some salt with that?

I’m just uploading some material to youtube for business related reasons but while I was at it I thought I would upload & share this.. In Bolivia I met a Canadian cyclist, James. We teamed up to cross the harsh landscapes of the southwest.. including a couple of days riding across the Salar de Uyuni at almost 4000m altitude. Quite a surreal place. We’d spent the night on the small rocky outcrop known as “Inca Huasi” and were heading to the Tunupa volcano some 50-60km away if memory serves. This is James filming, me in the red shirt with the same sunhat I’ve worn on just about every bike adventure for the last 10 years.. it could only have a more interesting story to tell if it been swallowed and subsequently “passed” by some example of megafauna… a giraffe perhaps :-)

The original post with photography is here 

Sixty Degrees of Latitude – a reminder

It’s time I gave my book another plug I think. It has been receiving some lovely feedback from buyers, so thank you if you have a copy… and if you haven’t it is a beautiful book printed on a very heavyweight lustre paper that would make a very nice addition to your book shelf if you enjoy travel.. or photography or cycling… or even if you don’t. One chap with a copy said this about it which I thought was rather nice.. “…I’m glad that the book doesn’t force feed you “a journey” but rather offers you some insight into the allure of travel. Especially by bicycle. And that is getting to know something of the personality of a place you visit. And above all, this is a collection of beautiful photographs.“

SIXTY DEGREES OF LATITUDE

“A journey by bicycle following the spine of the Andes from a latitude of approximately 5 degrees north in Colombia to 55 degrees south at the tip of Tierra del Fuego. These are some of the places in between.“

http://www.blurb.com/books/2205982

If you would like a copy I have a couple left from the first batch at the initial price of £33 + shipping afraid none left of the initial batch but it is available to buy online here  - print on demand so delivery will be a week or two but it’s worth the wait.

Sixty Degrees of Latitude…

First presented in preview form here Sixty Degrees of Latitude is here at last and available to order. 132 pages of interesting photography, printed on a very high quality ‘lustre’ finish paper.  It is not a travelog as such, nor is it exclusively street photography. Rather it is just a look at some of the places in between on my cycle journey through the Andes. Of course I’d be very happy if you all ordered a copy.. and you “should”* if you like interesting photography… or are interested in South America.. or bicycles and travel by bike.. and especially if you enjoyed reading this blog as I pedalled my way along through the Andes ;-)

You can preview the book in full below and order directly here

“A journey by bicycle following the spine of the Andes from a latitude of approximately 5 degrees north in Colombia to 55 degrees south at the tip of Tierra del Fuego. These are some of the places in between.”

Sixty Degrees of Latitude by Mike Hayes | Make Your Own Book

Granted it is not dirt cheap, such is the cost of print on demand, but it is a very high quality book and to put it in context.. for £25 you can go and buy 70 pages of rather dull (in my humble opinion of course ;-) photography in the form of Moby’s new book.. because he is Moby.. or you can have this instead <hint>.

cheero!

Sixty Degrees of Latitude – a preview

A few weeks ago when I first wrote about A Boatbuilder’s Story I also mentioned I was working on another project.. as that other project now nears completion I can present a preview I think. It is not a travelog about cycle touring in South America, neither is it a diary. It is simply a photo essay. The draft introduction, still subject to change, says it all..

A journey by bicycle following the Andes from a latitude of approximately 5 degrees north in Colombia to 55 degrees south at the tip of Tierra del Fuego. These are some of the places in between.

I should be ready to go to print in a couple of weeks. 132 pages of interesting photography, initially in softcover only. Naturally I hope you’ll buy a copy ;-)

(update.. as of 24 May 11 it is now available, see this post:  http://mikesimagination.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/sixty-degrees-of-latitude/ )

The following are a few screen grabs, they’re small but they’ll give you a flavour..

Stay tuned..

I see dead people…

“I see dead people“…. sadly if you asked me to come up with a movie quotation off the top of my head then that would probably be it… nothing so special as “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine...”.. or even, hehe, “search your feelings Luke, you know them to be true….“. It was those words whispered by Cole in the Sixth Sense that were bouncing around in my <strange> mind as I walked around looking at all the dead people, or rather their tombs, in Buenos Aires’ Recoleta Cemetery while pondering our species penchant for preserving those of our dead considered wealthy or important enough to be worthy of the privilege.. whether it’s mummified tribal chieftains in Irian Jaya or, as here, the vast marble and granite tombs of Argentinas elite.

I did not spend long, the late afternoon heat was intense in the narrow alleys between tombs. The inscriptions read as a who’s who of Argentinas history with the merely wealthy also mixing it with the powerful and influential. Eva Peron lies here too, I did not specifically seek her out but it hard to miss her.. her tomb is the one with the crush of tourists crammmed into the narrow alley, camera lenses poking every-which way. I wondered if the scene would have been the same if there had not been a movie with Madonna in the title role…

So, very different to the streets of Buenos Aires as portrayed in my previous post below… and I am also off to a very different place… the airport :-(

las calles de Buenos Aires…

…late summer in Buenos Aires, a time for whiling away the afternoon heat with a cold beer in a dark, smokey bar while watching life pass by on the cracked and crumbling pavements outside…

I flew out of Ushuaia in a cold dusk onboard an Austral MD80...

My flight left Ushuaia much later than scheduled… on a scale of 0 to 5 for punctuality, where 5 rates always on time and 0 rates total failure, Aerolineas Argentina sits somewhere around a 0.4.. at least it does for Ushuaia. On the basis that the LAN flights were on time I surmise it is the airline rather than the airport ;-) The airstrip in Ushuaia is wonderfully situated, having checked my bike in with, suprisingly, no additional charges (perhaps due to my first class bike packing job.. hehe) I was able to sit outside and watch dusk settle over the mountains and the Beagle Channel. I could not help but feel melancholy at leaving the Andes behind. Unlike the group of Americans  that checked in after me and were seemingly more interested in complaining about everything they could think of rather than simply sitting back and enjoying the view…. They provided a constant level of amusing background tut-tutting in departures. I was concerned re seating on the flight, some of them were wider than they were tall… I was lucky however, finding myself seated next to a stiffly prim but very thin old dear from I have no idea where – she pretended I wasn’t there. Might have been my socks, hadn’t washed those in a while…

street footy in the heat of late Saturday morning in BA

Having spent so long savoring the beautifully cold, fresh air of southern Patagonia arriving in the city some 3000km northeast was something of a shock.. the heat, the humidty, the noise, the fumes… La Jungla Cemento as a local friend put it….

... a little more of that footy

tango imagery is everywhere.. the tourists love it, and why not :-)

I am staying in a big old town-house in San Telmo, a somewhat colourful, arty.. and artfully crumbling district of narrow cobbled streets and small shady plazas, the strong heart of which beats to a tango from mid-morning outdoors through to dawn. As I wandered in search of a coffee this morning I passed numerous young folk sleeping off a hard night out amongst the homeless with their handcarts.

San Telmo...

Anyway, enough with the words, it is time for a siesta after my wanderings this morning so here is a little look around these colourful streets from the last few hours for you …

old fashioned delivery bicycles are ideal in the narrow streets

the downtown is as modern as any european city

.. narrow streets jammed with buses and taxis, but there is hope... already many bicycles and the city authorities are saying they want to implement more cycle-friendly policies....

plenty of old American trucks happily :-)

away from downtown... lots of cobbles, lots of bicycles

open air tango, done primarily for the tourists but it is such a part of the city's culture it feels 'right'

a definite sense of humour ..

I sat with a very cold beer at a bar window and watched the streets in motion

colourful buildings reflected in the windscreen of one of numerous battered old Renaults

 

 

still a local hero....

 

only in BA could Che meet tango..

random friendly people I chatted with on the street

gasoline….

“it’s really gasoline? You know, like gasoline gasoline..?”
“yep, it is definitely gasoline”
“so not alcohol or anything, definitely gasoline?”
“yep, definitely gasoline, it came out of a Petrobras pump in Puerto Natales”
“oh cool, I’ll have it then, pour it in there….”

I packed up my tent for the last time this morning ready to move to a hostal in town for a couple of nights prior to my flight… mainly to make it easier logistically with respect to packing bike and stuff and having a place to hang out the day of my flight which does not depart until late evening, especially if raining as it frequently does. I had about a 1/4 litre of gasoline left in my stove fuel bottle that of course could not be poured away so I offered it to Adrienne, a girl on a motorbike from Vancouver. She had reached the end of her trans-south american journey and was about to set off for the 3000km trip to Buenos Aires where she hoped to transfer ownership of the bike to a friend… illegal in Argentina, foreigners are not permitted to sell their imported bikes here.. but apparently a short hop to Uruguay fixes everything :-) Despite my expert use of the American word for petrol she clearly was not immediately reassured that I wasn’t going to play some sort of evil cyclist joke on her motorised steed…

It felt very odd packing up the tent and loading up the bike for the final time for the short 4km transfer into town… the place I camped up in the hills was very cool, a place where cyclists and, mostly, motorcyclists were ending and beginning their South American adventures. The company and cameraderie… and pizza.. and beer on tap… was excellent. I missed it straight away when I arrived at the hostal.. a very nice place with friendly ownership but only a  few exceptions to the mostly baby-faced gap-yah residents. Ho hum.

weirdness at the post office

As far as bike packing goes.. for once I have some useful info.. useful to anyone reading this and likely to find themselves in a similar situation here. There is a decent bike shop in town, it is at Gobernador Paz 301.. he sometimes has cardboard bike boxes.. but being an astute businessman he apparently charges about 20 pesos for them, no big deal but as boxes are in demand and bike sales low I get the feeling he may not often have any.. like this week so I have been seeking alternatives. At Pastor Lawrence 805 there is a ferreteria called El Martillo.. he has foam plastic and heavy duty plastic sheeting off the roll as well as gaffer tape. Recommended. I bought a few metres of each and then went off in search of cardboard… the obvious suspects like the shops selling refrigerators and giant TVs did not have any spare today but I lucked out with a pile of boxes just put out for garbage collection. I have what I need to make a tidy package.

Ushuaia has street names dripping with history.. Darwin, Beagle etc etc. Fuegia Basket was one of three native Yaghan people taken hostage from Tierra del Fuego by Fitzroy, skipper of The Beagle, during her first voyage in 1830. By extension that means somewhere there are also streets named Jemmy Button and Boat Memory.I have not found them yet.

The act of packing up the tent really forced home the reality of returning to the UK and how much I will miss particular people I met and met again along the way… Ennio & Dina, Nina, Kevin the motorcyclist etc. In this respect it has been a quite unique, and happy, journey.

I was chatting over coffee this morning with someone who just happened to be chatty, they said “oh you have had lots of time to think about what you would like to do with your future”.. I had to say “errm, no.. in reality mostly all I ever thought about on my bike was food, beer, mountains, a place to sleep.. and women of course… and not necessarily in that order”. Definitely not time wasted ;-)

it is a big old country... this is a photo to go with......

 

... this one. Somehow 50km has been missed, or a case of Ushuaia distancing itself from it's ugly twin?

Already thinking about the next trip and changes to my equipment  I have decided that next time I’m going to carry a little folding saw with me. On so many occasions on this journey there was plenty of dead wood lying around but rarely in handy sizes for a fire… the little saw on my Leatherman isn’t really up to branches and so on. I figure the few extra grams of an 8-inch folding saw will be worth it… and fun to play with even with no wood around, say for cutting cheese at a picnic in a particularly dramatic fashion.

stuff for bringing her home...

p.s last night I added a few more pics in my previous post below… just given the remote possibility you’re interested and missed them…

Ushuaia…

You know those vaguely damp looking patches of fur you see on the road sometimes… that may once have been a rabbit or fox but reduced to anonymous flatness by passing traffic… I felt kind of like that once the satisfaction of arriving had worn off, hehe, although Ninas BBQ innovation of bananas cooked in their skins but slit and filled with dark chocolate went some way to alleviating that.. or perhaps it was the red wine…. but no matter her farewell asado was a tasty affair :-) I also take pleasure from a most excellent adventure and can think about returning to the Himalayas again… or something ;-) In the meantime however I finally mustered up the motivation to venture further than the bar and take a look at Ushuaia…

when the sun shines the streets are colourful

It is a chilly place… the warmest month is January with an average temperature of just 10.4 degs C…  I have been lucky this last couple of days, the sun has been out and the wind dropped…  it has felt positively balmy… but there is still a sub-polar chill in the air and the mornings are frosty. It is also a small town of about 64,000 people. I like it. Tomorrow I think I shall swap bike shorts for tourist underpants and take a boat trip out on the Beagle Channel :-)

steep streets & yellow buses

well endowed with watering holes....

a particularly pleasing arrangement of poles.... to me anyway ;-)

a family enjoying sunday afternoon on the waterfront

the naval representation...

yet another deliciously 'fatigued' old American pick-up.

old and, in the background, new...

the skipper was caught out by an unusually low tide....

this lovely old DC3 is sadly no longer flying.

if you have enough wedge then you too can drink tea here... ;-)

... at the aeroclub.

ship is in...

on the waterfront

the bottom of a continent & the end of the road…

I was hoping the girl in reception would offer me a free night in a 5-star suite for my trouble. She didn’t… must have been fully booked – I cannot imagine any other reason why she would not have wanted a somewhat scruffy but otherwise excellent quality cyclist to stay in her hotel. I thought my hint of “oh I am looking for somewhere to stay the night….. could you perhaps tell me where I can put my tent” might have made a difference but she just pointed at the map and said “oh you can camp down by the lake, it is about 5km…“

the last of the pampa.. the Atlantic visible in the distance

Hehe, you see I had met a couple of Dutch cyclists on the road out of Rio Grande that morning, they were three days into their 5 month journey north from Ushuaia and had forgotten to return their room key to the reception at the rather nice hosteria they had stayed at 2 nights earlier in Tolhuin… “could you take it back for us please” they said “we had ridden 50km before we realised we still had it“. So I took it down the road with me and delivered it the afternoon I arrived in Tolhuin.

the romance of the open road. A hard but good life.

Much to the bemusement of the motorized visitors I had left Rio Grande with a big hug from Norma, the bubbly girl that runs Club Nautico. She was a star and I think, judging by her guestbook and photos adorning the walls loves cyclists…  I had felt a little bad for her the night before… in the evening a pair of Land Rovers showed up carrying two Welsh couples in their late fifties I guess. They had not been there for 10 minutes before they started complaining, clearly forgetting they were paying just £3/night for hot water, wifi and use of a kitchen… They had metre-square cartoon flavoured stickers on their vehicles that said “The World is Not Enough”. I hated them… ah, that’s too strong.. I disliked them intensely is probably more diplomatic. Used to cruising quietly through countries on my bike, engaging with people and places along the way I found the idea of ripping through in a cloud of dust in a vehicle effectively shouting “look at me” rather distasteful. I suppose it is true… I am just a bike snob. They could have been a little more friendly and easy going at Club Nautico though, I might have liked them then… ;-)

fine facial detail on this guanaco.. but you'd think if going to the trouble they'd have given him a nice smile ;-)

I felt good riding out of town. It was a bitterly cold morning but the sun was shining down from a clear blue sky and I knew that the day would be my last bit of pampa. The first 12km were into wind. They took me over an hour but after that I had at least 50km of cross-tailwind as I cruised south with the gleaming stripe of the Atlantic visible across the pampa to my left.

Lago Fagnano

As the day wore on the empty pampa was replaced by a series of low hills covered with stunted trees and on the horizon the peaks of the mountains in the far south of Tierra del Fuego became visible. Hurrah! I ate lunch watching a pair of condors circling lazily over the road that shortly afterwards swung south west into wind approaching Tolhuin. That slowed things down considerably :-|

Camp Hain

I left the highway and crunched along the dirt road into Tolhuin after 115km. It is not much of a village but it does have a famous bakery that is visited by all and sundry passing on Ruta 3. Having visited it I think it is only famous because it has become known as being famous… the reality is that is very much a regular bakery with a cafeteria attached. The cakes were OK but not spectacular…. The bakery also has a spot where cyclists can camp for free. I chose not to for the simple reason I was having trouble with eczema on my face and in my eyes and I wanted a shower to wash all the dirt and sunblock off.

interesting....

So having ridden a few more km on the aforementioned key quest it was with 125km under my wheels for the day that I rolled into the rather colourful & eccentric ‘Camp Hain’ on the shores of Lago Fagnano, at 98km long it is a significant stretch of water and being oriented east-west the persistent winds ensured a decent size surf on the pebble beach in the afternoons. The location was stunning with snowcapped mountains visible to the west. Stunningly windy too. Handily tent sites have wooden windbreaks.. all heavily bearded with the lichen that covers everything down here.

lichen covers everything down here.. dead and alive. Probably would not want to sit still for too long...!

The site itself is a rather eclectic mix of junk and history of travellers who have been coming this way for a number of years. A good place to spend a night, especially given the log cabin with big wood burning stove as a refuge from the biting wind :-) I rather enjoyed the ironic sign in the mouldering bathroom requesting that guests maintain order and cleanliness.. I wondered if that meant polishing the mushrooms growing up through the floor..

Camp Hain

I stayed 2 nights there, partly to give my skin a chance to settle down again and partly because it was just such a mellow place to hang out. I met a very pleasant young English chap there, Joe. Very unassuming and with excellent conversation he was walking from Ushuaia to Uruguay, a journey of some 4000km.. “just something I wanted to do” he said as we chatted over coffee by the fire. No publicity, no website .. just out there doing something cool. That night we made a big fire and grilled some slabs of beef for dinner :-).

not sure why you would leave your shoes... something of a fundamental bit of kit, I need mine. Instead considered leaving some sacred underpants... you know, 'holey' ones.. <sorry..>

Joe gets into the swing of life as an adventurer by smoking his socks for dinner...

For my final day on the road I was up early. At 6am there was not a breath of wind. “Hurrah” I thought, as the road to Ushuaia heads directly into the prevailing winds. By 7am however I could hear a faint and ghostly whine although could feel nothing… the wind arrived shortly after, by the time I rolled out at 8am the lake was covered with white caps and the surf was building once again.

just south of Tolhuin there is an old observatory rusting away..

