Hiking across the Argentinian border

Our loyal readers will remember our footprint 'Reaching the end of Carretera Austral' where we mentioned how our undecidedness for booking the border crossing caused the first tour operator to run out of places for us. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise when on Wednesday morning we left the hostel to walk to our tour operator who would bring us to the harbour. Turned out that the other tour operator's boat was broken so it wouldn't run that day. Having gotten to know a lot of people in the hostel who booked tickets with that operator, we left with mixed feelings as we felt a bit bad for those that waited long (some longer than us) to leave Chile and now had to wait even longer. But that's how it can go in Patagonia and we were happy we were lucky enough that it was all going according to plan for us that day.

The boat ride across Lago O'Higgins-San Martín was bumpy but the views were great. We were accompanied by a Swiss family of 6, 4 bikers, and a German mother and daughter. It was interesting to hear other's travel stories. One of the bikers was cycling the American continent from north to south, another cycled here from Florida. Earlier in the hostel we also met an American who was hiking from El Chaltén to Coyhaique. These kind of stories are just fascinating to listen to and underline that our trip isn't in any way impressive.

Arriving on the other side of the lake, we asked the only inhabitant of the, let's call it settlement, to bring our heavy backpacks to the border, 15km away. That part was a gravel road that was also easy to walk. But before we went there we had to go the Chilean border control. After waiting a long time in line, it was our turn to watch how a guy slowly typed our passport information into an Excel file before copying it again to another system. We got our stamps! And off we went. It was a bit uphill but a nice walk with great views. After 5 hours we reached the Argentinian border, which was just a few signs in the middle of nowhere. It was 17:30 and we contemplated camping there or hiking another 7km to the harbour of our next day boat ride, where also the Argentinian border control was located. We decided to hike on, having heard stories about difficult river crossings and muddy paths. Those turned out to be true, and we were lucky we only ended with one wet foot and not an entirely wet Daniel and backpack. After a tough 2,5 hour hike down we only reached the campsite right before sunset. This meant that we had to cook and eat in the dark and with it getting very cold this was quite a challenge and our bodies felt quite frozen when finally entering our sleeping bags at 23:00. The bikers reached the campsite some hours earlier, so we were a bit jealous of that. Nonetheless the great view and simply the idea of hiking for so many hours without being officially in any country, was a great experience and totally worth it.Read more