December 2019 · Patagonia
Carretera
Austral
Five days in a rented car. Puerto Montt down to Coyhaique, with a detour south for the Marble Caves. Glaciers, fjords, emerald rivers, and one of the most remote drives on earth.
Puerto Montt
start
Coyhaique
turnaround
5
days
Dec 2019
southern summer
The Road
What is the Carretera Austral?
Ruta 7 — the Southern Highway. A 1,240 km road that cuts through the Chilean Patagonia, from Puerto Montt in the north down to the tiny village of Villa O'Higgins.
I picked up a rental car in Puerto Montt and drove about halfway down — to Coyhaique, with a detour further south for the Marble Caves at Puerto Rio Tranquilo. Half the road is still gravel. The land is broken by fjords in places, so you load the car onto a ferry and keep going. Rainforest, glaciers, and lakes the colour of pool water.
It's one of the last proper frontier roads. And for five days, it was mine to drive.
The Route
Puerto Montt to Coyhaique
...with a detour south for the Marble Caves.
Day 1 · December 19
Puerto Montt & the first ferry
The road starts in Puerto Montt. An old steam locomotive in the town square is basically the unofficial trailhead. A few hours south, the first of the ferry crossings — a short hop across the Reloncaví fjord. First real taste of how remote this is going to get.
Day 2 · December 20
Into real Patagonia
Up early. The road weaves through dense forest and opens onto glacial rivers the colour of raw emerald. Orange steel bridges every so often. Stopping every twenty minutes because the landscape just refuses to stay the same for long.
The Best Part
The friend I picked up along the way
Somewhere near the start of the drive I met a guy who needed a lift to his hometown. I had a car, space, and was headed roughly the same direction — so he hopped in.
Here's the catch: he spoke only Spanish. I spoke very little Spanish. For the next couple of days we navigated Patagonia with hand signs, Google Translate, a lot of laughing, and the occasional shared pointing-at-mountains silence.
And then there was the ferry loading — trying to reverse a rental car up a steel ramp, in the rain, while a Chilean crew shouts directions in a language you half-understand. Somehow we made it. Every time.
We're still friends to this day. Sometimes the best parts of a trip aren't on the map.
Day 3 · December 21
The Marble Caves
Villa Cerro Castillo, then down to General Carrera Lake. The marble caves — Cuevas de Marmol — are reached by a small boat from Puerto Rio Tranquilo. Sculpted by 6,000 years of water against limestone. The lake itself is an unreasonable shade of turquoise.
Easily the most surreal hour of the trip.
A Country in the Middle of Something
The Estallido Social
A street in a small Patagonian town, December 2019. Smoke in the air, people moving — you could feel the country's mood even far from the capital.
What you don't get from the postcards: Chile, in December 2019, was in the middle of the largest protest movement in its modern history. The estallido social — the social outburst — had started two months earlier in Santiago over a metro fare hike and had since become something much bigger. Inequality. Pensions. The Pinochet-era constitution.
Even a thousand kilometres from the capital, you could see it. Graffiti on walls. Posters in shop windows. The national flag everywhere — often with a Mapuche flag next to it. One evening in town, tear gas drifted down a street as people moved around us. We just kept walking.
You don't travel expecting to brush up against a country's politics like that. But it was there, threaded through the whole trip — the quiet reminder that the prettiest landscapes still belong to real people with real things on their mind.
The protests eventually led to a constitutional referendum in October 2020 — the largest vote in Chile's history. Nearly 80% voted to rewrite it.
Days 4 & 5 · December 22 – 23
The long way back
Turning north. A night ferry in the rain — vehicles loading under yellow lights, the kind of scene that looks like a film set. Then a full day on a bigger ferry threading back through the fjords toward Puerto Montt. Time to sit with what you've just seen.
What it left behind
A kind of silence.
Patagonia has a way of shrinking you. Not in a bad way — in a way that makes problems feel smaller and the world feel larger. For five days, the phone barely had signal and it didn't matter.
You watch glaciers that have been there for thousands of years, and you realise most things aren't worth being anxious about. The scale does the work for you.
Turned back at Coyhaique this time. Already planning to go back and take it all the way down to Villa O'Higgins.
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