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!

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 :-)

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 ;-)

a melancholy ascent…

I’ve been climbing steadily for the last couple of days…. from Jujuy to Purmamarca, and from Purmamarca to Humahuaca as I make my way up onto the altiplano. The riding itself has been wonderful… from the green valley of San Salvador de Jujuy the road took me up above the moisture laden clouds to the pampa… back to a mountain desert landscape with terrific cliffs upon which cacti stand sentry once again below the eagles soaring the updrafts.  

the road to Purmamarca

 As I write this I’m sitting at about 10,000ft with just another 2500 or so feet to climb to the border I think. I’ve made good time, the road has only been steep in places so just 3 to 3 1/2hrs riding and 70km each day. I figure 1000m of ascent is enough for one day while still enjoying the ride… ;-) 

Purmamarca

 Despite the sublime riding my time on the bike has been tinged with an air of melancholy… these are my final miles in Argentina as I climb to the border… it feels like saying goodbye to a close friend, a drawn out goodbye when you know it may be a long time before you meet again. Argentina and it’s people have been good to me. A wonderful country.. and all that time I spent battling and cursing the headwinds and ripio she was saving a parting gift for me… a light to moderate tailwind to ease my climb to the heights of the altiplano… hence the good time I’ve been making :-)   

Purmamarca

I’ve been very much in a reflective mood these last couple of days… as I sat in the plaza at Purmamarca last night watching the locals put away their market stalls and contemplating the endless cycles of lives around the planet I was reminded that even when this particular adventure is over my wanderlust won’t be satisfied… after almost as many countries as I have years it never has been and never will be no matter how far and how long I travel. Such is my life I suppose as I pass through the places in between as little more than a two-wheeled shadow… the hard part is figuring out how to consolidate it with the need to earn a living… lol! 

Purmamarca

Purmamarca

 My soundtrack then as I climb towards Bolivia, with just one brief exception, is very much Remember by Groove Armada… 

Anyway enough of that… back to the past few days :-) My extra day in Jujuy proved to be a fun one… that second evening as I was sitting on the floor looking at my map of Bolivia a pair of well used hiking boots appeared somewhere just west of lake Titicaca… I looked up… they were attached to a fine pair of legs belonging to a regular Lara Croft character.. sassy stance, backpack slung over one shoulder but minus the firearms… (probably a good thing)…… but it was only Emma from Sweden … :-) Choosing not to camp in towns definitely has advantages for the solo cyclist… ;-) 

Purmamarca

 Llama in various forms (leg of, steak of etc etc) also appeared on local menus for the first time, along with the change in the faces of the locals another indication of the transition to a more purely ‘Andean culture’. That evening the four of us went for a pre-dinner peek at the local ‘crime’ museum, it was the girls idea.. getting warmed up for a steak or something perhaps, or just satisfying a buried bloodlust, as it contained a pretty gruesome collection of photos of bad guys and fools in various states of dismemberment… I enjoyed the rifles, vintage frogman suit and chatty copper downstairs in the police museum much more :-)   

cemetery at Maimara

 Met Emma again in Purmamarca, a very pretty pueblo nestled against richly coloured cliffs. The church here was beautifully simple with an interior heavily decked out in cactus wood – ceiling, pews, pulpit, altar etc.. in fact everything that wasn’t stone or adobe. It’s a beautiful wood, odd to look at – a porous lattice that polishes up better than you’d ever expect based on it’s living form. I’ll get some pics when I remember… With reference to my post of the 22nd March this Wednesday was a public holiday in memorial of the 24/3/76. The tiny plaza was full of people, live music and traditional dancing.. the dancing in particular was interesting, almost animalistic in it’s intensity and movements, but with a subtle sophistication all the same. Quite remarkable.

between Tilcara and Humahuaca

That evening dinner with Emma was ‘blessed’ with a loud local duo.. pan pipes, drums and stuff… something of a conversation killer and not a deliberate choice of place to eat but inevitable I suppose given Purmamarca is quite the touristy little spot being so close to Jujuy and Salta. Ho hum… I felt for the guys when no-one bought a CD afterwards… but only until I saw a compulsory cover charge added to the bill* . The obvious escape was to climb the hill behind the village by moonlight and sit up there looking at the stars… and listening to the same music drifting up from the streets below.. some stamina those guys, lol.. night-time vocals almost as durable as the local dogs… Our stamina on the other hand was pretty rubbish… at about 11.30pm the evening ended on a note far less romantic than the surroundings with a duo of  ” yawn…time for bed…” so we split with an idea to try and meet again in Bolivia – which would be ace, the usual downside to travelling by bike is that the people I meet are travelling so much quicker than I and never seen again.    

into the tropics

I also know who to blame for the mental soundtrack to the morning I left Purmamarca on my bike being Abba’s Chiquitita… I only managed to get it out of my head with the excitement of crossing the Tropic of Capricorn… a very cool moment well worthy of goosebumps :-) After that is was back to Groove Armada…

Humahuaca

 And that is pretty much that for the last couple of days… Humahuaca is a fine highland pueblo with cobbled streets and colourful adobe buildings. It is deliciously cold and windswept tonight too… though suspect by the time I’ve crossed Bolvia cold and windswept won’t feel so delicious :-) I think I’m going to have to stop a day here in Humahuaca too.. all is not quite right… that niggling sore throat from Jujuy, unable to sleep properly and stuff… very tired I guess. No matter, although not high by standards of previous adventures it will be useful as an acclimitization stop :-)  

Humahuaca

Humahuaca

Humahuaca

Humahuaca

Humahuaca

stopped for coffee in the pretty pueblo of Tilcara on my way to Humahuaca.. the little girl there had a new kitten...

*still cheap and with Bolivia just a couple of days away I’ve stopped caring about my budget…

cones etc: in San Salvador de Jujuy…

I’m writing this bit at about 3.30pm during my enforced day off in San Salvador de Jujuy, having slept another 3hrs this afternoon I’m feeling a lot better… but, with reference to my words of yesterday, so much for expecting to be on form today, lol.  However, I have time in my schedule I think having reached the north of Argentina quicker than I expected and, as is so often the case, spending time in a  place for which a stop was unexpected has been quite rewarding… and I enjoy having time to write with a big mug of té Inglés by my side :-)

San Salvador de Jujuy

San Salvador de Jujuy

San Salvador de Jujuy is not as pretty a town as Salta, much of it was trashed by an earthquake so little of the original colonial architecture remains… it does however have a very good highland town atmosphere… and good coffee… and an interesting museum.

San Salvador de Jujuy

I often find museums dry and over-extensive in their content, much of which I’ve often seen before, Jujuy’s archeological museum  however is perfect – it’s a pokey little affair with a random but very good collection of Inca and pre-Inca artifacts from the area. I got the feeling I’d made their day by visiting… in exchange for my 2 pesos I received an effusive welcome followed by a hurried turning on of all the lights for me :-) Amongst the various pots and tools and so on they also have an Inca child-mummy (I mean a dessicated carcass rather than a teenage mum… heck we have plenty of those at home, no need to come 12,000 miles to see one) which rather than being gruesome is just fascinating. You can read about the associated practice of sacrificing children by leaving them on a mountain-top here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plomo_Mummy

Also in evidence a large number of cranially deformed skulls.. the nobility of many pre-Colombian Andean cultures used to deform the skulls of their children… indeed they may have been the original coneheads ;-) I’ve often wondered if it had any effect on the intellect and has it got anything to do with the reason the Inca never managed to think of the wheel…

I wasn’t allowed to take pics so instead here’s a couple from the public domain.

Inca skull

nothing new ;-)

Speaking of intelligence, and nothing to do with another button sewing exercise, last night my companions and I realised that we had not had a drink for St Paddy’s Day… all three of us have Irish blood so I guess we just forgot… so after dinner a hunt ensued for a suitably atmospheric bar… we found one but with an unfortunate Budweiser neon over the door.. the menu did however indicate a supply of Argentinean beer – only Quilmes but anything is better than Bud, that would have just been wrong. So we sat down and ordered “un litro de Quilmes por favor, con tres vasos…” We waited a while and eventually three mugs of coffee appeared…. I didn’t think I’d drunk enough wine with dinner to get my pronunciation that wrong so we explained that actually we wanted cerveza Quilmes…..  it turned out that he only had Budweiser in stock so we beat an embarrassed retreat, leaving a guilt-tip, to the flourescent-lit cafe around the corner.

Salta Negra.... mmmm

What it lacked in atmosphere this place with it’s plastic tables and football on the telly made up for with a fridge full of Salta Negra – probably the closest thing locally to an Irish stout and very good when served ice cold :-) Mission success. Eventually.

San Salvador de Jujuy

San Salvador de Jujuy

stained glass in the post-earthquake cathedral

via armadillo… Salta to Jujuy

as I sit here in San Salvador de Jujuy I have a free wifi connection so may as well write something I think… it was a lovely ride up from Salta, a very mellow 100km/4 1/2hrs through what can only be described as a very green and pleasant land… a massive contrast to the desert just a few days ride south. This morning as I left Salta under cloudy skies in a relatively cool 25 degs C or so I reminisced about thundery spring days riding in the western Pyrenees… with the terrain, the weather, the landscape and the smell of cowshit in the fields I could easily have been half a world away there in France.

