National Park Fray George

We have already arrived in the desert region of Chile, with one exception: the National Park Fray George. In the middle of the mountainous desert, a forest has managed to survive along the coast.

Only 30 km from the highway, we thought we'd take a look. Haha, think again! The gravel road was so bad that we could only drive at a maximum speed of 20 km/h. If you're not really bad at math, you can calculate that it took us 1.5 hours for the whole distance.

When we arrived, the park ranger told us that the rest of the route is a pretty bad gravel road and it goes up damn steep. Normally, Chileans always say something like 'it's fine', but here the ranger even asked us if we had any doubts, waaaat?!

At the bottom, we had to register with the ranger, who then radios up to the ranger at the top that a car is coming up. If it doesn't arrive there, they will look for us. I think they wanted to reassure us with that, but it backfired tremendously!

The ranger hadn't exaggerated, but the road was wide enough and there was no oncoming traffic, so it wasn't impossible, but at the edge of our abilities.

When we arrived at the top, the ranger said 'nice that you're here', we weren't quite sure what he meant by that, but okay. However, the forest disappointed us a bit, but the ranger also said it had been a very dry winter. He was very proud when he said that there is a lot of humidity here and that it rains 1500 mm per year, yeah right, but okay, definitely remarkable for a desert. The plants mainly regulate their water balance by absorbing water from the air. Due to the coastal fog and the strong temperature differences between day and night, it's quite foggy there.

It didn't really blow us away though. After lunch, we had to shake our way back to the Pan-American Highway for another 1.5 hours.