I stood at the edge of the jetty, articulating with hands and feet, throwing half-baked sentences of broken Spanish at the service personal. It was 12:02 and the friendly looking sailor in his green oilskin trousers tried to make me understand that the ferry had to leave on time. This ferry was supposed to bring us across the fjord to Rio Bravo, but Dorit wasn’t there yet. I was very much out of breath, since I had cycled the last 17km of gravel road in about 40 minutes and I had left Dorit behind somewhere on the way. “Mi novia!” I repeated a few times and pointed up the hill. But Dorit didn’t magically show up and the sailor with a rope end in his hands shook his head, ready to untie the vessel from the jetty.<\/p>\n
3 \u00bd hours and 48km before, we had left Caleta Tortel and our goal was to catch the 3pm ferry. We stopped here and there to take photos of the rough surrounding mountains, the ice blue Rio Baker, of goats passing by. Somehow though we advanced a lot quicker this morning and even the 420m climb to the mountain pass didn’t take as much time as it usually did. So once at the top I told Dorit that we actually had a realistic chance to catch the 12pm ferry. We agreed that it would make the evening and the next cycling day more relaxed and so we took our heels, if that can be applied to cycling after all, and started a 40 minute sprint. Eventually we realised that there were quite a few uphill sections along with the downhill ones, slowing us down a fair bit and when a car passed by and Dorit, in a rushed change of gears, derailed her chain, nearly lost balance and I almost ran into her from behind, slamming hard on my brakes, yes, there I was ready to give up on the earlier ferry. It took Dorit quite some time to get the chain back on and she shouted how sorry she was about it. But it wasn’t her fault, was it? What fault anyway, we hadn’t lost yet! And so I checked the time and the distance, we got back on the bikes and started another, yet more energetic sprint. By the next bend I had left Dorit behind and the downhill section that followed shook me through thoroughly and I got worried that this time I would finally break my rims and my rear rack of my 40kg+ vehicle. Hammering the pedals on some flat sections, I reached the harbour at 12pm sharp and from a distance witnessed the last car reversing onto the ferry. Once at the jetty, the ferry personal generously tried to direct me on board, but then again, Dorit wasn’t there yet\u2026<\/p>\n
12:03 and the vessel’s big steel mouth was about to close as the captain announced via the intercom that we would wait another minute. I went up the jetty again in hope to discover Dorit at the next bend at the foot of the hill. Nothing. So I turned my sad face towards the ferry and shrugged. Another last glimpse around the corner. Oh wait\u2026 something came racing down the hill, raising a large yellow dust cloud behind the rear wheel. Dorit had arrived on her fiery red horse and even from far away I could see the exhaustion in her face, though her lips formed a big “No way” as she discovered the ferry. I know, I might be pushing this glamourous moment a bit, but what is actually true is that Dorit received some random applause from other passengers in their cars and the from the sailors as she rode onto the ferry.<\/p>\n
The locals say about the Carretera Austral that those who are in a hurry don’t get very far. At least this one time it got us there a lot earlier and we both had a big satisfied smile on our faces, while sailing across the fjord to the next part of this oh so beautiful road.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I stood at the edge of the jetty, articulating with hands and feet, throwing half-baked sentences of broken Spanish at the service personal. It was 12:02 and the friendly looking sailor in his green oilskin trousers tried to make me understand that the ferry had to leave on time. This ferry was supposed to bring us across the fjord to Rio Bravo, but Dorit wasn’t there yet. I was very much out of breath, since… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3581,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chile","category-cycling_patagonia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidhuebner.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidhuebner.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidhuebner.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidhuebner.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidhuebner.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3576"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/davidhuebner.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3583,"href":"https:\/\/davidhuebner.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3576\/revisions\/3583"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidhuebner.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidhuebner.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidhuebner.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidhuebner.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}