26, Rain, rain, rain, rain. What a pain.

Our luck with the weather ran out, like it always bound to. The clouds rolled in and the beautiful views became obscured by opaque swathes of grey misery. Undeterred, we wrapped up and wandered around in the drizzlery.

One day of non-stop rain passes and our spirits are still high, the river water is still gorgeous and the fish remain elusive. Actually, one did jump at the spinner but missed, damn stupid lucky fish.

Rio Futaleufu is home to rafting, kayaking and more rafting. The town of Futaleufu is one of those tourism hotspots filled with hostels trying to outdo each other with their rustic homely décor and happy hour cocktail deals. During a rare and welcome break in the rain we, and our brave French companions, embarked on a battle of inflatable raft vs white water vs trying not to poop ourselves. With a bonus cliff jump making the latter all the more difficult.

 

But despite the cold and huge rapids the raft survived, we survived and so did the wetsuits. We proceeded on to a camp spot with our companions to reminisce about how we all nearly died/soiled ourselves. We showed off our van levelling skills.

It’s starting to get really rural again.

We’re on the third day of mostly rain and everything is damp, the roof lining is mouldy again and we just keep driving because that’s the only time we get a heater. There’s an occasional glimpse of blue sky, quite the tease, or dolphins laughing at us land based mammals who can’t handle a bit of precipitation. We know it just looks like a slimy shadow in the water but it is a dolphin, honest.

The sun even came out one morning long enough to make a rainbow! Before it started raining again. So we made our way to a little seaside town to park under a magic free government WiFi spot and faff away the day re-accepting the terms and conditions every half an hour.

It was in this town we met Sergio. He is from Uruguay and is travelling in a pickup truck with a camper on the back. As we walked along we noted how the engine was running, but the steps to the camper were still out and Steve joked that maybe he’d forgotten. Turns out he had and 2 minutes later he drove past us with the camper back door flapping around, his steps lying in the road behind him, and headed up the hill. Steve gave chase and like a ninja cat, immediately fell over. He just so happened to be carrying 8 loose eggs in a plastic bag in his hand. Managing to break only one during the paratrooper tuck n’ roll he eventually caught ol’ Sergio and saved the day.   

 

More reminders that above the misery lives the glorious sun that we haven’t seen in days.

The morning engine start reveals that there isn’t any room left in the air for water, everything is now fully saturated both inside and outside. More driving it is then… even if the bridge looks barely fit for a bicycle.

To brighten our day we went to Jenjen’s version of the sweet shop, a fruit and veggie shop. Photo colour adjusted to show it how Jenjen sees it.

We pulled in past a nice stream to camp beside another river, slept through 9 hours of heavy rain and awoke to find that the stream had risen and our access road was now also stream. We drove right through it, it isn’t like anything could be wetter anyway!

Later, post lunch stop, we returned to the main road and saw a small campervan drive past with a dog painted on the side, one of the rental campers we’ve seen dozens off. Trying to remind ourselves what the cartoon was, we took chase and upon catching the van realise it is our Dutch friends from last week. After aggressively forcing them to stop and chat to us we all decided to make our way to a remote village that offers less crowded tours of a local phenomenon, marble caves.

The wipers ruined this otherwise lovely photo, and do you know why the wipers ruined the photo? BECAUSE IT WAS STILL RAINING.

But then the sun started to shine through and illuminate the dirty river mixing with the teal lake.

 

Just as soon as we got to the small town on the road that had been open only 17 years, we tagged along with another pair of travellers who were about to embark on a tour. Perfect timing.

The caves were cool and we learnt all about how maybe they formed, something about being part of the sea once but now a lake and dead sea life crushed or something something. Don’t you love how much we teach you?

The return journey was…. eventful. You’d think on a wide open lake it would be hard to crash into something as big as the land wouldn’t you? But our captain, which might be a slight stretch of the term, managed to plough straight into the shore. We aren’t sure of the exact cause... Firstly he said we were blocking his view, then said that a rope got caught in the steering but we know it wasn’t either of those things. It was one of two other possibilities, and we know this because we all saw him, either he was playing candy crush or reading a text from his mum telling him not to be such a massive twat and to stop playing with his damn phone while driving a boat.  No damage done, the boat is dragged back into the water and we proceed back to the planned shore as the rain starts again.

We proceeded on to a camp spot with our companions to reminisce about how we all nearly died/soiled ourselves.

And then it happened, we woke up to BLUE SKIES. Bright, deep, clear blue skies. Oh what a relief, the rain had been coming down for what felt like forever and even though we’re a lot better off than the cyclists and the hikers, it was getting tough living in a leaky cold van.

So we just saw this, and this is craaazzzy, but here’s the picture, Condor maybe?

These monsters can have a wingspan of almost 11ft and live over 70 years! Now that is crazy!

Smiles all around we said goodbye (for now?) to our new friends and started to explore this whole new, and extremely beautiful, world.

Rio Baker, an extremely powerful yet astonishingly beautiful river suitably earning the name. Not to be messed with this is Chile’s mightiest river with huge rapids of crystal clear water. Well, they were clear until Steve had his first bath in over a week plus, plus, plus some more. Jenjen checked that her skills of not catching fish were as finely honed as Steve’s and then we had our coldest night yet, 2 degrees inside the van, the thankgodfully dry van.

