New, far-away voyage! Days in Poland are getting colder and shorter and shorter – so it is time to fly to the other hemisphere! In Patagonia I was already twice, but I visited mainly the East – the Argentinean part. This time, I set out to Chile. Patagonia Chilena is famous for bad roads, a maze of islands, rarely visited fabulous fjords and glaciers – it’s much bigger challenge for the traveler. To many interesting places you can get only by water. Due to irregular transport and I’m not sure if I succeed… It will be therefore once again a great adventure, improvisation, wiping a new trail. I begin the journey in Puerto Montt and famous for its wooden churches the island of Chiloe (they even found their way to the list of World Heritage of UNESCO). Then I will follow the road south via the famous Carretera del Sur – to the place where it (as a gravel road) finally ends in the hamlet of Villa O’Higgins. The only option to follow further south is the passage through the Andes range to the Argentine side of the main mountain ridge – to the bottom of the famous summit of Fitz Roy – and to wander further south – re-crossing the border – to Chile, where I would like to visit once again the National Park Torres del Paine. All of these combinations require the perfect refinement of the various possible options. I devoted to the analysis many hours, but what will be the effect of this will work I will see only on the road. The plan there has still a lot of unknowns, starting with the weather, which can not be predicted…
Look at the map on the left column – for the first time it is so stretched down! Chile stretches from north to south by more than 4000 kilometers. A section, which I intend to defeat by land and sea is 1300 km in a straight line in each direction …
I’m going to come back on December 20th – on time to buy a beautiful Christmas tree. Because there’s nothing like Christmas in Poland! I ask my friends to keep the fingers crossed – it can make that the sea will be calm, and ferries and ships will not be delayed, that battered buses do not get flat tires on the gravel roads of Patagonia, that the cloud does not obstruct the views of great glaciers, and my condition will overcoming consecutive kilometers of mountain trails.
If I will have the access to the free internet, a short messages from the road you will find as always in my travel log.
