Day: May 6, 2016

Chile and Patagonia 2016 – Quellon and the End of the Pan-American Highway

Date Explored: February 10th

On our second day in Castro, my husband declared he wanted to “go to the beach.” So we set off to find a Chilean national park with beach access. We did have one in mind, but we wound up taking a road trip instead. On our way south out of Castro, SILly and I spied another of the UNESCO World Heritage wooden Churches of Chiloe. We had only seen the one, in Castro, and we knew we wouldn’t have time to see another if we didn’t stop at Iglesia Nuestra Signora de Gracia. The construction is amazing, and we managed to squeeze in our visit before a tour bus pulled up. Score!

A nice little above-ground cemetery is to the left of the church, looking straight on.
A nice little above-ground cemetery is to the left of the church, looking straight on. Chile has a lot of beautiful above-ground cemeteries. We visited super-large ones in Punta Arenas, before stepping aboard a four-night cruise, and we visited another in Buenos Aires.
Yes, I'm making a big deal out of the wooden churches of Chiloe Island. Look at the little pieces of wood!
Yes, I’m making a big deal out of the wooden churches of Chiloe Island. Look at the little pieces of wood! That’s a lot of work.
And do you know how they created these domed interiors?
The marble look to the columns is drawn on. They aren’t really marble. The columns would have looked just as nice without the drawings, IMO. Do you know how they created the domed interiors?

Thus:

Courtesy of upkeep efforts, we can see that the churches are built upside-down, like ships. Well, the roofs anyway. That's how they get the concave wooden ceilings. Then they flip them.
Courtesy of upkeep efforts, we can see that the churches are built upside-down, like ships. Well, the roofs anyway. That’s how they get the concave wooden ceilings. Then they flip them.

SILly and I were able to climb the bell tower and walk along inside the shaped dome from one end to the other, where we looked INTO the church through a peephole. The guys, meanwhile, were having a siesta in the car. Silly men.

The church is about 4 klicks south of Castro, so don’t miss it if you’re in the vicinity.

After the church, SILly and I were ready to take Steve and BILly to the beach, but the guys had decided we might want to drive south to Quellon instead. I knew this from my research, but had forgotten — the highway we were on stretches 21,000 kilometers from Anchorage, Alaska to Quellon, Chiloe Island, Chile. When would we get another chance to drive to the end of the highway?

Never, my friends.

So instead of going to the beach, we drove to Quellon. It was a bit of a tricky business because, like on Easter Island, we were following our noses with no real clear plan of what was occurring. Were we on the right road? Did we take the proper turn? Turns out we were and we did. We arrived at a monument heralding our destination:

And it's on a beach!!!
And it’s on a beach!!!

The very end of the Pan-American highway. We didn’t have time to drive back up to Anchorage and back, so we stopped in Quellon for lunch instead. Everywhere appeared to be closed (damn siesta). But finally we found a restobar filled with locals, and I made fun of BILly’s “cheese soup” lunch until all the locals started ordering the same thing. It was delicious.

Here’s a view across the road from our restobar:

Quellon_view

I had read that Quellon was a small place not worth a stay, but we liked it just as much, if not better, than Castro. You can use Quellon as a base to take a 5-hour ferry to Chaiten, from where “the boat sails through the inner channels of the Chiloé archipelago” (taken from the ferry link). When we were planning the Chile trip, we knew we wanted to do the Australis cruise through the Patagonian fjords, but BILly kept whining about a place called Tic-Toc. I researched and researched and researched “Tic-Toc,” which I finally discovered is in a new Chilean national park that was so new during my research period that I couldn’t find out anything about it.

But now, now, thanks to me (not really, thanks to Google catching up with BILly’s ideas after we came home), you can find out about Tic-Toc Bay. If our group was serious about seeing Bahia Tic-Toc, we wouldn’t have had time to do the Patagonian cruise. Things turn out like they’re meant to. We left Quellon and revisited our quest to find My Liege a beach. We used our wily skills to make our way to Cucao, where we spread out on the sand along with quite a few Chileans, with the big difference that they would go in the water and we would not. Way too cold for us wimpy Canadians!

We did put our feet in the ocean. Ya gotta.

Then it was back to our B&B in the Ten Ten area of Castro where we had a relaxing night and left the next morning to catch the ferry back from Ancud to Puerto Montt. We needed to be at the airport in time to catch our LAN flight to Punta Arenas, from where we would begin the cruise that inspired us to visit Chile in the first place. The entire trip up to the cruise was an effort of backward-planning. Very handy and simple. Choose a primary destination where you HAVE to be somewhere at a specified time, then explore options previous-to and afterward. If you’re like me, you wind up in the country for a month. So much fun!

Any questions?

Stay tuned!