A Coastal Road Trip, From Canada to Chile?

Often, on this blog and elsewhere, I’ve pointed out that the west coast of South America is a mirror image of its North American counterpart, with vast deserts comparable to those of Baja California, a Mediterranean heartland resembling California, and mid-latitude forests and fjords in higher latitudes.

One of the comparisons I make, in the course of writing and lecturing, is between British Columbia’s Vancouver Island and Chile’s Isla Grande de Chiloé. Superficially, the comparison is obvious – they’re two large islands slightly separated from the continent, by the Strait of Georgia and the Canal de Chacao, respectively (though Vancouver Island is three times larger).

Both are lush and forested, with temperate rain forests and extensive hiking trails, but they have one thing in common that I learned only recently. My Moon colleague David Stanley, who covers the South Pacific but also overlaps with me in covering Rapa Nui (Easter Island), informs me the village of Lund (pictured above) is (in the words of a local website) “the northern terminus of Highway 101, the Pacific Coastal Highway, a 15,200 km highway along the Pacific Coast extending from Canada to Chile” (photograph courtesy of David Stanley).

I have never been to Lund (named after the Swedish city), though I have been to more southerly parts of Vancouver Island. I have, however, been many times to the port of Quellón (pictured above), the route’s ostensible southern terminus, on the Isla Grande. I had, however, never heard of the “Pacific Coastal Route” as any sort of unified entity – in fact, US 101, which runs through Washington, Oregon and California, often heads inland while California’s State Highway 1 almost invariably sticks to the coast.

To the south, Mexico’s Carretera Federal No. 1 runs the length of the Baja California peninsula, but is not always coastal and, where it is coastal, it’s not always on the Pacific. In the rest of Mexico and Central America, the Pan-American Highway often approaches the coast but, in the words of journalist Jake Silverstein, it’s “a system so vast, so incomplete and so incomprehensible it is not so much a road as it is the idea of Pan-Americanism itself.”

There is, of course, no highway through Panama’s Darien Gap, and roads rarely follow the lush tropical lands along the Pacific coasts of Colombia and Ecuador, where most of the people live in the highlands. Peru and northern Chile are a different matter, but in Chile’s Mediterranean heartland and southern lakes region the main highways bypass the shoreline for the central valley.

I’ve never been to Lund and, though I’ll probably revisit Quellón later this year, I’ll still find it hard to think of it as the end point of any unified route – especially since there are several other ferry crossings I’ve not yet mentioned, including one that continues south to Chile’s own Carretera Austral, arguably the best road trip in all of South America.

Weekend at Piñera's

Doug Tompkins may have started something. Since the US environmental philanthropist succeeded in having Parque Pumalín declared a formal nature sanctuary under Chilean law, Sebastián Piñera - elected Chile’s president in 2010 - has created his own private nature reserve in the virtually roadless southwestern sector of the Isla Grande de Chiloé. This past weekend, for the first time, I visited Piñera's Parque Tantauco.

Since acquiring the property and declaring it a park in 2006, Piñera - who consulted with Tompkins about the project - has built an attractive guesthouse, an elegant campground with modern bathrooms and a spacious quincho for cooking, several hiking trails, and a series of refugios (shelters) along those trails for hikers who brave the park’s nearly incessant rain and soggy forests. At the same time, he’s created a plant nursery to reforest areas damaged by fire and logging, principally near the park’s overland entrance at Chaiguata, near the city of Quellón.

The park’s nucleus is its headquarters at Caleta Inío, a settlement created some 30 years ago to exploit the area’s extensive kelp beds. Accessible only by foot or motor launch from Quellón (2.5 to six hours away, depending on the vessel), Inío has a permanent population of about 50. Many of them are now park employees; others benefit from the park’s presence by offering lodging, meals, and handicrafts for sale. Given Inío’s isolation, they also benefit because Tantauco’s daily launch takes them to and from Quellón for free, on a space available basis (paying passengers have priority).

During my weekend, I stayed at the park guesthouse (pictured above), which offers only bed and breakfast, unlike Pumalín (which has a full-scale restaurant). I took my meals from the simpática Doña Silda Cadín, whose kitchen produced far better food than I had any expectations for. Her greenhouse cucumbers and tomatoes, for instance, formed the basis of superb salads, and her carbonada (beef stew) and grilled fish were as good as, or better than, any restaurant in Quellón. She also offers decent accommodations, with full board and even satellite TV in the evening, for less than US$40 pp.

On arrival at Inío, I took a three-hour hike on the Sendero Punta Rocosa (pictured above), a trail that climbs to a solar-powered lighthouse erected by the park and then loops through rocky headlands punctuated by several small, secluded beaches. Tantauco, in fact, may have some of South America’s most beautiful secluded beaches, even if the South Pacific at this latitude is a bit too chilly for swimming except on the warmest summer days.

