01/14 What a day. This was the section I’d been looking forward to/dreading for months. It definitely lived up to its reputation as being the toughest area for cycling for anyone riding from northern Alaska to southern Argentina. For me, in 3 years of riding, it was the hardest part.
Things start off easy enough. Wake up at 6am to be at the ferry terminal for the 8:30am departure. It was a 7 km ride on a gravel road with very few hills. That only took 32 minutes. Stefan and I had another riding day together and when we arrived at the dock a Spanish guy, whose name I can’t remember for the life of me, was also there so the three of us hung out for the day.
The ferry arrived on time and we settled in for the 2 hour and 45 minute ride across O’Higgins Lake to the port at Candelario Mancilla. Nothing too exciting happened on the ride except it was rough and lot’s of people came back in quite suddenly when the freezing cold water splashed up over the bow and soaked the lot of them.
In Candelario Mancilla it was a short ride up a gravel road to get stamped out of Chile and then it was off for the next ferry 22 km away. The first 5 km was very hard. The track was steep with lot’s of loose gravel. Did a lot of pushing here.
The border was another 10 km away. There was nothing there but a sign. After that the trail turned into hell. What had been a rough jeep trail turned into what was nothing more than an advanced singletrack for mountain bikes. It was one skinny dirt track that was rarely more then a foot wide and it lasted for 7 km (4.3 miles). It was never flat and the hills always had rocks or tree roots going up which required a lot of lifting to get over. I had to wear one of my front panniers as a backpack and had the other front one strapped on top of the back just to have enough room in the front to squeeze by rocks/bushes. This made the bike extremely heavy on the back but there wasn’t enough room for 2 low panniers on the front, at least for the first couple km’s. After a while I was able to get one pannier on to help keep the front tire from lifting up on hills.
The whole thing was ridiculously hard, especially for me because my bike is so heavy. A couple times the guys stopped and helped me push up a hill that was way too steep for me to get up without having to unload all my bags. This was the other problem. We were trying to make it to the ferry for the last departure of the day at 6pm. To give you an idea of how crazy this area was, 4 hikers beat us to the ferry and they walked the entire 22 km. Anyway, to save time we all helped each other over the bad parts which made things a lot easier. I ended up walking for about 90% of the 7 km. The back of my right calf is shredded from banging into the pedal.
The good thing is that they’ve done some work to make some of the really hard parts passable. There were no stream crossings that required getting into the water/mud unless you slipped off the logs. One of them was very tricky and we helped each other across for that one. The fallen trees that caused problems for others before us had been cleared so we didn’t have that to worry about. The worst part was the last 1/2 mile or so where the trail turned into a narrow trench that my back panniers barely fit through. This part was all downhill so I had to walk up on the side of the trench bending down to steer my bike and keep the brakes on.
Argentina customs was at Desierto Lake where we caught the 6pm ferry across. The fare was CH$ 13,000 and another CH$ 5,000 for the bike. I stayed at the campground near the lake because they have hot showers, hot food and cold beer (AR$ 35 for camping).
Here’s a short video of me riding along an easy part before the fun begins at the border crossing. Glad I recovered from the little slip. 
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