The first 48km were something of a grind into the wind but then the road arrived at the foot of the final Andean pass.. Paso Garibaldi. Not high at just 400m, still above the treeline, but a wonderful climb with nice views of about 8km on a good road and a nice gradient. It felt good to get into a good climbing rhythm again. Beyond the pass I was very much back in mountainous terrain.. I had missed the mountains while out on the pampa.

one final mountain to climb... Paso Garibaldi. Why you would name a mountain after those tasty biscuits with currants in is beyond me, you can't even buy them here...

After 100km and with just a few km to go into Ushuaia I met an Argentian chap heading north on his bike. He did not look as if he was just setting out, too ‘well worn’.. “no, I have come from Alaska” he said, “but now I cycle home. It is only another 3000km to Buenos Aires“. Excellent stuff. I had been hearing about this “Argentine guy with 50kg of gear and junk all over his bike” ever since the Carretera.. It was him. True, he was carrying a lot of what some folk would class as junk but I cannot judge another cyclist, suffice to say his bike looked well “lived in” :-)

the final few km... bitterly cold, damp and windy .. but beautiful

So, Ushuaia. The end of the road for me. The road itself goes a couple more km south-west before running out, and the locals happily charge you $15 to get there, but Ushuaia is the southernmost city in the world. South of here there are a few islands, ending with Cape Horn, itself just a storm-blasted little island.. and beyond that nothing until Antarctica. I am camped at the foot of a ski hill above the city. Nina whom I met on the Carretera was there so on my arrival in a heavy rainstorm I had a ready made drinking partner with which to retreat to a warm bar :-)

from the road into Ushuaia... scruffy tugs, a few black fast patrol boats belonging to the Argentine Navy and cruise ships..

Ushuaia at first glance is a nice city. Very heavily touristed for both the location itself and as a jumping off point for Antarctica, but in a way that is not brash or in your face. A good place to end a journey. The location is stunning with snowcapped peaks around, a nice waterfront where ancient wooden boats mix it with cruise ships and superyachts. The town is blessed with great cafes and bars and the locally brewed beer, Cape Horn, is very good. I know what I shall be doing as I rest my legs over the next few days ;-)

cruising for beer...

As always at the end of an adventure I feel quite flat and miss the idea of being able to just move on again. I thought about heading to Brazil but I’m tired, a lot of my gear is knackered so I figure best go home, make repairs and ponder what the future holds for me.. both in terms of where to head next and also earning some sort of a living…. For the next few days however I can enjoy this place and get all misty-eyed about the Andes… finally put to rest from Colombia in the north to this, the very southern tip :-) Favourite places… Southern Colombia, Southwest Bolivia, Northern Argentina and the wonderful Carretera Austral… it’s all good however, even the bad bits simply because of all the terrific people I met along the way… if if you’re reading this and you met me then that means you :-)

the local brew in a rather cool bar-cum-museum, hence the vintage clockwork model railway 'in' the bar.

Don’t hang up just yet though, I sense much photographic opportunity here in Ushuaia.. and I have a few days in Buenos Aires before heading home… where the usual kayaking, cycling and related fun will continue. In the meantime however I hope you enjoyed coming along for the ride ;-)

Hasta pronto!

p.s. this post almost never happened. My netbook survived many 1000′s of km of ripio only to have me drop it last night after a few beers. Hmmm.  I lost all cursor control… happily it is just the trackpad that is bust, I picked up a mouse for a few $$ this morning and all is good. Phew :-)

Rio Grande…

I have been in Rio Grande two days… Southern Patagonia has been hard going and with successive stormy nights I’m feeling somewhat shagged… besides with some time on my hands before my flight out of Ushuaia I figured this perpetually cold & windy town was at least worth a look.

It is a strange place without a heart, just a lot of intersections, traffic lights and a jumble of concrete. There is a plaza but it barely qualifies as being a center for the town.. a soulless affair geometrically blending concrete and grass. In its favour however the people are very friendly (even if the dogs are not) and when the sun shines one can appreciate the colourful buildings and flavour of the town. My feelings about the place have improved dramatically since I rolled in on that deathly quiet Sunday afternoon, and not just because beer is cheap (Argentine Tierra del Fuego is VAT exempt to encourage economic development).

the Cornish village where I grew up has filled with holiday homes and wealthy retirees that like their village 'just so'. Given an opportunity to move back there I would park one of these in my front yard I think, just to add a little 'edgy flavour' ;-)

The locals have no qualms over brightening up their town with a lick of paint.. blue, green, yellow, red, pink.. you name it. Granted not all the colours work particularly well, I was not keen on the lilac ‘mansion’ on the way into town – given the lack of taste it probably belongs to a footballer -but I do think it would be a good thing if those dreary housing developments in the UK were given a touch of colour…

the burbs are a little 'tatty'.. but interesting

the city has provided playgrounds and ball-courts all over...

.. despite which every spare surface seems to be covered in graffiti. Not the product of talented artists but rather the ugly scrawls of bored youth

a lot of coastal defence construction work going on

The full name of this province is Tierra del Fuego y Islas del Atlantico Sur.. which includes Las Malvinas/The Falklands and South Georgia.. both of which Argentina claims sovereignty over. All over Argentina I have come across occasional reminders of the disputed islands.. a rusty roadside sign in Chilecito, street names and so on. In Rio Grande however the reminders are everywhere. Given the proximity of the town to the islands and the military base I imagine that a number of families lost members during the conflict and feelings over the islands are very much alive.

one of a number of official monuments to the conflict

The history of the various claims over the islands is interesting – I suggest Wikipedia for a summary. Successive Argentine goverments since the fall of the military junta have pledged to use only peaceful means to recover the territory but it is a dispute for which officially there will be no resolution for as long as the islanders wish to remain British citizens… their right to self-determination…. not to mention the recent oil finds .. ;-)

..& one of many unofficial. This one painted on the side of a house. Rough translation "must not forget, Islas Malvinas Argentinas for ever".. or something

Despite all that in more than 3 cumulative months in Argentina I have never felt anything less than welcomed with open arms. I have been confronted with the issue on a few occasions but always good naturedly. It is a problem between governments, not people.

Anyway, tomorrow I shall set sail for Ushuaia. The final leg of this journey. Just 250km which I should deal with in 2 days… with favourable winds!

Tierra del Fuego…

I think he wanted to play at Captain but instead was being forced to deal with The General Public.. oiks like me for example ;-) Unlike the captain himself the chap managing the boarding and taking tickets for the ferry to Porvenir was a grumpy old duffer… or maybe he just hated cyclists. Either way when we had questions or asked where to put bikes we were ignored with nothing more than a brief but dirty look.  An orange overall clad regular crewman came to the rescue and bikes were stowed at the side of the car deck amongst the juggernauts.

Punta Arenas has one of 'those signposts' being the southernmost city on the continental mainland

As the HGVs drove onto the narrow vehicle deck foot passengers swarmed through them in gaps less than a metre wide in their haste to get on board… with no attempt made at separating people from enormous trucks it was surprising no-one was killed.

Punta Arenas does have some interesting old bits.. not many but they are there ;-)

the city waterfront is bleak and visited mostly by stray dogs..

a novel reminder of the dangers of alcohol, lol, in a city with a fine brewery.. as I open another bottle ;-)

I was happy to be on board for the 20mile crossing to Tierra del Fuego. Punta Arenas left me somewhat underwhelmed for the 28hrs I spent there. The place I stayed was very friendly (Hostal Fitzroy for the record) but the folk I came into contact with in the bars and cafes, and indeed from expressions of many people in the street, seemed to be a rather dour lot… I am sure not everyone is like that so maybe it was just me, maybe it is just the difference between the city and the  small & friendly country towns.. or perhaps it was the cold, grey weather. Whatever it was I felt quite depressed the morning I spent wandering in the town centre. Not even an expensive-but-good coffee and slab of cake in an atmospheric little cafe could lift my mood. I missed the simple beauty of the countryside… even the pampa ;-) I was glad when it was time to ride the 6km to the port.

Punta Arenas shipyards

the boat to Porvenir... and a man in an orange t shirt

If the weather is stormy it can take 4hrs or more to cross the Straits of Magellan… I was lucky, the weather was calm so after just 2 1/2hrs we were docking in Porvenir at 7.30pm. It was a pleasant, albeit chilly, crossing. I watched groups of Magellanic Penguins doing what penguins do.. i.e bobbing and diving and fishing… and on the approach to Porvenir dolphins were enjoying themselves in the cold evening light.

holiday snap.. sorry!

Incredibly four of us cyclists rolled off the boat, myself and Sergio the Italian who I came to think of as Lego thanks to square blocky view from behind of his orange panniers and his overwhelmingly orange dress, and an Austrian couple, Philip and Valeska who had come from Alaska (after Europe & Africa) and were a mere 4 1/2 years into a trip of unspecified duration… “probably Japan next” they said. As with the vast majority of cyclists they were all good fun. Sergio had no English and no real Spanish so we got by in a weird mix of Spanish & Italian, the two being just sufficiently similar.

Porvenir

Porvenir, hiding behind a headland, revealed itself to be a windswept pastel wash of metal homes in a bleak location at the western end of Tierra del Fuego. I liked the place. There is no camping in Porvenir itself so as it was getting late I had planned to find the Albergue Municipal for the night,  tip from a friend up the road, but was hijacked on the way into town by a couple in a 4×4 offering rooms for 5000 pesos. At first inspection the beds, in what was a scruffy residential, looked fine so, given the low price, we all agreed to stay before heading out in search of food.

Porvenir

On our return what had appeared to be decent beds turned out to be little better than a few sacks of potatoes disguised with a six-inch layer of dusty blankets that could have easily have been discarded by Magellan 500 years previously as unfit for purpose. I did not sleep well.

the road out of Porvenir

This part of Tierra del Fuego is as stunningly bleak as expected, the road east from Porvenir is a rough dirt affair that goes all the way to the Atlantic coast and Argentina. The first 100km or so the road follows the Bahia Inutil… The Useless Coast. A wonderfully empty, windswept stretch of coastline, populated only by the occasional fishermans hut… “Pampa on Sea”.

a life lost at sea perhaps, one of the local fishermen presumably

It was a good wildlife day as I pedalled east with a fresh breeze at my back.. on my left, the landward side, plenty of wild Guanacos and the occasional Rhea.. and on my right Skuas, the occasional lonely penguin on the beach and a few dolphins off-shore. It is a very dry stretch, just a couple of brackish lagoons dotted pink with flamingos. The only option for water is to beg at estancias along the way.. they are a friendly bunch of people so it is no problem.

an empty stretch of coast, just the occasional fisherman

fishermans huts

I managed 122km before fatigue really started to make itself felt, not so much from the distance but from hammering of the rough ripio. For camping out here it is simply a case of finding a roadside patch with some shelter from the wind but without trespassing across the endless fences onto estancia land. My last night in Chile was a comfortable one just a few metres from the road although with no additional water than that on my bike. The few trucks that passed were a friendly lot, all happy to give a wave and a blast of the horn as I sat eating dinner. No idea where the rest of the gang off the boat were other than Sergio was somewhere up the road ahead, very much on a mission, and the other two were cruising somewhere behind… I was somewhere in the middle :-)

riding Bahia Inutil

wild guanacos...

as with most things on Tierra del Fuego this pickup had seen better days...

.. as had this fishing boat, presumably wrecked during a storm

patchwork metal of a fishermans shack

away from the coast...

sometimes you just have to stop and sleep...

To my horror I awoke to find the wind had done something it rarely does down here… it had swung 180 degs to blow a gale from the south east… I had to rapidly revise my expectation of reaching Rio Grande that day so when, after 5hrs grovelling along in my granny ring, I reached the Argentina border control after just 40km I decided I really had had enough and parked my tent on a patch of waste ground at the back of one of the buildings that forms the San Sebastian border and retired to the cafe for fried meat and chips.. and a liter of beer. Contentment.

must be a million km of fences on Tierra del Fuego...!

Tierra del Fuego is rich in oil... in 1978 Chile and Argentina came to the brink of war over the borders, there are many old minefields...

not the most interesting place to ride a bike, and tough in the wind... but a satisfying part of the journey nonetheless

I had met Ian from England in the 15km of no-mans land between the Chilean and Argentinian border controls. He had the air of a classic randonneur about him.. woollen trousers tucked into long socks and a cable knit roll-neck jumper. I could imagine him lighting up a pipe outside his tent of an evening. His bike was obviously well travelled, a battered old frame in Italian steel with a rusty bell and well worn Brooks. Not a shred of lycra or carbon in evidence :-) We chatted in the wind as long as the pentrating cold allowed before he happily disappeared west with the gale at his back and I struggled on for the last few km…

the South Atlantic... looking to home 13,000km away!

The border control for Argentina is situated right on the Atlantic coast of Tierra del Fuego. An incredibly wild & bleak place with nothing but a cafe, a gas station and the administrative buildings. That afternoon I rode my bike down onto the beach… in the cold mist it was a lonely land without definition.. the dun pampa behind me blending into grey shell studded sands blending into the grey, stormy Atlantic waves in turn blending into the grey sky. With my wheels pointing north-north-east I thought about the Atlantic shores of Cornwall, home, some 13,000km away.

storm debris - above the high water line hundreds of little dead sharks, mummified by the dessicating winds..

Philip & Valeska showed up at the border around 5pm and pitched their tent alongside mine. We bought more beer and sat in the misty cold working up the motivation to cook dinner. They were great company :-) There is a small ‘refuge’ at the border with a hot water tap and a couple of benches… you could spend the night in there, indeed one old toothless but talkative Argentine chap waiting for a ride on a truck did, but with the gas heater permanently on full blast the heat was unbearable to us,  acclimatized as we are now to living outdoors in the cold.

a most salubrious camping spot...

That evening the wind dropped to nothing… it was the prelude to the roughest night I can recall spending in a tent. At midnight I awoke to a severe gale and torrential rain. It was wild. At about 2am I crawled out to add some more pegs to the guys as the noise of the storm increased beyond what I thought was possible. Eventually dropped off back to sleep at 3, to wake at 6 to a deathly calm and freezing cold…

the border has a particular 'flavour' of desolation that I quite liked..

Fearing a return of the easterly wind we were on the road early while conditions were calm for the remaining 80km to Rio Grande. The wind did return but it was a good wind, a breeze from the west. Not enough to avoid pedalling across the flat pampa but it certainly helped :-)

the final border crossing of my journey

oh look at that, more pampa! The road to Rio Grande.

the sun came out but it was still cold... a pleasant day of riding

Little House on the ...... Pampa :-)

Sunday afternoons are generally not a good time to arrive in Argentine towns… devoid of life and with all businesses shut bar the gas station and supermarket Rio Grande was a depressing prospect. Serving only as a center for Tierra del Fuegos mineral wealth it is a concrete affair in a grid layout on  a bleak stretch of coastline… I felt a little uncomfortable riding in, there is a military base and airfield with a large memorial to to the lives lost during the Falklands/Malvinas conflict.. and a big sign saying “Las Malvinas sos Argentina”. I decided to be Swedish for the duration of my stay…

a barren, eroded land. Not a tree for 100's of km!

But.. there is a very cool place to camp that changed everything. At the southern end of town there is a scruffy bit of dockside with some grass next to a big metal shed. The shed serves as the local kayak/nautical club and has showers and a small kitchen. We camped outside for a few pesos with a fine view of some old waterfront sheds and put our feet up in the warm shed with our very friendly hosts. With lots of character and that interesting view I am happy to stay here a couple of days to rest my legs before the final push to Ushuaia. After all, beer is cheap here, Argentine bakeries are generally excellent and despite my British passport the locals are a brilliantly friendly bunch as indeed they have been all over Argentina :-)

I rather like the visually interesting view from my tent

Club Nautico Rio Grande

indoor bike parking :-)

footnotes:

• Tierra del Fuego… the Land of Fire. So called because Magellan spotted the smoke from the fires of the native peoples… indeed originally he named it the Land of Smoke but it’s name was later changed… not dramatic enough I imagine ;-)
• check out Philip & Valeskas website online, you can find them at www.2-play-on-earth.net
• as I write these last words in Rio Grande it is once again pouring with rain and the wind is raging. Another rough night :-)

once more unto the pampa…

The Furious Fifties were howling appropriately as I lay in bed feeling the building rock with each mammoth gust and thinking “oh it could be a bit rough on the road today”. It took quite an effort to wrench myself away from Puerto Natales that morning, I’d found very much a home away from home there with days filled with easy conversation, reading and the drinking of much coffee, tea and beer.. not necessarily in that order through the day :-) I even happened to meet a lass from Montreal which was ace, we had a lot to talk about, I have fond memories of my years there.

a stormy looking Last Hope Sound as I rolled out of Puerto Natales

An American girl, also taking in interest in travel by bike, asked me one evening “like… how many, like, outfits do you have..?“. She had noticed I think that I live in my long sleeve merino top and 3/4 camo longs. I told her my morning suit and dinner jacket were at the dry cleaners… she just looked at me oddly for a moment and then decided maybe it was best to change the subject.. asking me if I had done The Trek. She had and said she thought it wasn’t good enough that the campsites in Torres del Paine did not all have hot water…

In  Puerto Natales I realised how tired I have become, or perhaps just lazy… and with some pressure from friends considered terminating my journey there but my bike was sitting there, laying the guilt on so before I really had time to think about it I was loaded up and rolling out of town in the teeth of a howling gale. I struggled to find my legs and briefly thought of turning back but by the time I had 20km under my wheels I had convinced myself that it made more sense to continue on for the 255km journey to Punta Arenas… it’s all about the mind games when the legs are unwilling.

the wind does strange things to the trees...

