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!

Tierra del Fuego…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Punta Arenas shipyards

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

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

holiday snap.. sorry!

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

Porvenir

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

Porvenir

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

the road out of Porvenir

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

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

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

an empty stretch of coast, just the occasional fisherman

fishermans huts

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

riding Bahia Inutil

wild guanacos...

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

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

patchwork metal of a fishermans shack

away from the coast...

sometimes you just have to stop and sleep...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a most salubrious camping spot...

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

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

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

the final border crossing of my journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

I rather like the visually interesting view from my tent

Club Nautico Rio Grande

indoor bike parking :-)

footnotes:

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

once more unto the pampa…

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

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

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

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

the wind does strange things to the trees...

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

the view from my temporary roadside bed

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

not a bad little gaff...

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

Villa Tehuelches, some nice old metal

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

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

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

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

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

Villa Tehuelches

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

Hasta pronto!

Penne al’Arrabbiata al’Torres del Paine…

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

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

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

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

riding north

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

cold and grey

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

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

lots of climbing...

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

fabulous early morning light

wonderful riding..

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

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

wonderful stormy skies

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

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

poor midday light, but still beautiful

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the road south...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

square wheels…

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

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

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

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

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

primary colours

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

 

There is also a little green house…

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

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

a brilliant old digger down at the harbour

Last Hope Sound properly windy again

 

Puerto Natales…

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

Puerto Natales

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

pretty, pastel street corners

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

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

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

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

Pto Natales.. some old American metal

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

the local bikeshop...

shoes.. for sale..

dramatic skies

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

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

Villa O'Higgins... a wet afternoon

Villa O'Higgins

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

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

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

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

leaving Chile by the back door...

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

bridges needed a little attention...

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

terrific, traffic free riding :-)

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

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

singletrack...

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

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

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

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

cool bridges on the road south to El Chalten

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

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

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

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

to El Chalten

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

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

out for a hike :-)

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

El Chalten... caravans tethered in the wind

El Chalten

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

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

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

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

Jedi cat & the end of the Carretera Austral

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

Cochrane.. weathered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

mmm, thank you Farmers Wife .. :-)

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

coffee brewing...

a fine day to ride

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

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

descending with the Rio Baker

small farms along the banks of the river

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

Tortel

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

Tortel

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

Tortel

Tortel

Tortel

Tortel, muy tranquilo

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

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

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

Tortel

Tortel

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

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

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

Tortel

Tortel

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

the road to P.Yungay

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

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

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

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

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

el gato Jedi..

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

bleak...

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

just so you know whose house this is...

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

heavy traffic on the Carretera

initially alongside the Rio Bravo...

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

.. before climbing steeply...

... & climbing some more...

.. into the misty mountains

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

spectacular breaks in the cloud after lunch

& some excellent dead trees

I park my bike with pride...

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

wind-streaked highland lakes

a small patch of shelter for the night

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

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

remote.. Villa O'Higgins

Villa O'Higgins

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

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

Villa O'Higgins

Villa O'Higgins

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

Villa O'Higgins

Los Exploradores and other places..

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

the track west past the impossibly blue Lago Tranquilo

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

mmmm... montañas :-)

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

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

some of the finest riding for a long time

waterfalls line the track

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

many hanging glaciers along the way

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

further west towards the icecap

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

the Exploradores Glacier comes down from the San Valentin icecap

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

rainforest camp

Tomas & Katrins wilderness gaff

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

some exploring without baggage..

a fine place to camp

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

a cold and cloudy morning

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

a difficult surface

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

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

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

the early hours of 2011 looked like this...

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

Lago Carrera looking improbably coloured in places...!

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

a cool camp with nice swimming

camp kitchen

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

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

another fabulous morning. Already hot by 9am

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

Puerto Bertrand

Puerto Bertrand

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

cyclists disappear in the dust

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

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

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

hot and dusty, the final welcome descent towards Cochrane

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

Cochrane

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

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

Happy New Year and thanks for reading in 2010!

Cochrane... a happening place

Costa Rica…. (or not ;-)

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

the road from Coyhaique

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

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

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

mmmm :-)

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

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

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

Cerro Castillo

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

Cerro Castillo

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

Cerro Castillo

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

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

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

Cerro Castillo

dining Cerro Castillo style

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

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

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

remarkable colouration in some of the lakes and rivers

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

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

more weather approaching from the west in the Rio Ibanez valley

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

descending to the Rio Murta

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

the Rio Murta

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

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

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

Christmas Day evening, the view from my camp

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

in Bahia Murta

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

more weather coming ;-)

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

a curious onlooker.. Bahia Murta

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

the road from Bahia Murta, with friends again

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

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

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

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

la vida es buena

a fabulously wild sky :-)

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

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

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

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

Rio Tranquilo

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

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

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

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

Rio Tranquilo

Rio Tranquilo

Rio Tranquilo

Rio Tranquilo.. the supermarket..

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

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

Feliz Navidad and all that..

