La Vida Gaucha:
Wandering around in Patagonia
 

                                                                                  Travels in Argentina and Chile, January-February 2001

Introduction

          This is another story about wandering around in Chile and Argentina, mostly in a borrowed pickup truck, mostly sleeping in the truck or in cheaper places along the way.   But still better than a gaucho's life, to be sure.
      So we start off acknowledging that I flew back to Chile via Santiago, there to stay with Chilean friends for a while. Before starting off for the south and the principal objectives,  there was time to visit some of the scenes of the now-defunct narrow-gauge Transandine Railway (el Ferrocarril Trasandino Chileno).  That included a visit to the outdoor railway museum at the Quinto Normal in Santiago, and a day up in the Andes, with views of several condors. 

On to Patagonia

      The trip to the far south, to Patagonia, began after arriving in Rancagua, where our shop is located.  There the 1998 Chevy 2-wheel-drive pickup was prepared and loaded, and I took off in the direction of "El Sur" on the Panamerican Highway.  The following day I drove over the Puyehue Pass, across the Andes, and into Argentina. The reason for this is that to reach Chilean Patagonia it would otherwise be necessary to take at least one ferry ship to reach the Carretera Austral, the principal roadway system in that area.  Since the truck was registered in my name and I have Chilean residency, the frontier crossings are normally quick and simple. The drive on the Argentine side lasts not much more than a day and is much more economical, both in terms of time and pesos, than the maritime exercises.  Most of the Argentine roads are paved and in excellent shape, and there is a significant reduction on the tax charged on Argentine nafta (gasoline) southward from El Bolsón.  The is the added advantage of riding over the countryside close to where Butch Cassidy had a legitimate cattle operation. For a while, anyway. 
        On this trip I elected to take a path back into Chile that I had not tried before: over the El Coyle pass. It is not really a pass in any noticeable geographical sense, but this attempt brought me into contact with an area theretofore unknown to me, and one in which I was able to get reasonably close to the wild critters of the area: the armadillo, the ñandus, and several other birds including the Patagonian flamingo. 
       As always, there was business to attend to in Coyhaique, and I looked into some of the real estate in that area before heading down the Carretera Austral once again toward Lago General Carrera. For those who have not read my other stories, Lago Gral Carrera is the second largest body of fresh water in South America, second only to Lago Titicaca.  Lago Gral Carrera is fed by a number of rivers, many of which originate in the Northern Patagonian Ice Field (Campo de Hielo Norte). 
      One of  the principal objectives of this particular leg of the trip was to review the progress being made on a branch road of the Carretera Austral which, when completed, will offer a passage from the inland areas around Lago Gral Carrera to an arm of the Pacific.  To enter into the area of the coastal mountains is to find yourself looking at territory that is reminiscent of southeastern Alaska or New Zealand's South Island. 

Camera and Related Details
      Most of the photos here were taken with a Nikon Coolpix 950 digital camera.  The original images averaged about 700 kb, while the versions on these pages are around 50 to 60 kb each.   The Coolpix 950 does not seem to take as nice a photo as the Kodak DC290 I had used previously. 
      The images were transferred in the field to a battery-operated flash-card reader assembly based on the Iomega Clik drive, which uses 40 MB disks for media. In this way I can also make backup copies using a redundant set of Clik disks (see? all that aerospace work had an effect on me).
      The Clik disks can then be read via an Iomega PCMCIA card that fits into a laptop, or via a USB dock that will transfer to either laptop or desktop.  The older parallel-port Clik drive that has the Compact Flash card reader will not work with anything later than Windows98, unfortunately. 


      And so it goes, and so I went. See the details in the story and pictures in the following pages. 
 
  • To the Index page
  • Map of the entire trip
  • Map of the Carretera Austral (Coyhaique to Chaitén)

    •  
  •    If you would like to see more pages on this part of the world,

    • clik here for PATAGONIA IN WINTER.
    Your comments:   patagonia2004@hotmail.com
     
     

    Foto this page: Near Coyhaique, XI Region, Chile
    1