With our friend Bart safely back home we had to continue our trek through the remote Aysén region towards the end of the road at Villa O’Higgins. This part of Chile was of little interest to both Chileans and Argentines until the end of the nineteenth century, when explorers such as Hans Steffen and Francisco Moreno began mapping its numerous hills and valleys. Aysén is a place of short green grass, pine trees, southern beech, large-leaved Nalca plants, jagged rock formations, and an abundance of deep blue rivers and lakes fed by some of the largest ice fields outside of the Polar regions. The Carretera Austral, the 1.240-kilometer long gravel road connecting some of the remote communities in Aysén, was only completed at the turn of the millennium; it is still a wild place where extreme changes in the weather are the rule rather than the exception.

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