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

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

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

Coyhaique

Coyhaique

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

.. and stray supermarket trolleys

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

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

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

.. with plenty of beer.. for planning purposes

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

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

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

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

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

Me (typically) from head downwards:

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

Rear right pannier:

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

Front Right Pannier:

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

Rear Left Pannier

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

Front left pannier:

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

Rear Rack top:

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

Ortlieb waterproof saddle bag:

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

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

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

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

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

a Coyhaique … en bicicleta bajo la lluvia

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

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

Puerto Puyuhuapi

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

P.Puyuhuapi - fish farming

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

along the road somewhere

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

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

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

on the climb..

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

heavy skies

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

the rivers hereabouts are a wonderful shade of blue

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

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

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

a particularly bleak stretch of carretera

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

Manihuales

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

Manihuales Gomeria... "the tyre bloke"

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

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

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

along the road south of Manihuales

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

the valley just south of Manihuales

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

yet another river :-)

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

Coyhaique

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

Coyhaique

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

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

Chaiten y la Carretera Austral

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

the ferry to Chaiten

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

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

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

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

dramatic evening skies over Quellon

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

dawn... cold!

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

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

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

 

Chaiten: a pair of the locals..

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

meet Dolly..

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

Sunday morning

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

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

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

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

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

the first of the four-legged vultures

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

leaving Chaiten

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

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

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

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

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

this will help keep the scenery fetishists happy ;-)

and this one.. this is Lago Yelcho

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

along the road.. a nice place to ride

the view from the tent, a nice place to camp

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

Jeff & Rose helpfully wore bright jerseys this day..

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

Villa Vanguardia

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

sawmill campsite

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

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

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

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

Puerto Puyuhuapi

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

Puerto Puyuhuapi

Puerto Puyuhuapi

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

the Puerto Puyuhuapi mob...

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

Puerto Puyuhuapi

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

Quellon

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

rural Chiloe..

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

Quellon

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

Quellon

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

earthquake zone....

the view from my keyboard

somewhat damp in Castro & Chonchi

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

Palafitos on the water in Castro

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

some nice churches on Chiloe

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

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

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

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

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

self-explanatory...

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

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

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

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

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

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

cheero!

Wednesday morning, damp & deserted

another scenery sort of pic

colourful mussel shells on the beach

hoping for blue skies again soon, this is Ancud

Arturo Prat…

Arturo Prat, possibly known as Archie or Arty to his friends, was a Chilean Navy Officer who become a national hero after his death at the Battle of Iquique in 1879. I only mention him because most Chilean towns, at least down here, have a street or a plaza named after him.. appropriately always an important street, and I thought it would put some context to this photo..

Wikipedia has a whole page on him here that makes for interesting & worthwhile reading.

My plans to move on today came to naught, a late night with alcohol and friends involved meant I got up feeling somewhat weary. Thought some fresh air might help so wandered down to the quayside and met a couple of fisherman enjoying a sunday morning box of wine… a glass was forced upon me… so it is all their fault. I need a siesta now. Still, I have time to chill and having a camera means I am never bored. I just need to get to Castro tomorrow to get my boat ticket to Chaiten.. hoping there are spots left, apparently it fills up fast being only a weekly service :-)

they even look guilty dont you think? hehe

I do like a bit of what some folk would regard as scabbiness.. the scrawled 'Pinochet (died)' gives it 'place'

Chile has feral supermarket trollies too..

Ancud etc…

If I was asked to summarise Ancud in one photograph I might use this one…

or possibly this one might be more useful..

But I don’t so instead I can just throw a few at you :-) Ancud has a terrific vibe to it, aside from the colour all the folk here seem generally happy.. lots of smiling faces and always some music drifting out from somewhere. I like. I spent a couple of hours wandering around the compact town centre this morning before slinging a leg over my bike after lunch to make a pleasant little sidetrip of about 50km out west to the Pacific coast where I cycled a few kms on empty sands and watched sea-lions in the breakers rolling into the wild stretch of beach.

Oh and despite what that Swiss couple said in Puerto Varas.. it is not a bit like Switzerland, have not seen a single cuckoo clock or bloke in leather shorts.

yellow is a very (very, very) popular colour for the local fishing boats... the wife of the skipper of this boat is probably quite unhappy that her bedroom door is missing...

that cannot be comfortable.. I envy creatures... and people that can sleep anywhere.. there is one person in particular I can think of, I can say what I like, it is unlikely he'll read this.. he'll be asleep in the chair...

you know those serious, studied portraits that some photographers like to make... miserable failure in Ancud, too many comedians at the market.. I was not given a choice :-)

the primary rural economy appears to be based on harvesting shellfish and seaweed (mostly for export to Asia).. great piles of it stacked on bullock carts and taken to be dried either in racks or simply along the side of the road

the wild northwest coast. Away from the sheltered estuaries the Pacific pounds in. Sealions play in the waves and the rich variety of shells studding the beaches hints at the richness of the local waters. Whale skeletons, or rather rotting whole whales, wash up here in the storms, I visited a chap who has the skeleton of a blue whale in his garden, along with a dried shark and other weird shit

fishermans shacks

home sweet home.. for someone. As is so often the case the gulf between the wealthy and everyone else is enormous

not just fishing...

una botella de ron barato en Ancud… hurrah!

