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So this morning I've had a lay-in; mainly because there's a boat across a fjord 20km on. Which doesn't go until midday. So I'm here relishing the view from my viewpoint campsite. It has turned out not bad at all, the cloud that moved in over the mountains to the west yesterday evening have broken up, leaving rags of dirty white cloud but with much blue sky. Those clouds providing a degree of shade and relief for the sunburn I've gotton this last few days.

In the end with having such a relaxed morning, I've left packing up to the last minute, and myself little time to cycle the twenty K. I'm cutting it fine. What I haven't taken into account are the possible hills which will slow me. And indeed there is plenty uphill which slows me to walking pace from where I set off. Following a narrow gorge with a thundering stream at the bottom: the road carved into the rock face and after the initial climb drops away down before rearing up again.

This is how it is until reaching a watershed in the mountain peninsular. There begins a ridiculously steep descent: the steepest part, I get off and wheel the bike down, as a brake cable suddenly giving would mean death. Well, perhaps, not exactly dead, but badly injured with mangled bike. The risk isn't worth taking.

I reach the ferry in the nick of time; just as the ramp is about to lift and the ferry move away from the quay. There's a cycling couple on board, Chris and Alisha from Alaska. I'd already met Chris. He stopped earlier at my viewpoint campsite to take a photo. When I told him how late I'd left, he replied I'd made good time to have ridden that road in two hours.

Arriving the other side, I leave them sauntering about and ride on, anxious to ride as much of the 95km to Villa O'Higgins today as possible, and then have a short day's ride tomorrow. This nearly a hundred K stretch to O'Higgins, was the last section of what had been a military road to be built, having been completed in 1998. Before that, Villa O'Higgin had no real road access with the exception of horse trails, including one over the border from Argentina, Paso Mayor. In effect, much the same story for most of the settlements in this part of Southern Chile: the only overland way in would've been through the mountains from Argentina.

The settlement of this area came about due to what was happening in the neighbourland to the east of the Andes from the 1920s on. From the late nineteenth century, there was a huge sheep farming boom. Sheep reared for the value of their wool. And a large number of the farmworkers were from Chile. Then the years immediately after the first war saw a slump in the price of wool; and eventually, a complete colapse of the price of wool with the introduction of synthetic fibres that would in time become the sole raw material in the manufacture of clothes, meaning the price of wool would never recover; leading to unemployment amongst the Patagonian farmworkers. At the same time Chile had a delema insofar as much of the territory it claimed in the south was uninhabited and therefore vulnerable to invasion and to be claimed by Argentina.

So in simple words the Chilean government of the day enticed newly unemployed farmworkers of Chilean origin to return home by the offer of free land.

The area known as the cordilera: temperate rain forest. So those pioneers from the 1930s onward that came through the mountains from Argentina, had to clear the forest to make pasture land for farming. The main tool was burning. The period of clearing and settlement continued through to the 1970s when basis cart and car tracks were opened connected to the main Argentine road network to the east. There was no terrestrial connection to the rest of Chile. This became a problem when both Chile and Argentina were ruled by military governments intent on defence of territorial borders and if possible, in the case of Argentina, extending it's borders further west toward the Pacific. With the many tracks of communication opened up from the Argentine side of Patagonia, the Chilean government felt their new frontier lands in the south were open for the taking by Argentina. All they had to do was drive in and raise the blue and white flag.

So, in 1976 or thereabouts, the dictator in Santiago set to work with a large force of military engineers and roadbuilders to build a road, a longtitude or road running north to south connecting all the new settlements; primerally to move military personal and logistics to defend against any possible incursion by their neighbour to the east.

The road took 22 years to complete, the thousand kilometres or so from the city of Puerto Montt to Villa O'Higgins. And the cost, was astronomical.....

This final stretch, to the end at O'Higgins, has next to no traffic on it at all, just a rush of five cars passed from a second ferry at three o'clock. Other than that its completely empty. That and, being new, the surface is very rideable. Ten kilometre per hour is easy, even though I've been up and over three lengthy climbs. The road goes south east through wild primeval, almost untouched by human hand forested mountains, all most to the border with Argentina. Then about seven I reach a long flat bottomed valley with bog along the middle. Meaning most places off the road are waterlogged; not good when looking for a place to pitch the tent.

I spend over an hour riding on while looking out for a good spot, eventually coming to a layby filled with road building hard-core, level, grassy and about fifty metres off the road; having just enough time before nightfall to cook and eat. The writing will have to wait until the morning.