Morning Glory flowers in the hedgerows

Once clear of Salta.. once past the giant 20ft metal armadillo in fact, ruta 9 north turned into a little country lane, with only the occasional vehicle but a perfect surface. It wound it’s way slowly through the mountains climbing gently for 30km and about 1400m vertically or so into a rich cloud forest before descending once again into the province of Jujuy… the last, or first depending on direction of travel, province in Argentina.

rich cloud forest

With the easy riding I made good time despite empty legs… I always feel rubbish after a few days off, my body goes to sleep, the adrenalin drains away and all that’s left is a residual fatigue from the last few thousand km. Tomorrow I should be back to normal :-) Lunch in the village of El Carmen just 25km or so south of San Salvador de Jujuy was a sandwich and bottle of fizz from a corner shop. I measured 28 degs C when I stopped, an unbelievable 15 degs C cooler than it was at a similar lunch stop and similar altitude a few days south near Chilecito, at the foot of the Cuesta Miranda :-)

yet another groovy old motor

Here in Jujuy today there is a memorial event/demonstration happening in the Plaza… March 24th 1976 was a dark day in Argentina’s history… I know today is the 22nd so I’m assuming today is either a designated memorial day or the whole week.. On that date a military junta seized power and more than 30,000 people were subsequently ‘disappeared’ in the ensuing 8 years. Officially the period was known as the ‘National Re-Organisation’ .. . congress was closed, political parties banned, freedom of press and freedom of speech abolished. Described by those in power as a war against terrorism and communism the reality was that the military government persecuted, tortured, and killed those who opposed or questioned the dictatorship, expressed leftist views, or simply appeared in the address books of people considered subversive…

Poignant photographs of those disappeared adorn the pavements and the banners & flyers all bear the simple slogan “nunca mas”.. never again.  The images of Che Guevara and Túpac Amaru are also evident, symbolic of freedom as they are.

As for the armadillo, well not to make light of today’s events in the plaza but he was fab, a great metal beast standing sentry at Salta’s northern limit….

Postscript… 23rd March: delayed in Jujuy a day extra with a sore throat and muscle aches. humpf… Last night I was lucky enough to meet two American girls on bikes, Kate & Malena for an evening out. I’m stopped at a hostel in the town centre, it’s OK but suffers the usual lottery of ‘rooming companions’.. I lost out last night with the arrival of two early-twenty-something backpackers who were trying painfully hard to be very cool – something that anyone older than that will know is virtually impossible to achieve at that age :-) I came back from dinner relatively early at 11pm to find the room sealed up tighter than a…. ah no I can’t say that… well anyway, I opened the door to be confronted with a blast of heat and cheap aftershave… eeeugh! I opened the windows wide to some muttered protests from the darkness…. but the night air was perfectly cool .. and breathable. Suffered also from the hostel ghost…. a character that walked in out of the room all night switching lights on and off and rustling plastic bags in a ghostly fashion…. some people need a smack… Oh, and the source of my lurgy has just been revealed by one of my room companions, it’s French… :-|

Shelterbox first-hand, and other stuff..

just a short post.. there is a fascinating first hand account of life as a Shelterbox Response Team member during January’s floods/landslides in Peru here: http://shelterbox.org/news.php?id=280 and if after reading it you’d like to make a donation then my JustGiving page is here: http://www.justgiving.com/mikesimagination

…as for me, well getting ready to leave Salta in the morning.. part of which involved demonstrating my intelligence by managing to sew a button back on my trousers while still wearing them… and attaching them to my boxers. So much for being a competent engineer… I’d blame it on the altitude but Salta is only at 1200m or so….  I’ve also been  chuckling the last day or so over something that Steve, another English cyclist I met, said to me while we were discussing the disproportionate number of beautiful women in this city (and indeed the country)… “..yes but they are so high maintenance” he said.. “ look at ‘em in the parks and streets clinging on to their men like there is no tomorrow…“. I nearly said “oh yes, give me my bicycle any day….” Nearly….. clearly I’m not as dedicated to my sport as I should be… hehe, last night when my dinner arrived in front of a world class cleavage and bejeweled naval I’m ashamed to admit I would not have noticed had I just been served a plate of beetles ;-)

In other news I’m very grateful to the nice folks at Road.cc for giving Shelterbox a mention, I’m a long way short of my target and any extra help is appreciated – it’s very hard to get noticed as a regular individual unless a footballer riding a unicycle in a frock…. or something…. (which is fine by the way tho I’m not inclined to wear a frock up here…) especially with so many different and worthwhile fundraising events happening at the moment. So… if you can spare a £ or $ or € or anything else then Shelterbox and I will be grateful. I will also be writing a feature for road.cc when I get home so stay tuned for that, nominally it will be June but I have this strange urge , when I get to Peru and given that further north from Cusco would be to cover old ground to instead  head west  and scoot all the way back down the Pacific coast through Chile to the very tip of Tierra del Fuego… and from there it might be possible to work passage on a  ship to South Georgia and go riding with some penguins… oh the possibilities are endless…  lol ;-)

Anyway, that’s enough from me from Salta… next time I log on I imagine I’ll be some-way along the 400-and-something km or so journey up to the border. Hopefully I won’t have the floods leaving the city that I had on the way in ;-)

hasta luego!

p.s. if you’re headed to Salta and need a place to stay I can’t recommend Inti Huasi enough, a terrific little hostal run by really lovely folk, peaceful but with good music and epic BBQs. http://www.intihuasihostel.com.ar/en/

a slower pace of life…

The police were playing in the plaza this morning… not The Police but rather the local ‘policia’ band. I was there purely by chance enjoying coffee in the morning sun and watching the slower pace of life on a Saturday morning… and having been very much seeing in colour yesterday this morning I was feeling distinctly monochrome…

I chatted with some of the guys during a break and for the first time was confronted directly with the Islas Malvinas problem… but in a good natured way, what could I say but that I had no answer… however with smiles all round and a firm shake of my hand it clearly wasn’t a problem between us.

difficult light with combined shade and sun, sorry about the burned out background..

Ceremonial gauchos were in town too this morning for a parade…

I’m in danger of enjoying this life off the bike too much.. getting up late, spending my mornings watching life go by with a long coffee.. lunch on the street somewhere before an extended siesta as preparation for evening of beer, wine and company… lol. I still have a fair way to go however and for the next few hundred km it’s mostly uphill too :-|

Last night while enjoying icecream in the company of cycling friends, Mark and Steve, storm clouds rapidly gathered to the east, so as the sky darkened and the first streaks of lightening cut across the sky we took refuge in a small cafe on the corner by the Iglesia San Francisco.

Old music photos of the proprietor in his younger days covered cracks in the plaster and Bolivian TV played by the doorway. A pile of fresh empanadas and cerveza Salta arrived simultaneously with the deluge… gusts of rain-laden wind blew through the open windows as people raced by outside in search of shelter.

It’s a pretty nice life.
(Must leave on Monday… must leave on Monday….)
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If you enjoyed reading this and haven’t done so already then please consider sponsoring me for Shelterbox, even if it is only a couple of $. It doesn’t matter what country you live in.. it’s completely secure and you can use paypal too… cheers: http://www.justgiving.com/mikesimagination

Streets of Salta (& stuff…)

Salta is a great city, it took me a couple of days to get a feel for it but have decided to stay a few days longer and enjoy it, especially as have found some good company here including friends from Cafayate. Salta has a very different feel to Mendoza.. whether it’s the heat or the narrow streets or just the colour but life here feels more ‘intense’. For once I also have some useful words .. well, useful from the point of view of anyone heading this way by bike so stay tuned for those (scroll down I mean..). First though as I have spent a happy morning wandering with my camera I think I’ll just sling up some street photography up that might give a feel for the place from it’s densely packed colonial core to the more modern, open ‘burbs…. and no apology for the fact that bicycles and groovy old trucks feature quite extensively ;-)

good empanadas & humitas at the mercado municipal.. which also happens to be a great steamy, sweaty box of humanity :-)

making empanadas

and TVs everywhere

this pic needs bums on seats.. but no bums in evidence sadly

some bums here however

presumably it started with the wheels being nicked...

And now for the useful stuff… having managed to sort just about everything with my bike in the space of a morning it may be handy for anyone heading this way who comes to these pages to know where to go for bike bits, help and excellent conversation…

First off the bike shop – Salta’s biggest is on the southwest corner of Pelligrini and Corrientes south-south -west of the city centre. Pelligrini is the road you’ll come into the city on if coming from Cafayate on Ruta 68… It’s pretty well stocked with Shimano road and mountain stuff.. prices are much the same as the UK… I paid about £55 I guess for a new chain and cassette… XT stuff too :-)

As for a bike mechanic… well I have what I need to do everything myself except remove the bottom bracket so I didn’t need to go looking for Rene, David and Hector but having heard about them through the bike-traveller grapevine (the internet is a wonderful thing these days…) I figured it had to be worth it. It was. Although the workshop appeared to have downscaled somewhat from when I it was first written about (here: http://www.pushonnorth.com/Bike-shops-and-bike-mechanics-in-Latin-and-North-America ) David was still there when I visited with my bike and new parts, and based on a cheery wave from him through the window when I arrived it doesn’t look like he’s fed up of bike travellers yet :-) So while he set about stripping down and servicing my freehub and realigning my rear mech hangar (clouted it on a rock on a rock I guess, possibly on the crazy descent from Tocata to Iglesia…) I admired his handiwork in the form of models and sculptures assembled from wood and scrap metal.

I also had my failing cycling shoes with me .. they were taken care of when he asked a friend of his to take me to a little repair shop a couple of blocks away where they were fixed up for the princely sum of 5 pesos :-)

Back at the workshop David has a book of messages of goodwill from cyclists heading north and south dating from 2006, it made interesting reading though for some reason the entries dried up after late 2007… a big jump then to mine for 2010. Definitely worth dropping by even if you only need a drop of polish on your bike, honestly I was happy to leave it to his attentions and now it’s clean and running sweetly as ever.

If you do go looking then the address is Pje David Lascano 133, San Felipe y Santiago Al 1500, 4400 Salta , it’s just south of the area shown on the tourist maps of the city and has no sign but if you go half a block south of the junction between Ave Independencia and San Felipe y Santiago you’ll find it…  the shop is south facing on the western side of SF y Santigo and has some faded logos painted on the wall. So there you go, some useful words for a change … well, if you’re on a bike anyway.