In the end I needed 3 nights in Puerto Varas to get all the inflammation under control and my head back in the right place :-) Time well spent eating cake, watching movies, reading and generally chilling out. The only downside to the time spent in Pto Varas was that some miserable bugger stole my MSR fuel bottle. My bike was parked in the covered interior courtyard of the hostal, pretty much out of sight and not accessible by anyone other than hostal staff and curious guests. I have little doubt it will have been taken by a backpacker rather than a local. My fault for leaving it on the bike, I figured as it had gasoline in it I should leave it with the bike rather than take it indoors. It could have been awkward, such stuff is generally hard to find but at least Puerto Varas has a mountain guide/outfitters.. and they were able to sort me out with a replacement. Phew.

along the road...

The 110km ride from Puerto Varas to Ancud was a good one. At last it feels like the journey is properly under way rather than just mucking about in the lakes trying to get over being sick, and I had good legs :-) Hurrah!
Riding out of town I passed a local woman carting her child around in a wheelbarrow. Makes an awful lot of sense compared to those fashionably expensive pushchairs with large wheels beloved of mothers in the UK. After all you can use it for an awful lot more than just your child.. like carting firewood or horse shit around for example and I expect a wheelbarrow is far better on difficult terrain :-) The best means of carrying a child however, in my humble opinion.. is the simple cloth sling you see among the people of the high Andes, aside from the obvious benefits like being cheap, simple and leaving hands free, from a childs point of view it has to be the best place to be, high up and reassuringly close to mum, peeking over her shoulder and relaxed by the natural motion of walking. Compare the western way.. in a pushchair, low down and looking up at all the big people and motorcars.. and exposed to the big, scary world by being shoved out in front. Is it any wonder kids at home seem to scream a lot yet in the Andes, in my experience, they are as good as gold… funny how the ‘developed world’ often involves complex, expensive and inferior solutions to problems that weren’t really problems at all.

the ferry to Chiloe..

Anyway, I digress, soap box away… back to the road. 30km of ugliness getting past Puerto Montt and then another 50km, straight as a die to meet the ferry to Chiloe. This stretch of road was not particularly memorable.. it passes through an unchanging area of scrubby forest with little smallholdings carved out of it and punctuated by occasional shacks weathered to the same colour as the cold and heavily overcast sky. The only brightness in the landscape this day being the occasional large bill-board appropriately advertising chainsaws of the chunky variety beloved of lumberjacks around the world.

bleak on the water

The ferry however.. now that was a different matter. Bicycles and boats go together on journeys like fish and chips.. they are an ace combination. Aside from getting a chance to rest ones legs a boat ride really gives a sense of the journey, of leaving one place behind and arriving somewhere new, somewhere isolated by a stretch of water. In this case the island of Chiloe. It is not a long journey across the Chacao Channel, just 35 minutes or so.. but it is enough. I was able to ride straight onto the ferry just before it departed. On board I met a friendly family from Bariloche in Argentina here on holiday. We chatted a while before they sought refuge from the cold wind in their van. Just 10 degrees or so on the water today.

Ancud... weathered!

Riding off the ferry with just 30km or so to go to Ancud I met a Dutch cyclist enjoying a brew at a roadside shack. He had arrived on an earlier ferry and was also headed to Ancud and eventually on to Ushuaia. Our conversation however was somewhat limited, he had no Spanish and only a little English. His bike caught my eye… it was a techy wonder… a German machine with chunky and rather square alloy frame members in gleaming white and gold, a Magura suspension fork, Magura hydraulic rim brakes, a Rohloff hub and lots of pretty carbon and CNC’d anodized alloy parts. As an exercise in bicycle technology it looked pretty amazing.. but as a bike for adventure touring on it looked, errm… hideous.. Is that rude? With a suspension fork up front all his gear was piled on the back.. and in a backpack which must really have sucked. It looked like he had about half as much gear again as I do.. and his tyres were off-road knobbies of the super soft and sticky variety. This is not intended as a criticsm, different strokes for different folks and all that.. but a significant.. really significant amount of wedge would have had to change hands, in my direction, to get me to swap my old steel Nomad for that. We rode together for a few km.. the buzz of his rohloff and the energy-sapping sound of his tyres sucking the asphalt in contrast to the silence of my derailleur transmission and Marathon XRs pumped up as hard as I thought sensible.. and then a little more to ease to my passage across the asphalt. He fell quickly behind on the first hill.. I dawdled to allow him to catch up at the top and figured he may as well sit in on my wheel in the fresh headwind.. it didn’t work, as soon as the road went slightly up again he was off the back. Always a mild ethical dilemma.. to hang about and wait or just to ride away.. I chose the latter. After all we’re not riding buddies and if I met someone on the road faster than me the last thing I want is to hold them up. We will meet again I suspect with just one boat off this island to Chaiten.. at midnight next Friday night. The witching hour, it’ll be a couple of two wheeled pumpkins riding onto the boat…

Ancud

The ride into Ancud was a pleasant one, the last few km along dunes on the pacific coast before crossing a long bridge into the colourful, weatherbeaten town with the familiar aroma of fish on the breeze coming from the harbour. It is a friendly town too, more than a few folk along the road nodded greetings as I passed and a crusty old salt at the harbour I asked for directions was positively gushing in his conversation.

the evil eye of Ancud..? nah, it is a great place.

