Sometimes Things Go Wrong

Feb 09, 2026

Puerto Bertrand to Villa O’Higgins, January 5 - 11, 2026

Trip odometer: 879 mi

After the emotional roller coaster that was the day before (free veggies to awful heat to beautiful lake and hacky sack with new friends), we got up early once again on January 5th to knock some miles off before the full force of the sun fell upon the earth. We hoped to make it to Cochrane, the next city, before the temperature peaked for the day. After our first climb and descent, the road out of Puerto Bertrand unexpectedly turned to smooth, fresh pavement. What a treat! The views of Lago Bertrand and the surrounding rivers grew ever sweeter as we climbed up the mountain road, almost like the landscape was rewarding us for our hard work. As I stopped to take a photo or two, Lucie passed me and moments later pulled over with any other flat tire. On a near faultless gravel road. Very strange. This would be Lucie’s third flat tire in as many days. I came over to help her fix her tire but the valve broke just as we finished up and we ended up with a second flat. After that fiasco was seemingly settled we continued on and stopped for lunch an hour or so later. We ditched the bikes on one side of the road and crossed to the other to nestle into the shade of the bushes. As we munched we heard a peculiar sound coming from across the way, the hiss of air escaping a punctured tire! Super confused, we went to replace the tube that had mysteriously punctured while stationary. The next tube had already been patched and the patch blew once it reached the necessary air pressure. The same thing happened with the next tube we tried. Finally, after over two hours of total tube replacing time, we managed to get Lucie rolling again with a brand new, patchless tube.

Taken mere seconds before the flat tire occurred

In addition to this flat tire filled hell, the sun remained scorching. The heat combined with the lack of wind made the road a regular horse fly palooza. They’d crawl around the lip of my helmet, get caught in my hair, and fly into my face and ears, causing me to jerk in recoil and throw my bike around the road. I prayed for a headwind that would brush away the heat and the flies, deciding that maybe strong gusts were not the worst evil that could be encountered on the road. That day I did have the realization that, at risk of sounding cocky and incurring a karmic lesson in humility, there wasn’t much the outside world could throw at me that would really set me off kilter. Mechanical issues, adverse weather conditions, or a crappy road can surely test my resolve but the worst moments I’ve experienced have sprung from stupid crap happening inside my own head. The outside world is nowhere near as effective at putting me in a bad mood. Even the flies that seemed to like me much more than they liked Ciara and Lucie were much more easily shaken off than the spirals of negative thoughts or mental beatings I had given myself during times of difficulty on the road or simply unprompted. But if I could start the day on even mental footing, it didn’t really matter what happened on the road.

We arrived in Cochrane without further incident and splurged for some real beds at a paid campsite close to the center of town. After completing our usual routine of eating a ton of food, we dressed in our rain gear and dropped the rest of our clothes off to be laundered. Nick and Char unexpectedly arrived at our campsite and we spent a lovely evening together. The next day we planned to run errands and hang out until our laundry was done, but the campsite owner thought that us sitting quietly in the corner of her backyard was far too much of a drain on her resources and unceremoniously kicked us out while bearing an enraging passive aggressive smile. Homeless once again, we lounged in the plaza feeling unsure of what to do with ourselves. Ciara and Lucie took turns sitting by the outlet of the women’s room in the public bathroom and charging our phones until Char entered, asking the attendant for “La señorita en el baño” and blew our cover. After this interaction the bathroom attendant also kicked us out. Around 5 pm our laundry was finally done and we were excited to get the hell out of this town where nobody wanted us.

Ciara and I peering into a frutas secas store that was closed for siesta

We had planned a short 5 or 6 kilometer ride to a campsite by a lake, but the minute we struck out Lucie got another flat tire. Luckily there was a campsite just outside of town, maybe 500 feet from where we started, and we collapsed there, absolutely defeated. There we found our friends from Rio Tranquilo who told us that maybe our glue was old and that’s why our patches weren’t sticking. We decided to wait another day for our friend Nic (not to be confused with Nick who is traveling with Char) would arrive on a bus from Coyhaique carrying new tubes and patches for us. Nic’s front rack had broken but there were no bike shops to speak of in Cochrane so he had to leave his bike, bus back to Coyhaique, and return carrying parts for himself, us, and a French cyclist named Anthony. Thank god the lady who owned this campsite had no problem with us waiting out the day on her property. That evening we met Nic at the bus station to collect our treasures and then debated if we should try to backtrack a bit to Patagonia national park. We had heard great things from our friends at the second campsite but the logistical challenge seemed too great and we opted to continue down the road a few miles to the lakeside campsite we had planned to sleep at the night before.