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If you enjoyed reading this and haven’t done so already then please consider sponsoring me for Shelterbox, even if it is only a couple of $. It doesn’t matter what country you live in.. it’s completely secure and you can use paypal too… cheers: http://www.justgiving.com/mikesimagination

a day of transitions.. Cafayate to Salta

hehe, I think I may have stacked up some bad backpacker karma with my comments below about the generic backpacker… the night before I left Cafayate the place I stayed filled up with new folk and was no longer quite so “muy tranquilo” as when I arrived…  was like sleeping with a bunch of asthmatic horses.. mind you they were probably equally as suspicious of the skinny idiot with the strange tan lines and funny shoes… ;-)

this is locro, a local stew of corn, beans and meat... not bad :-)

So it was with significant sleep debt that I rolled out of Cafayate on Monday morning having filled my panniers with good bread and my stomach with poor coffee. Whether or not I’ve had decent sleep I always feel crap when I get back on my bike after more than a day off  so the first 50km or so of riding were hard going with aching eyes and furrowed brow… it  may also have been something to do with the wind tunnel effect of the Quebrada de Cafayate (see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cafayate) .. this is the easier, surfaced route to Salta, I had planned to go via Cachi but in the end when decision time came I couldn’t be bothered being tired and all..  As for the wind.. well  I met a Dutch cyclist coming the other way, we chatted a while and I allowed myself a little mention of the wind and he said “ah yes, I had recently become aware of a little breeze pushing me along“… I could have hit him…  no, actually I wouldn’t have done that, not to a fellow cyclist.. maybe just a brief hard stare instead a’la Paddington Bear :-)  A car also came past with an enormous cheer, luckily on a slightly downhill stretch so I could at least look fast.. hehe. It was the French guys I’d enjoyed talking to in Cafayate the day before :-)

quebrada

The quebrada itself is a very beautiful place, but from a cycling perspective no more beautiful than many other places. It enjoys special status as a tourist destination thanks to it’s proximity to Salta and Cafayate. Some of it’s sights are truly spectacular.. others are pushing it a bit in terms of turning a very average rock into a special ‘attraction’…

I ate cake under this tree.. but I was still slow after

road through the quebrada

portent of wetter roads to come...

one of the last of the dry riverbeds..

can't think of a title beyond the obvious...

I only felt better after meeting a couple of excellent chaps from Buenos Aires making a cycle tour of the Salta region at a small cafe where I stopped for empanadas and water..

every self-respecting cafe in this area has a large pot outside (and cyclists if they're really cool)

We talked about the usual things that cyclists will talk about… bikes, gear, weight, bike parts, food and women for example, not necessarily in that order. Further down the road I also bumped into 5 cyclists from Colombia heading south.. this was great, aside from being a bunch of total characters it was nice to be able to say that I had cycled in their country two years ago and that in my opinion “Colombia es el mejor país“… (Argentina también para mis amigos Argentinos ;-) I enjoy the on-road encounters very much, it is very much like being part of a global collective and always a reminder that no matter how cool I might think I am  (I don’t really…. much, ahem) there are always folk out there on bicycles that are much cooler… see the photo below and judge for yourself, I must get a flag on a  stick and an embroidered bag for my handlebars. Really.

all the way from Colombia

These chaps were from Armenia in the Zona Cafateria part of Colombia. I always liked the idea of naming part of a country for it’s produce… back home perhaps we could have the Zona Spingo or on a larger scale instead of Cornwall.. the Zona Pasty (or Zona Gull-Shit All Over The Car).

another road side shrine and a phallic cactus...

But I digress… back to the ride out of Cafayate… This day was very much one of transitions.  In particular my transition out of the desert… after weeks in a harsh, waterless environment the transition to a lush, sub-tropical zone was a matter of just a few kilometres as I headed north  east from the quebrada.. the change was remarkable as dust and rock was replaced by thick, green undergrowth, fields of tobacco and stands of palm trees. The the air became thick with humidty and my jersey perpetually heavy with sweat. The locals I spoke with also no longer talked of summer and winter, or the hot and cold seasons as they did further south… now they talked of the wet and the dry.

local 'stuff' for sale..

I also briefly noticed, or thought I did, a transtion in my Spanish proficiency from doing ‘just OK’ to finally getting to grips properly with the all the tenses and conjugations.. that was based on a long and happy conversation with a lady I bought cake from just outside the village of La Viña… and even later on managing to keep up with another Argentine chap and his Colombian girlfriend.. but this morning I was spoken to by a teenage chap with a thick head (I mean my thick head, I don’t know how he was feeling) and buggered if I could make head or tail of what he was saying.. so confidence dented somewhat there… but on reflection I can barely understand the average teenager back home anyway….

lakeshore near Coronel Moldes

I stopped after 135km for the day on the pretty-but-sadly-spoiled-by-litter lake-shore near the pueblo of Coronel Moldes. Pitched my tent on the grass there for the princely sum of 5 pesos and promptly collapsed in a  heap. There had been a lot of climbing into wind in the form of cruel false flats that suck the life out of your legs, I’d been on the road for 8hrs though only 6.5hrs of that was actual riding. The Argentine guys showed up about 2hrs later and we had a pleasant evening involving just a small amount of beer, I think because we may have been too tired to walk more than once the 50 yards or so to the scruffy little kiosko by the lake, and a large amount of mickey-taking out of the single ciclista Inglés… I was outnumbered :-)

Coronel Moldes

That I was now in a damp part of the country was reinforced by the torrential overnight rain.. at first it was just very hot and humid in my tent as I tried to decide whether I would prefer a cool night outside with mosquitos or steamy night in without… the decision was made for me when the heavens opened and I sealed my tent down hard. It hammered all night, I must admit I enjoyed it – my tent is tiny but it very weatherproof and it also washed away the last traces of a faint aroma of canine pee the fly-sheet had acquired overnight back in Santa Maria….

The rain stopped about 8am, just in time to brew a large pot of coffee and sort out breakfast. With only 65km or so to Salta the morning was characterised by significant faffing with wet gear before I said my farewells and rolled back up the hill to the main road at 10am.

Coronel Moldes has a v pretty church

Coronel Moldes

I hadn’t appreciated just how much rain fell overnight… until I came to the first flood.. the water rushing across the road was deep enough to cover my hubs.. I charged through the 100 metre flood, feet underwater and with an impressive bow-wave from my front panniers hoping that I wouldn’t come across any significant potholes hidden by the muddy red water… I didn’t find any though I was completely swamped a number of times by trucks pushing through in the opposite direction… perversely once I was soaked I found this all rather good fun. It was a scene repeated 7 or 8 times on the way into Salta… which is where I am now.

floods..

water in the rivers....!!

doh!!... another flood

Tomorrow is going to be bike cleaning and servicing day… I also need to find someone who can repair my cycling shoes… the outsole is detaching from the carbon sole plate and they’re in generally tatty condition… once I’ve got my chores out the way and am happy my bike and gear are ready for the next leg then I’ll go and enjoy Salta… if the city is as good as the beer that bears it’s name then I think I’l be very happy :-)

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cactus, una rana y un ciclista perezoso…

(cacti, a frog and a lazy cyclist…)

I’m excited this morning, I just got back my clothes from the lavadero… it’s been a month since they had a proper wash… handwashing is all very well but you know all the “ground in dirt “that the soap commercials back home love to talk about… well after all the living in the dust since leaving Mendoza there was plenty of it… I’m in Cafayate by the way, a lovely town just a couple of hundred km south west of Salta and home to some truly fine wines as I am discovering, in particular the Torrontés grape that is special to the region…  It’s touristy but it manages it in a civilised, even bewitching way.. and I’ve spent a pleasant morning nursing a coffee at a pavement cafe on the corner of the plaza, watching flat capped old men and young women alike cruising past on their singlespeed boneshaker bicycles.

Cafayate

Arrival yesterday was a little bit of a culture shock… after a few weeks off the tourist trail the streets here were full of the stereotypical lonely planet slaves clutching their copies of ‘the bible’*… Oh dear, I seem to have my cynical hat on today, lol…. As for the stereotypes, I’d better be careful what I write in case anyone with zip-off trouser legs is reading, hehe, but yeah they come in two flavours.. the middle aged couple wearing socks with their sandals and zip-off leg trousers, mostly French it seems in this town, even the French guy I chatted with earlier over a glass of wine (yeah I know.. in the morning… shocking) doesn’t know why all his compatriots are here… which I suppose by extension means that he doesn’t know what he’s doing here either but he was a nice guy so I can forgive him that ;-) The other flavour manages to look the same the whole world over… young, head adorned with a tea cosy hat, tattooed ankle band or a scruffy bit of string down there and muscles wasted by a diet of white bread and beer mainly because they’re too mean to eat properly…. the plaza is full of them, some with the almost obligatory guitar and others weaving scruffy bits of string to sell to the poor folk who aren’t yet ‘cool’ enough to have one on their ankle…. I haven’t got one sadly, not cool enough… I have to make do with just the occasional chainring tattoo when I’ve been careless with my weighty bike… ;-)

Cafayate

The place I’m staying is great, muy tranquilo… If I’d seen their logo first I would probably have walked other way.. “run by bakpakers for bakpakers” (spelling intentional) however it is unexpectedly quiet with a nice courtyard and friendly young staff. I did have a brief moment of panic when I stepped out last night in search of food… walking down the street right towards this place was a bunch of loud, guitar-equipped English backpackers… what they were doing here I have no idea, I thought they all went to Koh Phangan. They walked right on by the entrance however and with a sigh of relief I trotted off to the market :-)

I should probably qualify however in case they are reading, hehe, that as with every rule or stereotype there are exceptions and I’ve met some terrific people here too, in particular an expat Irish/English chap who rode his horse all over Argentina for 2 years – a fantastic adventure worth a book I reckon, and a couple of girls from Ecuador and the US respectively who have their own interesting stories as well as being excellent company ;-)

Cafayate

So, the last few days… my journey from Belén didn’t go quite as I had envisaged thanks to a glass of wine and a bag of fruit.. Having spent my last evening in Belén chatting to Tom, a cyclist from Bristol heading south from Ecuador, I rolled out of town along a beautiful stretch of road on the 10th loaded up with food and enough water for 1 1/2 days and a night in the desert. The early morning skies were cloudy and the weather pleasantly cool. The sun eventually came out just as the asphalt turned to ripio and the going got harder shortly before arriving at the pretty little pueblo of Hualfin with it’s pink adobe church and pink adobe “mini-hospital” after 60km of riding.

the road to Hualfin

A very green little oasis in the desert it was here that my day went a bit awry.. you see I stopped at the one hosteria in the place for lunch… it was beautiful single-storey adobe building in, you guessed it, pink and surrounded by artfully arranged rocks and cacti.

