We are five months into our trip. We still find ourselves saying ‘Can you believe we are doing this?’ Sometimes it still doesn’t quite feel real. The vastness of the scenery, the change in cultures, the different people we meet, living on the bikes, waking somewhere new (almost) everyday make everything feel so disparate from our old everyday life. But our time in Chile, in the area famous for Monkey Puzzle trees and volcanos, has felt more unreal than normal. So much so that it has, at times, felt a bit like we’ve been unwitting characters in a film and if I was going to pick one,  it’s mostly felt like living in Don’t Look Up* but with hints of Jurassic Park (the original 1990s classic version!)

Firstly, we left Argentina, cresting the top of Paso Carirrine under the canopy of lush, green, almost tropical-feeling forests, to be met by the biggest tarantula we’ve ever seen in the wild. It just didn’t seem real. There it was just casually crossing the road. It felt like someone had just placed it there. Surreal. We stopped to snap some photos but thankfully he (he looked like a he!) wasn’t going our way and he scuttled off into the forest undergrowth. We rolled on, passed the now familiar red and white marker indicating that we were back in Chile and whizzed down the steep and rocky descent to the border guard station.

The border guard station couldn’t have been more different from the Argentinan one I mentioned in the last blog post, that we had passed less than an hour earlier. Despite being in a forest with only 4×4 track access, it was the size of a haybarn, with three different window counters and multiple outbuildings – a bit over the top. As we approached, five guards came out to meet us. All smartly dressed in immaculate uniforms,  shoes polished to a shine and hair slicked back – adding to the Jurassic Park feeling. All very friendly but it felt a little excessive. We moved through from one counter to the next. The first counter for migration was simple enough. The second counter for vehicle registration felt a little ridiculous given that we were on bikes, but we still had to register the make, model, colour and wheel size of our bikes. Why our bike wheel size choice would make a difference to our time in Chile is anyone’s guess, maybe they just wanted to chuckle at our choice of 27.5′ wheels knowing we’d struggle to find replacements around here where everyone rides 29′. We’d never had to do this before on any of our other crossings into Chile so maybe the border guards at our previous crossings were a little more down to earth. Nonetheless, we dutifully answered all their questions and we were handed one slip of paper for the two of us – when there is so much bureaucracy here it’s hard to believe one piece of paper for two bikes and two people is considered sufficient! The final counter was about imports, and what we were bringing into the country. As we filled in the forms, Ted glanced over his shoulder to see a guard donning blue stretchy elastic rubber gloves, shirt sleeves rolled up, he pulling them on tight and snapped them into place at the wrist with a twang. Ted nudged my elbow, raised his eyebrows and I struggled not to laugh as the grin spread over his face. As Ted remarked later, he was thankful they only wanted to search the inside of our bags and not inside anything else. The search was due to our declaration that we were bringing in food (it’s so much cheaper in Argentina it would be silly not to). The guard opened every bag. Every. Single. Bag. Even Ted’s wash bag, even my bag of tea, even the bags within bags (and every bikepacker knows there are many many of those!). It was a pain for us to have to unpack everything, but I feel like the guy doing the search had the worse end of the deal having to rifle through our smelly washing! As we were not carrying any fresh food they had no issues with anything and let us continue with our journey which we did, after making slightly excessive use of their WiFi.

We were instantly reminded of the incredible green lush beauty of Chile. Steep sided mountains all covered in dense lush forest, and as we made our way down and back up the deep valley, we caught our first glimpse of the volcanos this area is known for. A perfect triangle pointing skywards above the trees, snow capped and covered in black lava ash with a gentle puff of smoke from it’s top. If you were to ask a child (or me!) to draw a perfect volcano, the volcano we were looking at is what you’d get. It was so good it didn’t feel real, it looked like a film set. I had to keep staring (causing all kinds of wobbles all over the road!) to remind myself it was in fact real.

By the time we reached the town of Conaripe we were also fully reacquainted with the Chilean fences. Every single inch of every road in Chile is fenced. I don’t quite know the exact reason why. They very rarely seem to be keeping anything (like animals or dinosaurs!) in, or out, of the fences. The more time we’ve spent in Chile the more we’ve come to suspect it’s an ownership or possession thing. Simply marking your territory and staking a claim to the land, so that you can then make money from people who want to enter or cross it. There are no rights of way across land here in Chile the way we have footpaths, bridleways or open access land in the UK. Although there is still a long way to go in relation to land access in the UK, experiencing a country where there are no rights of way makes you appreciative of what little rights we do have back home. It means that riding here in Chile starts to feel a little hemmed in after a while, like you can’t escape the road – not even to refill your water bottle from a stream or nip off for a quick wild wee or eat your sandwiches. It creates a bit of an oppressive atmosphere. A direct contrast to the feeling granted by enjoying the expansive wilderness that lies just beyond the barbed wire. If you fancy following a signpost on the road for a ‘Sendero’ – footpath – you’ll usually see the cost of using the footpath written underneath.

In Chile, you are also charged to enter most National Parks. This feels so counter-intuative to me, surely – as the name suggests – a National Park is a park for the nation? But no, not here in Chile. Even if you just want to cycle (or drive) on the roads through the park you have to pay, and it’s not cheap. They also have lots of rules about what routes you can use at what hours of the day, what direction you can walk a footpath in, as well as a whole host of things you can’t do when you get there – I wouldn’t be surprised if ‘having fun’ was a prohibited activity given all the other weird and wonderful things they ban in the parks. Plus, they are closed on Mondays, although how you close nature I really do not know – Where do they expect all the animals and birds go on Mondays when the park is closed!?!