That day (January 7th) marked exactly one month of biking. So in honor of that exciting anniversary here is a list I made in my notebook.

Things that have gotten easier after 1 month on the road:

Taking things in and out of bags while keeping the bike balanced (diminished desire for a kickstand)
Having deep thoughts on bike, physical demands of bike and road not all consuming
Not beating myself up about being slow
Speaking Spanish!
Existing in public spaces
Remembering to throw toilet paper into the trash can and not into the toilet
Talking to strangers/asking for help

The day of January 8th was largely uneventful. We pedaled around some beautiful lakes and I had a moment of genuine gratitude for the fact that I was not in a car. I stood taking in the scene before me, listening to the calls of birds and watching two dragonflies chase each other through the swaying grass of the lake, when I heard a distant rumbling. The rumbling grew and grew until a car rattled into view and I got a glimpse of a stone faced driver in sunglasses before the metal behemoth blew past me in a cloud of dust. He just missed all this great stuff! What a blessing to move slowly. We pulled over a little early, around 3:30, at a gorgeous campsite by a river with a view of glacier topped mountains. We washed in the water, set up camp, and had some blissful downtime before dinner. As we ate, who came bouncing down the gravel path but Char and Nick! The next morning (January 9th, my birthday), after a birthday breakfast of congealed ramen, we engaged in a lovely game of hacky sack with our dear friends before moving along down the road.

The lake that made me thankful to be moving slowly

The morning riding was excellent, my body felt great and we were flying down the road! But after we stopped for lunch I started feeling sort of icky and tired. I fell behind Lucie and Ciara and while I was riding alone I started to hear a strange squeaking coming from my bike. That morning I had had some problems with my cargo cages (the things that hold my bags to the front of my bike) but some inspection proved they weren’t at fault. I had been continually tightening my brakes because I was too lazy to replace the over-worn pads so I thought maybe I had over tightened them, but it wasn’t that either. The first time I pulled over to do some roadside investigating a dog came over to see what all the fuss was about. Once I got back on my bike he trotted alongside me, and waited with me as I pulled over a second and third time. The third time I stopped Nic and Char caught up to me. Char told me that her phone had fallen into a deep and fast-moving part of the river and the duo were unable to recover it. Bad luck seemed to be going around. Unable yet again to locate the source of the squeaking, I continued to pedal forward with them and my new canine companion until I reached Lucie and Ciara who had stopped at a bus station shelter at the base of our next big climb due to yet another flat tire from Lucie.

It only took a moment for Ciara to realize that my bike frame had broken. Something I had not checked because it was not supposed to happen. My frame is made out of steel, I had chosen a much heavier material in favor of supposed strength and durability, but no one seemed to bother telling Sylvia that. The eyelet where I mount my rear rack had completely broken off and the rack was skimming the tire. What the hell was I supposed to do? After a brief moment of putting my head in my hands I got to zip tying. The broken eyelet still slotted into the part where it had broken off like a puzzle piece, so I lined it up and zip tied the rack to the frame until it showed no signs of movement. Ciara and I then exchanged goods in our panniers until I carried all the light bulky stuff and she all the small heavy stuff. We figured we should keep as much weight off of the compromised frame as possible. Char and Nic had forged ahead after some quick words of sympathy. They had just gotten word that their ferry out of Villa O’Higgins on the 12th was moved forward to the 11th due to weather, so they were on a time crunch. More bad luck. Like a true champion, Ciara slogged up the climb with a pile of extra weight. Emotionally exhausted by the freak breakage, I walked up several of the steeper portions despite my lightened load. The ride down was also rather unpleasant for me since I had barely functioning brakes, as I mentioned before.

