Past wanderings through northwest Canada have resulted in my sometimes entertaining the notion that you're not truly on a motorcycle trip until you've taken a free ferry ride. This one wasn't free -- far from it, in fact, at the equivalent of about $10 per bike -- but still, for the trip, an essential ingredient now added.
I write this now from the sourthernmost part of this trip, at about 41.88 degrees South. Our route today was a nice opening cruise along the lake from Petrohué Lodge to Puerto Varas, where we took our fuel-and-coffee stop. Thereon, we cruised the 4-lane Highway 5 to Pargua, from where we ferried over to Chiloe island to Ancud for the night. |
A relatively short day in the saddle, and a feeling more of A-to-B today, but where 'B' is a place with some interesting history. Tomorrow, we return back north, preparing to cross the Andes into Argentina.
The guides took a maintenance hour for all the bikes before supper. In an effort to nurture the man-machine relationship I offered to help out, and was hoping to at least clean my own chain -- after all, any relationship based solely on pleasure is destined to ultimately be shallow and short-lived -- but as you can see below, Edu has a pretty good system down so I took a nap instead.
Day total: 177 km, 5h15m
Trip total: 681 km |
Start: Petrohué, Chile. End: Ancud, Chile.
Soundtrack: Earplugs, then napping to 9 idling motors out my window. |