Once we had navigated a rather wiggly route avoiding excessively expensive national park roads, spending time in amongst the prehistoric-feeling monkey puzzle trees, under the everpresent volcanoes was pretty cool. You can’t help but marvel at the thick elephant-skin-esk bark of the trees, or the branches of spikey ‘monkey tails’ or at just how big they are. They feel like dinosaurs of the tree world. The forest that grows underneath them also feels jurassic, along with the trails deeply cut into the hillsides thick with layer upon layer of mud and volcanic rocks in varying shades. It’s like nowhere else we’ve ever been.

The peace of the monkey puzzle forests couldn’t feel much more different to the tourist towns of Pucon and Villarrica, which were less than a days ride away. We did our usual thing of arriving in each town and standing about like rabbits in headlights whilst our senses readjusted to the hubbub of busy streets, cars and people. But we were thankful that both towns had vegetarian restaurants (pretty much unheard of in these parts!), so we filled our bellies with lots of yummy veggies. In fact, this part of Chile would be a Waitrose shoppers dream – sweet blueberries, perfectly ripe avocado and refreshing watermelon were everywhere, every fruit and veg shop seemed to be overflowing with them. So much so, that one veg shop out of town kindly gave us 1kg of blueberries for £1 – we’d probably need to remortgage to buy that many blueberries in Waitrose!

A day or so after leaving Villarrica on quiet, hilly roads with more incredible volcano views, we learnt of the the huge forest fires destroying areas of the country further North near Santiago and the coast. It was really sad to hear. Even though we were no where near the large forest fires making the UK headlines, there were also some small localised ones in the province just North of us. We kept a keen eye on the fire maps and asked around with locals, who were all very blase and almost indifferent to it as it wasn’t close enough to be a worry to them or their businesses, but for us, it was hard to imagine all those beautiful, lush forests going up in flames. The monkey puzzle trees have bark so thick they can withstand forest fires to a certain extent, and that brought us some comfort, but it was still a harsh reality to have to accept.

It’s easy to understand that forest fires are a real issue here with the continued heat – which we persistently struggle to ride through. We’ve made use of any stream or river we could access, to have lunchtime or end of the day swims. The cold water a pure tonic to our overheating and sweaty muscles. We also took to having longer and longer lunch breaks in whatever shade we could find. On one particularly hot lunchtime (when the Garmin read 53°), in the random village of Malalcahuello, we sat outside a veg shop, and then a bakery in the shade of their parasols for a couple of hours. As we sat there, locals would pull up in their huge American style pickup trucks. Leaving their V8 engines running, they would get out and go into the shop. Whether this was for 5 minutes or 15 minutes the truck engine would be running the whole time, spewing out unnecessary exhaust fumes. When one truck pulled away, another would immediately appear, doing the same thing. For the whole two hours of our lunch break there was a pickup truck with it’s ridiculously oversized engine running totally unnecessarily. We couldn’t quite believe it. Whilst their local forests burned to the ground, fuelled on by the excessive heat and the hot winds of a warming planet, they leave their engines running with no thought for the consequences. Ted being Ted asked a couple of the guys to turn off their engines as they walked into the shops – it sadly was not received well and made no difference to their actions. It was at this point we felt like we were in the film Don’t Look Up, and once we’d noticed it we struggled to shake the feeling.

Helicopters flying overhead waterbombing the local fires were constant companions to the last couple of days in Chile after that. They trailed across the skies, dragging water buckets that can carry 16 tonnes of water, which looked like small water balloons in comparison to the size of the huge helicopters themselves. But they still paled into insignificance in comparison to the size of the forests they were trying to save.

In comparison to our time in Europe, where we had engaged in many conversations about the warming climate, sustainability, and the environment as well as the small but encouraging changes people were making to their everyday lives, here there is none of that. It seems that the world is literally burning around them, and yet there are no conversations about the environment, it’s not on anyone’s agenda and there’s no change to behaviours. Above anything else it’s this that made us feel like we were living in Don’t Look Up. Those blueberries I mentioned earlier, they were handed to us in a plastic box and with no recycling here the box sadly went to landfill after we’d devoured the contents. The monkey puzzle forests I mentioned, they are cross crossed with 4×4 tracks so that they can be accessed by car, no need or encouragement for anyone to walk or cycle anywhere. The idyllic looking swim spots I talked of, they too were usually surrounded by a smattering of rubbish – a plastic bottle here, a foil wrapper there.

Ted’s professional life back home, in sustainable manufacturing, can often lead to the feeling that the climate, environment and sustainability is a big deal on everyone’s agenda, but our time in Chile was a stark reminder that sadly that is not the case. We talked about it a lot, and at times it weighed heavy on our hearts, but it has also highlighted how lucky and appreciative we are to experience this incredible place now, and we did not take that for granted.

* For the benefit of those who haven’t seen Don’t Look Up (I recommend you watch it as it’s a great film) I realise it would be helpful for me to explain that it’s a black comedy about two scientists who discover a comet on course to hit the Earth and they set out to convince indifferent politicians, the media and the public to try to act to save the planet. It’s a metaphorical satire of climate change.