Wandering around after arrival I bumped into the same family from Bariloche I met on the boat. We shared coffee from their flask while sitting on the quayside looking at a couple of old hulks and some seaweed. The conversation came around to the variety of dialects in Chile and Argentina. Interestingly they said that the further north they go in their own country then the harder they find it to communicate. I have the opposite experience, the southern dialects down here are harder for me than in the north where the language spoken is closer to regular Spanish.

Anyway, little else to report, other than the lomito wolfed down on arrival that I realised, after most was gone, was not cooked properly.. buggerance. A quick visit to the bottle shop for a litre of aged rum, sadly not available in a brown paper bag, by way of a preventative measure (it’s true, it does work.. google it) hopefully will keep me well. I didn’t drink the whole litre of course, I would not be here writing this.. but please excuse any typos ;-) One of my water bottles is metal with a screw cap. Strikes me as the perfect vehicle for taking a drop south for those lonely tented evenings.. So how good does rum at £3 a litre taste… umm, pretty damn good actually :-)

Stay tuned for more pics. Hasta pronto!

Puerto Varas

Puerto Varas, I have a room in a rambling old hospedaje.. a veritable rabbit warren of dark wooden corridors and alcoves illuminated by little rectangular skylights. There are redundant bakelite fittings on the walls from an earlier electrical age and I can enjoy such curious innovations as the light switch for my room being situated on the outside of the door, or an old enamel sink, complete with pot-plants, plumbed into the stairwell. I am coming to the conclusion that southern Chile exhibits a peculiar flavour of weirdness absent from other South American nations.

cherries in season and available on every street corner. I have indulged. Significantly..

It is a fine day for hanging out, the rain is coming down in buckets and every so often the building is rocked by a blast of wind. I changed rooms earlier this morning thanks to a leaky skylight.

Puerto Varas

The town itself is small and pleasant yet as with all up and coming tourist spots it is perhaps over-endowed with trendy little cafes, restaurants and bars. Prices are worthy of a European resort although there are still a few local-flavoured eateries in the backstreets that will do a 3 course set lunch for around 2500pesos. In keeping with the outdoorsy resort theme both Salomon and The North Face have boutiques here.. but they don’t sell anything useful like tents and big knives and stuff, only the fashion lines are available at prices that appeal to the wealthy package tourist.

a fine local craft...

There is a black sand beach on the lake-front past the modern casino. As I walked past the Star Wars theme was drifting out over the mist-enshrouded lake and the vaguely ship-shaped pile of twisted metal on the beach. One wonders if the town council put it there deliberately to enhance the ‘atmosphere’ or for small children to hurt themselves on.

even the prettiest of things have an arsehole.. actually I think it is rather characterful, it's the view from my room

I feel I should apologise for my little whinge yesterday, lol, I was at a low ebb. Still, at least I’m not hiding any reality…  Still feeling rough today but there is no rush to leave. I had felt pressured to catch the once a week boat from Quellon at the south end of Chiloe to Chaiten, but say I take a week longer.. it’s no big deal. I am wondering whether to go to Chiloe at all now and instead catch a boat from Puerto Montt to Chaiten. You see I just met a Swiss couple who came from there. I asked them what it was like. They said “like Switzerland”. Damn, I didn’t come all this way just for chocolate and cuckoo clocks ;-)

what a cyclist likes..

I cannot help taking pics like this, just colour and shape. It says nothing about Puerto Varas.. other than that there are some scabby old cars with flat tyres. I nearly posted a picture of the 'Super Pollo' truck.. "No hay pollo como Super Pollo". Indeed.

Elvis lives! As a hairdresser in Pto Varas it seems..

p.s there are two volcanoes ‘visible’ from town. The Osorno one is a perfect cone, happily the sun was shining when I came this way in January. Here it is:

 

No hay agua caliente…

In Osorno, for a few quid, I stayed in a gloriously delapidated pension where the old blankets lay an inch thick on the beds, lino was peeling off the bathroom walls and the friendly but slightly eccentric landlady in her pale blue dressing gown kept the ignition for the hot water boiler under lock and key. Still, that weird mix of programming called the BBC World service was available on cable so I was able to catch up with items relevant to my situation such as the impending royal wedding and business opportunities in Gabon.

prime real estate

Osorno. Honestly, could you build something this wonky if you tried...

I grovelled out of Osorno. I had absolutely nothing in my legs at all and the fresh wind was once again in my face. Not knowing whether to blame my recent illness or lack of appetite the evening before I simply got my head down and concentrated on the business of hating every km, hehe. Every touring cyclist will know what I mean..

Osorno

I had planned my day with two possible destinations I could choose depending on how my legs were, as it happened I chose the nearer, just 60km away.. the small Germanic commune of Puerto Octay on the shores of Lake Llanquihue.

