#28 Boardwalk Empire - Caleta Tortel

I won't keep you in suspense for any longer - what makes Tortel so special is that the entire town is constructed of boardwalks; you cannot drive into it or around it - all cars are parked at the entrance to the town. Very cool. Someone described it later like this; it's not exactly pretty but it's uniqueness makes it interesting.

You will see from the pictures that the sea is a kind of grey, dirty colour, so the view is nothing spectacular. Everyone lives in houses on the hillside overlooking the water in what look and feel like tree houses. Obviously the place is on the small side, so it's not far to walk from the carpark to one's house, but still you cannot always carry your heavy stuff up and down all the stairs so some stuff gets carted in by boat as most of the houses are accessible from the water.

Although by the sea, fishing is not the main industry in Tortel, cypress wood is. Its abundance here is one reason for the lack of asphalt. Although in Chile, many of the local customs (and this goes for a lot of Chilean Patagonia) have been imported from Argentina, such as the mate, gaucho lifestyle, farming practices etc. This is because the pioneers of Patagonian Chilean traveled across the Andes from Argentina (at this time Chilean Patagonia was connected only to the remainder of Chile by boat).

Although an interesting place and very tranquil there was also not much to do save for some expensive trips to nearby islands and glaciers. So we had pretty much seen everything in an afternoon and were ready to move on (this included a trek through some unexpectedly muddy and hilly terrain not designed for the jandals I had on!). Unfortunately our desired destination, Villa O'Higgins, could not be reached by bus as we were told. Hitching was out of the question as four other tourists had the same idea and very few people drive on from Tortel to Villa O'Higgins, especially on days the boat to El Chalten doesn't travel. So back to Cochrane it was.

As there was no bus back to Cochrane until the following day so we decided to take our chances hitching in the opposite direction. We walked a bit further than the carpark and sat down to prepare a cardboard sign with our snacks we had purchased to wait out what we thought could be some time. Not five minutes later, in the midst of printing the middle 'C' in Cochrane, we saw a ute. Out went the thumb, our expectations of a lift very low, but what would you know as easy as that we had a ride. We almost felt disappointment that we didn't get a true hitch hiking experience.

Wood fire ovens we have become used to cooking on.

We were directed to the back of the ute to sit amongst the gas bottles, which was fine by us. Though after the three hour ride the bottom was feeling worse than a whole day's worth of riding on the bike. We would have seen at most 3 cars driving the other direction, and there was no guarantee they were going all the way to Villa O'Higgins, so it seemed we made the correct decision in continuing on.