January 7, 2019 – January 14, 2019

(Grab a coffee, tea or beer…..it’s a bit of a long post……)

We camped for a night in a small town called Puyuhuapi, situated at the end of a long fjord, in a small area behind a woman’s house. We were there with several other tourists, all of which were either travelling by bike or by hitchhiking. It had been very rainy, and I was thankful for our warm camper but felt guilty about our luxury when I walked by the chilled tenters on my way to the bathroom. But they were young, and they had a wood stove to gather around, and a little discomfort can increase the sense of adventure….ha ha, easy for me to say as I sipped my warm coffee from the comfort of our toasty camper.

On our return to the Carretera Austral the previous day, we drove through the small village, Villa de Santa Lucia. This town was devastated on December 16, 2017 by a massive landslide. The houses affected were still almost entirely buried, beside a temporary road pushed through the debris. It was difficult to imagine what the people there had been through. A few days before that, we had driven through Chaiten, a town that had been hit hard by a volcanic ash flow, and had been rebuilt in a new location, nearby. The land here, being on the “ring of fire”, shifts, flows and shakes.

So, when a loud siren started blaring about 1 am in the morning, we were more than a little concerned. Was a volcano erupting? Had an off-shore earthquake sent a tsunami up the fjord? Were we supposed to do something? Surely the owner of the camping area would bang on our door if we needed to evacuate…or would she just run to save her own life?

We got up to investigate and saw an orange glow in the sky and smelled fire. The second story of a home a few hundred metres away was on fire. The fire engine arrived quickly, and within about an hour, all the commotion was over. We were, at that moment, quite happy that there had been so much rain throughout the preceding days, soaking all potential tinder between us and the house that was on fire.

The next morning we snuck Piper into Parque Nacional Queulat (dogs are not allowed in many of the national parks in Chile and Argentina, not even if they are kept in the vehicle). We (minus Piper) hiked to a view point for the Queulat hanging glacier. The trail was very muddy, which made for slow going and wet hiking boots, but the view point was well worth the slog up.

We spent 3 or 4 days driving from Queulat to Rio Tranquillo, the next major stop on our route. Along the way we free camped at beautiful, isolated rivers and enjoyed the views as the skies opened up to show us the surrounding glaciers and mountains.

In the little town of Rio Tranquillo, we booked a boat tour to the Cuevas de Marmol (Marble Caves) for the next morning, and then headed west for a drive along a road that used to go to Bahia Exploradores. If we had been able to drive the length of the road, we would have been treated to amazing glacier views, and then eventually we would arrive at the ocean at the end of the road. Instead, we were only able to drive about 27 kilometres to were the road was blocked by a large landslide that had subsequently created a lake where one didn’t exist before.

The boat tour to the Cuevas de Marmol started the next morning at 9am. We were loaded into a small motor boat with about 8 or so other tourists and taken south of the town of Rio Tranquillo for a tour of the marble caves.

We continued south, stopping at the confluence of Rio Baker and Rio Nef to see the mixing of two very different coloured rivers. There we chatted with a family with 3 young children from France who were travelling around South America. They were having suspension issues with their truck, and Derek told them about the problems we had been having with starting the truck, which seemed to be acting up again. Back at the parking lot, as though it had been listening, the truck didn’t start on the first try, but then roared to life on the second try…..so why, after our two visits to Dodge dealership/shops, both of which ran full diagnostics, was this happening. We decided to keep heading south, and hope that it was maybe due to thin diesel fuel in Chile and that the problem would fix itself (yeah right!) when we were able to refuel in Argentina.

We spent the night in a gravel pit off of the main highway, south of the town of Cochrane, hidden from the road and with a great view. The next morning we planned our departure to coincide with the ferry departure at Puerto Yungay, a necessary ferry crossing in order to make it to the very south end of the Carretera Austral, the town of Villa O’Higgins. We were pretty sure that this was a fairly small ferry that could only hold 4 or 5 cars. We hoped that if we arrived a half hour or forty five minutes before loading that there would still be room for us….otherwise we would need to wait several hours for the next ferry.

We were on schedule, had everything packed and ready to go, I took a picture of Derek with the truck and a glacier in the background, we jumped in…..and the truck wouldn’t start. We sat for a moment, Derek “bumped” the starter, and we tried again. Nothing. Lots of battery, and the starter was fine, but it sounded to Derek, AGAIN, like the truck wasn’t getting enough fuel, exactly the same as the last time it wouldn’t start. Derek removed the fuel filter at the engine (we have two pre-filters so it is okay to do this) and we tried again. No change. This was looking bad. We were very remote, and although we would eventually be able to flag someone down for help, who knew how long it would take for a tow truck capable of carrying or towing our, now dead, 5 ton pig, to arrive, and it was hundreds of kilometres to a major town, over very rough, very challenging roads.

Derek tried again, and this time he got the truck to start. We cheered and let out a big sigh of relief! We discussed our options and decided we should drive back to the town of Coyhaique, about 6-7 hours north, where we knew there to be another Dodge dealership/shop. We couldn’t risk breaking down on the other side of the ferry, or on the ferry for that matter, and there had to be something wrong that the other mechanics had missed. During the drive we were too afraid to turn the truck off for anything like road construction stops or a decent break. On the way, we discussed the problem and Derek concluded that it was unlikely to be bad fuel again, the filters probably weren’t clogged already again, the thin fuel probably wasn’t completely responsible, and with how the truck was performing it was unlikely to be the high pressure part of the injection system…. That started to make the in-tank lift pump seem like the most likely suspect…

So we drove a long day, over rough roads, arriving in Coyhaique about 7 hours later. We arrived too late in the day to get an appointment with the garage, so we found a nearby campsite, and hoped that we could get the truck started in the morning.