Me and my hired Nissan saw a growing friendship with every kilometer added to the counter. Without ever fearing a nasty bump or dangerously steep slope, he has shown me all the most beautiful parts of Chilean Patagonia, the land of endless roads through coin-flat grasslands and majestic mountains.

For a guy from Belgium, the wideness of Patagonia is mind-blowing. At home, it is almost impossible to follow a straight road with your eyes until it disappears behind the horizon. It happens even more rarely that you stand on top of a mountain and see the road whirling around the mountains in the distance, every now and then vanishing and appearing again over and behind yet another slope.

Discovering the world by road stays ever fascinating. In Chile, it turns out to be one of the best ways of travelling. You get all the nice views, and all the wonderful animals only a heartbeat away, like this guanaco.

It will however always be important to stay aware of the large effect of the roads on nature, like I described before. Chile clearly showed me another inevitable road effect in the shape of roadkill. The Patagonian roads seem to score bad on this, with dozens of ended lifes of hares and rabbits. Especially at night, the hares cross by thousands, making them almost impossible to avoid.

Of course, there is always the other side… Roadkill creates a real paradise for birds of prey, as they get served their rabbit as a fastfood happy meal.