As I pointed out my home town in his atlas the man in the tourist ‘shed’ by the plaza told me I was the first ever visitor from my part of the UK to come to Puerto Octay. I knew better however. We had had exactly the same conversation back in January when I passed through Puerto Octay in the rain just 2 days into my ride to Peru. I was headed north up the eastern side of the lake and eventually east into Argentina. This time I’m headed south down the western shore of the lake.

Puerto Octay

P.Octay is a pleasant little village with some interesting old buildings however I was more interested in seeing if the batty old dear still had her little shop selling empanadas by the plaza, and to see if they were as good as I remembered. She does and they were.

Puerto Octay. The volcanoes are hiding in the cloud on the far side of the lake

“No hay aguas calientes” the man said after I had paid him 4000 pesos* and pitched my tent in a tranquil little spot surrounded by rose bushes on the shores of the lake. It was non-negotiable. Bugger. As it happened there wasn’t any cold water either except a dribble from a standpipe by the shed. Still, it was a beautiful, quiet spot and I was able to look forward to a mug of tea at dusk and a good nights kip. It didn’t happen. After sun-down every dog in the village joined in a communal all-night shouted conversation. Why do they do that? I would have happily shot every last miserable one of them. I have earplugs but due to a quirk of nature known as my ears they won’t stay put for long.

Puerto Octay, the view from my campsite

And so to Puerto Varas. A pretty little town on the southern shore of Lago Llanquihue. In January I stopped here for a coffee on my way north, just one hour into a journey that turned out to be more than 4000 miles. As I write I feel I am at an unintended crux of the journey, more so than just stopping for a brew. What goes on in my head here determines what happens next. The journey south of here is ‘committed’, there are few  ’opt-outs’ once I leave Chiloe and hit the Carretera south of Chaiten. I don’t normally write about how I feel, beyond “crap, I’m fooked”… no-one wants to read all that self-indulgent crap.. however just this once I’ll mention where I am at as it is relevant to the next couple of months. You see I’m suffering <cue violins, hehe>, I’ve not found myself in quite this situation before on the road. My hands, wrists, feet, head and neck are persisently cracked, bleeding & fooking painful no matter what I do. It makes riding and camping, at best irritating.. at worst, miserable. It’s proving hard to deal with and I find myself questioning what I am doing here. The skin issue is usually symptomatic of some deeper stress, in this case I suspect it is a combination of physical from having been sick and emotional – in that respect it can be a self-perpetuating thing. I love adventure but as I write this evening I find myself indifferent about whether or not I complete this journey. I fully appreciate how lucky I am to be able to just come over here and ride my bike again for a few months but as with so many facets of the human condition logic doesn’t come into it. Still, I’m experienced enough in these things to know that I have bad days, as do we all, and that a few good nights kip, some good food and good company can make a world of difference. I can have two of those three here in Puerto Varas so here I shall remain for a couple of days while I try and find my emotional feet again. I have little doubt that I will. Oddly the third, good company, is lacking. This is a heavily touristed spot but I guess it is too early in the season for most folk. Since leaving Santiago I have not met a single other gringo. Not one. Amazing.

At this point I should probably go and have a beer. Sadly in the bars here beer comes in stupidly small bottles for a stupidly high price and many of the bars would rather sell you a Budweiser or Corona rather than any of the, in my opinion superior, local brews. Quite the opposite of Argentina just over the border. Oh well ;-)

* wild camping in this area seems all but impossible, being quite heavily populated the land is either all actively farmed or built on. That will change soon enough I think :-)

Los Lagos log house…

One of my favourite things about travel by bike, other than the freedom, is that one is never fully in control of ones destiny, unexpected things happen that invariably add to the richness of the journey, even if it is a dog running away with your shoe…

spring time roads in the Chilean lakes... red, purple.. but mostly yellow

On Friday morning I rode the 60km from Panguipulli to Los Lagos along mellow spring time roads, arriving in time for a fully loaded hotdog for lunch from a small cafe. Feeling more fatigued than I normally would after such a short ride I was in two minds whether to keep going for a few more hours or call it quits for the day in Los Lagos, an unremarkable little wooden riverside town that you’re unlikely to find in any guidebook for the simple reason there is bugger all there. While pondering this decision I had a look around town on my bike, it didn’t take long, and attracted the attention of a small bald chap with wire rimmed spectacles who came running over to say hello and ask if I wanted to stay somewhere ‘chileno’. I shrugged my shoulders and said “si, ok…”. He told me his friend had a spare room in his house and that it was a very interesting house… Sounded good. So that was how I came to spend a night with a local family in a fantastic self-built log house in Los Lagos.

