Across Patagonia . . . on a Bicycle

Chiloe Island, home to a handful of rural villages, nature parks, penguins, and weekend cabanas where Santiagans can get away from Santiago, is located off Chile’s southwest Pacific coast. Ancud, a fishing and farming village at the north end of the island, was the starting point for our 700 mile bicycle ride to Playa Union, a beach resort on Argentina’s Atlantic coast. The trek took us across Patagonia - the southern region of South America, between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

Experience Plus Bicycle Tours, experienceplus.com, has included this “expedition” bicycle tour on its website in the past, but had not featured it for a number of years until, at my urging, it agreed to offer the tour again during the height of the Patagonian summer, January 10 to 26, 2020. Experience Plus offers cycling trips ranging from easy to difficult, their expedition tours being the most difficult. Seventeen cyclists, ranging in age from late thirties to mid-seventies, and all in superb physical condition, signed up for the trek. A day or two before the trip was to begin, we gathered in Puerto Varas, Chile to meet our guides and each other.

On the third day, we arrived in Castro, the largest town on Chiloe Island. After settling into our hotel, four of us went out to find dinner. As we walked down the street, a young woman hailed us from her front porch, waiving us over and shouting in English, "I make the best pisco sour in the whole world, hands down." The pisco sour is Chile's national cocktail and, by this time, our fourth day in Chile, we had all sampled a few and considered ourselves pisco sour experts. We accepted her invitation.

The young woman introduced herself as Carolina (pronounced Kar-o-lee-na). She led us into her colorful, little house, through a front room where her tweenie daughter was stretched out on a raggedy, comfortable, old couch playing a video game, and into a dining room that she had converted into a restaurant with three or four tables. Carolina seated us at a table next to her front window, and she prepared our pisco sours. They were, indeed, the best pisco sours in the whole world, hands down. She served us her homemade bread, which she prepared while we were sitting there, and a few ice cold bottles of Chile's Australis beer. What a night! We gave Carolina 30,000 Chilean pesos (about $38.00) for her food and hospitality. She seemed happy, so we left and continued our exploration of Castro.

Our rides averaged about 54 miles a day, some a little shorter and some a little longer. After we conquered the Andes and were on the Patagonian steppe headed for Argentina's Atlantic coast, the daily rides were considerably longer. Sixty-five or seventy mile days were not unusual, and there were two days of a little over a hundred miles. The ride across the steppe was mostly flat, with a few rolling hills, and traced along the Chubut River. The days were sunny and hot on this side of the Andes, and the terrain was dry and covered with brush, but not quite a desert. The Chubut River provided enough water to support an abundance of sheep ranches, known in this part of the world as "estancias," and also indigenous wildlife. On these long rides, we tended to get spread out over about five to ten miles, so many of us were riding alone. Our guides set up water stations about every 20 to 25 miles to provide everybody with an opportunity to stop, account for each other, refill water bottles, and compare observations about the sites and wildlife seen along the way.

Accommodations on the Chilean side of the Andes were good. We stopped each night in small villages and stayed in independent and family owned hotels - always clean enough, with acceptable wifi and passable plumbing, and always near a good restaurant. Because our group of seventeen was usually too large to be accommodated in a single hotel, our guides often dispersed around town in different hotels. But it was always easy to gather at a local restaurant, or a central hotel, for dinner and a planning session.

The village of Futaleufu was our last stop in Chile before cycling through the Futaleufu Pass to Argentina. Nestled at the foot of the Andes, it was only about ten miles from Futaleufu to the border. We spent two days there in order to get rested before taking on the three-day traverse of the Andes to Argentina's Patagonia Steppe.

After crossing into Argentina and onto the sparsely populated steppe, the few villages we encountered were little more than truck stop developments. We arrived at Paso de Indios, a former uranium mining town, after a particularly grueling 102-mile day, to find that the local truck stop simply was not going to provide adequate food and drink to satisfy us. Our guides arranged for a nearby sheep rancher to prepare a feast, including slaughtering and roasting a couple of lambs for our dinner. The lambs were served along with homemade chorizo sausage, fresh vegetables, bread, and plenty of the local red wine, a carmenere. The rancher's wife, a school teacher, persuaded her colleague, the music teacher, to play his guitar and sing Argentinian folk songs during dinner.

We eventually arrived at Gaiman, one of the last remaining Welsh settlements in Patagonia. In the mid-19th century Welsh immigrants settled the Chubut River Valley, stretching across Patagonia from the Andes to the Atlantic Ocean. The settlers became successful sheep and cattle ranchers, and built a network of irrigation canals that, to this day, transforms much of the dry, scrubby Patagonian landscape into lush farm land. Gaiman still has a sizable Welsh speaking population, and some public schools in the region still require their students to learn Welsh. I met a sheep rancher who intended to send her twelve year old granddaughter back to Wales for high school.

We arrived at our destination on the Atlantic coast, Playa Union, on January 25th. We said our good byes over dinner that night, and headed our separate ways the next day.