Though Tantauco’s really in its early days, one trek appears likely to become an instant classic: several hikers I met, almost all of them Chileans, had completed the five-day, 52-km Sendero Transversal from Chaiguata (reachable by bus from Quellón) to Caleta Inío, where they would catch the launch back to Quellón. En route, they stayed at the four simple refugios, which eliminate the need to carry a tent. The shelters also have cooking facilities and latrines (not flush toilets).

At first glance, the daily distances suggested - ranging from 7.5 to 15 km per day - sound pretty modest for experienced hikers at low altitudes (the trail’s highest point is only about 250 meters above sea level). That’s misleading, though, because a good part of the route crosses soggy (sometimes muddy) terrain and involves climbing up, over and down fallen tree trunks. Many but not nearly all of those trunks have steps cut into them, even then, they are often slippery and require caution to avoid spills and sprains (both of which I experienced over the weekend). In some areas, boardwalks, bridges and staircases make things easier.

Another option is the Sendero Quilantar (pictured above), a two-day, 22-km loop from Caleta Inío that includes a night at Refugio Quilantar; I hiked part of this route on Sunday. All trails are clearly marked with bright metallic triangles every 100 meters; at regular intervals, these also have numbers that indicate progress along the route. Still, given the area’s copious rainfall and winter storms that often knock down trees, maintenance is a major issue.

Combined with whale-watching in the Golfo de Corcovado, Parque Tantauco could make Quellón a notable eco-tourism destination. At the same time, Tantauco lacks some of the attention to detail that Tompkins brings to Pumalín and his other projects - Tantauco’s guesthouse, for instance, lacks double-paned windows, there are no books (though there are bookshelves), and there are no towels (bring your own). Electricity comes from a diesel generator (there are no suitable sites for a hydropower turbine, but wind power is a real possibility here).

It’s hard to imagine that Piñera can’t afford a wind turbine for Tantauco - his fortune, made largely through LAN Airlines and the pioneering implementation of credit card payment systems in Chile, must be immeasurably larger than Tompkins’s. On the other hand, for the Chilean president, Tantauco is just one of many projects; conservation appears to be Tompkins’s principal life goal.

In any event, I would recommend visiting Tantauco sooner, rather than later, before it’s become a fixture on the international eco-tourism circuit. If not, though, there may be at least one other option - across the Golfo de Corcovado, near the even more isolated settlement of Melimoyu, the Sociedad Naturalista Patagonia is assembling a 100,000-hectare ecological reserve in and around the 2400-meter Cerro Melimoyu. Sebastián Yancovic Pakarati, one of the of the Sendero Transversal hikers I met at Inío, is working on that project, which is not yet open to the public (in fact, from the website, it’s not clear that it ever will be). Sebastián, interestingly, is of Croatian and Rapanui (Easter Island) descent.

Lemonade at Tantauco

A short time ago, I received the news that my photograph of Laguna San Rafael will grace the cover of the upcoming third edition of Moon Handbooks Patagonia, whose manuscript I am in the process of finishing up. I’m pleased partly for ego reasons - I’m proud of the photograph - and partly because it means an extra paycheck (most Moon authors, by contract, provide their own photographs for the books, but there is no additional payment unless the publisher chooses one of your shots for the cover).

I’m also disheartened, though, because most if not all of that paycheck will go to pay for the blown head gasket on my otherwise trusty Nissan Terrano, which I use to explore the Southern Cone countries as I update Patagonia and my other books. It happened, fortunately, within the city limits of Quellón, on the Isla Grande de Chiloé, and I was able to get a well-equipped mechanic to look at it immediately.

That said, it will take at least four and perhaps seven days to get me back on the road - part of the machine work has to be done in the city of Castro, an hour to the north, and the upcoming weekend means an unavoidable delay. I’m not particularly fond of Quellón as a city but, that said, I will use my lemons to make lemonade by boating out to Sebastián Piñera’s 118,000-hectare (456 square mile) Parque Tantauco, the Chilean president’s own Pumalín-ish conservation project on the southwestern shores of archipelago’s big island.

Thursday afternoon I met Tantauco’s Quellón-based administrator Alán Bannister (despite the name, he’s 100 percent Chilean, but with English and German grandparents) and arranged an excursion that will let me spend the weekend at Inío, the park headquarters in the most southwesterly part of the park. In mostly roadless Tantauco, it’s three to four hours away, depending on the speed of the launch used to get there. There are a guesthouse, campgrounds and hiking trails throughout the park, but limited access has kept the number of visitors down.

I spent about an hour in conversation with Bannister, talking about the park’s origins and legal status, its conservation and educational initiatives, its natural and cultural history, and its future as an eco-tourism destination. As with my interview with Kris McDivitt Tompkins, I won’t have time to transcribe and edit it until later this year, when I return to California. Still, I should have more to say about the park after my return on Monday (presuming the fine weather here on Chiloé continues - part of the route crosses the open Pacific, where rough seas can delay departures and returns.