Hualfin

While waiting for my lunch I met a terrific Argentine couple, Stella & Marcelo travelling the region by car… Aside from being named like a pair of movie stars from the sixties they were great company… much food was eaten, wine was drunk – I strategically mentioned my birthday was coming up – and I was given an enormous bag of fruit.. and all of sudden it was 4pm, very hot and very windy.. it was at this point I noticed the hosteria had some rooms at the back.. rather nice ones too with views of the cacti in the garden and handwoven blankets and so on.. you can probably guess the rest, my resolve collapsed and that was it for the day :-)

Hualfin

So there you go I’m a dead lazy cyclist really and crap at sticking to a budget… but hey for my birthday I had an absolutely awesome sleep and even got to learn the Spanish word for frog…. a very large one magically appeared in the toilet that evening… The chap running the place just stared at me when I told him “hay una rana en el inodoro…” At first I thought my Spanish was at fault so I said it again… but it wasn’t my Spanish, I think he probably thought I was making a hash of saying something completely different like “can I clean my boots with the towels..?”

surveying a rare river crossing north of Hualfin

The morning of the 11th, my birthday.. I had a great breakfast with birthday wishes from the staff when I let slip “hoy tengo 21 años otra vez “. My bill for such extravagance…. £18 for dinner, bed and breakfast – happy birthday me :-) I left Hualfin feeling fresh and enthusiastic under cloudy skies again which was nice as the first 30km of the day were really quite hard work.. hilly ripio alternately super soft sandy stuff or thick, gloopy mud.. neither type is very quick, I only managed 10km/hr average.

haven't seen this much water for weeks..!

The mud was mostly confined to km 20-30.. lots of road improvement going on though to be honest I couldn’t see much improvement despite lots of activity and the constant spraying of the road with water which just turns it to thick clay.

roadwork

I think I may have attacked that section just a little too enthusiastically, the road was all uphill for the first 80km or so and after 2 hours I really started to die horribly… lol. I made a few stops to get some more sugar in me but any effect that had was negated by the arrival on the scene of a vicious headwind on the exposed road… :-( In the end it took me 8hrs to cover the 115km to Santa Maria.

taking a break..

I stopped for a big tub of icecream in San Jose Norte, a pueblo about 20km or so south…

ate most of it before I remembered to take a photo...

sat on the pavement for a while chatting to the lad running the heladeria.. told him it was my birthday too but I still had to pay for the icecream… it did however sort my legs and tired head out and I steamed the rest of the way to Santa Maria, a pretty little place, where I pitched my tent just outside town forgetting previous lessons learned about camping in/by villages..didn’t sleep a wink that night… dogs fighting, music ’till 4am and so on.

San Jose Norte

By rights I should have been grovelling on my bike as I left town the next morning.. but I wasn’t, I had great legs:-) Not sure if I had actually recovered really well from the previous day of riding or whether it was just the pint of coffee I brewed myself at first light.

Santa Maria

Santa Maria

Everyone I spoke to in Santa Maria told me I should take the asphalt, albeit 20km further, road via Amaicha del Valle… but I decided I’d rather take the ripio back road, which just happens to be Ruta Nacional 40, which pretty much goes direct to the ruins at Quilmes. The first 15km or so were ace, a broken but hard surface winding it’s way through scruffy, sorry – picturesque, little pueblos at the foot of the mountains.

Ruta Cuarenta... a rather weathered sign

The next 15km were still ace but a very very soft, sandy surface that slowed me right down to a crawl, spent much of this section in my granny ring just to keep moving

savouring the silence of the desert

It was on this stretch that I met the spitting image of Vin Diesel/Xander Cage (xXx) albeit with a spanish flavour… this heavily tattooed chap with shaved head pulled alongside on one of those motorcycles designed to be especially noisy, girl on the back, and yelled something across to me .. we tried to talk but his machine was too noisy and I was concentrating on keeping going in the sand. Our brief conversation finished with a shouted “adios Inglés” from him as he revved his machine and disappeared in a cloud of dust… but not the last I was to see of him.

Ruta Nacional 40!

I’m not really a ruins person but the 10km up and back detour to the extensive pre-Colombian ruins of Quilmes, about 60km south of Cafayate was worth the effort if only to see the enormous cacti standing sentry amongst the stone walls.

Quilmes

The place was a Diaguita fortified town that resisted the Inca but couldn’t resist the Spanish, they were all deported to a neighbourhood of what is now Buenos Aires.. Recently, much to the disgust of the remaining descendants of Diaguita the site was sold to a private businessman who opened a hotel and cafe right next to the ruins.. By the time of my visit however the native people seem to have claimed the site back and the hotel has been closed down – all good news. There is some history here if interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quilmes_(tribe)

Having wandered around the site with walls that looked as if they could have come straight from England’s Peak District.. and cacti that couldn’t… I was munching on a cold milanesa (fried meat, fried egg and cheese) sandwich bought from a man under a tree when Vin Diesel showed up again.. His motorcycle wouldn’t start and his girl was standing by in the shade of a tree waiting for it to come to life. I sauntered over and said “¿quieres mi bicicleta?”.. his girlfriend laughed and he just looked at me with a bemused expression for a moment before it finally burst into life with a particularly loud roar. “Hermosa!!” (beautiful) he shouted over the din. I’d let my tyres down for a fast, rocky descent back to the main road so we took off together and headed back down the mountain at around 50km/hr until the track levelled off and he disappeared for the second time with an “adios Inglés” into a cloud of dust… good fun.

Cafayate

From there it was a lovely rolling ride through surprisingly lush countryside to Cafayate and it’s surrounding vineyards. As I sit here it’s just about lunch time… I have a pile of fresh bread, cold meat, salad and fruit from the market… I don’t really feel like a proper adventurer now with such luxury… I’ve not lost much weight and despite having a diet that seems to consist mostly of fat it ain’t from having to chew on dead seals or penguins like the intrepid explorers of old.. Not many seals or penguins hereabouts anyway and I don’t think there’s much fat on a llama either, years ago in Peru I ate some alpaca cooked in the ground with hot stones and I don’t recall much by way of grease… just very tasty, very lean meat :-)

So, that’s it for now.. I need to go and wash the fly of my tent, 2 months of dust and grit can get quite destructive if left in the fabric to slowly grind away at the fibres.

Cafayate

Cafayate

Cafayate

Cafayate

Cafayate

route planning.... not water in the glass

* as for Lonely Planet – like all guide books it is a useful reference but in this case my own opinion – and it just that, an opinion, is that it has too much power… it’s very opinionated and has the power to destroy a business and even entire villages… frequently I’ve arrived at a place that the ‘planet’ recommended avoiding and having a wonderful time… so, use it as a reference but don’t be a slave to it is my rule, get out and enjoy the places in between.

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el calor del desierto … Chilecito a Belén

I did take another photo in Chilecito… here it is – JC being uplifting behind a regular cats cradle of cabling…

The ride from Chilecito to San Blas was one of those to be endured rather than enjoyed, lol. No doubt the scenery would be described as awesome in it’s scale when looking at it from the cold side of the window of an air-conditioned car… but for cycling through I found it a toughie…

After a long, fast descent from Chilecito the road then felt like it climbed steadily for at least 90km of the 125km distance, not steeply but with enough of a grade to be frustrating, especially when combined with the fresh headwind.. For much of the day the road was just an endless ribbon of shimmering heat in the desert disappearing to the northern horizon… the mountains to the east and west weren’t particularly attractive either… just brown, and the temperatures soared as the day wore on.. up into the low 40′s Celcius. Which reminds me, at midnight in Chilecito I measured the temperature outside at 33.5 degs C… bit sweaty. If I said this day was like spending 7hrs on a turbo trainer in an oven then at least my cycling readership will understand a little… lol!

Not that I’m complaining about the day of course, bicycle touring is just like this at times. I confess that at times in fact, I hated every single pedal stroke but on days like this the smallest acts of kindness and human interaction are magnified enormously in significance and the pleasure of arriving at a ‘place’ for the night can be immense. The road was very quiet, I saw just 6 vehicles all day – one of those turned out to be a German couple touring in a rental car.. random act of kindness number 1 for the day was these two passing me and then making a u-turn in the road ahead to come back and see if I was Ok and to give me 2 litres of ice cold water from the cooler in the trunk of their car.. oh it was sooo good, the water in my bottles and the bag on the back of my bike was probably at around 50 degs C :-)

San Blas

Random act of kindness number 2 was on arrival at the first pueblo in the string of pueblos collectively known as San Blas… I stopped at a little kiosko for an ice cold bottle of coke.. the chap had no change and I had nothing smaller than a 50 peso note.. so he just gave me the coke in return for some friendly conversation. He was just about coherent but his two mates sitting in the shade outside were rolling drunk, lol. Nothing much else to do I guess on a baking hot Sunday afternoon in the middle of nowhere. I rolled away from there with a big smile on my face. I’ve noticed that people definitely ‘look after me’ more when I’m cycling alone…

Iglesia de San Blas

After 100km of desert the final 22km through the string of villages was lovely, virtually deserted but lined with green trees and grasses, a tonic for my eyes. I passed a place to camp but I’m having real trouble with my skin in the heat and the lure of being able to have a shower at the end of the day and wash off the dust and sunscreen in the cool is too much to resist. Once I’m back up at higher altitudes the problem should go away.

