Carretera Austral day 2 Villa O'Higgins to Tortel

The sun doesn't rise until 830am so it makes it tough to get out of bed. We did try to leave before the kids woke up and drove to the Copec gas station to top off our water before heading out and that woke up the kids and we ended up stopping to make breakfast for them. We had a 100km drive to Rio Brave ferry terminal which would take around three hours and it was 946am when we finally batten down the hatches for the washboardy drive north. We stopped once to use a portapottie to dump the cassette and made it to Rio Bravo thirty minutes early.

We had an hour drive to Tortel, the town all the ferry passengers disembarked at before we got off yesterday morning. It is famous for not having any roads in town and only have wooden boardwalks connecting homes. 

We ran into a New Zealand couple that had been on the ferry and they told us they were awaken at 620am yesterday morning and told their stop had arrived and they walked off into the darkness and huddled under a pavilion until the skies lightened. They were all waiting for the bus to leave for Cochrane the next town north.

We walked around town for a couple hours and everything was closed because it was Sunday and it was off season. A dog guided us around on our walk leading us the correct flight of stairs and not taking the steps that ended. The town was quite spread out and there are around 7km of boardwalks. There are metal signs in Spanish describing plants and miradors. The town was very quaint but with nothing open we decided to head out of town and camp an hour north on the ruta 7. We found a place next to a stream and parked and the kids played outside and then had dinner and did homeschool.