Patagonia and Altiplano Expedition | #36 – Coyhaique

From Villa Cerro Castillo we continued along the Carretera Austral. Our next destination was Coyhaique, the largest village at the Ruta 7 with 50,000 inhabitants (not counting Puerto Montt at the start/end of the Carretera Austral).

(Editor’s note: Sorry for the long delay since the last blog post. In real time we are now back in Germany and had to find a new apartment and move all our stored stuff back from a container to the new apartment. In addition, since September we have been working full-time again in our main jobs in the automotive industry. Therefore further delays for the next post are sadly unavoidable. We were in Coyhaique in February 2023.)

It’s a 100 km drive from Villa Cerro Castillo to Coyhaique.

Coyhaique

After a couple of serpentines, a viewpoint is reached offering a nice overview of the Río Ibáñez valley.

About halfway between Villa Cerro Castillo and Coyhaique, the road passes through a beautiful mountain region, where we had another opportunity to observe a couple of cute huemuls.

End of March this mountain pass is one of the best places in the world for breathtaking fall colors. Although end of February is normally far too early for fall colors some of the leaves had already turned red and orange.

I have never seen any fall color as intense as in this place. I have no explanation for this, but if you have a chance to visit this region end of March do it. It’s just spectacular.

Coyhaique

A few hours later we finally reached Coyhaique, the capital city of the Aysén region of Chile.

The next day, we celebrated my birthday in a very nice restaurant in the center of Coyhaique. It’s called CB Gastronomía Patagonia and we had the best food there in Chile (including Santiago). If you are in Coyhaique this restaurant is highly recommended.

During the last few days, we detected that one of our tires was losing air. We had to refill it every day. Therefore we drove to a gomeria to have it patched.

Sadly that wasn’t as easy as we had hoped. A quick test with soap water revealed that the tire had more than 12 holes and a repair would make no sense. Luckily we were in Coyhaique and not in a remote place elsewhere in Patagonia.

Since all our tires looked pretty damaged we decided to look for a completely new set of tires.

The Pirelli Scorpion AT tires had run only about 20,000 km, but the rough roads like RP 41S and the southern end of the Carretera Austral ruined the tires. The Pirelli AT is a nice tire for occasional offroad tracks with very good on-road behavior. But we were driving about 50% of the time on rough gravel tracks and probably more than 1000 km on very challenging offroad tracks. That was too much for the Pirelli. We needed something more sturdy.

Tires imported from the U.S. like BF Goodrich are extremely expensive in Chile (about three times the price of the same tire in Europe). However, the market in Chile is dominated by Chinese tires. Normally I try to avoid buying tires from cheap brands because it’s one of the most important safety and performance elements of a vehicle. But after reading many online reviews of Chinese offroad tires I found one model with very good reviews in Australia. The Roadcruza RA1000. If it survives the challenging Australian outback it should be well-suited for Patagonia and the Altiplano. According to the test reports it is a very robust tire with very good traction under all offroad conditions. Its main drawback is its bad behavior on wet paved roads. But I could live with this limitation since we mainly drive on gravel roads where this is irrelevant.

We, therefore, bought 5 new Roardcruza RA1100 for a reasonable price and kept the best one of the Pirellis as an additional spare tire.

From Coyhaique we did two longer excursions.

Puerto Chacabuco and X-608

The first one started on Ruta 240 to Puerto Chacabuco. 30 km after the start we reached the Cascada Velo La Novia. A short trail led in 5 minutes to the beautiful waterfall.

Not far from the waterfall, we stopped again at a small stream with tannin-colored red water and beautiful green mosses, ferns, and bamboo plants.

Next, we reached the famous Cascada La Virgen. A spectacular two-step waterfall surrounded by a beautiful temperate rainforest. But contrary to the previous two stops you are not alone there. This place is overrun by tourists. But it’s still worth a short visit.

In Puerto Chacabuco, we had planned to visit the nearby Parque Aiken del Sur with its Cascada Barba del Viejo. But sadly this wasn’t possible on that day. A big cruise ship had arrived in the port and seemingly the whole Parque was exclusively reserved for the cruise ship guests.

I was never a big fan of cruise ships and their potential negative impact on the environment in certain regions but it seems that there are additional reasons for not liking them …

On the way back to Coyhaique we decided to explore a relatively new small backroad which I found during my research on the internet and on Maps.me about this region.

Near Puerto Aysén the X-550, a small gravel track leads along the Rio Aysén and then later follows the Rio Blanco. 28 km after Puerto Chacabuco we reached a small cable ferry over the Rio Blanco. The problem with this ferry is, that it stops running sometimes late afternoon. If we wouldn’t be able to reach Coyhaique on this track we would be stuck in the middle of nowhere until the next morning. Nevertheless, we decided to take the risk and used the ferry to reach the other side of the Rio Blanco.

From there the X-518 continued along the Rio Blanco, Rio Quetro, and Lago Portales through a stunning landscape.

From Lago Portales, the name of the road changed from X-518 to X-608.

Soon we reached the beautiful Rio Colorado Waterfall.

Later we found another spectacular waterfall near the Lago Altravesado.

Luckily, just before sunset, we reached Coyhaique at the end of the X-608. From there you could theoretically start directly to another beautiful side-track along the X-686 to the Lago Elizalde and Lago Caro, which I had done in 2019 (see here).

Puente Piedra

Our next exploration from Coyhaique led us to another place that is rarely visited by tourists, the Puente Piedra. About 102 km north of Coyhaique (if you take the Ruta 7 and not the ‘shortcut’ via 240 and X-50) you can find the junction to the Ruta X-510. The track leads through a remote mountain region with a few farms.

About 12 km later you can find on the left side an entrance gate to a private property where you have to pay an entrance fee. You can choose to either park your vehicle there and walk about one hour to the Puenta Piedra or drive half the way on a rough 4×4 track and then walk another 30 minutes. We did the latter, but a 4×4 with high ground clearance is definitely needed for this track. I think the fee per person was around 5€ and an additional 5€ for the vehicle.

The Puenta Piedra is a small canyon with intense blue-green water and interesting rock formations. It reminded me of the Soča canyons in Slovenia. I love these kinds of landscapes and thoroughly enjoyed the visit. Altogether we spent about two hours at the canyon and shot lots of images.

Although (or maybe because) it’s off the beaten track a visit to Puente Piedra can be highly recommended.

There are a couple of other interesting things to do around Coyhaique but since I have been there already twice in the past I was focusing this time on exploring some new places.