So.. back to the pampa, the vastness of bugger all away from the mountains. With the wind from the west I had a vicious cross-tailwind for the first 50km or so which helped me along although only at about 25km/hr average as the gusts sent me skidding all over the place and simple tasks like putting on a windshell for a passing shower became insanely difficult. I still needed to stop at a lonely roadhouse for a ridiculously expensive coca-cola before my legs started to feel good. From there for the next 50km I was able to cruise comfortably at 45km/hr as the road turned directly east for a while. By 1pm I already had 100km under my wheels…. Then the road turned south-south-west across a particularly stark, barren stretch of terrain with kilometres long draggy climbs and of course the gale became a cross-headwind. My speed plummeted into single figures and the day that had started reasonably comfortably became something of a grovel. I didn’t dare retreat into some music for this stretch, despite the road being mostly empty I needed my hearing to be able to avoid the very real risk of being blown under the wheels of the occasional passing truck as I fought to keep my bike upright and on the right side of the road.

the view from my temporary roadside bed

At 2pm I badly needed to rest so sought refuge from the gale in a little metal bus shelter at the junction of an access road for one of the vast estancias that exist out on the plains. I stretched out on the hard bench inside and despite the buffeting & rocking from the wind I was instantly asleep, rare for me, for a much needed siesta. I think if there had been water here I would have been tempted to stay the night…

not a bad little gaff...

I planned to camp for the night, but with no water and no shelter from the wind anywhere I kept going into the evening, arriving at the tiny, windswept little commune of Villa Tehuelches with 150km under my wheels. The village with its brightly coloured metal roofs seems to exist mostly as an administrative center for the surrounding area, it has a small shop on the highway, a large administrative building and bugger all else.

Villa Tehuelches, some nice old metal

I asked the coppers at the checkpoint if there was a place to camp, they said no but there was a hospedaje. Not dirt cheap at 10,000/night but the thought of a decent bed in a private room for a good nights kip out of the wind was attractive. The interior of the place was overwhelmingly tacky… at breakfast I sat next to a large pink flamingo while looking at a wall painted with glossy orange sunset over Torres del Paine. This mural sported non-authentic features such as a lightswitch and door knob. Here I met an Italian cyclist.. it had taken him two days to get here from Pto Natales… I didn’t feel smug, rather I thought he’d been quite sensible… looking fresh as he did while I felt utterly destroyed, lol. Breakfast itself was as bad as the decor, given it was included in the price I tried to eat a decent meal with the miles ahead in mind but the combination of dry bread and weird jam, a mess of runny eggs served with an even weirder topping of strawberry yogurt.. and bad coffee just would not go down.

appropriately 'frontier' street names.. though no signs are really needed for Villa Tehuelches couple of streets

The wind had died to nothing overnight so at 8.30am I rolled out into the eerie calm, legs feeling somewhat empty from the previous days efforts. The wind eventually returned, fresh from the west – a crosswind again but not quite as strong so I was happy to cruise along to random selection of tunes :-) Approaching Punta Arenas at midday the road turned southwest, into a rapidly freshening wind. The final 20km were not fun, wrestling the bike again in the wind with increasing amounts of heavy traffic approaching the urban ugliness that surrounds the city.

a final 100km of nothing. I wondered how the Swiss Ruta 40 guy was getting on...

The girl in the tourist office was unhelpful with regard to my questions re places to stay so instead I just cruised around the downtown core for a while. the first couple of places I spotted were cheap but grisly…bunk beds rammed into airless holes crammed with noisy people, mostly from Israel. I eventually found a quiet, airy place for a few quid a night.. and met another Montreal girl. We drank beer as a priority. Dark ale from the local brewery.. recovery drink :-)

Villa Tehuelches

So, Punta Arenas.. I have not as yet been inspired to pull my camera out. Food and beer being higher priorities after the stiff ride from Puerto Natales. It is not a particularly pretty place… just a relatively modern concrete town, albeit one with some decent ‘frontier’ history.   I am only staying here long enough to catch the boat tomorrow across the Straits of Magellan (oh the romance of it :-) to Tierra del Fuego and the next leg of the journey…

Hasta pronto!

Penne al’Arrabbiata al’Torres del Paine…

“well you’ll still need a tray.”
“No, I will not need a tray. I do not need a tray to kill you. I can kill you without a tray, with the power of the Force – which is strong within me – even though I could kill you with a tray if I so wished. For I would hack at your neck with the thin bit until the blood flowed across the canteen floor…”
“No, no, no the food is hot you’ll need a tray.”
“Oh, oh I see the food is hot, I did not realize..”

I tried to explain to Ennio why I was laughing like an idiot as I cooked dinner in the wind outside my tent… penne al’arrabbiata… every time I make it I think of Eddie Izzards Death Star Canteen sketch, and particularly the inspired piece of Lego animation to go with it <link here>.

the road north from Puerto Natales... 15km of windswept asphalt, and then another 80km of wonderful dirt to Torres del Paine

We were camped on a handy patch of gravel by a stream some 70km north of Puerto Natales on the dirt road that goes to Torres del Paine. A fabulously scenic bit of riding, albeit a hilly one, we had decided to camp just south of the park boundary in the interests of avoiding the crowds and  high park camping fees.. and having an easier day :-)

riding north

The morning dawned grey and cold, just a couple of degrees above freezing but by the time we were on the road after a lazy breakfast the sun was breaking through. It took a while to cover the 20km to the park entrance simply because of the stunning views along the way.

cold and grey

I was uncertain about visiting the park itself… it is expensive, US$30 to get in and once there, with wild camping forbidden, the camping fees for spots accessible by bike are high too… It is also very busy with some 250,000 visitors between December and March. It is “the place” to go down here. In Puerto Natales people always ask,  not “have you been hiking?” but rather “have you done The Trek?” referrring to the standard 5 or 6 day walk, “the W”, along the central massif. If the answer is “no” then the assumption is automatically that you must be going to do The Trek…. *

a stony camping spot with lots of useful big rocks to anchor tents against the wind

lots of climbing...

and with tired legs and a poor surface it's hard to go in a straight line ;-)

fabulous early morning light

wonderful riding..

The road to the park is brilliant ripio, but once across the boundary it deteriorates markedly… a little disappointing to find that for all the millions of dollars in visitor fees it appears to have been many years since a grader passed this way… corrugations 6 inches deep, potholes and rocks that make riding a frustrating experience… the views are nice though :-)

shit road inside... this bit is about the best of it

wonderful stormy skies

The park itself then. I have mixed feelings… like a rich chocolate cake that tastes amazing but so heavy it leaves one with a stomach ache… I like my wilderness raw and empty, Torres del Paine on the other hand is stunning but to a large degree feels like a place for people that prefer their wilderness gently softened on a US$1000/night plate. Indeed you can pay this much to stay in one of the hotels that dot the park…. I looked at the website for one, in describing itself it uses words that appeal to folk with too much spare wedge like “organic” and “in sympathy with the environment“.. all that for a pile of 20yr old concrete blocks with some gas tanks at the back built before such terms had been invented by the tourism industry….

Being a cheapskate of course I camped… one has no choice but to use one of the organised campgrounds. Some of the more remote grounds for trekkers are free but if you want path access for a bike you have to pay… I stopped at one having been told to expect to pay around US$8 which I figured was fair enough. I filled out the forms and the lady says to me “that’ll be 10,000 pesos” (US$20). I choked and said “I’m not paying that.. I’ll cycle to this other one.. 37km away“. “Oh she says that is 10,000 too“. When I said I’d been told that camping was 4000 pesos she said “oh, last years price...” so with inflation like that next year will be 25,000… In the end she said “OK, because you are on a bike I can let you stay for 8000 pesos“. With not much choice I paid up and stomped off to find a gold-plated patch of grass on which to put my tent :-)

poor midday light, but still beautiful

I did have a nice view from my tent and the weather that afternoon was stunning.. for a bit until the cloud came down. I had also said farewell to Ennio and Dina, with lots of time on their hands they were heading off for a few days trekking. Great company on and off the bike I shall miss them but I have little doubt we will meet again in Europe.

the flat evening light better shows the interesting geology with the dark sedimentary caps on the granite towers

I spent a pleasant evening in the company of Jorge, a cyclist from further north in Chile. He had stopped by the campsite shop, where I was charged 1000 pesos for a few bread rolls the size of golf balls, to buy beer. Lordy knows what he paid for them but they went down very well while sitting on the lakeside looking at the mountains. I gave him my spare can of sardines for dinner…. and some fresh herbs brought from the garden back in Pto Natales.

I'm quite happy with cold and wet. It is atmospheric

My plan the following morning was to ride up to the north end of the park and hike up to the base of the towers. The weather had other ideas. It lashed it down all night and I packed my tent in an icy cold mix of sleet and rain. With the cloud right down I explored just 20km north, the dusty road of the previous day having turned to gloopy mud, before having an “ahfuckit” moment and turning around to head back south and the marvellous riding outside the park.

leaving the park ... Patagonia all over... :-)

I passed the embarkation point for the boat that runs 30 minute trips across one of the lakes in the park. The parking lot was full for this ride that costs US$30… $1 a minute, only the space shuttle costs more :-) Honestly the businesses that have licenses to operate in the park are not just pricing services high, they really are having a laugh. In a country where many folk scrape by on minimum wage of about £200/month there is, in Puerto Natales, at least one Hummer.. that most vulgar display of wealth. Having been to the park I now suspect who it belongs to… the owner of that boat. I did a few sums while riding, making an assumption about the fraction of visitors to the park that might use that boat… and came up with a turnover for the short season of about US$2 million. I imagine his house, rather than being clad in zinc-galvanised steel, is platinum plated.

... a battered pickup completes the scene...

Anyway, enough of the rant, hehe. I stopped at a park office to dry my tent in the wind and make lunch on one of the picnic tables. A group of tourists from one of the luxury hotels was lined up at the roadside by their minibus pointing their cameras at the mountains. As I arrived the cameras all swivelled 180 degrees to take a photo of the grubby cyclist. Like the mountains just one more thing to take a picture of and then forgotten in anticipation of the next. The chaps running the tour were nice however and came over to say hello, there was lunch left over after their guests had departed for a walk, probably carried in sedan chairs on the shoulders of Nubian slaves to avoid muddying boots, so I was invited to join them… “but only because you are a biker.. not for anyone else“… ah, two wheels gets you everywhere :-)

the road south...

One of the guys was studying tourism at the Magallanes University in Punta Arenas. Having worked my arse off to get my aero engineering degree I have often wondered what one studies for 3 years on a  tourism degree… beyond the liberal application of key words such as “organic” and “in sympathy with the environment” ;-)

.. and for one brief & wonderful moment ....

So I left the park after just one night. As I pedalled south past the entrance a large tour bus was discharging a bunch of visitors, all lining up to pay their entrance fee. Fifty cameras turned in my direction, fifty shutters clicked and then then all turned away again without even a wave. I am happy with being the subject of a photo… but if I’m going to be looked at by a bunch of strangers in years to come then a wave to say hello is sometimes nice out there on the lonely road.

Moving away from the park the weather brightened, as I looked back down the road to the storm-shrouded mountains the light, for a brief moment, was wonderful. I am a complete cynic sometimes but really, as a place to cycle to it is first class… especially outside the park ;-)

a fine wild camp.... resting with a mug of tea in the late afternoon sun between rain showers

That night I found a perfect spot to camp. I hopped over a fence by a river, pushed my bike about 200 metres upstream towards some cliffs to find a secluded patch of grass by a little waterfall with a fine view of the dry hills to the east. As I cooked dinner a pair of condors were soaring the updrafts over a snow-dusted rocky peak behind my tent and I felt contentment once again.

a fresh dusting of snow on the lower peaks in the morning

The condors were there again in the morning. Just a couple of degrees above freezing and cloudy I was on the road by 8am to enjoy some peaceful riding before the tour buses started appearing.

classic Patagonia... the only thing the camera cannot show is the gale of wind..

30km north of Puerto Natales there is a cave. A few years ago the mummified remains of a Mylodon <link> were found here. The place was declared a national monument, a sign was put up, a restaurant was built and an admission fee charged. I did not feel the need to pay a fiver to look at a cave. It is a dry cave in sedimentary rock.. much like many other caves I suspect. I judged it to be of less than £5 worth of interest to me on the basis that a) I was not allowed to ride the path to the cave, and b) while I sat and ate a packet of biscuits every tourist I saw there took a photo of the sign saying “Cueva del Myloden”.. it was not an interesting sign but if worth a photo to the folk looking at the cave then the cave was probably not that riveting either :-)

I have an ambition to get my bike in a beaver photo.... It remains unfulfilled ;-) so a large wooden ground sloth will have do as a fair substitute for now....

Back in Puerto Natales I stopped at a rather nice vegetarian cafe for a lunch of bread, hummus and salad with a tall milkshake. As I rested my legs and looked scruffy two British couples dressed in hideously coloured Rohan trousers on the table next to mine planned their attempt on “The Trek” with a meticulous detail Montgomery would have been proud of….

*the full circuit of the Paine massif takes longer than The Trek, and is a more challenging walk, 8 or 9 days usually and involves having to make do with a little more hardship like taking water from streams,  cold water and stuff.. it is not so popular with the masses.

square wheels…

I have concrete, possibly square, wheels on my bike… or this is how it seems. The last two days my efforts to leave town have taken me as far as the breakfast table where I invariably settle down with a few good coffees, some wonderful home-made bread, pull my map out, do a little arithmetic and think “ah, I can stay here another day, still make a loop of Torres del Paine and still get to Ushuaia in time for my flight... ” of course the longer I leave it the more dependent I become on favourable winds ;-)

It has not been wasted time. I washed my trousers for the fourth time this journey…;-) and I had my hair cut in a scruffy little barber shop by a small, round balding man in round glasses and a white coat. I enjoy a haircut in such places.. the old fashioned barbers chair, leather cushion cracked and faded with age, the wonderful cut-throat razor with an ivory handle, formica peeling off the work-surfaces on which stands an old glass bottle of disinfectant containing a tortoise-shell comb. I also needed the time off, the chest bug knocked me sideways pretty hard. I have been waking up feeling more exhausted than I went to sleep and then self-medicating with strong coffee throughout the morning :-)

The bike is a hard task-master, it lays a guilt trip on me every time I walk past. It becomes a part of ones identity when travelling. I think this is the reason I find buses so depressing.. to take the bus is to lose ones identity as a cyclist… just one more traveller on the road, hehe. Speaking of which… while the majority of the ‘LP slaves’ are really nice folk among whose ranks I count a number of friends there is sadly a significant proportion that are not. There is a disappointing “fuck you” attitude to both other travellers and the local population among many of the  travelling horde, not just the Israelis and not just the young either. It makes me sad and quite angry, already well on the way as I am to being a grumpy old tw@t ;-)

During one of my chilled out afternoons here I was kicked back on the sofa quietly watching a movie. The place was empty most of the time until a girl, mid-twenties walks in. It is probably best I don’t label her with a nationality or mention the war or anything… <oops>. “Are you watching that?” she says. “Errm, yes” came my reply… “oh right, it’s just that you won’t be able to hear” she says as she pulls out her phone, sits down and proceeds to conduct a loud and lengthy conversation, quite ignoring the fact that there are plenty of places to have a phone conversation.. like the sun lounge at the back or the kitchen.. or the rooms upstairs. Shocked into silence by such rudeness I packed up and left. Not to mention that there are always, unfortunately, going to be folk that will insist, despite protests and requests to the contrary, on packing gear for a trek at 1am in a room with people trying to sleep..  I would quite happily strangle every single one of them if they were even worth the effort…

Anyway, I have a plan to unstick myself. Ennio & Dina are still in town you see. Ennio needed to get a new derailleur hangar fabricated for his bike… that is all fixed now so they’re leaving to cycle up to Paine in the morning.. at 8am. Company is always a motivator so I’ll try and get past the coffee pot for a change :-)

primary colours

The sun came out this evening. There is a little house with a red roof across the street from my window, I have been looking at it for the last couple of days… just enjoying the geometry of the roof and the overhead wires around it.

 

There is also a little green house…

With the clear air down here the light here is fantastic in the late evenings. Despite midsummer being a month ago it still does not get dark until after 10pm. I expect the mid-winter sun would be wonderful…

So while we’re on the topic of primary colours…

a brilliant old digger down at the harbour

Last Hope Sound properly windy again

 

Puerto Natales…

Fireplaces. This was the metaphor that sprang instantly to mind when I thought of how to compare Puerto Natales with El Calafate. No idea why but it works for me. Apologies to any readers who have a cheap and shiny.. either fake brass or marble, fireplace, perhaps from Argos or B&Q if you’re English… that is El Calafate, a bit brash and tacky and possibly with a little porcelain dog on top. Puerto Natales however is the genuine old and weathered wood fireplace, pleasant to the eye with lots of appealing texture… and if there was anything on top it would be a battered old flask of whisky, next to the whalebone pipe.

Puerto Natales

Puerto Natales then is a wonderfully weathered collection of pastel-coloured buildings stretched out along the wild and windswept shores of the romantically named Seno Ultima Esperanza… Last Hope Sound. There is plenty of tourism here but somehow it has been effortlessly absorbed into the tranquil fabric of the town without affecting the natural character of the place one little bit. I wonder if it is because the package tourists are carted directly to Torres del Paine, Puerto Natales perhaps not considered worth the time…

pretty, pastel street corners

The few souvenir shops and outdoor outfitters blend in perfectly with their peeling corrugated steel facades and wonky hand-painted signs. It is a terrific place to simply hang out. The last two mornings, with an outside temperature of just 6 degs C,  I drank coffee next to an ancient wood-burning stove in an interesting little cafe-cum-secondhand bookshop where the tables are papered in old maps & postcards and the tattered and yellowed volumes on the shelves speak of many interesting years of travels for these books that have wound up all the way down here in southern Patagonia. For lunch today I sat on the waterfront for a while and watched a beautiful pair of black-necked swans, each with two fluffy cygnets on board. Link here. :-)

it has been cloudy pretty much 100% of the time... but when the cloud breaks the wonderful Patagonian light is a sight to behold

It was 5 hrs on the bus to get here. My bike went in the hold with no complaints from the driver, although I did have to pay extra. Dave the clearly very bored dog was a proper pain in the ass as I packed my camp early in El Calafate and he followed me to the bus station on my bike and spent the next hour or so sticking his huge head in places where it was not welcome.. mostly other peoples crotches. I disowned him completely. The bus was depressing.. and the for the first hour or so I looked out the window at the pampa and wished I was riding. Then it started to rain, hard, and I decided that I did not really mind that much.