As I write this bit in this particular pueblo in San Blas I’ve just been for a wander around the village… it didn’t take long… just a couple of dusty, deserted streets and adobe buildings around a shady plaza. Not a soul to be seen, just the faint sounds of music or TV shows drifting from a few windows shuttered against the heat. I like these kind of places, they have a way of surprising you… like just now wandering back along the empty road a moped stacked with three beautiful women cruises past… inevitably I wondered who they were, where they had come from and where they were going… and was there room for a fourth person to squeeze in the middle…. ;-)

I think a fair number of cyclists head through this way, this road goes northwest to Chile over the Paso San Francisco… a popular route I think… my route from here however goes directly north .. some 300km to Santa Maria via Londres, Belén and Hualfin. It’s also my birthday on the 11th March, looking at the map I suspect I’ll be spending it on the ripio north east of Hualfin. Oh well, I’ll be in Cafayate shortly and that I think is on the tourist trail so should be able to grab someone to share a bottle or two of wine :-) I think I’m just 500km or so, depending on route,  from Salta now :-) I need to stop there a few days… aside from resting my legs and enjoying the food and wine, the chain and cassette on my bike is heavily worn… it’s only been 3000km since the start of my journey but despite best efforts to look after it the dust and grit of the ripio makes a very effective grinding paste.

The other thing I’ve been meaning to mention about riding here are the little roadside shrines to the Difunta Correa…. Argentina’s most loved pagan saint apparently. The roadsides are dotted with shrines all surrounded by vast numbers of bottles of water – left as offerings to ask for safe journeys… most of them, to be fair, look like garbage dumps with plastic bottles piled up at random.. so I’ve not bothered with any photos.. on the road to San Blas though I passed one particularly artful arrangement, well artful as piles of plastic bottles in the desert can be.. so for your viewing pleasure, hehe, a photo:

So that’s it for now, no doubt I’ll have more to write tomorrow from Belén but for now I can go back to watching Asterix cartoons with the kids here at the hospedaje ;-)

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Belén….  I must confess I got up this morning not really looking forward to the day ahead… on the map the road looked like just another stretch of hot desert highway… when I went to buy bread at the little shop in the plaza the lady behind the counter asked me where I was headed ,, when I said  Belén she sucked her teeth and said “todo cuesta arriba…” (all uphill)… I only sort of half listened because on the map  Belén is only at about 1300m altitude… I then went to buy some cheese.. the guy behind the counter asked me where I was from.. then where I was headed, sucked his teeth and said “todo cuesta arriba”… Started to have doubts about the accuracy of my map….

As it happened it was a fine ride… all that climbing the locals were thinking of happened in one steep-ish and very sweaty 10km stretch just 13km north of San Blas. Once that was out of the way it was an undulating ride along the eastern flanks of the Sierra Famatina with just a light wind and a light overcast to take the edge off the sun. The desert here was much greener than I’ve seen for a long time, may have been some decent rain recently… it was much easier on the eyes and I was in pretty good spirits as I cruised long the edge of the sierra. Such a change from yesterday.

At one point during the ride I was lost in some vintage Faithless on my iPod* when a heavily loaded touring motorcycle pulled up alongside… the rider was German so we rode side by side for a few moments for a conversation in Spanish (it just happened that way). It’s very cool when things like that happen, two nomads half a world away from home meeting in the desert :-) Stopped for lunch in the shade of a tree soon after that and watched the crumbs from my sandwich making their way erratically across the desert floor towards a nearby ants nest.

After 85km the road arrived at the tiny pueblo of Londres, nestled in a valley below the sierra. Both Londres and  Belén have been here since the earliest arrival of the Spanish in the mid-1500′s and have both strong Spanish and indigenous lineages visible in the features of the locals (the Diaguita people were here first…and the Inca also made their way here around 1480 apparently). Londres in particular is Catamarca province’s oldest settlement – dating from 1558. The bottle of Sprite I enjoyed while sitting in the shady plaza however was of a much more recent vintage.  Belén, 15km further on and 100km from San Blas, is a much bigger place but still tiny – just a few blocks around a plaza. It’s not a particularly pretty place but it has atmosphere, the setting is lovely  - a relatively green mountain oasis, probably a local micro-climate thing going on –  and it’s a very friendly town. A good place for a rest day.The Santaderia on one side of the plaza caught my eye last night… until now I’ve seen the usual panaderia (bread shop), fruteria (fruit shop), ferreteria (hardware shop), zapateria (shoe shop) etc etc.. so the Santaderia was quite amusing,…. fundamentally it’s a saint shop… or rather a shop specialising in religious ‘stuff’.. mostly garish pictures of JC in slightly effeminate poses.. plus of course the VM.

Dinner was a very good lomo and beer in a cozy flourescent-lit cafe just off the plaza… the only other patrons being a family with strong indigenous features tucking into an enormous pizza while the TV in the corner showed an extended commercial espousing the weight loss benefits of Dr Ming’s Chinese Tea….

My map says the next 180km to Santa Maria are mostly ripio but I stopped by the little information kiosk at the bus station and the lady there very enthusiastically told me that it has nearly all been surfaced now… it must have been a slow day for her, once the information floodgates had opened she also excitedly told me a whole load of other stuff, some of which was completely lost on me with the speed of her articulation….  Looking ahead then towards Santa Maria I’ll do a full day from here, wild camp when I run out of steam and then continue the next day … I think it may really be nearly all uphill this time as the road looks like it goes close to the 3600m contour on my map… will soon find out. Santa Maria is supposed to be a really pretty place so plan to spend some time there before riding on up to Cafayate.

p.s. The other thing worth knowing about Belén for anyone thinking of heading this way… there’s a wicked little hostel on the main road through town, ruta 40, on the left just after the turn for Avda Gral Paz on the right.. the sign is too small, so keep your eyes peeled.. it’s called Hostel Retama. At 30 pesos for the night with breakfast and kitchen I really couldn’t be bothered to look for camping.

* I rarely ride with an iPod, my hearing is a huge part of my spatial awareness but these last couple of days in the desert the roads have been so quiet and it does make the long, desert stretches on asphalt easier, especially if it’s windy….

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no through road.. Laguna Brava etc

The place I stayed in Villa Union was pretty much just a room in a family house (mum, dad, daughter and her husband and her daughter) where I felt very welcome and equally well looked after. I shared my bit of the covered courtyard with a very vocal parrot blessed with a wicked laugh, an equally wicked inventory of whistles and a reasonable Spanish vocabulary… for a bird. I was served with breakfast each morning in a dark panelled dining room whose walls were covered with a mix of family photos, religious images and football posters. I spilled my coffee on the plastic floral table cloth this morning while admiring the enormous bunch of plastic sunflowers in the corner next to the ancient TV :-)

While in Villa Union I also made a side-trip up to the little known Reserva Natural Laguna Brava … apparently it doesn’t even feature in the Lonely Planet which is a good thing IMO, it was peaceful up there… An out and back journey of almost 500km, half of it on steep dirt, from Villa Union I would loved to have gone up there on my bike… but it’s a dead end – there’s no road into Chile so it’s not possible to make it part of a big loop so with that in mind I don’t have time and sadly had to resort to a 4×4 :-(  On the other hand I’m ashamed to say I thoroughly enjoyed my comfy seat for a day off the bike and learned a lot about the geology, flora and fauna of the area :-) For riding it I reckon I’d need 5 or 6 days – 3 days minimum up – the track rises very steeply to around 4700m, and 2 days back down to Villa Union. Still, I have consoled myself with the thought that I have plenty of high altitude riding to come once north of Jujuy, and that really I’m still supposed to be taking it easy … I suppose, though that is probably the hardest part of any journey like this…!

By way of a brief description Laguna Brava is a saline lake at about 4500m altitude populated by flamingos and overshadowed by four of the biggest volcanoes on the planet, the largest is Pissis (stop sniggering at the back there…), inactive now, with a summit at 6,882m. The slopes leading to the lake are populated by wild guanacos and their more delicate,  rarer cousin the vicuña – all in full view which was magic, I had some brief, faraway glimpses of vicuña  in Peru back in ’98 but nothing like today :-)

Not much point in me writing any more about the place… I’ll let the pictures do the talking…. and then talk about the ride from Villa Union to Chilecito.

the road to Laguna Brava

more road.. 4500+m here

4x4... oh the shame of it :-|

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mountain refuges

tortured landscape of the precordillera. Fossils here too

So as I write it’s about 7.30pm and I’m in a bar in the town of Chilecito about 115km ride from Villa Union. I found it quite a hard day (7.5hrs on the road and about 6hrs actual riding) mostly because of the heat but it was a good day.. I needed a day like today to get my riding mojo back as it were.. though looking at the map the next 120km to San Blas look very dull indeed, and probably very hot :-(

The first 60km out of Villa Union were generally uphill.. gently for the first 40km or so and then steeply for the next 20km. The asphalt also ended after 40km as the road wound it’s way through deep red canyons on it’s way to the Cuesta Miranda. Red was very much colour of the day… the red of the surrounding rocks, the red dust all over me and my bike and the red mist that descended as the temperature soared above 40 degs C, hehe.

pueblo with no name.. well it has one but I forgot it & it's not on the map

I stopped for a bite of lunch in a tiny pueblo of no more than 5 or 6 buildings that looked more as if they had grown out of the red soil rather than been built upon it. At the one bar in the place I bought a coke and a litre of orange juice from the aging matriarch and sat in the shade eating the bread and cheese I brought from Villa Union before refilling my bottles and topping up my water bag from a standpipe outside. It was here I pulled out my little thermometer and left it on my bike in the shade… 43 degs C, more in the sun…

cactus country

With no wind to cool me the first few km of the cuesta Miranda were brutal… as I climbed higher however a welcoming wind took the edge off the heat. I think today was the hottest day of my journey so far.

climbing the Cuesta Miranda

Cuesta Miranda

very red

This was also giant cactus country… thousands of them ‘stalking’ the countryside and lining the canyon rims like Indians in an old Western movie.

there's cacti in them there hills...

from the pass a fabulous descent in beautiful surroundings took me down to the village of Nonagasta where I stopped for an icecream before joining the highway north for the final 20km to Chilecito… a not very fun 20km either.. baking hot, dead straight on a dull bit of highway and steadily uphill.. bah!

can see the road ahead just right of centre

The policman at the checkpoint on the way into town was very welcoming… the dogs were not…. I also passed a big sign at the entrance to town saying “Las Malvinas sos Argentina”… so when I stopped at a shop for a drink and was asked by the folk sitting in the shade outside where I was from I said “Iceland”…

fetching red highlights on my transmission....

