Wild Upon Wild

THERE WERE SIX OF THEM: two adults and four kids, cycling up an unpaved mountain road on three tandem bicycles. As my girlfriend, Charlie, and I careered past, we looked at the family and wondered momentarily whether our choice of transport was the wimp’s way to get around. In our sturdy, air-conditioned 4x4, we felt insulated from the rigours of the road, from the extreme geography and the sun reflecting off the glaciers above us. But the higher we climbed, the more confident we became about our decision. The gravel became big boulders, and as we navigated the switchbacks, gunning the engine up the steep slopes and bouncing over the rocks, we knew that this was going to be an adventure, whether we were on two wheels or four.

It was the first morning of a two-week road trip along the Carretera Austral, the highway that threads its way for almost 1,300 kilometres through southern Chile. Running between the towns of Puerto Montt and Villa O’Higgins, the Carretera takes you through Aysén, a little-visited region of Patagonia sandwiched between two popular ones—the Lake District and Torres del Paine National Park. When the poet Pablo Neruda wrote that “at the end of Chile the planet breaks,” he must have had in mind the fractured landscapes of Aysén—more than 1,06,180 square kilometres of mountains, lakes, glaciers, fjords, and archipelagoes.

Until the 1970s, there was no road that led here. The only way in or out was by boat, navigating inland from the Pacific through a tangle of rivers. That began to change when General Augusto Pinochet decided to