Los Lagos.. the local architecture has a particularly picturesque way of collapsing. Sideways

By way of a siesta I dozed off that afternoon to the mellow music of Chilean rural life drifting in through the window… birds in the trees, chickens in the garden… kids fighting and a chainsaw tearing up some timber. I caught up with Adolfo again later on that afternoon for coffee and cake. As if you hadn’t guessed from his name there is a strong German influence in these parts which also means very good cake. I explained how I have trouble sometimes understanding the local Chileno dialect.. Adolfo agreed. Cheeky bugger. He did make an effort however to articulate his words clearly for my benefit :-)

Los Lagos... high security ;-)

My host forgot my name so at dinner time it took a while to dawn that the “hey, gringo..” coming from the kitchen was intended for me. I didn’t mind, I forgot his name too. All I can remember is that it began with ‘E’ and he said it was something biblical. Trouble is when folk mention the bible to me all I can think of is pillars of salt and burning stuff and his name was definitely nothing to do with either of those. He and his wife must have thought I looked in need of a good feed, I was served a great slab of fried meat topped with two fried eggs, a pile of papas fritas with bread and salad on the side and copious quantities of wine out of a box. While eating a few local folk drifted in for a drink, they thought I was German.. something to do my physical perfection I expect <cough> but once that hiccup was out of the way we were able to enjoy a jolly evening of conversation. By happy coincidence the Chileno dialect is considerably easier after a few glasses of wine.

Los Lagos

Four years in the building, the kitchen of this handmade house, was especially interesting, a regular grotto of chainsaw architecture and interesting nicknacks. Had it been in the UK the mishmash of wiring would never have met building regulations, but just say it had then I could imagine it would be “oh so perfectly created” with a Smug Smeg fridge in the corner and some of those carved mushrooms* you can buy from blokes in old vans in lay-bys on the A30 outside the window on a  perfectly manicured lawn. Possibly even featured on Grand Designs or presented by Sarah Beeny, most probably pregnant at the time as always seems to be the case. Here however it was perfect.

Osorno

Saturday morning dawned grey and cold with damp in the air. With no obvious back-road route south from Los Lagos it was unfortunately a case of heading for Ruta Cinco, the Pan-Americana for the day and pointing my wheels south for Osorno. A good opportunity to get some lattitude under my wheels but a less than inspiring piece of riding other than being able to enjoy a few more of the little ironies that characterize Latin America. I stopped at a roadhouse for a brew after 60km. It was called Hosteria Vista Hermosa (Beautiful View). I sat at the window with my coffee and stared numbly out at a damp patch of gravel, beyond which was the strip of asphalt and then a 50 or 60 foot high wall of scruffy trees. Si, muy hermosa. Surely a deliberate pun… The other irony for the day was less amusing. Earlier in the year going north I endured weeks of, at times ferocious, headwinds. I figured this time it would not be unreasonable to expect a surplus of tailwinds… It was a hard and hilly grind into the teeth of a strong southerly for almost 5 hours to cover the 95km to Osorno. Oh well :-)

Osorno

I’m writing this last little bit in Osorno and wondering whether or not to have a day off here. I’m well aware that I have been sick and that my body also needs to adapt to daily mileage again.. Osorno itself is a gritty place, I like it, it is interesting with lots of photographic potential simply because it is not a particularly attractive place. The folk here at the cafe whose wifi I am using may even agree…

Big Ben, haha

my legs were thoroughly stuffed when I rolled into Osorno, luckily however recovery shakes in Chile come in frozen form on top of a cone :-)

* the mushroom phenomenon may be on the wane, riding around Cornwall this last few months it appears they are being slowly supplanted by wooden meerkats. Hundreds of ‘em. Ugh.

Lican Ray & other odd place names..

Lican Ray felt like a place that was holding its breath.. in late November the new seasons tourists have not yet arrived and the previous season is just a distant memory amongst the footprints in the black sand beach. Just 30km south from Villarrica this was my way of testing my legs and dealing with the frustration of being sick.

there is a nice 'outback' feel to the towns around here

Lican Ray turned out to be a very pretty little one-street lakeside pueblo boasting an asphalt main street, albeit with a significant dusting of volcanic sand. With nobody yet open for business I camped on a patch of grass behind a hostal in the process of renovation and retired to the beach for a couple of pricey Cerveza Australs in the shade of a tree. A very fine beer.

the rather 'crisp' waterfront in Villarrica

In contrast to the deserts of Argentina earlier this year this part of Chile is indeed a green and pleasant land to explore but not entirely without it’s dangers for the touring cyclist. Australia has it’s crocodiles, deadly spiders and jellyfish, Canada has it’s bears, Africa is.. well Africa and Lican Ray has it’s shoe-eating dog. Dozing in my tent with the door open I noticed one of the local dogs behaving like a spring-loaded idiot jumping around outside. I ignored it until the dim realization occurred that the stupid creature was stalking one of my cycling shoes. It was too late, the dog, and my shoe, were off to a far corner of the field for a chew. Following a barefoot dash the shoe was apprehended and returned to my tent with it’s coating of spit. Oh for a dog eating spider.

Lican Ray

Lican Ray

Moving on from Lican Ray proved to be an equally adventurous day, hehe, just 35km south to another lake side town, this one a regular metropolis in comparison. Panguipulli.

Still feeling less than vigorous I took a room here rather than camp.. in contrast to the heat of yesterday it was cold and overcast when I arrived. Spring. My tent got pretty wet in the night so I can dry that out nicely too. Having had a wander through it’s few streets Panguipulli is a pretty little place, it sits on the shores of yet another lake with snow capped peaks visible around its shores.