.. and on my legs

Discovered on arrival also that thanks to the red dust my legs had acquired the same orange hue as all the teenage/twenty-something girls do at home in mid-winter…. ( with their fake tanning products…)

Chilecito is a bustling little town, biggest place I’ve seen since Mendoza, but nothing special to look at. It looks relatively new and reminds me a lot of Latacunga in Ecuador. The following photo does it no justice at all but it’s dark now so it is all you’re going to get unless I am inspired on my way out of town in the morning…

por favor no limpiar las botas… To Guandacol & Villa Union

I was on the road out of San Jose before 9am on Wednesday, still feeling rough but restless enough to move on.

late night cybercafe in San Jose

The morning was perfect for cycling – a high overcast keeping things cool and no wind. A chap on a battered old tractor yelled directions at me over the noise of his machine as I happily pedalled away from town through the surrounding fields.

The first 40km or so to the little mining town of Huaco were stunning as the road wound it’s way through narrow red rock gorges and tiny tunnels hewn from the rock. At the turning to Huaco there was a police checkpoint… up until now the local coppers haven’t been interested in me and my bike so I just cruised on by the apparently deserted checkpoint until a whistle from inside the roadside hut called me back. The copper was a nice chap and took down my details… and on his form for vehicle registration details wrote down the name of my bike…

From there I cruised steadily through the desert along a mostly flat, mostly straight road to the village of Guandacol.. I was sorely tempted to keep going another 50km towards Villa Union as it was only 2pm when I arrived… but figured what with being off colour and all 110km for the day was probably enough ;-)  A few km south of Guandacol I also left San Juan Province and entered La Rioja… there was a checkpoint here too.. an inspection for fruit and vegetables in an effort to prevent the spread of pests from further south. The chap manning the post was happy to take me at my word when I told him I only had biscuits, rice and cereals on board (true) and sent me on my way with a cheery “buena suerte”.

Arriving in Guandacol mid-afternoon was the usual ghost town experience with the exception of flocks of squawking parrots in the trees along the road into town. There was however a kiosko , equipped with the usual basic selection of snacks, open on one corner of the overgrown plaza where the only sign of life was a rangy looking dog burying a turd in the dry undergrowth…..

I’ve decided to avoid camping (and heavy duty ripio!) for a few nights in the interests of laziness… I mean  recovery – saving energy and getting as much rest as I can… there was supposed to be cheap hostal in town but with no-one around to ask I was buggered if I could find it.. there was also a hotel however, very easy to find being all new and shiny… I guess it’s built to serve visitors to the mines in this area… my room had a sign on the wall saying “please do not clean your boots with the towels”… yep, probably miners ;-) I was the only guest which meant a price as cheap as a hostel with the added bonus of a swimming pool…. oh, and a sofa with a 40” wide screen TV and 900 channels of satellite including such delights as Wet Bikini Car Wash*… <ahem>. All a bit surreal in this tiny adobe pueblo :-|

From Guandacol to Villa Union was an easy ride of about 45km, I had thought I might go all the way to Chilecito, 150km, but body and mind, especially body, were mush as I rolled out of town so decided I need another short day for recovery… The road was good, climbing gently through a multicoloured landscape of rock.. sand, brown, red and black in colour. With better light this morning I had a closer look at the parrots, as vocal as ever, on the road out of town… no bright hues as in their rainforest cousins, these guys were dark & dusky in colour… very much the same as the surrounding desert.

multi-hued rocks enroute to Villa Union

So as I write this I’m in a cafe in Villa Union where my request for some salad has resulted in a slice of tomato being served on top of a great slab of fried chicken… also topped heavily with cheese and ham…. :-|

It’s a pretty little place surrounded by rich red cliffs and a street named after an engineer.. respect at last, lol!

Villa Union

Villa Union

Villa Union

* subscription only… not paid :-)

…to San Jose de Jachal

Discovered an amusing fact today while chatting with a local guy… one that most blokes will probably appreciate… in Spanish ‘esposa’ = ‘wife’, nothing funny about that but what I didn’t know until today… and only because we were talking about the freedom to travel and so on, is that ‘esposas’, as well as the plural, also means ‘handcuffs’.. thought that was very funny ;-)

Anyway… I’m stopped in San Jose de Jachal an extra day (at least), seems that hard riding with a stomach bug has left me very run down and feeling totally exhausted .. amazing what adrenalin can mask! So no choice but to stay put and rest up..such is life on a bicycle. I don’t mind too much, San Jose is a pretty little town and there is now a hostel here… a brand new one and it’s very nice… It only opened in February so won’t yet be in any of the travel guides and so on but if you´re headed this way it’s highly recommended – very light, airy and cool with rooms arranged around a central internal courtyard. It’s called Hostal la Casona and can be found on Ave. Sarmiento 2.5 blocks north of the plaza. Sure beats a tent… hehe.
I’m also alone once again, Mark doesn’t really have the time to mess about here while I get well… and I don’t need to feel bad about holding him up so it’s fine, it was pure chance we were able to meet up in Mendoza and our paths will probably cross again some time soon on the road north. So.. as I have time on my hands today here´s the words I promised about the protest in Rodeo and a few pics of San Jose.

the road from Rodeo

The protest in Rodeo was interesting, quiet at first the depth of feeling soon became clear and there were some very passionate, articulate speakers amongst the crowd. I’d heard tales of intimidation by the mining corporations… kind of a mafia thing apparently.. I could believe it, all evening for no obvious reason, and in complete contrast to the battered old local wagons, a new Audi 4×4, black with all blacked out windows was continuously circling the plaza… the police were around too but no media… the media and government prefer not to raise the profile of the mining related issues that are happening in this, and other parts of Argentina. From what I picked up during the evening the issues include the dynamiting of glaciers for mining access, the poisoning of local water supplies by heavy metals, the release of chemicals into the environment, the destruction/replacement of local economies by the mining cartels – whole villages are ‘bought’.. People are becoming ill, the environment is suffering badly and the culture/traditions of the small pueblos are being lost. It is a sad story and one that needs to be heard… as soon as I can get a decent connection I’ll link to some resources on this topic.

Leaving Rodeo on Sunday morning the sad condition of the lake became apparent… clearly a fraction of it’s former size it was rather shocking to see just how far the waters have receded with respect to the original shoreline. Knowledge of the causes added a melancholy element to the otherwise beautiful surroundings. The route east to San Jose de Jachal wound it’s way through a precipitous gorge, the road clinging to the black rock walls… as Mark put it “rather like riding through a coal mine”. There had been heavy rain overnight – the first for a very long time – and the smell of the damp desert rock was heavy in the air… the closest I can compare it to is the stale hops smell that hangs around a brewery on a damp winter morning back at home…
It was an easy ride… mostly downhill on a good surface and it took just 2hrs to cover the 50 or so km. San Jose itself is a small town of single-storey adobe buildings, colourful and on a Sunday afternoon… utterly dead! Lunch on arrival was a pile of greasy barbecued beef ribs and bread from a parilla by the plaza followed by icecream from a nearby heladeria.. the only businesses to stay open on lazy Sunday afternoons…. and that was it for the day… come Monday morning however – a remarkable transformation from ghost town into a bustling little market town.

One other thing.. if you haven´t yet read my post below re Shelterbox and Chile then keep scrolling down past the following photos and have a read.. please :-)

San Jose de Jachal

San Jose de Jachal

a truck that belnds almost perfectly into it's surroundings...

the same truck...

Uspallata to Rodeo.. dirt, winds and earthquakes..

So today I arrived in a small adobe town called San Jose de Jachal… The following post however I wrote yesterday in Rodeo.. I´ll update you on events at the protest in Rodeo (see below…) and the ride to San Jose the next time I can log on… so without further ado I present for your pleasure, hehe, Uspallata to Rodeo….

—-

… in a pueblo called Rodeo.. a ramshackle collection of adobe buildings that manages to be pleasantly picturesque… and becomes truly spectacular at the bottom of town where a turquoise lake sits against the slate grey mountainside. Rodeo has the claim of being the windiest place in Argentina.. a quirk of the local geography means the afternoon winds are consistently accelerated to 120km/hr.. every day. It’s a claim I can vouch for having cranked my way slowly down the mountainside yesterday afternoon into the face of such a gale… We took a small apartment in town for a couple of nights, I have had a stomach bug for the last few days and the riding has been very hard, I’m feeling quite weak today so I needed to rest up… I’m sat in the kitchen right now where a vase of dead flowers sits on the table…. I’ve got the TV on too, the horrible news of the 8.5 earthquake across the border in Chile – the epicentre was Concepcion, on the coast south west of Santiago – probably at least 500-600km from here yet the quake woke me up at 4am this morning… apparently it was a 4.8 in this area. strong enough to send me scurrying outside to watch trees, poles and so on sway heavily in the moonlight..  an interesting experience in that I did not know if it would get worse… sensibly here all the buildings are solid single storey adobe affairs with thick walls and small windows so the only apparent effect was a blackout.

