Boarding the ferry at the end of the road.


The quick and dirty...
The Carreterra Austal, Chile´s southern road, ends in Villa O´Higgins. Arriving there on a 7 hour bus ride from Cochrane (the town nearest the Estancia) we quickly learned that the nearest ATM was unfortunately a 7 hour bus ride away, back in Cochrane. After a mad-scramble to find our last bits and pieces of cash, we booked our ferry passage in a combination of Chilean Pesos and US Dollars -- setting in place the craziest travel day of our lives.

Due to the previous week´s rain the giant lake had flooded, so we took a zodiac to board the ship while a local hauled the bags through the shin deep water. The four hour ferry took us through some gorgeous landscapes with giant gushing waterfalls on every slope. When we arrived on the far shore, we handed our luggage to a man with a horse set off for the Argentine border carrying only our daypacks and a lunch. Six hours and 22 km later we arrived at the Argentine customs building on the shore of another lake. On a whim, we hopped the departing ferry, which fortunately dropped us directly onto the bus to El Chalten. We staggered off the bus and directly into the dirtiest hostel any of us had ever seen, arriving dirty, tired, and a day or two earlier than we had planned -- marvelous.

... more to come later.

View from the Ferry.

Crossing the border on foot.

Mt. Fitzroy at sunrise. Otherworldly. But frigid. About 25 degrees and gusts of 80mph that made it near impossible to even stand in one place.

Mt. Fitzroy with some of the locals.