Getting there!

25, Nice but Dull

True to our name, we’re really going southy now. The continent is getting skinny and the temperature dropping quickly. The reward is rivers and longer days. For the last however many months we’ve had the sun setting around 5 or 6 pm so the days have felt short, especially with the urge to avoid driving in the darkness. Maybe the sun was rising early and the days were just as long except we slept through the first half? We will never know. Chile seems to run close to our somewhat unproductive body clocks, which is nice.

Talking of things going south, we’ve got coolant leaking from a crack in expansion tank. You know when you think you’re doing the right thing but it turns out to be a super dumb thing? We replaced our 30 year old tank despite it having no issues to prevent it from having issues yet 30,000km later the new one is leaking… Bugger.

We’ve got a bit of a problem. Well actually it is you hat has a bit of a problem. The area we are in is nice, and there’s lots of normal things to go and do and people are friendly and helpful. Which means there is nothing interesting or funny to tell you about at the moment. It doesn’t feel like we’re in a crazy far away country, things are green and there are lakes and other people on holiday, we’re just being normal now. Which is pretty lame for our few remaining loyal readers, so we’re sorry.  We’ll do our best.

 

Here is a nice green field where we had two peaceful sleeps, played some Frisbee and fed some horses.

Then we went on a hike in a national park for 7 hours and it was nice and warm, and we saw monkey puzzle trees, nice mountain lakes and huge woodpeckers. We even found bamboo sticks to help us walk.

I know, it’s painful isn’t it? Here is a big volcano far away, and a really nice view. Nice, but not so interesting…

In a desperate attempt to keep you interested and amused, here is a sign telling you that someone is sigin’ in the rain in 500m.

To really prove the point that we’re no longer off the beaten (aka interesting) track, here are our neighbours for a night, a local in his Dad’s big van and some Dutch in a rented tiny van. They were nice, we had a nice evening.

Most. Productive. Day. Ever. This won’t mean as much to you as it did to us but here goes. In a single day we:

Filled our water tank thanks to the man with a hose watering the grass at a petrol station.

Bought a crap tonne of food before heading into the rural south.

Broke down on the motorway, then realised we had run out of fuel so used our reserve and carried on.

Refilled our propane tank which turned out to be much more empty than expected (classic us), but Steve had to operate the bleed valve himself sans gloves and got drenched in liquid propane during the process which is -42 degrees. Soon he might be able to feel his fingers again.

Filled up on fuel albeit a little later than we should have.

Drove 300km, twice our average.

And swapped our tyres around on the rims.

You see the photo on the wall? The big grinning man? He’s mocking us because he thought we’d have a good experience at an expensive tyre shop, but he knew better. In order to wear both the inside and outside of our poor tyres we wanted them flipped around on the rims. How hard can it be to do a proper job? Much too hard apparently, and as much as Steve wants to rant and rave about all the mistakes and ignorance it’s probably not in anyone’s interest to let him. But he will just say th…….  Jenny let me complain!! No one cares Steve, shut up.

Nothing, he doesn’t want to say anything more.

So back to boring niceness, really, what is there to say? It was a lovely place to swim in crystal clear water and the stars were out in their millions following a lovely golden sunset? Blah blah. Yawn!

Smooth tarmac and roadside blackberries. Nice, far too nice.

We’re leaving the “Lakes District” and hitting up “Patagonia”, the real thing. There is a road that runs through connecting all the rural arse ends of nowhere called the Carretera Austral, egotistically named after the prime minister who built it in the 80’s.

To start on this road we need to take a ferry, not the one pictured above. It takes 5 hours and leaves tomorrow so off we go to find a river to sleep beside. It’s very nice, and Steve even does some fishing and successfully catches absolutely nothing despite obtaining a lucky canine mascot. This was another almost adopted animal, so laid back in nature he didn’t mind being dragged around upside down by his front legs. In fact, when Steve stopped the dragging, he remained on his back and started waving his paws around as if to say “again, again”. Very cute, sickeningly nice.

We had more company reminding us of how not different we are. Three Germans and an Ecuadorian travelling in a rented car and a Canadian backpacker. New record, 7 in the van playing cards. You’d think that many people would make it warm in such a small space but no, it was still freezing all night. Having said that, it was probably much, much colder for the other lot sleeping in tents. Suckers.

Time to hit the water and what a nice, nice day for it. Genuinely perfect. We gently travelled along through a fjord in the bright sunshine, chilling on the top deck with dolphins occasionally jumping in the ship’s wake watching the glacier topped mountains pass us by. If you’ve got to pay for a ferry ride… this is probably the one.

It was a two part ferry, with a short drive between ferries in the middle. Can you tell we’re getting desperate to find things to tell you yet?

We hit terra firma again and said goodbye to the Germanish gang after a short walk in the ancient forests. Can you spot the non-German?

And then we slept beside the gravel road that marked the start of the next chapter, Patagonia. A good place to end before we bore you to death. But it was all very nice.

.paM