 

leaving Uspallata

 

Anyway, no idea when I’ll be able to upload this but there’s a lot of catching up to… the riding from Uspallata has been extremely difficult but spectacular in equal measure… There were times when I almost wished I was cruising along the Pan American instead but sitting here now and given the choice I would not have done it any other way. It’s been mentally hard too, bit tired of having nothing available for breakfast other than some stale bread, the shops out in the small pueblos have absolutely bugger all… especially when it comes to fruit and veg.. usually all that’s available will be a few limp, blackened carrots and some even blacker bananas, or a few onions. It’s a meat and bread based diet for the locals… for the traveller choices are pretty much limited to bread, meat and cheese in various forms…

• tostada carlito= square, flat sandwich of ham and cheese toasted
• hamburguesa = tall round sandwich of meat and cheese
• pancho = long, thin sandwich of meat and cheese (basically a hot dog)
• pizza = round open sandwich topped with tomato ketchup, ham and cheese….

so there you go, various shapes of the same things…. even Juan, an Argentinian chap we met over lunch (and more of whom later) commented on it…. Argentina produces heaps of fresh produce yet precious little of it finds it’s way into the home markets… I’m not complaining, it’s just a consequence of life on the road out here… speaking of which – my diary of the last few days:

The morning we left Uspallata my enthusiasm wasn’t that great.. it’s never a question of not being able to reach a given destination, rather it’s just knowing that getting there will probably hurt… usually once I’m riding my head sorts itself out though, especially if I can find some good coffee and breakfast before getting on the bike – failed on both counts in this instance! Heading north then from Uspallata we very quickly left behind the shady trees and asphalt to spend the next 60km riding steadily, but not steeply, uphill on the usual corrugated, stony ripio.. and the next 60km after that riding what was supposed to be gently downhill but felt uphill due to the fresh cross-headwind.

 

stimulating work..

 

This road was really quiet – once clear of the ‘road’ work going on a few km north of Uspallata I counted just 2 vehicles all day… and two cyclists…  One, an American chap, heading north we passed about 10km out of Uspallata, he’d only just flown into Santiago with his bike and got a lift over to Uspallata. Must say at the time I thought he was bonkers – he was riding an aluminium road bike with skinny slick tyres… completely unsuited to the terrain.. his logic was he’d be quicker on the asphalt and thus compensate for being slow on the ripio (very slow…)… we left him to it and didn’t expect to see him again… the road was tough going.

 

the road to Barreal

 

The other chap we met just south of Barreal was a Swiss guy headed south from Central America on old Swiss Army bicycle… a bombproof looking piece of kit. His load was enormous though and he was also, rather amusingly at the time, carrying about 3kg of onions having found a bag lying in the road … the classic “fell off the back of a truck”.. Not sure I’d want to try and subsist on that many onions and he was glad to off-load some to us :-)

The road to Barreal was hard going, it went directly north with the mountains of the pre-cordillera on the right and the snow capped high Andes on the left.. and it just stayed that way all day, utterly spectacular but punishing to the cyclist… very hot, very windy, very dusty and very rough.. very everything in fact including fantastic :-) Somewhere along this road I also left Mendoza province having entered it many many km ago in the south.

 

leaving Mendoza province

 

After 105km the ripio ended…. the asphalt was heaven, every fibre of my body was tired and hurting… there really isn’t a lot more to say about this road except that Mark seemed even happier to see the asphalt than I was….

 

Mark shows his affinity for the asphalt..

 

After 120km and 6.5hrs of riding (8hrs on the road) we rolled into the leafy shade of Barreal , a really pretty little village of a few dirt streets backed by red mountains. Here we found icecreams before looking for a place to camp but instead finding a very pretty, quiet little hostel with comfy bed surrounded by trees and grass for just 30 pesos/night.. it was a no-brainer really :-)

 

Barreal

 

I also managed to find the only miserable sod in what was a really friendly little town when I went to buy some fruit juice in the local shop… at first I thought it was just me and my bike he didn’t like but soon realised he was just being grouchy with everyone :-)

 

a dust lubricated drivetrain

 

At about 8pm I was sitting with a mug of tea back at the hostel wondering what had become of the American chap when a familiar profile rolled past the window on skinny tyres, hehe…. Jeremy had quite a rough day and was badly sunburned, dehydrated and exhausted but smiling nevertheless :-)

 

north of Barreal

 

The village of Calingasta is just a further 50km from Barreal on a surfaced road that rolls it’s way along the edge of the pre-cordillera, perfect recovery riding for tired legs. Breakfast didn’t happen aside from some of yesterday’s bread toasted over the flame of the stove.. there was nothing much available in Barreal itself early on so it was just as well it was only two hours to Calingasta. This road was typically spectacular with multicoloured cliffs as it ran alongside the river.. Calingasta however turned out to be a very scruffy little place redeemed only by a very friendly little cafe that sorted us out with a lazy lunch of fried meat, bread and some salad (hooray!).

 

road into Calingasta

 

Jeremy showed up later and joined us for lunch before we all went off to find somewhere to stay.. options in the village were limited to patch of dust with no water available, or a pricey but empty, crumbling hotel.. so we rode about 3km out of town and camped in the garden of the only other hotel in the area :-)

Searching for supplies in Calingasta was the usual frustrating exercise so gave up and decided to rely on being able to find some fresh bread in the morning. I’d be laughing if my bicycle could be powered by brooms.. every shop in town had a rack of brooms for sale… but bugger all else.

 

need a broom...

 

Dinner was a slightly weird and very greasy pizza back at the cafe.. weird in that it was topped with grated egg. Not sure if it was that which messed my stomach up or just that my body is feeling particularly hammered at the moment. Ho hum :-) I did have a major breakthrough however in that I found a little shop at the back of someone’s house that sold cheese… having asked at all 4 other shops in town and being told that cheese wasn’t available. lol. Lunch for tomorrow… pending fresh bread.

 

Calingasta

 

We did get fresh bread eventually in the morning.. it took almost 40 minutes to actually buy it once it had been spotted (South America….) .. and also some bananas best suited for eating through a straw. The onwards plan from Calingasta involved taking two days to get to a village called Las Flores, around 150km away.. with 100km of that being nothing at all bar wilderness, with a wild camp at some unspecified point along the way.. I figured it was going to be tough, the road climbs on the map to the 2700m contour and once past Villa Nueva, 40km from Calingasta, all dirt and apparently quite ‘bad dirt’…

 

leaving Calingasta

 

Feeling pretty weak the first 40km on asphalt to Villa Nueva was a leisurely affair.. as leisurely as climbing a 6% grade out of Calingasta can be anyway. The scenery was simply stunning in the clear morning air with the occasional adobe farmhouse and cultivated field green against the background of desert ochre.

Villa Nueva, as it’s name suggests, is a relatively new village of a few identical brick cottages and a school.. I guess to act as an administrative centre of sorts for the surrounding farms.

 

arriving into Villa Nueva

 

There was a shop there, we had to ask around to find it… usual limited selection but she did have some salami, some more bread for the road ahead… close in weight and consistency to the rocks in the desert around here… and a bottle of coke. We’d agreed to meet Jeremy here too – he had leftover pizza from the night before for lunch which he supplemented with two litres of beer from the shop, lol. We ate a picnic lunch in the shade of a yard belonging to the local school teacher while chatting to him and his two friends about pretty much everything.

 

10 litres of water on the back...

 

Learned that Villa Nueva has about 100 inhabitants with about 50 children attending the school… also learned that the road ahead really was rather bad and that for about 100 pesos each we could put our bikes in the back of a pickup for the journey to Las Flores…. despite my weakened state (oh the drama of it…lol) I refused, hehe. These local chaps thought Jeremy was hilarious, I’m sure he was doing it deliberately, playing the ‘tipica yankee’ as one of chap put it.. riding along in his baseball cap and hawaiian shirt, eating pizza, hydrating on beer and somewhat unbelievably carrying a wine glass (real glass) and box of wine from a bodega near Santiago in his panniers. The challenge being to see how far he could get without breaking it…

After a short siesta we said our goodbyes and set off towards Las Flores. The road deterioted dramatically into the worst ripio I’ve seen so far, very soft sandy, gravelly stuff with a 6% upwards gradient. It made riding very hard, frequently losing traction and balance in the soft stuff.

 

struggling up from Villa Nueva

 

With a further 10kg of water on the back of my bike hauling it out of such traps was a huge effort.

 

sinking tyres..

 

I’m trying not to over-use the word spectacular as I write… but it really was as the climb took us upwards into the teeth of a howling gale… deja-vu…!

After 20km or so the gradient eased but we were still only averaging 6 or 7km/hr so at around 6.30pm started looking for somewhere with some shelter from the wind to camp…. we could have kept on riding into the night I suppose until the wind dropped, usually around 11pm, but I just didn’t have the strength. It seemed more sensible to sit out the wind and recover somewhat and then set off again at first light the next day. The best we could do in terms of shelter was a man-made ditch which once looked like it had been an artifical watering hole for livestock… though now it was bone dry with the just the mummified carcass of a cow, ribs gleaming through the holes in it’s weathered hide, watching sightlessly over it. A pretty marginal sort of place, it was still a two-man job pitching each tent in the gale.

 

Mark´s pic, note the bike shaped tent pegs for the wind...

 

The evening was beautiful, ignoring the wind of course, as the sun set behind the mountains to the east a crisp ¾ moon appeared over the mountains to the east, rising with the purple then indigo of the night. The night itself was cold with a magnificent starscape overhead.

Come morning it became apparent our shelter from the wind was acting as something of a dew trap, despite being in the middle of desert everything was dripping wet. Up at first light and on the road just as the sun peeped over the mountains it was back to the uphill slog… with just a light wind and with a chill in the air progress was much better than the night before and we able to average a whole 10km/hr for the next 2 hours to the high-point of the day where the road just grazed the slopes of the peaks of the west before turning north east for the descent towards the village of Iglesia.

