It was bittersweet to wake up on our last morning in Cochamó in a wet tent. I am stoked to sleep in a real bed tonight, but also, I would stay here for another month if I could.

The previous evening, we had agreed to meet the horse guy with our two big bags packed and ready at 8am. As Will and I are sitting on a bench at the meeting spot around 7:55am, we saw the horse guy walking towards us and thought he might actually be on time. But then he walked right past us, towards where the horses were presumably stabled overnight, and didn’t come back for another half hour. Now that’s the Chile I know and love.

After the horse and the horse guy finally took off with our giant haulbag and the big duffel, we packed up our two smaller backpacks one last time for the long hike out of the Cochamó Valley. Since it had rained a fair bit over the past 16 days, including a bigger storm just yesterday, the trail was significantly muddier on the way out. Even with a sunny blue sky and walking downhill with very light backpacks, the hike took us a solid four hours when the same trail had only taken three hours uphill on the way in.

Day 16 Modified Perfect Ratio

There it is, the final Modified Perfect Ratio: 1.09. Our goal was to climb more pitches than the number of hours we had to hike to get to all of those climbs, and we just barely made it! We definitely left some pitches on the table, as there were a few routes that we didn’t complete and a few days that we could have climbed more had we planned better for the weather. Maybe next time we’ll reach our stretch goal, a modified perfect ratio of 2. But overall, we’re stoked to have reached the objective for this trip and I’m even more excited to finally finish this graph that’s been slowly building over the last fifteen posts.

49 pitches : 45 hours

When we finally made it to the trailhead and got our bags from the horse guy, we had about an hour before the bus was going to arrive to take us to Puerto Montt. Obviously we used that time to eat sopaipillas and completos from the little café. It was Will’s first real completo in Chile, which he was surprised and a bit disappointed to find is literally a generic hotdog with different toppings. I had explained to him that a completo is a boiled hotdog in a hotdog bun but with mayo, tomato, and avocado as the usual toppings instead of ketchup and mustard, but somehow that didn’t register until he had one in his hands. Chileans go crazy for completos but I’m not a fan, a surprising fact to my parents who remember me eating a concerning number of hotdogs when I was in elementary school. Sopaipillas, though, are so tasty. It’s a dough that usually has squash or pumpkin in it, fried in disks and served with a sweet syrup. Ten out of ten, can recommend.

Images from Wikimedia Commons because I never remember to take out my phone.

The bus left on time, sort of, if you knew what time it was supposed to leave. We had asked a couple of people both in camp and on the trail what time the bus would be leaving the trailhead, and we got a few different answers but 3pm was the most common one. And it turned out to be true, at least on this day. But, in the timetable posted inside the bus itself, the one we were currently riding that had just pulled away from the trailhead at 3pm, this 3pm departure time was nowhere to be found. Now, I’m not an expert in reading bus timetables, but I do know how to read numbers and it definitely just wasn’t there. So I’m not sure how everyone else knew what was happening.

We also picked up and dropped off a ton of people on the 2+ hour drive to Puerto Montt, which is obviously what buses do, but it felt like it happened in such random places. We’d be driving down a two-lane country road with empty fields and forests on either side and no towns nearby and suddenly two people would appear and wave and the bus would stop and let them on. Or, it would stop in the middle of a city block when we had done another stop less than 2 minutes prior. I’m not sure how all of these people knew when the bus was coming but somehow the system seemed to work. I’m way too gringo and way too Andy to function in this system though.

We arrived in Puerto Montt a bit before 6pm and got a taxi to our hotel. I decided to ball out and get us a suite at the Marriott in town because we just slept in the woods for 16 days and we deserve it. Also Marriott suites in small cities in Chile aren’t actually that expensive, but that’s besides the point.

I thought the suite was overkill but decided to do it anyways because it had a jacuzzi tub vs just a shower in the regular hotel rooms. Turns out we actually needed all the space though. We had packed up our tent still a bit wet that morning, so we pitched the tent in the middle of the sitting area of our suite to dry overnight.

After a tasty dinner (that ironically included more sopaipillas) and a hot shower, we tumbled into a big fluffy bed around 9pm and tried not to think about all the packing we’d have to do the next day to prep for bus and then plane travel.

Adios Cochamó, we will absolutely be back. And maybe next time we won’t end up sleeping in the rain.

The full list of Cochamó posts can be found here.