The descent deposited us at Puerto Yungay where ferries run across Río Bravo every other hour. We arrived with about 30 minutes to spare before the 4 pm ferry, perfect timing! Perhaps things were looking up after all. We got a beautiful berry tart from the little cafe next to the dock and stepped aboard the free ferry. We got to board first since we had our bicycles which meant we got to claim some of the few seats on the vessel. We quickly abandoned them though as we ventured into the mist onto the outside decks to take in the surrounding mountains and crisp cool air. After a glorious 45 minutes, we disembarked on the other side of the large river mouth and leaned our bikes up against the small nearby shelter. We had plans to sleep there. It was a paradise with its wonderfully clean bathrooms and delightfully functional outlets. However a short, stocky young man with a black Lacoste hat whose job it was to sit on that side of the river and wait for the ferry informed us (very kindly though) that we actually weren’t allowed to stay the night. Oh well, it turned out there was a shelter about a half mile down the road, so we picked up our stuff and went.

After dinner I realized that my glasses were in fact not in my glasses case. I did a quick search through my stuff but I remembered setting them down in the shelter by the ferry so I rode the half mile back to the river. However, a scan of the building yielded no results so I concluded that I must’ve grabbed my glasses and put them in some weird pocket in some irrelevant bag. Back to our campsite I rode, only to tear through my belongings in vain. No glasses. Now I really started to get upset. I am quite a forgetful person despite my very best efforts not to be. I have lost many an important thing in my life and, in my efforts to stop this occurrence, have accidentally developed an outsized anxiety associated with losing things. I rode back yet again to conduct a more thorough search of the facilities at the river mouth. I looked everywhere. Under the benches, in the bathroom I never even entered, on windowsills, on top of the fuse box, the entirety of the building’s surroundings. Nothing turned up. In the back of my mind I knew that the most likely scenario was that the man who worked there had seen the glasses, taken them, and deposited them in some sort of lost and found. But this didn’t stop me from slowly walking back towards camp and scanning every inch of the the road in the fading light as if the glasses might’ve gone flying out of my pocket and landed in a ditch 10 feet to my left. The whole walk I gave myself a thorough mental beating lamenting about what a god damned idiot I am. It had been a long and toilsome day. The universe seemed dead set on ruining my birthday, and if it couldn’t dampen my spirit enough by making me feel sluggish, breaking my bike, or making me navigate a wet gravel descent without proper brakes, it would provoke me in a way it knew I was ill equipped to handle, making me lose something important. And to make my bad day even worse, as I got ready for bed, utterly defeated, I felt something on my neck. When I went to brush it off it was a huge spider!!!! A fucking spider. On my neck. I went to bed that night in a rotten mood. (Huge in this case being moderately sized, bigger than one quarter but smaller than two quarters. But any spider on your neck is far bigger than what is acceptable)

Image used as proof that I had my glasses when we got off the ferry

The next morning, of course, the guy who worked the ferry terminal knew exactly where my glasses were. “Oh your glasses,” He said to me. “Yeah, I have them!” My heart leapt. What I suspected all along but had refused to accept had been true. Of course they hadn’t been on the fuse box or in a ditch by the side of the road, how silly of me to look in those places so fervently. “Thank you so much! Where are they?” I asked. Still grinning under his flat brim cap, my new best friend pointed to the ferry just as it pulled away from the dock. “It’s on there!” He said excitedly. “You see that guy in the grey sweatshirt walking down the stairs, he has it!” Oh. The ferry would not be back for another 2 hours, it had to go to the other side and then back again. I thanked my friend and we went back to the campsite wondering how we were going to fill this gap of vacant time.

Fortunately, wasting time is something that Ciara, Lucie, and I seem to excel at. Soon enough we returned to the river, recovered my glasses, and were on our way. That day was one of climbing and not much else. We had four consecutive climbs, each seemingly worse than the last. It was a taxing day both physically and mentally but aside from that there wasn’t much to report. We did sleep in one of the cyclists shelters that were becoming more common as the route traversed increasingly remote stretches. The wooden walls were covered in signatures, drawings, and words of wisdom from cyclists past. We had lots of fun reading all the different messages in the warmth of the fire we had built in the little fireplace and peering out at the mountains through the slats of the windows.