Panguipulli

 I’m making lunch as I write offline, probably not a good idea, I burned my soup, a feat in itself…. I have a kitchen here you see, and a sofa and a fabulous shower, all for 10,000 pesos, about £13. Cable TV too, a small price to pay indeed for a little luxury to aid my recovery :-)

Panguipulli

So, I’m moving at least, albeit slowly. At times over the last few days I have really struggled to get my head in the right place for adventure, being sick didn’t help and i’ve got some quite bad blistering from eczema too from being run down as a result.. but as in all the Andean countries it seems that every day the locals put a smile back on my face.. whether it’s being invited to share in a family BBQ in Lican Ray or the antics of the road workers I photographed in Panguipulli… and of course when feeling a little down getting on your bike is about the best thing you can do.. that and have a beer. It all gets better from here! Cheers ;-)

Panguipulli.. the local rag I think

Panguipulli lake shore

these guys laughed when I asked to take their picture and said, near enough, "oh shit, we had better look busy" .. except the guy to the right of the pic:-)

this one is running from a spider..

on the road again, here's my trusty old Nomad

Monday. Sunshine

Monday, sunshine.. the faded, melancholic town of yesterday springs to life with a colour and vibrancy that could not have been guessed at a day earlier.

rowing boats down at the lake shore

the view from my window, Volcan Villarrica looking rather splendid

Wish I could say the same of me, about as much vibrancy as a bread roll dropped in a puddle… still not strong enough to ride..  Still, mustn’t grumble, hehe.. could be worse, could be at work.. or something :-)

Beerography..?

Villarricas faded Sunday evening streets, out on the hunt for food I note that Funerales Corona is open, always good to know that one can pop one’s clogs on a sunday evening without having to worry about one’s corpse kicking around until 9am on Monday. Finding something to eat on the other hand…. I do eventually find a bar happy to put a lomito sandwich together but I can’t help laughing to myself about the bar economics that says the addition of one or two lettuce leaves to a lomito tomate adds 1000 pesos to the bill. While I’m pondering my choice of fillings the TV over the bar is showing football, a player is being interviewed.. his name is Eduardo Ponce. Sounds about right… for a footballer.  I asked the girl behind the bar for a Cerveza Austral.. “ah, no tengo” she says. OK I say, I’ll have any local Chilean beer then.. She plonks down a bottle of Cusquena… from Peru. Brilliant, geography clearly not strong on the curriculum here :-) Or maybe that should be beerography…

damp Sunday evening in Villarrica

p.s for a guide to all things beery in South America check out Pete’s words on the topic here.. that is Pete that I rode with in Peru by the way.

Villarrica…

Despite my words of a couple of days ago I do have reason to remember Santiago… not because I have come down with a dose of bronchitis, no doubt contracted courtesy of Iberia recycled cabin air but rather because of the fantastic hospitality shown me by my hosts yesterday as I was invited to share in a lazy afternoon of fried fish and beer before giving me a ride to the bus station with my boxed bike to catch the overnight bus to Villarrica. Thanks guys :-)

 

Villarrica

 

So I have time to write but not much to write about while in the grip of the lurgy… no riding for me for a day or two which rather sucks. It is pissing with rain down here today and rather cooler than Santiago which makes sense given I’m something like 800km further south. There is a big smoking volcano towering over the town.. it is hiding in the clouds today but I saw it back in January from across the border in Argentina, that day cycling up to Lago Alumine. Villarrica itself is an OK place, a gently delapidated town of faded pastels on the shore of one of the numerous lakes in the region. Being Sunday it has an especially mellow, almost melancholy air to it with the few folk out and about huddled down into their collars against the rain and the faint sound of hymns wafting up from the church on the lake shore.

Santiago de Chile…

Some cities have a character that I pick up on instantly, other cities have a character that takes a day or two to become apparent… and some just fail to make an impression. Mendoza was in that latter category and so it seems is Santiago. That is not to say they are not nice places they just failed to strike a chord within me. Santiago is pleasant enough but really is just a big city with all that entails … like heavy traffic. There are few nice old colonial buildings around but it lacks a defining character.. well, during daylight hours at least, later I shall investigate the night-time  scene.. ;-) Still, as a place to get my shit together and rest up after the flight from the UK it’s fine and it really did deserve a look. I found a bed and some new friends for a couple of nights at a terrific little hostel near the university.

 

I wonder what Che would have thought.. mild amusement perhaps at seeing his face, next to Michael Jackson, on a beachtowel at the market..