That final evening in El Calafate, the last of the "campstove sessions" I met a very rare animal indeed... a travelling Japanese Banjo player. The music was wonderful, his name however I cannot pronounce let alone write so to me he will always be the Japanese Banjo Dude...

Pto Natales.. some old American metal

Luck was on my side on arrival, I stumbled across a fabulous little place to stay… a brand new hostel run by a lovely New Zealand lady. She’s been in Chile decades and her kids are Chilean so no issue with foreign ownership. Wood floors, spacious rooms, a notable absence of bunks, a great kitchen and copious amounts of hot water would be reason enough to stay… but throw in the breakfast of homemade bread with homemade jams… home-made granola, scrambled eggs and good coffee and you have probably the best place to stop in Patagonia. What it is not is a dirt cheap crashpad so it sees a better quality of traveller, like me for instance….. ;-) but at 10,000 pesos (about £14) it is not expensive either for this part of the world. All that sounds like a bit of a shameless plug for the place… and it is. I promised I would because I have been especially well looked after here as I recover :-) The slightly dubious name is The Singing Lamb (www.thesinginglamb.com) and you can find it at 779 Arauco. Personally I think the Spanish translation is better, El Cordero Canto, but despite that it comes highly recommended if you’re in this neck of the proverbial woods. Especially if you like breakfast.

the fishing fleet is in the background. Many of the boats carry wonderfully evocative names like Mar Bering or Rapa Nui.

I met Ennio and Dina here once again… a major bike mechanical means they never made it directly to Torres del Paine either, instead having to hitch a ride here to engage the services of the local bike shop. I suspect we may all be pedalling north again on Monday into the park for a few days.

Right, that is it for the words. I am being lazy so now I’ll just throw some pictures at you, give you a flavour of the place.

I like places where not even the street lights can stand up straight

it is supposed to be always windy here... but for a morning there was not a breath...

 

there is an empty beer bottle in the bottom of every boat in South America I have decided.

 

as with harbours worldwide, the shore is littered with tyres and rusting drums. Here though no plastic, lots of glass and strangely.. a lot of discarded clothing. Happily without bodies inside.

Last Hope Sound not living up to its wild and windy reputation...

 

The streets are spotless, but if garbage cans looked like this in towns at home people still wouldn't use them. They'd probably be vandalised within a few hours.

some more nice American metal, in this case a second-generation ('74-'78) Ford Mustang Coupe complete with fluffy dice, although the stripes looked like they had been painted on by a 7yr old...

weathered corrugated steel, pastel colours.. and a pick-up. Could only be Chile.

 

nice old boneshaker. People ride bikes around town here.. fuel is expensive

the local bikeshop...

shoes.. for sale..

dramatic skies

the camp stove sessions…

I must have picked up some bad karma along the way I think, possibly something to do with my comments about the tourists here in El Calafate.. hehe, I was expecting some stronger words but the worst I’ve been accused of so far is being a “a little wry..” ;-) I’ll come back to that in a mo but first the karma… you see I have spent the best part of the last few days curled up in my sleeping bag. That cold I collected did the one thing that is always a risk for me, being asthmatic, and the worst thing it could have done – it went into my chest. So for the last few days I’ve barely had the strength to go and pee on the bushes near someone else’s tent let alone ride a bike… Still, there is always a bright side… I have had time to get to know a number of different folk all passing through and all with interesting stories to tell. So when not dozing in my bag I’ve been wrapped up in every stitch of clothing I have sitting around the camp stove with a bunch of other ‘vagrants’. Could be worse :-)

beer and charango

Today, Wednesday, was my mental ‘crunch’ day. If I felt OK I’d plan to get on my bike tomorrow morning. If I didn’t then experience tells me it’s going to be quite a few more days before I am fit to ride…. I didn’t feel OK so, heavy of heart.. and legs.. I dragged myself to the bus station this morning and bought a ticket to Puerto Natales. If I need time off the bike I want to spend it somewhere visually interesting where I can enjoy some photography. Puerto Natales I think is going to be that place. Who knows I may even be taken to task again, as I was in Ancud, for only photographing the “ugly”, aka visually interesting, parts of town… ;-)

a nicely fatigued pan... popcorn inside :-)

It means I may miss Torres del Paine, but c’est la vie… I enjoyed some fantastic, uncrowded wilderness on the carretera and out in the Valle de los Exploradores  so I cannot complain too much, and I am still excited about riding the coast of Tierra del Fuego :-) Although I could always change my flights and extend my stay over here of course….

in El Calafate I photographed.... some wires and poles. Inspiring stuff ;-)

I learned during one of these camp stove beer and charanga sessions that another name for the Rhea, the large flightless bird that inhabits these parts, is the Ñandu [pronounced "nyandoo"]. They make good eating apparently but the primary reason the topic came up is thanks to motociclista Kevin.. you see during the many long & lonely hours on his bike crossing the pampa he has been polishing a joke of which he is mightily proud. I promised I would share it online and bring him the fame he deserves. Here it is:

q: what do you call a dead ñandu…?
a: a  ñan-don’t

hmmm, well.. yes… there you go.  I did promise…. of course it only works in English… and only after a few drinks ;-)

the Deutsche cutlery & charango duet :-)

Thanks to illness I have had too much time to think too… at times about why I bother to write. It gives me something enjoyable to do… I worry a little about what some folk may think of my words at times but I shouldn’t I think… I know it works both ways, I have little doubt that folk look at me as I walk down the street and think “look at that skinny bugger that can’t even be bothered to wear trousers that are clean and not torn….” but I don’t mind.. I think the slightly raggedy look adds a nice edge to my otherwise perfection <cue coughs and sniggers> :-)

Well, that is it for today. I have little doubt 5hrs on a bus will be a depressing experience but no more depressing than staring, short of breath, at the inside of a tent. When feeling rough it is too easy to forget the wonderful times of the past few weeks. My blog is useful for that at least, even if nobody else ever read it I can skim back over the words and pictures and remember how brilliant it has been :-)

Hasta Puerto Natales!

this is Dave the dog, he has an inverse superman complex. His friends Mutley and David Bowie provide some entertainment... especially when Sid Sparrow is around

p.s… oh, another search engine click-through gem… “i don’t want to be a skinny bugger..” hehe, says a lot about the content  perhaps!

algunas palabras de El Calafate…

No photos today,  just words… I am uninspired by El Calafate  but for you my dear reader it is still a bumper weekend :-)

Back, briefly, to the pampa… when I described it as being a place of bugger all I wasn’t being entirely honest.. aside from the rocks and dust I had completely forgotten about the wildlife I encountered. The enormous rhea that ran alongside me on the road for a moment with 13 little ones in tow, or the guanacos that roam the steppe. There is also some decent bird life out there, the raptors are the most visible but bursts of song from the scrub hint at more delicate species. That rhea was intriguing, I did not know they laid so many eggs, thinking perhaps there is some sort of nursery arrangment going on as is sometimes the case with penguin colonies but a quick look at wikipedia indicates anything up to 60 eggs in a clutch. Gawd, I am only a twin and I think my folks had a hard enough time with just that.

As if you hadn’t already figured it out I camped here in El Calafate… I am not generally a fan of official camping sites, especially at this time of year.. they can be noisy and crowded, and peeing at night on the bushes near  your, or indeed someone elses tent is generally frowned upon so I tend to avoid. This one however suits my needs.. cheap, shady and pleasant with wifi… I am camped on a patch of grass by a stream from where I can observe various members of my species… In the mornings I can watch the big, burly viking character across the stream carefully attending to his hair with a comb, lol… or the wrinkled old guy with his tiny bivy tent that sits in his car reading all afternoon. In the evening there is the young guy of about 18 that cannot play the guitar to save his life yet strums away idiotically nevertheless, head bobbing to some rhythm… just not a rhythm that bears any relation to the noises coming from his guitar. I feel qualified to comment as I cannot play the guitar either so am experienced in what constitutes not being able to play.
There are no sportscars in rural Argentina so many of the young folk wave willies with their tents when on holiday. Parked not far from me is a huge, bright red armadillo of a palace that if it was a car would be something vulgar.. like a Hummer. It is home to just two small, skinny  folk. The tent next to that is a shiny new Ford F250 pickup of a thing, the one with the double rear axle, that could do with its own electricity substation to power all the gadgets. It is most amusing to watch these constructions buckle and twist in the wind despite the shelter of the trees.

As for the Perito Moreno glacier… some may think me a fool but I didn’t feel US$50 worth of need to see it given past glacier experiences either mountaineering or by bike. Spectacular it may be but when I think of the wonderful, wild and lonely places my bike takes me for free I lose the desire to join with the other tourists condemned to otherwise stare numbly at the places in between from behind the windows of a bus. So, Sunday today… day of rest… oh I must stop with these biblical references like a good little atheist.  I have a cold.. a breakfast of coffee and Beechams has fixed me up a little but I shall not be rushing to do much more than just chill out today, and sort out my food supplies for the next few days ride south. The online forecast indicates southerly winds are on the menu. Bah!:-| Ennio & Dina showed up last night absolutely exhausted… the westerly winds were brutal yesterday, so I imagine some beer, or possibly wine, will feaure in the day at some point too :-)

Now, just as an aside and nothing to do with Patagonia or cycling… at least to my knowledge… One of the fun features of wordpress is that I get to see the search terms folk use if they click through to my blog from a search engine. Today I saw a cracker.. “ponies that are for sale but easy to ride on bus in canada”.. I kid you not. I suspect there is definitely a gap in the market there for you entrepreneurial pony breeding types. I also get a lot of traffic from folk searching on the term “sadly”…. hmmm.

ciao!

p.s. I must also find some decent loo roll today. Fed up of the shite on sale here in single rolls, it goes to pieces at the mere sight of an arsehole… well, mine anyway ;-)

p.p.s  24/01/11… ok one photo, this is the El Calafate collaborative Swiss-Anglo-Belgian-German cyclists asado project… more meat out of shot but the concept of putting veg on the grill is one completely alien to the locals, there was much bemusement. Since writing the first draft of this post Kevin showed up from El Chalten too.. with a bottle of the locally brewed spirit.. known as ‘leggy’ (unsure of spelling). Not sure how much of what I feel today is being sick and how much a late night with alcohol. Either way feeling crap, hoping to get out of here tomorrow (the 25th) :-)

the Pampa…

“ach, the fuc*ing wind…!” is a phrase I have heard often over the last few weeks.. it is usually the second, if not the first thing cyclists I meet coming from the south say to me. Regardless of their native language they at least have this much English. Statistically it is true, going to the north is harder… in theory, the winds down here mostly blow from the west/northwest. It doesn’t always work like that however.

a long way from home

a successful firewood collecting mission

I somewhat reluctantly unstuck myself from El Chalten on the 7th day… nothing biblical about it however. I felt as if I had run aground there, I made friends, drank beer.. and wine, enjoyed great slabs of beef cooked over the embers of a fire under the stars of the southern sky… all that romantic sort of stuff, as well as the amusement of watching various inebriated males fail miserably to ingratiate themselves with a group of 4 French girls that joined us by the fire :-)

the valley at El Chalten

I felt a little sick in my stomach as I rolled out of town with 6 litres of water on board, having suffered crossing the vast deserts in the north I knew I was likely to suffer again in the wastes of Patagonia. Dramatic eh! My hope was that the winds would be favourable, from the northwest….

20km east from El Chalten...Cerro Fitzroy looking rather magnificent

Indeed theory was borne out by reality as I climbed out of El Chalten onto the appropriately named Meseta del Vientos, a pair of Condors flew alongside me briefly as I enjoyed the pressure of the gale at my back. 10km later and clear of the mountains that changed. The wind shifted to the southwest.. a cross wind for the 90km stretch out to Ruta 40 where I would turn south.

the road east. Pampa is really just another word for "bugger all". Lots of "bugger all". Big sky country :-)

Great gusts tore into me like cannonballs, sending me skidding across the road and into the gravel on the opposite verge. With little to relieve the monotony of the pampa and in an attempt to block the roaring of the wind in my ears I plugged myself into my iPod, found a small gear and plodded across the wastes.

looking south... some scrubby bugger all, then lago Viedma, then some more bugger all. Great icebergs could be seen on the lake, the children of a vast glacier just visible in the far southwest corner.

As the day wore on I watched my shadow grow shorter then longer again.. and then disappear altogether as the sky clouded over and what little colour existed in the landscape was erased altogether by the gloomy light.

curves in the road are all relative out here. in this case the sign warned of a barely perceptible change in direction of a half-degree or so.

I joined Ruta 40, last seen many 1000′s of km away in the north of Argentina, with empty legs. Now into the wind I grovelled a further 20km before calling it quits for the day at 110km and pitching my tent behind what was probably the only roadhouse for 100′s of km.

depending on your persuasion this sign may mean "paintbrush", "desert island", "stupid cheese-string man from the TV commercial", "bizarre sexual fetish" or simply "windy". I thought of all of those in the space of about 30 seconds as I rode by so not sure what that says about me.

'good old' Ruta 40.. last seen 1000's of km away in the north. It hurt then too ;-)

I'll include this pic too simply 'cos I like it. I shouldn't grumble about Ruta 40, at least this bit is paved :-) Plastic waterbottle ethically scavenged from the garbage in El Chalten ;-)

Here the staff were not overly friendly but nevertheless were quite happy to take large sums of money from visitors. English to the core I chose a slab of rather nice looking walnut cake from the counter to have with my afternoon tea. US$5. For a piece of cake. I didn’t buy anything else. Judging by the steady trickle of tour buses that stopped by that evening I suspect they do rather well out here.

the roadhouse at La Leona

there was a sign saying it was a 'historic site'... but I think that means simply that before it was built there was just dust. No great civil war took place or anything exciting like that ;-)

The wind raged all night, I finally dropped off in the small hours before waking at 5am to… silence. A rare and unusual absence of wind. I should have got going there and then but I didn’t. I was too comfortable in my sleeping bag so spent the next hour and forty-five minutes trying to decide if I should get up or not. I did, eventually and hit the road around 8am.

desert highway...

The wind when it came stayed light most of the day, a rare occurrence in southern Patagonia. I thought I might manage without my iPod but I only lasted 45 minutes. The monotony of the road, asphalt at least, and the long, draggy climbs slowly sapped my willpower and my legs.
Early in the day I met a Swiss cyclist going north. His gleaming bike and spotless gear suggested he was only at the start of his journey and had yet to enjoy some ripio. His bike was amazing, lots of gleaming carbon and anodized bits with hydraulic discs and suspension. The Russian guy would definitely have considered it worth  stealing… ;-)

“I am going all the way north on Ruta 40” he said. Keen to find out about road conditions south to Torres del Paine I asked if he had been there. “No, it is not on Ruta 40” came the answer. “ah, OK, will you go to El Chalten or ride the Carretera Austral?” I asked. “No, it is not on Ruta 40 .,..“… “ah but it is very beautiful with lots of water and the trees shelter you from the wind” I answered. “No” he said, “I think the Carretera is a bad road, it is too slow“. Somewhat more imaginative than his previous replies but I said no more, thinking only “bah, you’re welcome to Ruta 40“. Down here Ruta 40 is mostly monotonous windswept desert for a very long way… pretty much as it is in the north, just colder. For cycling.. it sucks… in my opinion ;-)

the timing of the arrival of the Swiss Ruta 40 guy was perfect for this photo!

With 30km to go to El Calafate the wind returned.. and from its usual direction, the west. Unfortunately the road at this point goes west too. I grovelled, arriving in town around 3pm. I met Jonathan & Monica on the way in, one of the Swiss couples I’ve been playing leapfrog with over the last few weeks. They sensibly took 3 days to cover the 220km from El Chalten. I could barely stand up when I got off my bike.. but when alone with nothing else to do but ride I just ride….

"I'm fooked..." a roadside siesta

As for El Calafate… well.. it is hideously touristy with shop names like “Del Turista Chocolates” and “Arte Indio” selling mass-produced souvenirs, and the streets rustle with large manicured people adorned in colourful gortex and daypacks worn on their chests with Nikon camera straps proudly displayed. It is a good thing they are here because it means they are not elsewhere.. in the quiet little pueblos I like so much. One can walk into a shop and hear an Englishman talking to the locals in the same slow, loud & patronising English used by the plebs on the Costa del Sol, as if speaking like this somehow mitigates their laziness in not even bothering to learn a few cardinal numbers.. despite which most of the locals speak English anyway. Oh and when will they all wake up to the fact that the tap water is fine and buying armfuls of plastic mineral water bottles is not sound practice :-| I wish I had stayed a little longer in El Chalten which is still a mere pueblo with a bakery and mountain shop. Perhaps the lack of ready cash there is a good thing. There is a mitigating factor in El Calafate however.. food. Lots of it. Feeling in need of a serious meat fix I headed to a parilla advertising an all you can eat for US$15. It was worth it. A hungry cyclist can eat quite a lot. I tucked into chunks of beef, spicy sausage, ribs of lamb and a chicken breast while watching a lady in North Face & heels, gold jewellery clanking, take photos of her tour group, her dinner, the salad bar, the waiter, the tablecloth and the grill.. and quite possibly the toilets too :-)

Calafate has a pretty little church at least amongst the modern restaurants and souvenir shops....

As I write this by my tent with a mug of coffee I am thinking today is a good day for washing some clothes and drinking coffee. I have to decide if it is worth the effort of washing my riding shorts… probably not, the dirt is so ground in it may as well stay there. I may also try and find a new lucky hat but so far all I have seen are caps emblazoned with “Patagonia” or “Ruta 40″ or “Tourist Inside”.. well, maybe not that latter but as good as. Tomorrow I may visit the glacier 80km west.. or I may not. It is said to be stunning but I have climbed on, in and over many glaciers in my time… and a copy of the Lonely Planet I saw in Cochrane described it as a “life-affirming experience” which is typically the kind of bollocks wheeled out by the LP that makes me want to go in the opposite direction… it had better be pretty much gold-plated too for what the cost is.. US$25 for the bus and another US$25 for the park entry. The wind is forecast to be 100km/hr later and I have no interest in a 160km out and back ride.