January 11th we woke up full of piss and vinegar. We were so close to Villa O’Higgins! So close to the end of the Carretera Austral! We had a beautiful morning of relatively flat and high quality road. We muscled up a big climb around 2 pm and thought about having lunch but decided to push another three or so miles to a nice lookout point. I was gleeful as we began our descent. The riding had been engaging but fun, the sun was shining, the views were breathtaking, and Steely Dan’s “Hey Nineteen” had begun playing in my ear. I followed closely behind Lucie as we shot downward and didn’t have time to react in kind when she quickly jerked to the left to avoid a big rock lying in the road. I hit it full on and immediately knew I had a flat. But as you might recall, my brakes were not at their finest and it took me a while to slow to a stop. By this time Lucie was far ahead and with both her earbuds in she couldn’t hear my two fingered whistle as I tried to catch her attention. She disappeared around a corner. Ciara pulled to a stop and offered me the canister of compressed air to re inflate my tube after I had patched it. But I had had bad experiences with those in the past (most recently breaking one of Lucie’s valves just a few days earlier) and doubted its ability to fill my tire to the proper pressure. In haste, I urged her to try to catch up with Lucie who was carrying the hand pump, assuming that if the road proved too difficult or if Lucie had gotten too far away that Ciara would just come back. However, I did not communicate this assumption to Ciara who begrudgingly perused Lucie for what turned out to be a very hilly mile and a half. When Ciara finally caught Lucie they decided to leave Lucie’s bags behind a bush on the side of the road so that she could ride back to help me unweighted.

As all this was going down, I had stepped off the road into what I can only assume was the 2026 Chilean Patagonia mosquito convention. The little bastards were so desperate that they actually tried to bite my bike tube and tire on more than one occasion. As time passed, I realized that Lucie had definitely been far away and Ciara probably had not turned back as I assumed she would. Feeling guilty, I started to walk down the road until Lucie came into my view. She was rather hungry now and I inflated my tire quickly as she told me Ciara had run ahead to get lunch started. We biked through the rolling hills for a few minutes but soon Lucie started to suspect that we had passed her bags and should turn around. At this moment Ciara came into view. We were out of sandwich materials so the plan had been to have ramen for lunch but Ciara didn’t have any fuel with her to start the stove, so lunch was not at all ready. Emotions heightened by her low blood sugar, Lucie became extremely concerned that her bags had been snatched up by a passerby. Feeling wracked with guilt for insisting on using Lucie’s pump rather than the compressed air, I quickly began backtracking even though I had no idea where she and Ciara had put her bags in the first place. Thankfully, Ciara who had much more knowledge about the situation soon found the bags and our miserable little trio embarked upon a final, extra steep climb, up to our lunch spot. We fed Lucie cookies as the ramen boiled and took a moment to rest after lunch to let our emotions recover.

The rest of our ride into town was without incident, thank god. The lakes and mountains were beautiful but at this point we were just desperate to stop moving. The quality of the road worsened a bit but became flatter, so it all sort of evened out. And suddenly, we were there. A beautiful sign appeared. “Bienvenidos a Villa O’Higgins, Fin de la Carretera Austral” We had done it! Once again in great moods, we cheered and hugged in front of the sign. We took pictures, rode over a cattle grate, and hit a stretch of blessed pavement. Our regular routine commenced. We stopped at the gas station and while we were disappointed by its lack of amenities, we had a lovely chat with some Argentinian motorcyclists, Paula and Sergio. We then made our way to the plaza where we were once again disappointed by the lack of public bathrooms. We did however find an excellent grocery store on the corner and commenced our traditional feast on the curb outside the establishment. We weren’t ready to pay for accommodations yet so we found a decent spot to pitch our tents in the forest behind the town’s small airstrip. Many of these Patagonian towns having something like this, likely because the road systems are not very developed so it takes well over 30 hours in a car or truck to travel the same distance as a two or three hour flight. That evening we ate many delicious burgers and went to bed feeling accomplished and satisfied.