 

The journey over here was OK..ish, I escaped Cornwall just in time before much of the county was shut down by floods. It seems a world away now as I sit here in 26 degs and sunshine. The only hiccup was an indicated engine fault on the Airbus A340 out of Madrid so we had to return for an investigation. Happily it turned out to be an instrumentation fault but I could have done without the extra couple of hours wedged in that seat on what is already a very long overnight flight. I am feeling somewhat buggered as I write. One very cool thing did happen on the flight and that was on the approach to Santiago over the high Andes in Argentina just north of Aconcagua.. we passed right overhead the little pueblo of Barreal and the dirt track Mark and I rode north from Uspallata to get there. On the ground it was a pretty brutal day, from the air the terrain looked simply epic. That original post is here.
My bike made it over here in one piece too.. the Nomad is so tough that I am starting to think of it as immune to baggage handlers.. which of course is tempting fate so naturally I do not think that at all. I built it up this morning figuring that if anything was bust then Santiago would be the best place to fix it. As it happened although the box was somewhat crushed my bike was fine… except for the pedals. Nothing to do with the flight but when packing it up in the UK I typically paid attention to every component except the pedals.. just tossed them in the box without a second thought. Very dim of me. The bearings on the right hand pedal were feeling pretty ropey with some play present. Bit of a pain but rather than hope for the best this afternoon became a mission to find a bike shop with SPD pedals. Successfully I might add, there is a whole string of bike shops along Avenida San Diego a few blocks south of the University of Chile.. which of course will be of no interest to anyone reading this unless you’re stuck here and in need of a bike shop. ;-)

I’m getting out of here tomorrow night, the bike has to go back in it’s box.. typically the more developed a country is the harder it gets to take a bike on public transport.. Ecuador, Bolivia, India etc – no problem but here I’ve been advised it’ll only go on the bus in it’s box. You see I have no desire to waste time cycling out of the city, instead I decided I’m taking the bus a few hours south to Villarrica on northern edge of  the lake district where it gets really interesting with, unsurprisingly, lakes and volcanoes in abundance. Ideal surroundings for easing myself back into the touring routine :-)

 

not desperately interesting.. ;-)

 

p.s Iberias charges for the bike were sort of reasonable. Most airlines charge these days so 50 euros for a trip halfway round the world was not unexpected. Although it still bugs me that me plus all my gear and my bike is still lighter than many of the ‘larger’ folk to be found wedged uncomfortably into a airplane seat… and that is ignoring their typical  mountain of wheeled suitcases. Arguing the case never seems to work. Oh well, beer calls ;-)

Shelterbox in Chile

With reference to my last post below Shelterbox are right now enroute with aid to Chile after the massive earthquake there a few days ago. With their resources already stretched by the Haiti quake my journey and your donations are more relevant than ever… so please, point your mouse to that blue ‘Justgiving’ button on the right and help out… The latest Shelterbox news is here: http://www.shelterbox.org/news.php

El Jardin de Patagonia….

Hola, today I’m writing from Valle la Angostura in Argentina, it calls itself El Jardin de Patagonia… and it really is rather beautiful. The town looks and feels almost identical to Banff, same homogenous natural wood and stone architecture, shops geared towards mountain sports and so on.. very much the mountain resort… just without the Japanese tourists… but loads of Argentine visitors, busiest place I’ve seen so far :-)

So, back to Monday evening…. having totally sorted myself out with lunch consisting of slabs of local trout, pan fried, with rice, chips, salad, bread and beer, rounded off with a big slab of raspberry kuchen and coffee, I couldn’t be bothered to fire up my stove just for tea in the afternoon so I went up to the house of the lady who owned the camp with my mug & a tea bag to scrounge some hot water from the kettle.. she was just cooking dinner for the family so along with the hot water I also got another great slab of trout… all I really wanted was tea and biscuits but it would have been rude to turn it down… yum :-)

I did myself no favours at all yesterday, it was a long day (7.5hrs) on the bike with something like 3000m climbing in total, climbing the pass between exiting Chile and entering Argentina was a moderately brutal exercise, 22km of climbing at grades around 12%, at times the trucks weren’t going much faster than I was… took over 2hrs to reach the pass… above the tree line and surrounded by snow covered peaks. Border formalities on both sides were simple… just time consuming.

I got here about 4.30pm, found a proper campsite (hot water and all, lol) on the outskirts of town and instantly made friends with a couple of Argentinians camping ‘next door’… which took care of my evening and put paid paid to any chance of my legs recovering.. first the caffeine load from a few rounds of sharing maté (not the cocoa tea from further north on the altiplano)… a social thing, drunk from a gourd with a silver straw.. it contains a fair bit of caffeine so although exhausted I was buzzing.. and then into town for beer and snacks and it was gone 10pm before we remembered to get something to eat… The whole evening stretched my Spanish to the limit… hard work but also really good for me..

Anyway, off now to ride down to the lake having had a post lunch doze to meet a couple of cyclists from the Netherlands for tea. I’ll upload some pics later… pics now added below.

postscript @5pm…. as for my next move… north to San Martin de los Andes… not sure how far it is, I know at least 50km is dirt road, I know it’s very hilly but depending on who you talk to it is somewere between 100 and 200km away, which means the map may not be entirely accurate (won’t be the first time)… so planning on a wild camp tomorrow night, the really long days are hard to recover from if riding every day. So now if you’ll excuse me, my litre of Cerveza Patagonia is getting warm..

p.p.s. I know I make light of it but it is bloody hard work cycling in the mountains, and now I’m in the heart of the mountains it will only get harder as the extremes of temperature increase, the altitude increases and the roads get worse… so if you were still dithering over the sponsorship thing you can be sure that atmany times in the near future I’ll be suffering horribly, lol :-)