From here I want to go south then west to Torres del Paine. The forecast online for the next 5 days is for southerly winds…. On the map the road looks hard.. not that it is anything unusual, 4 or 5 days, depending on winds, of ripio across the pampa. No supplies and possibly very little water. I have not yet met a single cyclist that has gone this way unfortunately… other cyclists are the best source of reliable road information. Drivers haven’t a clue ;-)

p.s. to save you the trouble of telling me… yes I know I am a tourist too and I write like an arrogant cock sometimes… I enjoy it… ;-)

p.p.s oh I just remembered something else… on ruta 40, a generally empty road I was nearly taken down by a pair of Landcruisers passing at high speed just inches away. They were emblazoned with huge stickers saying “Expedición Ruta 40″… now, I always thought the idea of an expedition was to face a challenge or explore something new… to drive a Landcruiser from the north to the south of Argentina on ruta 40 at the time I did not think met those criteria, though now I realise of course it is a challenge… that of not falling asleep at the wheel and killing a few cyclists along the way. Pillocks…

a salad of meat and beer…

It is strange how not being able to do something increases ones desire to do that very thing… in this case cycling, the motivation is back after a couple of days hiking and a couple of days chilling… but there is little point in rushing south from here. I have to go back into Chile to continue, either to Torres del Paine and at any rate to reach Ushuaia, isolated as it is on a little wedge of Argentina surrounded by Chile on the Grande Isla de Tierra del Fuego… the problem is not one of injury or bicycle problems, rather Chiles borders down here are closed. The goverment is hiking the price of gas by 17%, it is already as expensive as the UK in southern Chile so an extra 17% in a primarily rural economy with cold temperatures and vast distances to travel is going to hurt. The roads are blockaded by protests.. burning tyres, petrol bombs etc, that kind of thing. The police are using tear gas and people have died. I am sure I can sneak across on a bicycle and I have every intention of trying.. but given it is only about 1100km to Ushuaia I do not need to rush to do so. Today instead I have an appointment with a friend from New York, a fire, a steak and a beer.. or two. An Argentine salad if you like… of meat and beer. The sun is shining, the wind is howling. Life is good :-)

a clear and cold evening, the summit of Fitzroy looms over town

A few pics follow… but not many – this connection is as slow as the glaciers coming down from the icecap.  Yesterday I made the 25km return hike up to Fitzroy. On the trail at first light around 5.30am I had the place to myself. Magic. It was only on the way back as it started to rain and the wind began to howl that I met the guided day hike tour groups, shuffling their way upwards in lines of heavy boots… I felt ashamedly smug as I skipped my way past in my running shoes with a little dry bag over my shoulder :-) Just 10 minutes from the trailhead and looking forward to a siesta the trail became busy… people already out of breath and asking me if there was much more climbing to do… “errm, yes, a little..” was my answer. After all one doesn’t want to discourage folk by telling them they have another 12km and a lot of steep uphill to get to the amphitheatre ;-)

unfortunately a cloudy morning but Cerro Fitzroy is a magnificent peak nevertheless

beautiful blue waters at the foot of Fitzroys cliffs... this lake flows into another, more blue, that has a surface littered with scrps of floating ice from the glacier above.

shortly after I arrived the clouds descended and a light snow began

nicely twisted trees somewhat reminiscent of Cornwalls north coast :-)

Back in El Chalten the logic of touring on a simple, understated bike like my Nomad was illustrated to me perfectly. I found a Russian chap inspecting it closely, he turned to me and said “where did you buy this bicycle, in South America no?”. I explained it was English and, in my opinion, a really rather excellent bicycle. “How can this be” he said, ” it is so very simple and it does not even have suspension, you are crazy to pay more than 200 euros for this bicycle”. I didn’t try and explain the concept of a quality handbuilt steel frame able to absorb the worst of the bumps and durable, high quality components for touring. The point was he didn’t consider it would be worth nicking even when parked alongside the local beaters and ATBs :-) Admittedly the skinny steel frame and thumbshifters look old fashioned… and it is useful perhaps that I rarely clean it apart from the essentials like drivetrain and brakes. The matt black finish buried under a coating of dust is highly effective at disguising what is, in my unashamedly biased opinion, a really rather nice bike :-)

here's trouble...a rare pic of yours truly in the backup hat ;-)

to El Chalten & the land of the gloriously shagged… (American truck)

I lost my lucky hat… the one that, when I wear it, has women falling at my feet… <cough>.  I lost it in the gale of wind crossing Lago O’Higgins on the boat. But it’s OK, being well prepared as always I have a back-up hat, a woolly one from home in Cornwall. Given its origins I may well find it to be attractive to birdshit instead :-)

Villa O'Higgins... a wet afternoon

Villa O'Higgins

I was happy to stay in Villa O’Higgins as long as necessary, it was a great place and with access to a woodburning oven I baked fresh bread.. perfect for a cold and stormy day. The weather eased enough for the boat depart on Thursday, but earlier than the usual time so it was a hideously early start, riding the very last 7km of the Carretera Austral to the lake in a light rain at stupid o’clock in the morning.

the boat to Candelario Mansilla... look at all those bikes! This crossing is very much a cyclist bottleneck

It is a 2 1/2hr journey south down the lake and a hideously expensive one at that. With the sole concession on the lake and with a steady trickle of tourists on package tours wanting to see glaciers and the like the price has been jacked up from 12,000 pesos just a couple of years ago to 40,000 now.. US$80. But they did offer a free paper cup of coffee, instant of course….

The rain cleared shortly after departure and it was enjoyable ride down the lake provided one did not think too much about the somewhat alarming list to starboard and the rather knackered, mostly deflated zodiac hanging limply over the stern…

leaving Chile by the back door...

We, as in Nina, myself and another cyclist, Patrick, left the boat at the slipway and stunningly situated immigration post known as Candelario Mansilla. With passports stamped we were off. 17km of steep, loose, stony track through the mountains to the border with Argentina followed by another 7km of nicely tight and technical singletrack in a forest.. this section was fantastic and frustrating in equal measure. Some nice twisty, rocky and rooty sections to test bike handling skills… interesting on a fully loaded bike.. but also sections ankle deep in stinking, oozing mud and to finish sections of sunken trail, maybe 2 feet deep and not wide enough for panniers to fit through. A lot of lifting and hauling. I managed to ride about 90% of it but wrenched my shoulder badly flying over the handlebars while trying to ride one section I should probably not have even attempted. It will need attention when I get home I think but there you go, occupational hazard despite which it was a lot of fun.

bridges needed a little attention...

...or in some cases a lot of attention. It was a 5ft drop to the river..

terrific, traffic free riding :-)

.. and so a return to Argentina. Patrick says 'cheese'...

I rode the whole section  maybe a little too aggressively getting myself and my bike filthy in the process… Nina showed up at the northern end of Lago Desierto about 40 minutes after I did looking absolutely pristine… women, how do they do that? Patrick was a little slower again, handicapped on the rough stuff by his drop handlebars and relatively skinny 700C rubber.

singletrack...

Lago Desierto.. Fitzroy sadly hiding in the cloud at the southern end.

It was pleasant dozing in the sun by the Argentine immigration shack while waiting for the boat to the southern end of the lake. When it arrived it turned out to be a tour boat so when it finally departed at 7pm it wasn’t a case of straight down the lake, rather a lot of faffing and messing about at the edges of the lake while the tourists on board climbed and elbowed their way over other to take pictures of a couple of very average, and very small waterfalls.

mm, quite nice here, evening views riding south from Lago Desierto

Back on dry land and back firmly in tourist land. Los Glaciares is Argentinas most popular national park. There is a camp ground near where the boat landed but being holiday season it looked hideous with kids running around so we rode a few km further and camped in the peaceful forest much to the bemusement of the occupants a passing tourist bus that stopped to look at a nearby waterfall. Honestly you’d think some folk had never seen feral cyclists… or waterfalls for that matter.

cool bridges on the road south to El Chalten

When he’s not riding Patrick fights forest fires back home in his native Canada so it was no suprise he was keen to make a big campfire, and one that he managed to revive again for breakfast. It was much appreciated, the morning dawned very cold and cloudy so it was nice to warm toes and dry wet shoes over breakfast :-) Amazingly Patrick works with the helicopter pilot that dropped myself and 3 friends deep into the Purcell Mountains, BC, for a wild climbing expedition back in 2001. Small world :-)

another cold, bleak morning. Great place to ride though :-)

From camp to El Chalten… 37km or rough dirt road. Quite beautiful and with a fresh tailwind. El Chalten itself is a small town of about 3000 people in a fabulously windswept location. The last few km into town we flew over the ripio at 50km/hr with a screaming gale at our backs :-)

Argentine ripio. No different to Chilean but this morning I found it hurt more than the Carretera. Tiredness perhaps or memory of being beaten up by many many km of the stuff in the north of Argentina

to El Chalten

Thanks to it’s location El Chalten is also the trekking capital of Argentina. If the town has a soundtrack it is the tap tap tap of trekking poles on the pavement. Zip-off trousers and shiny North Face branded gear much in evidence here… The town only really ‘started’ about 25yrs ago. It is a strange mix of outback scruff and modern tourist facility. Small buildings sprout from the scrubby landscape and the town has quite a collection of battered old caravans firmly tied down against the wind. It feels quite strange to be back on the tourist trail but the excellent bakeries and reasonably well stocked supermarkets are quite welcome. There is no bank but there is an ATM… empty of money 99% of the time. Strangely the Argentinians have not cottoned on to the fact that lack of ready cash is throttling the local economy.

the great cliffs of Cerro Torre hiding in the clouds...

out for a hike :-)

I bumped into Kevin the motorcyclist again here. He’s good company, we got quite drunk on some fine, dark Argentine ale :-)

El Chalten... caravans tethered in the wind

El Chalten

So, as I write I have been here 2 days. Today is a much needed rest day, I have a significant sleep debt and my hands, face, feet and so on are raw and bleeding thanks to the cold, the alternating dry & wet and the wind so I need to start getting that healed. Yesterday was a terrific 5hr hike up to Cerro Torre and tomorrow I will do the same to Fitzroy, 8hrs away. Nina and Patrick leave town tomorrow but I have company yet in the form of Ennis & Dina who made it here yesterday after taking an extended boat ride to the O’Higgins glacier :-)

Hurrah! Argentina, the land of the gloriously shagged American pickup

I am certain it is just fatigue, motivation to ride is low today. I suspect however may be partly the thought of returning to Argentinas ruta 40. Last ridden long ago in the north I think the stretches ahead of me maybe just as arid and difficult, albeit somewhat colder… I am hanging on to the thought that some decent stretches of it, in theory, should be blessed with fresh tailwinds :-)

.. and the not so shagged. This one was for sale... now there is temptation ;-)

Jedi cat & the end of the Carretera Austral

Surely cows need to sleep too? It was a question I asked myself many times while camped on a farm one night out from Cochrane. Throughout the night, like a foghorn going off and with the same mechanical regularity. Every 5 seconds or so a great bellow that not even my earplugs could attenuate. Still, it was not all bad.. a night in a beautiful spot on the banks of a river, oven-fresh bread courtesy of ‘farmers wife’ and a terrific chunk of BBQ’d chicken to take with me on the road next day.

Cochrane.. weathered.

sadly Chile lacks Argentinas fantastic old American cars and pickups. Just boring but functional Japanese stuff in evidence

I had needed an extra day of rest in Cochrane, feeling quite run down with a bit of a sore throat. The Carretera and its consistently difficult surfaces and weather was slowly wearing me down… but no matter, Cochrane was a fine place to hang out, muy tranquilo.. nothing much in town to look at as such.. except perhaps the ‘supermarket’.. stocking the usual limited selection of foodstuffs it was nevertheless reassuring to know that, should it be necessary, one could pick up a handgun or rifle along with a selection of truck tyres with the weekly grocery shop.

fine views on the road southwest from Cochrane. This pic so needs a cyclist in it...

Leaving town I met Kevin the motorcyclist from New Jersey. He was just in the business of rolling up his bivy by the side of the road where he’d spent the night. He had been on the road for 2 years from home, ridden all the way down, taking his time, exploring all the little places in-between. Having had so much time to think, accumulate baggage and so on he said he was increasingly keen to trade his well-worn and battered motorcycle for the “simple, elegant purity of a bicycle” (his words!)… his offer of a trade was only half joking but I said if he could wait until Ushuaia, he is headed that way too eventually, I might be persuaded to sell him mine ;-)

it could have been a fine descent but the headwind was so strong and the surface so soft I pedalled hard all the way down. At just 15km/hr..

It was a slow day out of Cochrane, reluctant legs as always after more than a day off, a lot of climbing and a fresh headwind so I camped early, turning west off the Carretera after 48km to ride another 3km along a wooded track to reach the aforementioned farm. Arriving at 2pm gave me lots of time to slob out in the shade with some reading and multiple mugs of tea :-)

mmm, thank you Farmers Wife .. :-)

The afternoon of rest paid off, my legs were in much better shape in the morning. It was a beautiful day for riding too.. warm in the sunshine with a pleasantly chill wind coming down from the icecaps to the west. A headwind but not too vicious. Ideal for the final 89km to Tortel but the headwind and poor state of the ripio meant I needed 7 1/2 hrs to get there.. 5 1/2hrs riding time.

coffee brewing...

a fine day to ride

a rare sighting of a road grading machine. It makes bugger all difference, just redistributes the rocks...

Leaving the rainshadow of the icecap the terrain turned back to thick rainforest, humid in the afternoon heat. The final 20km or so followed along the banks of the Rio Baker, small settlements in the wilderness on the opposite bank of the very full, somnolent river combined with the heat & humidity gave the scenery something of a Heart of Darkness feel.

descending with the Rio Baker

small farms along the banks of the river

Met a friendly Dutchman (aren’t they all?!) on arrival and went off for a terrific slab of local salmon and a number of beers. Peter was hitch-hiking his way north. It had taken him 4 days just to get out of Villa O’Higgins…

Tortel

Tortel then,.. a remarkable place. A village of houses perched on the steep sides of a series of rocky bays. The location is incredible, the sole reason for the place is the Cypress that grows on the mountainsides in the area. Between 1954 and 2003 the only access was by sea or air. A spur off the Carretera Austral connected it to the rest of Chile in 2003.

Tortel

There are no streets as such rather the hillsides and waterfronts are covered with a tracery of wooden walkways. The entire town is built from the same fragrant cypress which gives the town its reason to be. One wonders how frequently house fires occur.. There is a firestation.. a small red hut on the hillside with a small wooden motorboat, red hoses coiled on the cabin roof, moored below.

Tortel

Tortel

Tortel

Tortel, muy tranquilo

Tortel... the solution to a herb and vegetable garden when you live on a cliff

an engine waiting for a boat.. or a boat waiting for an engine..?

It rained during the day I spent exploring, the clouds came down thick over the enormous snow-capped cliffs behind the village and great waterfalls, cascading thousands of feet down the almost sheer rock faces, sprang into being where none were before. Beautiful.

Tortel

Tortel

Tortel.. the vuillage spreads around a few bays, all connected by cedar boardwalks

cypress logs are ripped into boards using a chainsaw on a slider.

old & new... fresh & weathered...

Tortel

Tortel

From Tortel the road crosses a steep mountain pass, following the Rio Vagabundo, to Puerto Yungay 50km later. Puerto Yungay barely registers on the map.. a couple of huts and a slipway.

the road to P.Yungay

a heck of an engineering job, the road is carved out of the mountains

I arrived, along with Ennio and Dina that I first met on New Year in good time for the third and last ferry of the day at 6pm.

P.Yungay.. some huts and a goalpost..

a pile of Lego bricks in P.Yungay.. the ferry is a free ride as a fundamental connection on the Carretera

Alonside the slipway there is a small kiosco run by a precocious 8yr old and her mellow father. The first thing the little girl, whose name completely escaped me, said to me was “como se dice ‘once’ en Ingles”. “Eleven” I said. She proudly counted to eleven in English before introducing me to the first of her pets… a long suffering shaggy dog decked out in a pair of pink tracksuit bottoms.. the creature had very much an air of having given up protesting such treatment long ago as it shuffled around the yard between periods of dozing in the shade. The second pet I suspect will be long suffering but at present is too young. A fluffy little grey kitten with a sneeze. The third had neither trousers nor a sneeze… a tiny blue hummingbird, dead since it flew into the window, housed in a little nest above the wall clock. She told me she was the only little girl in the village  as I sipped at my coffee and watched an upturned icecream tub with little grey paws shuffle across the floor. Yup, the kitten is in for a ‘busy’ time…

el gato Jedi..

An hour later on a cold, bleak evening the ferry dropped us and the one motorvehicle on board at a remote slipway. We camped for the night just one km further on at the top of another, disused slipway.

bleak...

my artfully distressed and weathered kitchen windbreak. No doubt if I could get it to London someone would pay a wedge for that so they could use it at Glastonbury ;-)

just so you know whose house this is...

The final 100km of the Carretera Austral are a suitably wild and woolly ending. A fabulous, albeit rough  mountain track that carves it’s way through a wonderful wilderness of forests, sub-alpine scrub and dark, windswept lakes in the shadow of snowcapped peaks.

heavy traffic on the Carretera

initially alongside the Rio Bravo...

.. with the occasional farm carved out of the forest..

.. before climbing steeply...

... & climbing some more...

.. into the misty mountains

Some very steep climbs along the way test the legs but reward the effort with terrific views. It is a very quiet stretch, I saw just 2 vehicles all day.. and a few horses and the giant hares that are everywhere down here. For lunch I sat on some old bridge timbers while watching the antics of a small rock from within the shelter of my rainjacket.

spectacular breaks in the cloud after lunch

& some excellent dead trees

I park my bike with pride...

