Rock.” I regretted not having taken a photo the first time I passed it and was glad to get another chance.

Now I’m in a hostel where I’ve been giving other cyclists advice about the road ahead. I saw a lot more cyclists today than I did my other first day. This guy Samuel and I are going to ride together tomorrow.

He’s Spanish but has been living in Santiago for two years because it was easier to find work here than in Spain, which makes perfect sense but still felt surprising. I guess there are a lot of people from Spain living in Santiago these days.

And now, a random picture of a cemetery.

I took the bus back to Puerto Montt on Sunday with Marilyn’s daughter Denisse, my bicycle, and four cats. Denisse invited me to stay with her in Puerto, and Marilyn let me leave a bunch of things I wouldn’t be needing — my tent, my stove — until I passed by again.

Anything I needed they somehow produced; any problem I had they solved. At one point I told them they were too nice, and Marilyn said, that’s just how we are; we like giving more than receiving. I said they were so nice I almost felt bad for not being nearly as good of a human. I was mostly joking around, but then I said, though maybe in the future I’ll be inspired to be nicer, and Marilyn seemed completely serious when she replied, “exactly.”

My bike gets fixed

Confession: I know very little about bikes. I do know how to change a tire, generally with a lot of swearing involved, and I used to know how to adjust a different kind of brake that my current bike doesn’t even have, and that’s about it.

I brought my broken bike into the shop, convinced I’d wind up waiting for weeks while they ordered a replacement part. Instead, the mechanic, using a tool I already had, fixed the problem in about ten seconds. Boom.

It turns out there’s another screw you have to loosen first and then you can tighten the one that needed to be tightened. Which was exactly what my bike guy back in Minneapolis had told me via email, but, not knowing the names of the parts, I didn’t understand a word of it until I watched the Chilean mechanic.

He didn’t even charge me.

I find my fuel
Denisse and I went everywhere. The biggest supermarket where they even sell clothes. The gigantic Chilean equivalent of Home Depot, with an entire camping section. No one had my fuel.

I had resigned myself to using rubbing alcohol, which I had remembered was a back-up option, but after getting my bike fixed I happened to walk past a small hardware store and decided to stop in just in case.

When he handed me the bottle I was so surprised I had to ask three times and inspect the label to make sure it was really the right fuel. “No one carries this; I’ve looked everywhere!” I said.

“I know,” he said, “but we do.”

I celebrate my birthday
Since I was leaving the morning of my birthday, Denisse decided we needed an early celebration. She took me to a bakery and ordered one of every kind of pie — four slices in all. We had it for dinner along with a bottle of mango sour, which turned out to be much stronger than I had anticipated.

Then I packed up and went to bed, ready to start the Carretera again the next day.

Waiting at the ferry ramp.

THE BAD

1. Flies
It’s not that they bite (though they do); it’s the constant buzzing sound, which is not only annoying but also taunts me with how slow I’m going (i.e. slow enough for flies to keep up with me).

2. Ripio
I was prepared for the gravel roads (ripio) that make up a significant part of the Carretera Austral, at least in theory. I was also prepared for hills. But I hadn’t considered the two in combination.

It’s awful. Some parts are relatively smooth, but when the rocks get bigger, you have to maintain a certain speed just to keep your balance. Which, when you’re going uphill… Yeah, it’s terrifying, especially with clip-in shoes. After nearly falling, I gave up and resigned myself to pushing the bike uphill whenever the rocks felt dodgy. Going downhill was almost equally terrifying, so I clipped out of my shoes every time just in case an awkward rock made me fall. (I just read today on the Carretera wiki that the section I’m talking about is one of the two worst, so that’s comforting.)

3. The sun
The sun here doesn’t care about sunscreen. I could feel my skin burning by early afternoon and so added a third layer of sunscreen, then eventually put on my jacket-vest when my skin started to feel even worse. The ferry actually had a UV forecast, and that day’s rating was the highest possible level.

And it was hot. Toward dinner time, I was feeling woozy and realized I was at risk for heatstroke, so I stopped at a random house where people were sitting outside in the shade and I asked if I could join them and rest awhile. After ten minutes I thought I felt better, but the moment I was back in the sun again, I started to worry. Would I make it to the next town? Where was the next town? There was thick forest on both sides of the road, too dense to push through and set up camp, so I had to at least wait for a clearing, and who knew when that would be? I’d been looking for hostel or campsite signs for almost two hours and I hadn’t seen anything.

Then the very next house had a sign: hospedaje familial.

THE AWESOME

I spent the night on this amazing farm with the nicest family. They have pigs, turkeys, goats, an apple orchard, a greenhouse with flowers and spices, and a full garden made doubly impressive by the fact that it’s on a steep hill.

The are also bees, and some cousin came over for an arthritis treatment I’d never heard of — Marilyn, my hostess, plucked a bee from the hive with tweezers and handed it to her cousin, who held the bee to his knee until it stung him. He left the stinger inside for about a minute and then removed it. Apparently that’s a thing.

Their homemade treatment for my sunburn (oil and sugar) was less effective, but I did get a couple of aloe leaves from the greenhouse. Then Marilyn brought me a white long-sleeved shirt of hers and insisted I take it with me.

Also, I lied — the sun does care about sunscreen. My back is red but the spot on my neck that I missed with the sunscreen is blistered.

