Tortel

700 km, 3 days off-road track with an average speed of 20 km/h later, we finally arrived in Tortel. We have thought long and hard about whether the 200 km off-road track is worth it or not. But since many people have told us that it's sooooo beautiful there, we decided to go.

It took us a whopping 4 hours for the 100 km ride there, and our car looks as if we've been driving with the door open. The dust that rises while driving gets into every little crevice in the car. When we eat, everything crunches between our teeth because it's full of dust.

But Tortel was really worth it. The town was founded in 2001 as a naval base. The inhabitants mainly lived off fishing. Since Tortel was connected to a road in 2016, the town has established another financial pillar, tourism. The special thing is that the entire town stands on stilts and there are no streets, only wooden walkways. The town is located directly on the slope, which means you have to climb many stairs, up and down.

There is even a public internet connection here.

From here, you can take boat tours to a glacier and to Isla de los Muertos (Island of the Dead). The glacier tour is, of course, very expensive, and glaciers are slowly becoming old news for us.

But the Island of the Dead has captured our hearts. We took a small fishing boat there. On the island, workers were delivered in 1905 to cut down cypress wood, which the Chilean government wanted to use for road and rail construction. After all the cypress trees were felled, the 60 men were simply left behind. They died within 3 months, were buried by their comrades, and their graves were marked with crosses made of cypress wood. These crosses are still standing today. The historical investigation did not begin until 2001. Since then, there have been three hypotheses about how the men died: scurvy (quite funny in Spanish: "Scorbuto"), red tide (a toxic alga that also affects shellfish and fish, but is only dangerous to humans - it's quite common down here), and the last hypothesis is that they simply killed each other. In the end, it's not fully resolved.

On the way back, we went through several channels where the Chilean rainforest extends - really beautiful. We had actually thought that rainforests only exist in warm areas, you learn so much while traveling.