I had 70km under my wheels for the day when I experienced an overwhelming desire to sit by a windswept lake with tea and cake.. very English… so I wedged my tent in the shelter behind a large rock and sat out on a rock in the gale with a brew and the homemade cake I bought from the chap at Puerto Yungay. Possibly the most expensive cake in the world. I ate it all of course.

wind-streaked highland lakes

a small patch of shelter for the night

.. and a fine view to wake up to :-)

The final 30km into Villa O’Higgins in patchy rain were ace. I met a Kiwi couple on bikes heading north so swapped all their Argentine pesos for a wedge of Chilean ones. Found my legs too and steamed the last 10km at 30km/hr, flying over the rocks and corrugations. It felt good.
Villa O’Higgins is the end of the road, and it feels it too. The Carretera reached here in 2000. Prior to that time the few hundred inhabitants traded in Argentine pesos. Strictly speaking the Carretera ends 7km further south on the shores of Lago O’Higgins, the deepest lake in the entire Americas… 836m at it’s deepest point.

remote.. Villa O'Higgins

Villa O'Higgins

For motorised traffic there is no option but to turn around and head back at least as far as Cochrane… haha! For the cyclist or those on foot however there is a more interesting option for getting into Argentina… somewhat dependent on the weather I am waiting here now for a day or two, along with Ennis & Dina, and kiwi Nina for the gales to abate…. No bad thing, I enjoy days filled with copious quantities of bugger all. Also time for the glue to cure on my cycling shoes. Glued in Bolivia after a hammering I may have been better off buying new but decided to take my chances… and take some glue as well :-)

So, there you have it.. the Carretera Austral, 1200km long plus detours. 1000km of dirt and about 200 of asphalt. Brilliant.

Villa O'Higgins

Villa O'Higgins

p.s in case you are wondering a word may be in order about the O’Higgins chap whose name graces many streets, towns and lakes here in Chile. In short he was the leader who, along with Jose San Martin, freed Chile from the rule of the Spanish during the War of Independence. If you wish to know more of course then point your browser at Wikipedia as usual ;-)

Villa O'Higgins

Los Exploradores and other places..

Somewhat stupidly I never really expected Patagonia to do heat.. proper, intense, stuffy heat that causes your eyes to fill with sweat on the climbs and leaves the taste of flinty dust in your mouth as you ride. But it does and it does it well. The last 7 days have seen a spell of almost unbroken sunshine and increasing heat day by day. The last couple of evenings I’ve watched from my tent with a sense of anticipation as storm clouds threatened to the east.. but each time they come to nothing and the next morning dawns hotter and more sultry than the one before. Remarkably the last 2 days have not seen even a breath of wind…. indeed it is preferable to heavy rain and cold… but for the the bugs. They like the heat. Big, chunky flies with a set of jaws that will go through thin cycling clothing with ease. I have never come across such aggressive creatures that appear to positively relish a drop of bug repellent on their meat. They follow their meals on wheels at remarkably high speeds and on the climbs one can watch the shadows of hundreds of the little beasties following in your slipstream. But don’t let that put you off visiting :-)

the track west past the impossibly blue Lago Tranquilo

Anyway, I digress… from Rio Tranquilo then I pointed my wheels west up into the Valle de los Exploradores… It was a slow day at an average of barely 11km/hr The track is in poor condition and the cold wind was fresh from the west but I barely noticed either of those things. The scenery was wonderful.. and wonderfully empty. All day while riding I saw one person and he was a friendly old chap on horseback. Perfect. The night before a bus of Israeli backpackers had arrived in Rio Tranquilo.. in a place so small they are hard to ignore, indeed in packs their behaviour often has more in common with the flies, an angry sort of buzz that is always there. All over S America there are some establishments with signs saying “no Israelis”. Oh if I could have a cycling jersey that said “no flies please”.

mmmm... montañas :-)

Anyway, the track wound its way west through ever more spectacular scenery, past waterfalls and below hanging glaciers gleaming in the sun. I sat and ate a lunch of bread and avocadoes by a terrific waterfall cascading down a granite cliff while a pair of enormous Condors circled lazily overhead in a crystal blue sky. There are pumas in these forests too though I doubt one will ever show itself.

as the valley narrowed the road got better and better... in a manner of speaking, the surface was terrible :-)

some of the finest riding for a long time

waterfalls line the track

and many small wooden bridges. The plan is, eventually, to take this road all the way to the Bahia Exloradores and Parque Laguna San Rafael... whether it is ever completed remains to be seen...

many hanging glaciers along the way

44km up the valley I came to the house of an enthusiastically friendly German couple, Katrin and Tomas who have been living out there in the wilderness for 10 years with a couple of spare rooms for guests that make the effort to head out that way. The live a sustainable lifestyle and they even have a 10KW water turbine in one of the streams cascading down the cliffs behind their house. They proved to be engaging company so I pitched my tent in a small clearing in the rainforest behind their house before continuing west on my bike to the Exploradores glacier and a fine view of the edge of the San Valentin section of the permanent icecap.

further west towards the icecap

I took my stove and a fruitloaf with me so at 5pm I sat looking out over the glacier with a very English mug of tea and slab of cake brought from Rio Tranquilo… ah, who am I kidding, I ate the whole cake.

the Exploradores Glacier comes down from the San Valentin icecap

That evening my stove remained cold… the prospect of a delicious homecooked dinner of slow cooked lamb and potatoes cooked by Katrin was too good to ignore :-)

rainforest camp

Tomas & Katrins wilderness gaff

In no hurry to head back to the Carretera I spent a lazy morning exploring the local area on bike and foot before moving camp further west along the valley to a sublime spot where, in the warm sun, a swim before dinner seemed a fine idea. It was a very short swim. The lake is fed by the glaciers. It felt good though as did the evening as I sat by my driftwood fire and watched the sun set behind the peaks and glaciers to the west.

some exploring without baggage..

a fine place to camp

The plan was to wake up to a fabulous view of the snowy peaks to the west bathed in early morning sunlight… Typically however the cloud was down around the mountains, its cold, damp tendrils wrapped themselves around me as I thought “oh sod it I’ll swim anyway”. It was just 7am but when I’m hungry I get restless, and it is light from 4.30am at the moment. It was ‘refreshing’.

a cold and cloudy morning

On my way back east down the valley I called in on Tomas and Katrin to say farewell and thanks for the good grub but mother in law answered the door, both of them were in bed with a fever :-( So with no further reason to linger and with the wind at my back I got on with the business of enjoying the ride.

a difficult surface

As I moved east I left the cloud behind and arrived back in Rio Tranquilo in time for a late lunch in glorious sunshine. While I wolfed down empanadas at a cafe a local chap enthusiastically told me about the fishing out west where I had been. Salmon as large as 30kg he said… huge fish. Dubious as it sounds I had met a German chap fishing here a few days earlier an he showed me photos of salmon he’d caught well over 20kg… so 30kg.. believable I think. That’s the size of a sheep, would certainly fill the freezer nicely :-)

New Years Eve. No-one in Rio Tranquilo had Cerveza Austral, just this. One learns to endure such hardship when travelling by bike. It´s not a bad beer really.

On the way through Rio Tranquilo, outside the grocery store, I spotted a fleet of 4 familiar looking bicycles with Rohloff hubs and the butterfly bars favoured by Euro cyclists. It was the Swiss gang I’d met on the boat from Chaiten 3 weeks earlier. They were buying beer for New Years Eve, something I had quite forgotten about. They said “oh we are camped 1km south by the beach, you should join us”. So I did. Instant New Years party. Hurrah! Had this been Argentina of course meat for the BBQ would have been easy to come by. In Rio Tranquilo however not even the carniceria had anything more substantial than miserable little paper thin hamburgers wrapped in plastic. Ugh. I had cleverly dumped mine, along with the bread, avocadoes and so on by my tent while I took my beer down to the beach. With the fire glowing and ready for cooking I went back to my tent to find a telepathic cat enjoying the thawing burgers. Telepathic because the moment I swore quietly and thought about skinning and cooking it instead of burgers it scarpered.

the early hours of 2011 looked like this...

2011 dawned absolutely windless, cloudless and already hot when I rolled out relatively late at 10.30am. I’d had a rough night with streaming nose.. a head cold and nothing to do with beer… so when, after just 44km, I came to the suspension bridge across the straits where the clear waters of Lago Carrera pour at a rate of knots into Lago Bertrand I decided to camp on the tiny pebble beach below the bridge.

Lago Carrera looking improbably coloured in places...!

With very little traffic on the Carretera it was a peaceful night. Until 3am when someone thought it a good idea to ride a horse across the metal deck plates of the bridge. The weird and awful racket woke me up, I got out my tent in a daze thinking the world was going to end until I eventually realised what was going on :-)

a cool camp with nice swimming

camp kitchen

bracing cables for the bridge useful for drying clothes :-)

Awake at 6 with the sun streaming into my tent I was on the road at 8am in the relative cool so it was a nice ride to Puerto Bertrand and a cafe in the forest with decent coffee and kuchen too good to resist… Most expensive cake stop in the world though I think at about £8 for coffee and cake.

another fabulous morning. Already hot by 9am

I met familiar cyclists again on this stretch. The Carretera brings together cyclists journeying from all over South America, concentrates them into one southerly bottle neck like grains of sand in an hourglass :-)

Puerto Bertrand

Puerto Bertrand

Beyond Puerto Bertrand there are few places to camp and it turned into a proper climbing day. There are three successive climbs of around 600m each with no respite. All steep with grades up to around 20% on a very difficult surface… soft and heavily corrugated. The heat was intense with no wind and there was possibility to camp and no water so I just put my head down and hammered all the way to Cochrane.

cyclists disappear in the dust

Hard climbing suits me but I still felt a bit funny when I arrived at 4.30pm.. a litre of chocolate milk, an icecream and finally a cold beer sorted that out :-)

these signs are bad. For some reason this one appeared after 6km of climbing, perhaps just to remind one that the road is hard

whereas these ones are good... especially if equipped with a hover car as this one appears to indicate....

hot and dusty, the final welcome descent towards Cochrane

Cochrane is another one of those frontier sort of places. Feels a bit like Las Lajas in Argentina.. in the rainshadow of the icecap to the west it is hot, dusty and a little bit scruffy with very little life evident when I rolled into town.

Cochrane

in Cochrane, on a Sunday, fast food is very, very slow...

I’ve only been here about 18hrs and already stitched up. I took a cheap room in a little hospedaje. The chap of the house, a laid back sort, said “yeah, wash your clothes in the kitchen, no problem.” So I did.. or rather I got halfway through before the lady of the house walked in, one of those small, wrinkled but determined types, and gave me a proper ear bending… I was consigned to an old bucket in the dusty yard for the remainder.

Happy New Year and thanks for reading in 2010!

Cochrane... a happening place

Costa Rica…. (or not ;-)

I lay in my tent listening to the rain pattering on the fly and huge gusts of wind tearing through the forest like cannon balls… each one followed moments later by a violent shudder in my tent as it flexed heavily in the wind. I watched my breath mist in the cold air above my sleeping bag and thought “Why am I not in Costa Rica..?” It was the day before Christmas…

the road from Coyhaique

I did not leave Coyhaique until the morning of the 23rd, the fault of a pair of tall Australian girls that moved into my room on the evening of the 21st. I’d just polished off a number of late afternoon beers with my German friends & planned an early night ready to hit the road on the morning of the 22nd. It was not to be. They proved excellent company with tales of their visit to Antarctica and it was a late night. The necessary coffee the next morning lasted until midday so that was pretty much that for the day :-)

the road to Cerro Castillo.. stunning but oh so windy...

When I did get on my bike to leave my legs were feeling pretty dead… another late night and a number of Cerveza Australs in a bar in town. Christmas :-) My bike was heavy too, I had taken the opportunity of the last good supermarket for a long time to stock up for a few days. As we parted ways I distinctly remember saying “ah, should be an easy day – the road is surfaced for the next 100km (the last of the paving until beyond the end of the Carretera) and I don’t think there is too much in the way of climbing”… So at 3pm, legs complaining from having climbed for 15km into the teeth of a gale I’d had enough after just 63km.

mmmm :-)

I camped by a wild lake in the Reserva Nacional Cerro Castillo, not quite a national park but a protected region nevertheless.. probably just as well, south of Coyhaique the hillsides have undergone massive deforestation in the interests of cattle grazing… the giant bones of dead trees litter the hillsides slowly bleaching in the weather. The reserve however is quite beautiful with tall snow covered peaks, thick forest and rushing rivers.

fabulous hairpins... going down in my case :-)

I said “camped”.. “tried to camp” might have been more appropriate. The trees by the lake offered some reasonable shelter, certainly the best around, but not always enough for the heaviest gusts. As I carefully staked the flysheet out a great gust barrelled in, tore the tent out of my hands and wrapped it around a nearby barbed wire fence with predictably dire consequences… I swore… barbed wire.. Wilderness. The middle of nowhere.. and someone sees fit to stick a barbed bloody wire fence in. Stupid. I got the tent pitched eventually but not without it being flattened a couple of times while I got the extra guy lines in. I have since bent the poles back into shape best I can but they still look a bit funny… It took me an hour to patch the holes in the fly and it was not long before I had the chance to find out of my repairs were waterproof. I cooked dinner contendedly huddled in a lean-to provided by the forestry service watching raindrops hiss on the logs in my fire.

Cerro Castillo

I didn’t get a lot of sleep that night and despite a couple of mugs of strong coffee with breakfast my legs felt utterly empty as I rolled away from my camp in a light rain shower. After an initial downhill I grovelled uphill for another 18km or so into storm force winds, being blown right off the road on a number of occasions, before the road finally turned downwards properly through spectacular scenery and some fun hairpins to the little pueblo of Cerro Castillo. I had only ridden 35km. It felt like 135.

Cerro Castillo

One of the reasons I’m not in Costa Rica of course is that the intensity of life, the intensity of emotion that  goes with difficult riding in wild places is addictive. I’d been feeling pretty low as I battled the gales but when a friendly chap in Cerro Castillo put a beer and a large plate of chicken and potatoes in front of me as I sat looking out at the snow covered peaks I could not have been happier. It is a marvellous and addictive drug. I felt fantastic.. ignoring the dull ache in my legs of course. I didn’t have it in me to continue fighting the winds with tired legs that afternoon so I decided to stick around, rest my legs and tidy up the repairs on my tent. I took a room in a bright green house with ceiling and doorways better suited to hobbits.. I have bruises.

Cerro Castillo

Cerro Castillo was a terrific place… picturesquely ramshackle with streets a blend of rubble and wind-blown sand and a friendly bunch of locals. I chatted in chileno-spanglish to some guys on the highway for a while, they were trying to hitch with little success back to their homes for Christmas. Sensibly they had a box of wine to pass the time with.

most of these tiny hamlets have a decent communications array.. for the folk living out of town VHF radio is the only means of communication

For dinner I ate a burger with a huge mountain view from a joint on the highway fabricated from two old buses welded together with a grill and some seats installed.

Cerro Castillo

dining Cerro Castillo style

Christmas morning.. as hoped for I had an awesome sleep and felt much refreshed but sadly my other Christmas wish was not granted, the wind was still raging outside. At breakfast my host told me what I already knew.. I had 70km of dirt road directly into the wind before the road turned south towards Bahia Murta at 100km.. Happy Christmas he said :-)

from the road out of Cerro Castillo. Patagonia does booming great views very well... when it isn't raining ;-)

Rolling west out of Cerro Castillo at 9.30, tyre pressures dropped for the dirt, I mentally prepared for a tough day. I figured if I could make 60km I would be happy.. either that or simply stop around 4pm. The first few km were very difficult, uphill on a heavily cambered surface so loose and corrugated as to resemble a beach. The wind was so fierce and traction so lacking that gusts simply blew me sideways, tyres skidding in the dirt. I made 6km in the first hour… but knowing that even the shittiest road has to get better at some point I simply got my head down and kept the pedals spinning as best I could… The scenery was fabulous.

remarkable colouration in some of the lakes and rivers

My average speed just about sneaked into double figures (km/hr) for the day mainly due to the forested sections offering some respite from the wind and later on as the weather became damp the surface changed from loose corrugations to a nice hardpacked damp clay along the Rio Ibanez valley.

the track/road is just visible to the right of this pic

more weather approaching from the west in the Rio Ibanez valley

After lunch the road climbed for hours away from the valley, high into the clouds just below the lying snow.. it was a wild and lonely stretch, all day I had seen just two pickups and woken an old sheperd dozing by the side of the track :-)

descending to the Rio Murta

From the top of the pass I enjoyed a fast and winding descent into the brooding Rio Murta valley… it is the kind of place that feels as if the sun never shines. By 4pm I had just about made 70km so stopped and made camp on the banks of the Rio Murta.

the Rio Murta

A stunning spot I was briefly tempted to camp out on the gravel flood plain itself in full view of the mist covered mountains.. but thought better of it and instead chose the shelter of the trees. With tent up and tea brewing it was time to open my Christmas present… all the way from home, thanks Mum  :-)

Chocolate Santa had been well wrapped, only his feet were a little crushed :-)

I dozed for an hour in my tent before dinner.. with iPod on shuffle the first track was Apertura from the Motorcycle Diaries.. highly appropriate, gives me goosebumps.

Christmas Day evening, the view from my camp

An awesome day of riding and an awesome way to spend Christmas. No turkey or xmas pud for dinner sadly but I was quite proud of my cheese risotto followed by oranges, chocolate and another mug of tea that I enjoyed sitting in a light rain on a great old tree trunk by the river :-)
It rained heavily all night.. the flood plain was under an inch of water when I crawled out of my tent. Good decision ;-)

in Bahia Murta

It was just 38km along the river to the tiny village of Bahia Murta on the shores of Lago General Carrera, at 1000sq.km I think the second largest lake in South America. The village was dead.

more weather coming ;-)

I knocked on the door of a place with a sign saying “comida”. The lady looked surprised to see me but said if I was happy to wait she could cook lunch for me. So I sat with a beer watching a tethered horse eating one of her rosebushes from across the fence. Lunch was awesome, a great slab of fried meat with chips, salad and bread all swimming in oil, salt and chilli sauce :-) Yum.

a curious onlooker.. Bahia Murta

So it was thus fuelled, perhaps inappropriately for cycling, that I headed back out to the Carretera from Bahia Murta only to spot a pair of familiar German bicycles in the garden of a little hosteria…

the road from Bahia Murta, with friends again

We rode just another 12km before pitching tents in a stunning wild spot on the shores of the lake with a great waterfall cascading off the cliffs behind. Here it was possible to enjoy the novel sensation of being rained upon without getting wet. The rain swept down off the mountains all afternoon but the combined sun and wind evaporated the moisture at such a rate we were never more than slightly damp.

resting legs in front of the camp at Lago General Carrera. It is raining in this picture...

