Turning chaos into a plan
This is where things really started to unravel.
Up until this point, we had a vague idea of what we were doing. Now it was time to actually figure it out—and that’s when things started to unravel.
First things first: mileage.
Bear with me here, we are about to go down a rabbit hole.
The Carretera Austral is roughly 800 miles long and that ONLY gets you to Villa O’Higgins. We still have to cross over into Argentina
On paper, four weeks sounded manageable. Eight hundred miles divided by thirty-one days came out to about twenty-five miles a day.
Easy… right?
Except that math completely ignored reality.
Travel days. Rest days. Weather delays. And the biggest wildcard of all—the ferry at the end of the route. We were riding at the tail end of summer, heading into fall, when Patagonia weather gets even more unpredictable. If the ferry didn’t run, everything after it would unravel.
We started from the top;
We fly out early on a Monday morning and don’t land in Chile until Tuesday evening. Two days gone immediately. At the end of the trip, we were flying home on March 12th. That meant we needed to be through the Villa O’Higgins ferry system before then.
Here’s the problem: in March, the ferry only runs twice a week—Mondays and Thursdays. And it seems to be notorious for delays.
If we aimed for Monday and weather canceled it, would we be stuck until Thursday?
If we aimed for Thursday and missed it, would we be scrambling to make our flight home?
There wasn’t much reliable information online about delays, and everything depended on conditions we couldn’t control.
After a week of going back and forth, we realized we had two options:
· Play it safe, build a huge buffer, and increase our daily mileage
· Or cross our fingers, assume things would work out, and accept the risk
So naturally… we chose option two.
Fuck it.
We booked the later ferry date—March 5th—giving ourselves roughly a week-ish buffer at the end to handle whatever happened after Villa O’Higgins. Ferry booked. One massive question checked off the list.
Now back to the beginning.
Ideally, we wanted a full day in Puerto Montt to deal with jet lag, build the bikes, get groceries, and track down a gas canister for our stove. A calm, reasonable start.
Except there was another issue.
In the first seventy-five miles of the route, there are three ferries. Two short ones and one long one. If you mistime them, your mileage tanks. When we laid it all out, we realized that if we took a full rest day in Puerto Montt, we wouldn’t clear those first ferries until day four.
Four days to cover seventy-five miles felt… not great.
We wanted to spend most of our time in the southern, more remote part of the route—not crawling through the first section. So, staying consistent with our decision-making style so far, we made another questionable call.
We decided to sprint out of the gate.
Here was the plan:
We land in Puerto Montt at 5:30 p.m. Hopefully, the taxi I booked on a Spanish website actually shows up and can fit two massive bike boxes. We get to the hotel around 7:30 p.m., grab food, and sleep.
(Side note: this hotel was clutch. Downtown, ocean views, and a mall underneath it—with a grocery store, outdoor shop, and food court. We could get everything we needed without ever leaving the building. I’ll take full credit for that).
The next morning: hotel breakfast, build the bikes, wait for the shops to open at 10 a.m., grab supplies… and hit the road.
And by “hit the road,” I mean ride sixty miles, climb roughly 4,000 feet, and catch one ferry—all on day one. Jet-lagged. On minimal sleep. Running on vibes.
Sick. Just our style.
That early push changed the math. With sixty miles knocked out right away, we were down to about 740 miles just to reach Villa O’Higgins, spread over roughly twenty-one riding days—about thirty-five miles a day.
So now we had a route. A ferry date. A starting strategy.
Questionable? Absolutely.
But it was a plan.
And once the big pieces were in place, we could finally move on to the finer details—training, gear, and figuring out how to survive everything beyond the end of the road.