During the morning while climbing we were following Jeremy’s tyre tracks, quite distinct in the soft dirt, and figured he must have just plodded on and passed our camp at some point during the night. We caught up with him, picking his way carefully down the rocky track, shortly after the descent began. It’s this kind of terrain that my Nomad, and Mark’s Ripio, with the fat Marathon rubber really shines… descending this difficult track with a full load at almost 30km/hr, rocks bouncing off the down-tube and tyres bouncing off the rocks it really is unbelievable the punishment they’ll take.

 

sadly horrible midday light when we met these gauchos

 

Iglesia turned out to be a real gaucho village – it’s dirt streets full of horses.. and a few old bicycles :-) Sorted myself out with some sugar at the one shop in the form of a local version of Sprite – 2 litres, some chocolate and a bottle of fruit juice.

 

Iglesia

 

With no cafe’s or restaurants in town however it was a case of continuing another 11km to the dusty little village of Las Flores.. which has a cafe with icecream, pizza and sandwiches. With my dodgy stomach all I could face was a basic ham sarnie and a large pile of icecream.. very large in fact.. chocolate, lemon and ‘frutas del bosque’ :-)

It was about 1pm I guess when we arrived at this place and had promised to wait for Jeremy here. About 2pm he arrived… not on a bike but in a pick-up truck. His bike had finally succumbed to the terrain with three broken spokes :-( So, from there it was just a further 20km downhill to Rodeo… not that it being downhill made it any easier – see my earlier reference to wind.

 

Rodeo

 

Rodeo has a charm in a scruffy, single-street kind of way.. there’s bugger all here but I’m happy just to have a day off, it was 178km of hard riding from Calingasta.

Feeling utterly drained I’ve been craving simple junk all day…. alternately salty and sweet… I found a kilo bag of frosted cornflakes in one shop, hehe, which did for breakfast (not all of ‘em I might add…) followed by french fries and lashings of salt with a litre of Sprite for lunch… which is when we met Juan… A most interesting character, from Mar del Plata on the coast south of Buenos Aires, he’s been hitching his way around the world for the past few years funding his journey by selling travel his writing and photography. Having hitched his way around the world, and notably through the middle east – Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan etc he his now working his way north to Alaska. His writing really is very good, his website is at www.acrobatoftheroad.com and his book, in Spanish and available all over… or should be.. is “Vagabundeando en el Eje del Mal” (Vagabonding in the Axis of Evil..).

Juan is also acting as something of an advocate against the activities of the big mining corporations in this country. There are real environmental problems happening right here in terms of the heavy metal contamination of the water and lowering water table as a result of the vast quantities of water used by the mines. The corporations have so much power that unless something changes radically the problems will only get worse. The lake here in Rodeo used to be an international windsurfing destination thanks to the consistent winds but is no longer on the circuit – there isn’t enough water any more so sandbanks and rocks lurk just below the surface. I’d wondered what all the expensive crew cab 4×4 pickups were doing in town… they all belong to the mining outfits it seems. There’s set to be a protest/meet in the plaza tonight. I’m always interested in the issues facing the countries I travel so I’ll be there. In the meantime however in a local shop I have found tomatoes, onions, garlic, beef and pasta…. time to swap my grubby sun hat for my chef hat … mmm, a proper dinner :-)

the road less travelled… leaving Mendoza

In the interests of avoiding the main roads and keeping things interesting my route plan took us out of Mendoza by the ‘back door’ … It was also Mark’s first introduction to riding in South America and the other options of Ruta 40 north or the Pan Americana north-west simply would not have have done :-) It’s great having Mark along after the last 2000km alone, aside from being great company all of a sudden I can give my photos better context ;-)

We were pretty late leaving Mendoza after a late night out Friday but I’d planned a short day of just 50km up to Villavicencio anyway… to get the legs used to riding again after a few days of inactivity and it was all uphill anyway… So after 50km of riding uphill through a barren desert landscape towards the wall of the Andes we arrived at the little wooded ‘enclave’ of Villavicencio… the place is blessed with pure mountain springs and used to be the site of a spa-hotel.. that closed down many years ago and now forms part of a nature reserve.. the only other building is a a very friendly (well, to us anyway) cafe where we  enjoyed a good feed before pitching the tents in a misty rain under the trees nearby… it was a pretty wet night.

Mark is afraid this is the last good food for a while.... hehe

From Villavicencio the road goes up. Steeply.  For some 25km a rough dirt track, carved from the sheer mountainside, corkscrews it’s way upwards to over 10,000ft… it was a sublime climb in thick cloud at first keeping us cool as we worked our way up..

after two hours of climbing we finally broke through the top of the cloud into bright sunshine… warm but with a nicely chilled breeze.. perfect for riding.

that’s me in the black shirt…

up here herds of wild Guanacos were visible on the mountainsides… a relative of the llama, alpaca and other camelids – you can read about them here.

pic credit to Mark - a longer lens and extreme crop

The track levelled out onto a high altitude desert plateau

before rising once again to the summit of the pass

and so to the reward, a long, fast descent in awesome surroundings on a loose, rocky surface…

I have to say my Thorn Nomad (and Mark’s Thorn Ripio) is an awesome bike, loaded up with more than 20kg of gear, food, water etc when pointed downhill on a poor surface it’s solid as a rock .. we descended at 40-50km/hr with the frequent gravel/sand traps adding a little white knuckle flavouring..

Our destination for the day, Uspallata is a veritable oasis in the desert. Arriving among it’s tree shaded streets was the perfect end to an awesome day of cycling. Hot too back down in the valley… 39 C again!

Uspallata is a tiny crossroads town.. muy tranquilo :-)

The Pan Americana to/from Chile runs by here however with endless streams of monster trucks…

Our plan from here however takes us well away from main roads .. north on dirt roads through the Calingasta valley, the next brush with a highway is likely to be at San Jose in Rioja, some 300-400km north of here :-) It’s slower and likely to be hard going at times, I’ll need every one of the 12 litres of water I can carry tomorrow, but the rewards should be great :-)

Mendoza… pics

… first a bunch of pics that might give a sense of this place… and then that third interesting thing.. which, with reference to yesterday’s post, is really a third and a fourth (yes, very Monty P) and on reflection only mildly interesting rather than a huge revelation.. ;-) Oh, and if you haven’t sponsored me yet then you can right now, it’s that big blue button over there on the right… I’m back on the bicycle tomorrow.

lovely tile-work at Plaza España

the original cargo bike

pirate DVD market is healthy, Avatar available already..

as well as wine Mendoza area produces some fine olive oil..  & a bunch of other good stuff too

my next career move… the bicycle cafe

she failed to sell me fragrance, but a very pretty face nevertheless :-)

Now, as for interesting thing number 3… it’s the relatively high proportion of folk walking stumbling around with wrist, and particularly ankle injuries… no doubt due to the open, and deep, storm drains around the place… just the thing for hurting yourself on the way home home from a bar/club at night… Number 4 is icecream.. despite being a catholic country most folk here worship daily at the altar of the triple cone with chocolate sauce… every street corner, and all the bits in between has at least one heladeria…

and the icecream cone has even been immortalized, albeit unintentionally, in the city’s statues… hehe..

icecream cone worship, lol

p.s. amusing anecdote of the day is going to the market and buying a chicken and receiving my change with gooey bits of blood & guts stuck to the notes.. mmm :-)

p.p.s just been reminded (again) of the news that Mark Beaumont is going to have a documentary made about him for riding down the Pan American while there are hundreds and hundreds of people making/have made the same or similar trips.. on their own, with the most basic, shonky kit (like the Peruvian guy I met in San Martin de los Andes on his worn out bike and having lost his tent…) and facing interesting/challenging roads, without corporate sponsorship and so on… so to do it so quick – fantastic achievement and fantastic for the charities involved (at least I’m assuming there are…) – I wish I could get that kind of profile for Shelterbox, tis a very hard thing to do on your own… but as regards all the hype… I must admit in the context of the people I’ve met on this journey and others I initially found it somewhat distasteful when there are so many folk doing the same sort of thing, quietly getting on with facing the same or greater challenges all around the world… and have been doing so since the bicycle was invented.  On reflection though really I suppose it makes bugger all difference either way, lol, I’m enjoying the challenge and although I won’t raise vast sums for Shelterbox and I won’t be on the telly for doing it I’m hoping that with a bit more than 3 months left we can raise a decent sum <hint> ;-)

el tren ya pie…

Thursday today…  high temperatures and low energy have meant it’s been a very lazy week so far… but then that is what recovery time is all about and Mendoza is a terrific place for putting your feet up at a pavement cafe and watching the world go by… except during siesta anyway when the city goes to sleep… as do I :-)

I did however discover something, well two things really, very interesting here..  no wait, three things… oh this could all go a bit Monty Python…  so the first was purely by accident stumbling on Mendoza’s brilliantly derelict old railway station while cycling back from Parque San Martin which is where I discovered the other interesting thing… and I’ll write about the third tomorrow if I remember.

First however the railway station.. it’s not on the map, rather it’s just a big blank space, the reality is somewhat, and deliciously, different…

not leaving any time soon…

The other (second…) interesting thing was the discovery that Mendoza, 1000′s of km from the ocean, has a yacht club… It’s in Parque San Martin next to the artificial lake that at about 50m wide by 500m long must only be useful for rowing/sculling.. judging by the lack of waterborne activity however it seems that really the club serves the same primary purpose as all such clubs around the world… i.e somewhere to drink … ;-) There’s a golf club too……

Mendoza is really known for wine.. tomorrow I’ll head off on my bike and visit one or two of the local bodegas… get my legs going again ready for departure, back up into the mountains, on Saturday… all being well :-)

That Malvinas thing again…

Front page news today….

keeping my head down and pretending to be French… ;-)

<really makes no difference in truth, the people here are lovely>