That changed once the sun went down behind the mountains and we ate dinner by a fire on the beach with our backs to the rain and wind.  ”It’s an awesome life” I thought as I crawled into my sleeping bag at 9 “good job I didn’t go to Costa Rica instead”. It would not be Patagonia without the wind, the rain and the cold.  ;-)

it looked inviting... but it is bollock-achingly cold

la vida es buena

a fabulously wild sky :-)

.. and for breakfast.. a rainbow :-)

but then the sun came out and for once it was dry when breaking camp. This has to be one of my best wild camp spots ever

Feeling somewhat buggered by the hard riding from Cerro Castillo the onwards plan was simply to break camp late and cruise the 20km along the lakeshore as slowly as possible to the pueblo of Rio Tranquilo. This stretch I think was the most stunning stretch of riding I have enjoyed anywhere. Ever. The layers of blues in the lake, distant mountains and sky and, where sheltered from the omnipresent gales, the air thick with the scent of the abundant wildflowers. The microclimate here on the western edge of the lake is much drier than in the surrounding mountains and valleys. The sun shone all day, I grabbed the opportunity for some context riding pics :-)

Rio Tranquilo lives up to it’s a name, a small grid of houses by a beach with a great wall of snowcapped peaks all around. Something like 500 people live here, the remoteness means everything costs the proverbial limb or two, certainly pricier than the average European country, and most folk carry VHF radios rather than mobiles.

Rio Tranquilo

when the sun shines here it is truly magnificent but I have also grown to appreciate the moodiness of the wet days, those are special too

A day off here is in order to rest legs, make use of the glacially slow internet connection and so on. I have a bed in a little yellow corrugated house where the curtains are tied back during the day with forks stuck in the rough-hewn windowframes and my bike is round the back with the chickens :-)

Rio Tranquilo has a stop sign. Possibly the only one within 200km :-)

My occasional companions have continued on south but we will meet again. For me.. from here I plan to leave the Carretera Austral for a few days and head west on a track that goes out towards the Bahia San Rafael…  it’s a dead end and a wild one at that but with time on my side there is no reason not to go and have a look :-)

Rio Tranquilo

Rio Tranquilo

Rio Tranquilo

Rio Tranquilo.. the supermarket..

.. and the church. About all there is to the place along with a few houses..

.. and a few cafes like this one where for dinner I sat next to a dead cow under the telly. The TV soaps really are that bad :-)

Feliz Navidad and all that..

I shall wish you all Happy Christmas now in case, as seems likely, I don’t get another chance.. I hope you have a terrific time. I shall be on the road I have decided, it seems highly likely I will be able to link up with my German friends.. but if not it does not matter, I shall be surrounded by mountains and glaciers and all that kind of stuff.. so I shall be happy, even if it is raining… I shall also have a bottle of whisky with me on my bike. Too much sugar in rum I have decided to ensure a good nights sleep :-)

Coyhaique has been a pleasant place to enjoy some decent coffee, plenty of beer and conversation. In contrast to the surrounding areas it is a surprisingly normal feeling place..  I may be able to stay another day, in two minds.. my skin has not completely healed so half of me wants to get that fixed so that the sweat and rain and wind doesn’t make it worse again.. but I am also excited about the road ahead.. will decide in the morning. Buenas noches!

a rare and welcome glimpse of sparkly blue skies on midsummers day :-)

Coyhaique

Coyhaique

Coyhaique.. normal enough to have little yellow school buses..

.. and stray supermarket trolleys

...little white vans with white van men..

.. and the FBI.. I mean PDI. They are taught to hold their hands like that at PDI school

but despite all that normal stuff it is still a very picturesque little town

.. with plenty of beer.. for planning purposes

Christmas gear list for the Carretera Austral… or how many pairs of underpants..

I looked up some climate statistics for this area… average annual rainfall for Coyhaique is 2800mm, it is thought of as a drier area… with a mean temperature of between 7 & 9 degs C.  Just to the west of here on the coast the rainfall goes up to something like 5000mm… So all you folk back in Cornwall complaining about the weather… be quiet :-) Having said that.. as I write it is midsummers day and the weather is glorious for a change.. still a howling gale but the sun is out, the snow on the mountains is glittering under the blue sky and it is a relatively balmy 15 degs C :-) It won’t last..

I also bumped into my German friends of a couple of days ago, they had a major mechanical shortly after I left them and had to hitch a ride. All is fixed now however and it’s good to have someone to share a few beers with.

Now, as I have some R&R time here in Coyhaique I thought I would make the effort and write down a list.. not a Christmas list as such but rather the gear I have with me…. people like that sort of thing, you know.. to see what other folk are carrying, especially how few pairs of underpants various folk seem happy to live with.. or without rather.

I’ll do this by bag/pannier as that way it is easier for me to remember what I have with me and it might also show that there is some logic to my bike packing.. maybe. So this is what my bike looks like on a cycling day..

Me (typically) from head downwards:

• Bell Volt crash hat or Inov8 cap
• Sunnies…inexpensive (yet stylish, haha) ones because I invariably trash sunglasses by the end of an expedition..
• Buff to keep sun off neck/neck warm…
• Labgear long sleeve merino top – baselayer/riding shirt
• Cycling mitts
• Padded cycling shorts, not bibs, as liners for…
• Endura Zyme 3/4 length baggies (in Camo :-)
• Alpkit coolmax socks
• Specialized Pro MTB shoes, a standout bit of kit… thoroughly knackered by now.. glued in Salta and again in Bolivia… but with more than 10k difficult km on the clock and still going..

Rear right pannier:

• Rab Quantum Endurance 600 sleeping bag in an Alpkit waterproof roll-top stuffsac
• Thermarest Prolite 4 sleeping mat
• Silk sleeping bag liner
• Thermerest fleece ‘pillow case’ – a fleece stuffsac that I use as a pillow stuffed with clothes
• Integral Designs Siltarp – ultralight tarpaulin
• Clothes bag – Alpkit waterproof roll-top bag with..
  • 2 pairs bamboo boxers
  • 1 other pair of cycling undershorts
  • 2 lightweight merino short sleeve baselayers
  • Specialized roubaix legwarmers
  • another pair of Alpkit socks
  • woolly hat
  • Berghaus t-shirt
  • cotton cargo trousers (webbing belt)
  • cotton shirt for those rare times I want to look reasonably civilised ;-)
  • Montane microweight fleece top
  • light fleece tights/longjohns
• Spanish dictionary

Front Right Pannier:

• MSR Hyperflow waterfilter
• MSR Titanium pot, artistically battered, containing
  • Homemade pot cosy
  • random spices, salt, pepper
  • pot scourer
  • fire steel
• Primus Himalaya Omnifuel stove in a stuffsac with windscreen
• Alpkit titanum fork and spoon
• comprehensive first aid kit
• small cordura bag (Alpkit) with general spares and repair stuff.. zipties, steel wire, patches for thermarest and tent fabric, safetypins, small roll of gaffer tape, needle and tough  thread, superglue, Seamgrip, stove spares, spare lithium AAAs for my headlamp and possibly a few other widgets I have forgotten about
• small cordura bag (Alpkit) with the prescription shite I need to look after my eczema and asthma and a stock of moisturiser cream. Pain having to carry it but such is life :-)
• small cordura bag (Alpkit) as a washbag.. toothbrush, toothpaste, Tiger Balm, earplugs etc. Call me a tart but I have a comb too…. ;-)
• Also a little tin with a bar of soap.. this gets used for everything that needs washing.. hair, clothes etc. As a rule I don’t use soap when washing dishes (or me) etc in streams, not good for the environment but even greasy pans are cleaned effectively using a handful of sand or grit or even fine mud will scour something clean very well.
• Polycarbonate mug.. years old, battered and about to die I think..
• the old sarong I have been using as a towel for a long time.. finally going in the bin at the end of this journey

Rear Left Pannier

• off-bike shoes – Salomon trail runners
• small plastic tub with camera charger, spare battery, spare cards, strip of neoprene to old my iPod on my arm when riding should I need it… (usually just on vicious headwind days) and a USB card reader
• ruggedised 160Gb USB hard drive for photo backups
• Asus netbook with power-supply and cable – cable is common to the camera charger too
• Solartechnology Freeloader Pico solar charger for my iPod
• iPod Nano
• Petzl headlamp
• Camera in a small army surplus canvas shoulder bag.. the camera bag sits at the top of the pannier and I can reach it as quick as a bar bag.. I don’t like bar bags you see..
  • Panasonic GF1 + 14mm & 20mm panasonic pancake lenses and a Leica Summilux 50mm lens with m4/3 adapter (see here)
  • lens cloth
  • brush
  • 43mm polarizing filter
  • pen
  • notebook
• maps and copies of passport, travel insurance etc in a plastic envelope
• Patagonia lightweight down gilet
• Mountain Equipment light primaloft jacket
• Montane windshell
• thin windstopper fleece glove liners and a pair of very light shells
• raingear comprising
  • Montane lightweight waterproof smock with stowaway hood
  • Lowe Alpine lightweight rain pants
  • Sealskinz waterproof socks
• small plastic envelope with $US and some emergency pesos in it
• cash, passport and credit cards.. carry these distributed on my person in a couple of different waterproof  ’wallets’ but when I’m riding they just sit with my camera.. and go with me if I park up briefly to go in a shop for ex.

Front left pannier:

• Food
• Bogroll – for some reason as I write I take childish satisfaction from using that word, I haven’t used it for a very long time – in a ziploc bag with small box of matches
• Handcleaner gel
• few spare ziploc bags

Rear Rack top:

• Alpkit heavy duty dry bag containing
  • Mountain Equipment Dragonfly 2 tent
  • Flipflops
• tent footprint (cut from a piece of cheap blue polytarp)
• 1 litre fuel bottle

Ortlieb waterproof saddle bag:

• Bike tools.. chaintool, spoke key, tyre levers, couple of cone wrenches, 8mm socket, Park allen key multitool, puncture patches and glue, tyre boot
• Bike lube (Purple Extreme this time, ace stuff)
• 2x spare tubes
• zip-up plastic pouch with bike spares… few nuts and bolts, spare brake and gear cable inners, cartridge brake pads, KMC chain joining links, and some other useful bits and bobs.
• Leatherman Juice multitool
• Petzl knife with a nice, usefully big blade
• mini tripod
• sunblock
• lipbalm
• couple of pairs of disposable thin vinyl gloves – handy for avoiding filthy hands when dealing with mechanicals when no washing facilities around, and work really well as extra warmth under cycling gloves when the weather is filthy.
• Also a rag and small nailbrush for transmission cleaning
• Inside my handlebars I have spare spokes and a rolled up copy of my passport.. handy proof of bike ownership should it be nicked and recovered.

My 1 litre fuel bottle is also strapped on the back, it sits nestled in between tent and rear right pannier. I burn gasoline but use a little bottle of pure alcohol, v cheap from pharmacies, for priming. It reduces the soot. You can also burn Benzina Blanca instead, also burns cleaner than gasoline but is about 4x the price. Buy it from ferreterias.

That is about it, I probably forgot something as I am writing this in a cafe.. but I’ll go back and edit later if I did. The logic in my packing is that stuff I need to get at while on the road is all on the left hand side of the bike.. so that riding on the right if I stop and lean my bike against something at the roadside then that stuff is always on the outside. Clever eh…

One other thing is that the Ortlieb front panniers rattle at the bottom on my racks on bad roads no matter what I do.. hence the bungee cords you might have seen wrapped around them in some photos.

In combination all the clothes I have work together well to handle various temperatures/conditions… and the merino stuff is amazing for not being smelly after days (and days) of use. Excellent stuff.

a Coyhaique … en bicicleta bajo la lluvia

“And as he drove on, the rain clouds dragged down the sky after him for, though he did not know it, Rob McKenna was a Rain God. All he knew was that his working days were miserable and he had a succession of lousy holidays. All the clouds knew was that they loved him and wanted to be near him, to cherish him and water him.“

Rain. I always think of Rob McKenna and the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy as I watch the spray coming from my front wheel.. however I am not miserable about rain as Rob was. There are many good things about riding in the rain like not needing to plaster ones-self in sunscreen and… umm…. well anyway, you don’t need sunscreen.

Puerto Puyuhuapi

…”never known a night like it..” the weather was wild with gale-force southerly winds and torrential rain during my second evening in Puyuhuapi. Handily my camping pitch came with access to a friendly little house with a very yellow dining room where, for a dinner of meat and bean stew, I sat at a rough-hewn bench and watched a very 1970′s pair of crooners in wedding attire – bearded man in white suit, lady, sadly not bearded, in wedding dress – singing some awful routine on telly. All I could think was how nicely the generally blue shade of the TV screen contrasted with the rough yellow painted panelling of the room :-) It was a rough night, very pleased I brought my Mountain Equipment tent rather than the flyweight Force Ten.

P.Puyuhuapi - fish farming

The storm blew itself out overnight and I pedalled out of town on a perfectly still morning. For about 30km the rough track wound its way along the shores of the fjord before heading up towards the climb of the day. It was one of those days when raingear is on and off all day… but mostly on.

along the road somewhere

The climb to the pass itself was a very loose, rutted affair – quite hard going but quite beautiful as the track switchbacked it’s way upwards through the dripping rainforest, past waterfalls and all the time in view of hanging glaciers and snow covered peaks amongst the swirling clouds.

some of that giant rhubarby stuff. Edible I have been told... mmm, would it go with tuna and rice?

As I climbed the rain got heavier and eventually turned to wet snow, it was pretty miserable up on the pass itself.. icy cold, wet and windy.

on the climb..

The descent was welcome, quite fun on a very steep, loose and rocky surface but sadly it didn’t escape the rain… which got heavier and heavier for a while before suddenly giving way to bright, blustery sunshine. The river valley in which I was riding which had been dark, cold and depressing was all of a sudden sparkling with greens, yellows and blues :-)

heavy skies

I’d met a German couple cycling in the rain, they were knackered and I was thinking of calling it a day after 90km anyway so I waited for them to catch up on a bridge near where I’d spotted some camping potential in the trees. There was a wicked little beach alongside the rather wild looking river that would have made a fantastically picturesque camping spot but being fully exposed to the strong winds and rain squalls it made sense to take to the shelter of the trees instead. The spot was on private land near a characterful old wooden house with chickens in the garden and a small vegetable plot.. no-one was home so, as it was raining again, we decided to pitch tents anyway and wait to see if anyone showed up.

the rivers hereabouts are a wonderful shade of blue

We had just got a fire going to dry out socks and so on when an inscrutable old chap in  frayed tweed coat and flat cap turned up with a machete in one hand and an axe in the other… mmm, could not tell at all what he was thinking as I said hello… he muttered something incomprehensible and turned & stomped up to the house. “Ooops” I thought but 5 minutes later he came back with a wheelbarrow full of logs for our fire :-)

smoking socks for dinner... you know like explorers of old would eat their boot leather.. we have coolmax. sophistication.

Another wet night, it was still lashing down and only 2 or 3 degs C at breakfast. My new friends decided to have a pre-ride cigarette so I left them rolling damp papers as I pedalled off for the short climb up to the miniature little pueblo of Villa Amengual. Tried to buy bread there in the village shop.. but failed, bought chocolate biscuits instead.

a particularly bleak stretch of carretera

Had already decided to do a short day of just 65km or so to the village of Manihuales leaving just another 80 or 90km or so to Coyhaique the following day. It rained the whole way but at least the wind was at my back much of the way. As I pedalled I watched snow moving in curtains across the peaks around me.. despite the cold in my feet and the rain it was quite atmospheric.. until one muddy stretch of about 30km of one of the most miserably awful bits of road I’ve seen outside of Bolivia.. with a couple of Argentine exceptions. That is not a complaint by the way, just a statement of fact.. muddy, gritty, rocky, heavily potholed and corrugated.. there was no respite.. but the final 20km into Manihuales turned out to be asphalted.. and with a generally downhill trend. Magic. Arrived in time for a late lunch of pork rib and potatoes at a cafe on the highway.

Manihuales

Manihuales itself is a small and friendly village running along the Carretera for about 500m. It felt special when I arrived… nestled among high mountain peaks with their attendant bad weather all around the village itself seemed to have its own little ray of sunshine bringing out the colours in the wildflowers. To the east and west the wall of the mountains with tops shrouded in swirling cloud and snow, to the north and south just the darkness of heavy weather. I took a room for the night, an opportunity to dry out a wet tent and get the damp out of everything else.

Manihuales Gomeria... "the tyre bloke"

I stayed in a room with delightfully uneven and creaky wooden floors above a cafe where, when I wheeled my bike around the back, the man of the house was gutting the biggest salmon I have ever seen… twice the size of the wild salmon generally seen back in the UK. The fishing is good around here…

the owner of this place clearly likes his fish...

Leaving Manihuales after a slightly weird breakfast of coffee and a very pink but very tasty slab of cheesecake I had half an hour or so to enjoy the fantastic wildflowers in the river valley going south before the weather closed in. Again.

along the road south of Manihuales

It rained with a vengeance so as there was nothing to be seen through the heavy rain and mist I simply put my head down and caned it for Coyhaique.. made the 90 far from flat km in just over 4hrs, and arrived very wet and worn out. It had to be done, as much to keep warm as anything :-)

the valley just south of Manihuales

The wind today was from the southwest.. as always seems to be the case when the weather is bad… it makes sense, the cold and stormy southern ocean is down that way. When the weather is fine it comes from the north west. So as far as riding goes… today I had a cross-headwind but it makes little difference in reality, the valleys are so convoluted the wind bounces around all over the place so in one valley there’ll be an arse of a headwind but an hour later you can be racing along with a howling wind at your back.

yet another river :-)

On the road to Coyhaique the only time the wind really mattered.. on the long climb that starts about 15km north of town, I had a tailwind. Most welcome.. I also fell into an area of apparent rainshadow – the peaks and valleys all around disappeared into misty darkness but for the duration of the climb I had hazy sunshine and was able to take raingear off for a while and dry out in the cold wind.