We stayed up late talking and drinking mate; Marilyn lives with her parents but her daughter and grandson were also visiting so there were four generations in the house, and they were super fun. (I love making people laugh in Spanish. In English too, but in Spanish it feels like more of an accomplishment…)

I had such a good time that in the morning I decided to take an early rest day — after all it’s not like I’m in a hurry. Plus, it would give me time to investigate the strange shakiness I was feeling in the front of my bike…

THE KIND OF SHITTY

It looks like I may be bussing back to Puerto Montt to get my bike fixed. The headset is broken and I’m not thinking any of these tiny towns are likely to have replacement parts. I’m still investigating, both whether the next town might have a bike shop, and how dangerous or important this particular broken piece actually is.

Slightly less shitty but still a problem: I can’t find the fuel I need for my camping stove. Apparently it’s available in bigger cities, but as it’s less common for camping stoves than regular gas, not one place I’ve been to has had it. I could hypothetically live on sandwiches and other things that don’t require any cooking, but once I start camping (which I haven’t actually done yet) I’m going to at least want coffee in the morning, and mooching off other trekkers doesn’t seem like the best solution. So if I do have to go back, it will give me another opportunity to at solve that problem.

Plus, I’m really not in a hurry. When I first realized I might have to start over, I felt like crying, but really, I only did two days of the trek, the paved parts were gorgeous and worth doing twice, and for the ripio part, there’s actually an alternate, slightly longer but flatter coastal road I could take instead, so I’d only be repeating a few miles of the same ripio. And I could stop by and visit this family again.

So yeah, overall, everything’s still pretty awesome.

Puerto Montt does not seem to be a big fan of street signs. I wound up climbing a killer hill in the wrong direction — and then a second killer hill in a different wrong direction — before I finally found the right road.

I biked along, sometimes singing at the top of my lungs, hating the steep hills but otherwise having a great time. I didn’t make it as far as planned because it started to drizzle and my options were to pull over and dig out my raincoat from the bottom of my pack, or to just stop at the next hostal I came to, go inside where it was warm, take a hot shower, sleep in a cozy bed, and have internet access — plus, as it turns out, a hearty breakfast, which I’m very much looking forward to, having eaten nothing today but yogurt and bread.

Until next time… I suspect civilization will be sparser on the other side of the ferry ride, but I could be surprised.

1. The airport
Sky Airlines is used to flying bikes, and they don’t charge you anything. When I got to the airport, it took me less than 10 minutes to get my bike in working order. There’s actually a street in Santiago that is full of bike shops, so I had found the wrench I needed the day before.

Then it was time to pack up. My assorted dry bags and panniers had been packed into a red suitcase I bought for eight dollars at Savers, and now I needed to get them all on my bike.

It took about an hour to get ready. Next I found a place at the airport that stores bags for people, but they charge per day so it turned out it would be cheaper to just buy a new suitcase when I get back to the airport.

I gave the red suitcase to the clerk at the storage place; she seemed pleased, and I was happy not to just throw it away.

2. Frustrations
When you first get on a fully loaded bike, you might think you’ve made a horrible mistake. Your balance is off, the bike is harder to control, and it just feels so heavy. You adjust quickly, but starting off on a crowded highway with a tiny shoulder is a little unnerving to say the least.

Then too, people started honking at me. They were soft, cheerful honks; they didn’t seem aggressive enough to mean “get off the road!” (plus, there was no other road) so I was just confused. What did they mean? “Hello”?

I asked a man I passed who was waiting at a bus stop, and he looked embarrassed. He told me he didn’t know why people were honking at me, but I now think he was lying.

In my defense, I never once got cat-called in Buenos Aires, or in Santiago, so I wasn’t expecting it here, and it’s not like these honkers were yelling words at me out the window; they were just honking.

Puerto Montt is beautiful but it’s a maze; most of the streets don’t connect and if you don’t have a good map you can end up going in circles of dead-end streets trying to get over to the next neighborhood. I made it to my host’s neighborhood, but the buildings don’t have numbers on them, so I wasn’t sure which one it was, and I didn’t have a working phone. I also couldn’t find a café or anywhere to sit, and he wasn’t going to be home until 9 o’clock. Plus I was hungry, but it’s hard to go into a store with a bicycle, and even if I lock up the bike, it has six bags on it that I have to either remove and take with me or else worry about someone stealing.

What the hell am I doing? I thought. Maybe I am out of my fricking mind.

I decided to bike to a hotel instead, but I got lost so I went back – or tried to, but of course I got lost again. Though I did find a place I could bring my bike inside and wait, and a stranger let me use his phone to call my host and work out the logistics.

3. Happy again
I found my host on Warm Showers, which is like couch surfing but for cyclists. He was lovely; we drank wine and talked and everything felt okay again. He hosts a lot of cyclists – I’m the third one he had this week. He himself wants to travel, but he’s a medical student, which means he works 15 hours a day and basically does all the work of the doctors. After two years, however, he will be a doctor and have his own medical students to do all of his work, and then he can travel. So I guess it’s not a terrible system.

He left at six in the morning but I slept until noon, and now I’m writing this blog post from his apartment while I wait for all of my devices to charge. The Carretera Austral starts just outside Puerto Montt and then it’s about 30 miles to La Arena where I camp for the night and catch a ferry tomorrow. Unless the ferry is still running tonight when I get there. I really don’t know. I don’t know much of anything. I’ve traveled a lot but this trip is more mysterious and outside my comfort zone than anything I have ever done. Plus, my Spanish is rusty, I keep fucking up the money (I tried to pay 16,000 instead of 1600 for my wrench) and I generally feel totally out of place.

It’s kind of glorious.