Puerto Bertrand

Puerto Bertrand is barely a village — a scatter of houses, a couple of lodges, a general store that keeps hours nobody can predict — sitting right where Lago Bertrand narrows and pours itself into the Rio Baker. That transition point is the whole reason the place exists on any traveler’s radar. The water leaving the lake is that saturated glacial turquoise, and it stays that color as it accelerates into the river, which is Chile’s largest by volume and, according to every kayaker we met there, one of the most technically demanding and beautiful rivers in the world to paddle.

We weren’t there to kayak. We were there because a friend of a friend runs a small lodge on the water and told us to just come see it, and I’m glad we did, because Puerto Bertrand turned out to be the most purely relaxed stop of our whole Carretera Austral run. We spent an afternoon sitting on a dock watching a group of maybe six kayakers, mostly Europeans on some kind of multi-week paddling trip, ferry back and forth across the current above the first big rapid, scouting lines, occasionally dropping in and disappearing around a bend with a whoop we could hear from shore.

The Rio Baker has become something of a cause in Chile as well as a sport destination — there was a huge, years-long fight over a proposed dam project, HidroAysen, that would have flooded stretches of it and the Rio Pascua, and the campaign against it, with the slogan “Patagonia Sin Represas,” became one of the most visible environmental movements in the country’s recent history. The project was eventually shelved. Standing on that dock, knowing the water in front of us almost got buried under a reservoir, changed how I looked at it.

We ate trout that the lodge owner had caught that morning, slept with the window cracked to the sound of the current, and left the next day feeling like we’d stumbled onto something most people drive straight past on their way to bigger names further south. If you’re not paddling, there’s still fly fishing, short hikes along the lakeshore, and honestly just sitting there doing nothing, which is underrated.

When to go: The kayaking season and best weather run November through March; water levels and river conditions are at their most consistent in January and February.