December 28, 2018 – January 1, 2019

At about 180 km long and 50 km wide, Isla Grande de Chiloe is the second largest island in South America. Our guidebook described the island as a home to fiercely independent sea-faring people, cut off from the mainland until about 50 years ago. It made the island sound mystical, with its shroud of early morning fog, its mix of Unesco World Heritage wooden churches and its local lore full of stories about witches and trolls.

We took a day (and night) in Puerto Montt on the mainland to resupply, got some laundry done, and then drove onto the ferry for a twenty minute ride the the island of Chiloe.

We camped for free for several nights on different beaches on the island, visited a few of the churches, had some oysters, visited the end of the Panamerican highway (or the beginning, I guess, if you are driving north!), and celebrated New Year’s Day by watching a couple of penguins swimming in the estuary near our camp. We saw several toninos, a small, black dolphin species which was hunting fish just offshore at another camp.

The island was fun to visit, but was not what we were expecting. We saw a lot of tourist cabins, sitting empty, awaiting the summer crowds (January and February are high season here), and I suspect the island gets a lot more visitors now than even when our ten year old guide book was written. So while the island was beautiful, to us it didn’t feel a lot different from the mainland. We took the ferry back to Puerto Montt and resupplied to begin the drive along the famous, and for us, long awaited, Carretera Austral!