After passing Puerto Varas, the Panamericana begins to run out of land. It approaches a large bay where the central plain, the valley which has run for thousands of kilometres down Chile between the Andes and the coast, slips gently under the sea. This is the Seno de Reloncavi, and on its edge is the city of PUERTO MONTT, 17km south of Puerto Varas.
Puerto Montt looks like a rundown port at the end of the road. It was exactly that for many years, when both the Panamericana and the railway from Santiago ended here. The Panamericana now carries on southwest to the island of Chiloe, and the railway has retreated north to Temuco, but the place still looks the same: collapsing wooden houses with rustic shingle roofs under a frequent cloud of fog and cold. But that doesn't mean that Puerto Montt is sleepy -- in fact, it's a busy port with a billion dollar a year salmon farming industry fishing. For tourists it's an important, albeit ugly, lauchpad: the gateway to the rugged isolation of the Careterra Austral, and the embarkantion point for the long-distance ferry trips tothe famous Laguna San Rafael, with its floating glacier, or thourhg the fjords to PUerto Natales in trhe far south. Far nearer, but equally exotic is the world's largest privately owned nature reserve -- the one million pistine acres known as Pumalin Park.