Coyhaique

At first glance Coyhaique looks a pleasant little town. I will stop 3 nights or so… the constant rain and wind is not kind to eczema prone skin so I have some healing to do there, and I am looking fwd to a couple of days R&R. I found a very nice little hostel but sadly in this internet age with “backpackers” booking everything in advance should I wish to stay longer I will be kicked out after 3 nights regardless. Humph :-|

Coyhaique

Oh, I just thought of some other good things about rain…particularly heavy rain. It washes days worth of muddy shite out of your cycling shoes and all the waterfalls cascading down the cliffs here are rather beautiful. There you go, always a silver lining :-)

I have also learned something about the Carretera Austral… when someone says to you “oh the forecast is for better weather tomorrow“.. ignore them. They are making it up.

Chaiten y la Carretera Austral

< a couple of caveats before I get on with the narrative.. it’s quite a long one so I hope you’re sitting comfortably.. and one or two of the photos might not appeal to the squeamish or those of a vegetarian disposition… >

the ferry to Chaiten

Post-apocalyptic Chaiten, 2 1/2 years ago a town of around 4000 people in the shadow of a volcano thought to be dead, its last eruption happened some 9000 years ago. In May 2008 the volcano erupted once again prompting a mass evacuation by ship, burying the town in a thick layer of ash and sending torrents of mud through it’s heart. Now the town has been abandoned by the government and most of its inhabitants. Apparently 400 or so people remain although walking around the place it is hard to believe that number is more than 100. The streets still carry a layer of ash in which footprints are few and far between, frequently the only signs of life are the sparrows.

no light, no water, no help... the locals are proud of their town

It is a truly fascinating place with a unique atmosphere. The locals are proud of their ruined town and are fighting for the government to reverse their decision to abandon and restore at least basic services… and from what I saw in the local paper on Chiloe recently with some small success.

The boat from Quellon to Chaiten had an advertised departure of 2400hrs, hard to understand then why the folk in the ticket office told me to be at the port, 3km from town, at 1600 with my bike… There on the cold and windy quayside I met an Austrian couple with a rented pickup/campervan also wondering the same thing. We sheltered from the heavy rain squalls in the back of their van with beers from their 12v refrigerator. By and by a few more folk started showing up.. as, happily, did the ship. Not unexpectedly 4 other cyclists showed up to make the connection to the start of the Carretera Austral, all from Switzerland. Under the direction of the friendly crew We had the privilege of riding onto the ship before the motor vehicles :-) Having embarked all the passengers with vehicles we cast off and steamed 20 minutes to sit at anchor off Quellon.

dramatic evening skies over Quellon

Killing time onboard I think was preferable to killing time in Quellon, especially given the stormy weather. It was around 11pm I think that foot passengers embarked so we must have moved back to the port while I was dozing. It wasn’t until around 2am that the ship finally throttled up her engines and headed out to sea. I was lying across a row of seats fast asleep and dreaming at the time the heavy growl of the engines became part of my subconscious adventure and eventually woke me up.

dawn... cold!

During the approach to Chaiten dawn arrived with an icy blast, no more than 1 or 2 degs C on deck and fresh snow was visible on the forested hills above town. It was 7am Saturday morning when I rolled off the ship, tyres crunching the fringes of ice in the puddles. The Swiss set off south immediately while I stayed in town for the day as I particularly wanted to explore with my camera and I do enjoy the atmosphere of these places.

Chaiten has just a slipway near the beach with shallow approaches. The RIB was used to take mooring ropes ashore and the ship carefully winched herself in

a few Chaiten photos follow before the rest of my ramblings for this post…

 

Chaiten: a pair of the locals..

I had planned to leave after just one day, but when a rather lovely French girl says to you in a lilting accent on a cold and rainy Sunday morning “oh you should stay, we will kill the sheep and have a BBQ” what are you going to do? Put raingear on and ride away to spend the day alone in the rain and mud…? no, didnt think so.. I also am quite fond of unashamedly carnivorous women although I am somewhat ashamed at my lack of conviction when it comes to riding ;-)

meet Dolly..

Alexandra and her brother, who looks just like Homer Simpson when he has his hat on, and another friend.. all fantastic folk, arrived on the same boat as I did, we met on Saturday afternoon and proceeded to enjoy a laid back few hours of beer, wine, Pisco and conversation in the sun before heading out late to find something to eat. It was around midnight when we left to find our way back to the hospedaje.. with only a limited supply of electricity in Chaiten only on between the hours of 9pm and 12pm it was eery walking back through the desolate streets with only the light of a thin crescent moon to guide our way. Shadows of dogs silently running through the streets only betrayed themselves with a volley of barks and growls if we came too close. Despite the vocals the local dogs are a cowardly bunch, turn on them with a bark of your own and they run away pretty quick, whether on foot or bicycle.

Sunday morning

So to the sheep, purchased on Saturday afternoon it was immediately christened Dolly by Alexandra despite the fact that it was clearly a chap… cohones grandes you see. It spent its final afternoon in the yard, mostly hiding amongst the weeds behind the obligatory battered pickup…

Dolly picked up some pretty bad habits in life and wouldn't have lasted much longer anyway

So Dolly gurgled and twitched his last at around 10am Sunday morning and our host showed off his butchery skills as the carcass, genty steaming in the cold, damp air was prepared for the spit. By 2pm Dolly was ready for dinner. I had been out and sorted us with a few bottles of wine early so spent most of the day in a mildly inebriated state. It takes a long time to BBQ a sheep.

<standing by for hate mail> preferable to buying anonymous shrink wrapped stuff at the supermarket

Having spent much of the morning sitting in the woodshed out of the rain but in the thick of the smoke I was a little concerned that riding out of town the next morning I would have every dog in the area on my wheel, not to mention a few vultures as an aerial escort… While eating there was a line of black vultures on the roof slowly moving closer to the fleece which had been draped over the back of the pickup.. and a few dogs waiting expectantly on the track beyond the yard fence.

the first of the four-legged vultures

It was a good meal with us and our hosts family sat by the woodburner, followed by a few hours siesta. A most agreeable Sunday. I shall think of it is as my early Christmas dinner should I find myself in my tent eating rice and tuna on the 25th :-)

leaving Chaiten

Monday then I rolled out of Chaiten in a light and freezing cold drizzle but by the time the asphalt ended after 30km the sun was breaking through, things were warming up nicely and joy of joys.. a tailwind :-)

the air down here is cold but the sun, when it breaks through, is strong and hot

Shortly after passing the Yelcho glacier, amongst some rather nice scenery, I met an Australian couple on bikes, Jeff & Rose, some 14 months into their world trip. Having chatted a while and shared the obligatory packet of bicuits I took off to climb the next pass. It was a given I’d be quicker, their bikes were pretty heavily laden whereas I can easily lift mine with one hand, even with 3 days food on board.

I think every cyclist that ever passed this way has a variation on this photo. The DC3 made an emergency landing here many years ago, before the Carretera Austral existed. It could not be recovered and rumour has it someone lived in it for a number of years..

water stop. Such a contrast to the deserts of Argentina, water everywhere down here.. and soo sweet.

this will help keep the scenery fetishists happy ;-)

and this one.. this is Lago Yelcho

It was wicked descent on loose dirt to the little village of Villa Santa Lucia. About 3 or 4km south of the village and just off the road there is a small grassy patch by the river. Surrounded by snow capped peaks glittering in the sun it made a pretty nice place to camp. My new Antipodean friends joined me later in the afternoon and we enjoyed an excellent evening of conversation, with apple pie and cream (theirs) for dessert and polishing off my last half litre of rum as daylight finally faded completely around 10.30pm :-)

along the road.. a nice place to ride

the view from the tent, a nice place to camp

I did a lot of faffing next morning, partly due to getting up late and partly just being lazy, Jeff & Rose were on the road well before I was, I didn’t get going ’till just before 10.. I caught them fairly early on but then had to turn back a few km to find my windshell that I had lazily stowed under one of the straps of my rear pannier rather than putting it away properly… stupid. Back down the road I met the Swiss gang.. happily with my jacket :-)

Jeff & Rose helpfully wore bright jerseys this day..

The last I saw of Jeff and Rose was at the tiny community of Villa Vanguardia.. a row of 4 or 5 immaculate wooden houses tucked away in the mountain wilderness. We enjoyed misshapen icecreams and picked up some bread there before agreeing we would try and meet at a camping area inside the national park just south of La Junta. They had been excellent company the night before so I was looking forward to that.

Villa Vanguardia

The road turned out to be difficult going however, very loose and stony, quite a lot of climbing and a fresh southerly wind to contend with. They never made it.. and neither did I. La Junta looked an uninspiring collection of prefab flavoured houses stretched out along a wide and boring piece of dirt highway. I stopped briefly at 3.30 to get some fruit and a litre of chocolate milk (the best recovery drink around these parts) for later on. By 5.30 I had only made another 25km and had been looking for somewhere to pitch my tent for around an hour.

sawmill campsite

The land on this stretch of highway, although unpopulated, was all fenced off with barbed wire into ‘parcelas’ for sale or grazing with no easy access to water.  Eventually I passed a little sawmill, a one-man operation with a stony track leading down to the river. The chap there was friendly and said I could camp in his yard.

Although not quite as stunning as the night before as camping spots go it was pretty nice.. miles from anywhere, no dead dogs or cows lying around, plenty of water in the fast flowing river, logs to sit on, no dust or mud thanks to the layer of pebbles and backed by 1000ft high forested cliffs :-) I tried to make myself useful when the guys van wouldn’t start, giving him a number of pushes.. sadly all to no avail, he sat out on the road for an hour before a ride came along while I sat on one of his logs and ate my risotto…

ate breakfast in a light, misty rain watching the cloud swirl around the mountains

Just a short ride of 25km, less than expected, through the national park the next morning to the little pueblo of Puerto Puyuhuapi, located at the head of one of the convoluted inlets or fjords that characterise this part of the world.

Puerto Puyuhuapi

The character of the Carretera Austral changed yet again for this stretch, just a single vehicle width of stony, potholed track heavily overgrown with trees and stands of the giant rhubard that seems to grow everywhere down here. Thanks to a tip from a helpful reader (cheers!) as I write these last few sentences I’m camped in the garden of a little yellow house. It’s nice, despite being barely a trickle of hot water the shower felt awesome and I sorted myself out with a big plate of steak, eggs and chips for dinner.. and beer of course.. oh, and icecream.

Puerto Puyuhuapi

Puerto Puyuhuapi

I am having a day off here too, Puerto Puyuhuapi strikes that perfect balance, for me, of tranquility and life. Travelling alone means when I stop for a day I like to be somewhere with people, good food and so on.

the Puerto Puyuhuapi mob...

Best of all… after a bit of a rocky start and at last away from the relatively dull asphalt and tourism of the lakes this journey now makes complete sense :-)

Puerto Puyuhuapi

home in Puerto Puyuhuapi. Grass is growing on the roof and the door has an ingenious locking mechanism, operated from outside by a string through a hole. At night the string is retracted. Brilliant.

Quellon

I’ll post this little bit now as once I leave Chiloe on the boat tonight I suspect it will be a while before I see wifi or internet again…

rural Chiloe..

While wandering around Quellon yesterday evening I wondered if I would feel the same about the place if my host in Chonchi hadn’t mentioned that, in his opinion, it was not a place to hang about, bodies found in the harbour and all that. Would all those blokes standing around on scruffy street corners staring at me appear merely curious at my presence rather than threatening. Having found myself in notorious dives all over the world I should know better by now not to allow my impressions of a place, no matter how scabby it appears, to be coloured by local prejudices… all the same I pulled my cap down at the front and tried to look less obviously the one gringo in town. There is no avoiding it, if Chiloe has an arsehole then Quellon is probably it.. a rough looking place with vandalised boarded up buildings, weed infested dirt side streets, stray dogs and even, on the afternoon I arrived, a pall of smoke over the main drag from a pile of tyres someone was burning… Funny how so many ports end up this way. Border towns often suffer the same fate. Despite all that however the people I had cause to engage with, aside from the drunks on the desolate waterfront, were the usual friendly Chilenos, if slightly more reserved than elsewhere. The girl who filled my fuel bottle at the gas station on the harbour had a particularly nice smile.. ;-)

Quellon

It was a fairly stiff ride from Chonchi, only 73km but with a number of long, steep climbs and with a strong south-westerly wind.. a cross-headwind in my case, and once again it was pouring with rain with a temperature of no more than 8 or 9 degs C. I was very grateful for my SealSkinz socks keeping my feet toasty and dry :-)

Quellon

The ship should, in theory, be leaving tonight. Going to be a rough 7hrs I think, it is blowing a gale again. As I write there are occasional sunny breaks between frequent heavy rain squalls and while still desolate the place doesn’t look quite so bad as it did through tired eyes in the rain last night… maybe.

earthquake zone....

the view from my keyboard

somewhat damp in Castro & Chonchi

Just 87km down the road from Ancud, Castro had a noticeably different character.. lacking Ancuds outgoing charm I suppose it is no more than you would expect from a renovated administrative capital. The palafitos on the waterfront are pretty but beyond that the weathered old wood and corrugated buildings have been replaced with concrete and the busy streets laid out in a basic grid lacked interest.

Palafitos on the water in Castro

After another late night I felt a little weary as I pedalled out of Ancud in heavy rain and thick mist on Monday morning, the powerlines buzzing angrily in the damp above my head.  It stayed wet for the duration of the hilly ride to Castro, Chiloes green hills were shrouded in mist as I put my head down and watched the water dripping off my nose :-)

some nice churches on Chiloe

I caned it a little on this stretch I must confess, a Swiss girl I met in Ancud, she was doing her PHd research there, had met two cyclists a couple of weeks earlier heading despondently back to Puerto Montt having missed out on a boat ticket. I was somewhat interested in not finding myself in that situation so first order of business on arrival was to find the office selling boat tickets. In this respect I was slightly buggered by a messed up street numbering system. The address was #198 Calle Esmerelda.. found Calle Esmerelda by riding the wrong way up a one-way street.. found #400, then #376.. going the right way apparently.. so then I rode past #250, #248, #318, #132 and then all of a sudden #602… Gave up and went to the tourist office in the plaza, the girl in there said the address was right but it is not on Calle Esmerelda, it’s sort of down a sidestreet and then on a footpath through a garden. Turned out to be in a room downstairs in what appeared to be someones house. I dripped on the carpet.

ok, I had to get Super Pollo in one picture at least.. "No hay pollo como etc.... "

Almost Little Britain Chile… “Computador dices no” said my Chilean Carola Cerveza.. the network was down, could I come back later. Bugger. Back out into the rain.. next order of business.. food, then a bed for the night. Lunch was greasy shite, I made the mistake of going to a place called Pollos Rapidos.. but the beer was on tap rather than bottled and good. Finding a bed was easy, plenty of cheap hospedajes in town. I took a room at the first place I visited, it was fine.. in deference to that couple I met in Puerto Varas it did have a Swiss flavour, sort of a traditional chocolate box house in wood with big overhanging eaves and rather prim panelled rooms. I dripped on the carpet there too.

I had a cheeky request for more 'scenic' flavour of photos, I am rubbish at landscape stuff, especially on a bike... the light is never good or I simply cannot be bothered.. but when the sun does shine east coast of Chiloe sort of looks like this

I ate breakfast on Tuesday sat on a dark wood upholstered chair at a dark wood table in a dark panelled dining room full of ugly ornaments. Behind me on the wall hung a plate with a picture of the Pope on it next to a free calendar from Dulcolax… I felt rubbish, I had expected, and hoped for a quiet night after a number of successive late ones but at around 10pm a Chilean couple with two young kids arrived… As is commonly the fashion, in my experience, among Latin Americans in guesthouses (and campsites) the TV was on high volume until the early hours accompanied by plenty of bangs and knocks.. but not, thankfully, that kind of bumping and grinding.. well, with two young kids in the room would you… haha.

self-explanatory...

It was raining heavily again as I left Castro, an icy cold rain on a fresh southerly wind. I hardly ever pull on full rainpants but I was glad to have them. With no rush to go anywhere far I cruised the 30km south to the pretty little fishing village of Chonchi where, as I write I have a very cheap but most excellent room in a somewhat rickety wooden building on the beach. No carpet to drip on :-)

The sun came out later in the afternoon and I sat and watched sealions and dolphins from my window. The light is very clear and crisp here, with the green hills and cold rain and wind it reminds me very much of Cornwall in April, no bad thing at all.

Later, while in search of food I met a very drunk couple of locals on the beach. They were quite funny.. just about managing to say ‘hey gringo’ before collapsing in fits of giggles.

useful for beer as well as children. More of that excellent architecture in the background

So as I write it is Wednesday morning, it is also a public holiday and Chonchi is a ghost town. I have been caught out, I had no idea today would be a holiday, as such breakfast was limited to a packet of biscuits and a banana, lol. I am in two minds what to do with my day, my skin flared up badly again in the night so plans to visit the west coast at Cucao have been scrapped. It is pissing with rain again too. I may visit one of the islands offshore on my bike later, there is a boat every half hour from harbour a few km down the coast. Or I may not, depends how I feel, sometimes I like to be lazy, and experience has shown me that rest is the best tonic when my skin goes bad :-)

My next destination is Quellon, a place my host here in Chonchi described optimistically as a “bodies in the harbour kind of a place”, hehe.  Sounds a wonderful place to be riding to the port at midnight :-)

cheero!

Wednesday morning, damp & deserted

another scenery sort of pic

colourful mussel shells on the beach

hoping for blue skies again soon, this is Ancud