The planning

The planning for the "Project Patagonia" started with deciding the best time for the trip. There were four guys of us, (Mika, Juha, Mikko and Manu) and we had to find the dates which would suit for all of us.

We chosed Christmas day for the start day cause around Christmas and the new year was anyway more holidays. 

The plan was to drive from Osorno, which is located at about 1000km South from Santiago, the capital of Chile, to the very South of South America, an area in Chile called "fire land", originally "Tierra del Fuego" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_del_Fuego)

and more particularly to a city called Ushuaia, which is the capital of the area. 

(Our actual route varies little bit from the picture below and will be updated when the trip is in the final)

Based on the distance from Osorno to Ushuaia (about 3200-3800km depending on the route) and the experiences of earlier travellers and their blogs, we calculated that we would need 14 driving days (with 230-270km a day).

The second phase was to reserve the bikes. Mika had used Compass Expedition at his Australian trip and their operator in Chile was Moto Aventure. We got the best offer from there. They rent BMW GS 800 and 1200 bikes. Mika had had the GS1200 in Australia but we decided to take the 800's due the more predicted rough terrain on our route. GS800 is little bit lighter (229kg vs 260kg) but offers still enough loading capacity and power for our needs.

Moto Aventura Chile had over 100 bikes in Osorno so it was easy to reserve the bikes for the desired dates. They just needed the reservation payment and after that, the copy of passport, national and international driving license.

Third thing after confirming the bikes was to find the best suitable flights. We flew from Finland and changed the plane in Berlin, Madrid and Santiago. The total duration from Helsinki to Osorno was about 29 hours so it was a bit long. But as we know, when you are heading for an adventure like this, you are too exited to complain about the travelling hours. Also the waiting at the airports is good time for some extra planning.

We planned with Moto Aventura that we would leave the bikes to Punta Arenas, which is located about 440km back to North West from Ushuaia. We reserved one-way flights from Punta Arenas back to Santiago where we would departure back to home.

When the bikes and flights were confirmed, it was time to start to focus on planning more detailed route and also building a list of things we would need at the trip. Mika had very good list already from Australia so that was the base for listing the equipment.

(List coming in English)

We gathered together few times to plan the route in more details. These were good times to search interesting destinations from Google. 

We also found out that we needed to make some compromises between what we wanted to see and experience and how much we had time to drive. We noticed that visiting some places would have taken too much time and also some routes were too slow, for example due the road surface.  Travelling in Chile takes more time than in Argentina cause Chile is like a long archipelago when the west of Argentina is main land and therefor the roads are more straight and fast for driving. So the roughly planned route was a comprimise between desired experiences and realistic time to be used.

The final route was decided during the trip. We made the final decissions of the next days route at the night before. We were fortunate cause the weather didnt affect to planning.

Check out the video from our whole trip here