Puerto Rio Tranquilo and the Capillas de Marmol

I left Villa Cerro Castillo with a bit of a hangover. The return to ripio (the dirt and rock road) was tough going for the first ten kilometers, and I was tempted to walk my bike up parts of the hill. But I stubbornly persisted for sixty kilometers, and by the next afternoon I was in Puerto Rio Tranquilo, a mellow town on the shore of Lago General Carrerra. This is an enormous, rich blue-green lake that extends into both Chile and Argentina, but is called by a different name in Argentina. I stayed only on the Chilean side of things, and as it was the afternoon and I met up with another cyclist in town, the two of us together paid 25,000 pesos (about 20 bucks each) to visit the Capillas de Marmol, marble rock formations I had been told in Coyhaique were spectacular. They are. For about an hour, we puttered around through tunnels, into caves and into a bay where the capillas sit. There are pictures of these wonders all over the internet, and hopefully mine will appear on flickr. It was grand, and writing about it here without having the pictures to really demonstrate the emotion generated by being in their presence is difficult. I sat contentedly in the boat gazing at these giant lumps of marble floating thirty feet from the shore. The more luxurious way to visit the Capillas is to rent a kayak and a guide, and maybe someday I will have this opportunity. On the ride back, I sat in the front of the boat, feeling the spray from the water against my face, bouncing along with the growing waves of the late afternoon.