This crossing is part of a longer trip & TR posted in Chile (Southward HO: Adventures in Chile & Argentina). I'm posting it here so that folks interested in doing the lake crossing in either direction (we did Chile to Arg) can get an idea of what its like.
Andes Crossing: Bus-Boat-Bus-Boat-Bus-Boat-Bus-Boat
On March 3, in Puerto Varas, we awoke to a beautiful late-summer dawn, hurriedly ate an early breakfast of bread and Nescafe, made our picnic lunch sandwiches (smoked salmon and mashed avocado), did our final packing and departed Vicki Johnson’s. Although the bus arrival point was half a mile away, getting there was a cinch. We went to the end of the block, turned right on Del Salvador and let our suitcases pull us as they rolled down the hill towards the lakeside Casino. For once, gravity was our friend. We waited for the bus outside Turis Tours, across from the street from the Casino. It arrived on time (7:30), and was a comfortable modern bus half-filled with a mixed Chilean/foreign contingent of passengers who had boarded at Puerto Montt.
Our first stop was at the Parque Vincent Perez Rosales between Ensanada and Petrohué. What a beautiful setting! Cool and damp and green. There was a river here that seemed to be half rapid and half falls, “rolling and tumbling” through the dark gray volcanic rock. We walked around the area for half an hour and then it was back onto the bus and on to Petrohué where we boarded our boat. Petrohué is located on Lago Todos los Santos, which is intermediate between Lago Llanquihue and the Argentine lake country. We boarded the boat and our luggage went away by truck. We were to cross Lago Todos los Santos by boat and would not be re-united with our belongings until the end of the journey in Argentina. (This is the same crossing - except in the opposite direction and absent a fog machine - shown in the hagiographic Che Guevera biopic “Motorcycle Diaries.”)
Lago Todos los Santos has an eerie aquamarine – some people say turquoise – color, that is the result of minerals washed down from the surrounding mountains. We slowly made our way across the lake. The perfect cone of Volcán Osorno was visible astern and slowly receded as we made our way. To our left, the somewhat less photogenic Volcán Puntiagudo also appeared and then receded, sometimes concealed by intervening banks, hills and islets. Then the enormous Mount Tronador began to loom on the horizon. Formerly, an active volcano, it was now, like me, retired. Repeated eruptions had shattered the cone into what now resembled very bad dentition. As we neared Peulla, the tour operator announced the availability of helicopter overflights of Mount Tronador during our three hour (!) layover in Peulla. In a rash moment, perhaps because all flights other than one had been promptly booked, I signed us up. Herd mentality? Fear of missing out on something? I’m not sure.
Peulla is set in a remote part of the park (Parque Nacional Vincente Perez Rosales) and is accessible to the outside world only via boat. Its economy is based solely on the lake crossing, tours and lodging. It has one very modern and quite impressive hotel as well as a second, somewhat ramshackle one that is currently unused and in the process of being restored. Instead of dining in the massive hotel restaurant, we found a shady spot to eat our sandwiches and fruit.
After our lunch, we toured the grounds and then headed down the unpaved road to the grassy area that served as the helipad. Our trusty craft was awaiting us, a very small bright yellow five seater. The pilot and one passenger were to sit up front and there was room for three people behind them. We were scheduled for the half hour flight with a Spanish-speaking couple. It wasn’t until I was strapped in next to the right-hand door – and non-verbally warned not to touch the door handle by an “x” drawn in air and a shake of the head - that the enormity of our undertaking hit me. This was my first helicopter flight. I suddenly found myself consumed by a strong fear of flying! I speculated as to whether the helicopter was painted bright yellow in order to easily find its wreckage. I think it might have been better had there been something to hang onto other than the door handle that I’d been warned about.
After lift-off, my nerves weren’t helped by the pilot’s unnerving habit of heading straight for Tronador’s precipitous cliffs and then either rising above – or banking away from – them at the last second. I steadied my nerves by focusing on taking photographs. I think I took one about every thirty seconds we were aloft. And the views over Tronador were impressive. No fewer than seven glaciers have their origin here; four go into Argentina and the remaining three into Chile. And not all glaciers are the same. Some were pristine white; others tinted with cool blue undertones, yet others gray-black from embedded detritus. It being the end of summer there were numerous glacier-melt waterfalls. I shot a series of spectacular shots of glaciers, rock faces, waterfalls, and a small glacier-melt lake as the pilot danced around the shattered cone of the extinct volcano. We learned that it got its name – “thunderer” – due to the noise created when large chunks of ice crashed off the glaciers. As we were heading down, I had my last view of Volcán Osorno in the distance. The overall helicopter experience was both frightening and exhilarating. The other passengers were grinning ear-to-ear. I smiled weakly. To me, it had seemed an eternity before we landed.
After our flight, we rejoined our group and boarded busses at the hotel for the next stage of our crossing. We lurched our way on ripio through farmland that belonged to people whose farms had been grandfathered-in when the Chilean government had created the park. (I couldn’t help but mentally contrast this with the treatment of farmers in the Shenandoah area of Virginia who were forced to relocate entirely when Skyline Drive was created.) As we left the farmland, our tour guide announced that we were entering an environment know as “Valdivian rain forest.” We boarded a boat at Puerto Frios for a brief journey across Lago Frios to Puerto Alegre. We then reboarded a bus that took us through more Valdivian rain forest until we arrived at Puerto Blest. We were now in Argentina – we had crossed into Argentina on the bus ride, entering Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi.
The immigration process was comic but prompt. In an odd bureaucratic tic, we were to present ourselves and our passports in the same sequence as the bus manifest. Customs was practically non-existent – four randomly (I assume) selected suitcases from those that had been checked at Petrohué. (Ours was not among them.) I celebrated my arrival in Argentina at the nearby tienda with a great hot chocolate spiked with cognac. We were then reunited with our checked luggage – in a way. We watched as it loaded aboard a boat via the windows. We boarded via normal means and started our final crossing, the long way down one of Nahuel Huapi’s many arms to Puerto Pañuelo. Nahuel Huapi didn’t seem to have the spectacular fluorescent green color of Lago Todos los Santos, but it was too late in the afternoon to tell for sure. It had been a very long day and we were exhausted. It was 8:00 p.m. when we pulled up to the dock in Puerto Pañuelo underneath the magnificent hilltop resort of Llao Llao. In lieu of the final stage of the crossing – a bus to San Carlos de Bariloche – we gathered our luggage and took a cab to our relatively nearby lodgings at Kilometer 20 outside of Bariloche. We were done in –but what a fabulous day!



