Back in Argentina (Photos too!)

We are now back in Argentina after an enjoyable crossing from Chile. From Villa O´Higgins, we boarded a ferry for a three hour ride across a huge glacial lake. Disembarking from the ferry, we got our Chilean exit stamps on our passports from a funny little Chilean Carabineros outpost. Posted truly in the middle of nowhere, these military folks spend their time visiting pobladores for mate sipping sessions and driving back an forth on their 15 km long road in their lone vehicle, an old green John Deere tractor. We rode up the Chilean´s road to the border (past several washed out bridges) to the border, where the road changes abruptly to a trail, which we descended with some difficulty (due to deadfall and eroded sections) to Lago Desierto and the Argentine border outpost. We spent the night camped on the lake, caught a ferry across in the morning, and rolled downhill with the wind at our backs all the way into El Chalten, of Fitzroy and Cerro Torre fame. We celebrated our arrival with a wonderful dinner of parilla (barbecue) with a bunch of cycling friends we met along the way - a Swiss, a Dane, an Italian, and three Brazilians.

Since I was here eight years ago, Chalten has ballooned in size, quite a shock to see. It now has dozens of restaraunts, scads of hostels, internet access, a new park visitor center, upscale shopping... Back in 2001 it had one lone hostel, one restaraunt/bar, with nary a cyber-cafe to be found. Pretty impressive for a town founded way back in 1985! My next visit I fully expect to find a super WalMart and a couple Starbucks. Actually maybe the Starbucks wouldn´t be so bad, as we are back in the land of foul coffee, which the Argentines toast with sugar to give it a distinctly chemical taste, yum. We suspect it is a conspiracy headed by the mate industry, but who knows?

Anyhow, we are now showered and fed, and plan to hike around for a day or two before heading south (of course) out onto the windy pampas. We keep hearing all sorts of nasty wind stories from northbound cyclists, so it is with some trepidation that we leave the sheltering confines of Chile´s deep valleys. So wish us luck.

Oh yeah, and finally some photos, enjoy:

La Carretera Austral

All the best,

Ty

End of the Road, Sort of...

This very morning, Rose and I rolled into Villa O´higgins, the very end of the Carretera Austral! Since Cochrane, we have ridden through some gorgeous country, finally saw some huemules (the endangered Andean deer whose existence we were beginning to think was actually just a myth), and (most recently) endured two straight days of cold rain. My improvised new rear wheel, while strongly oval in shape, has been performing admirably (Question: What do you get when you cross a 34 spoke hub and a 38 hole rim?).

Our accommodations have been interesting the last few nights, both of which we were fortunate to find shelter from the endless deluge. First rainy night found us bunked in the Chilean military´s extra cabin in Puerto Yungay (population 3, plus 5 military folks). The highlight of that night, aside from the wood cookstove, was my two round bout with a giant Patagonian mouse, who woke us up in his attempt to drag our entire cheese supply off to his lair. Round one went to the mouse, but I scored a TKO in round two when I whacked him off the table with a nalgene bottle, after which we didn´t hear another peep. Rainy night two found us bunked in a friendly campesino´s smokehouse, complete with hunks of smoking vacuno (beef to you gringos). We started a lovely fire and dried out, but the damn place kept filling up with smoke, funny that... However, the owner had us in to gather round his wood cookstove for coffee, eggs and bread in the evening, then coffee and frybread in the morning. The sleeping quarters were also populated by three dogs a couple dozen chickens, and a spirited white cat named, get this, ¨gato blanco¨.

Anyhow, the sun is shining now and we just polished off a lunch of salmon empanadas, aaahhhh. Though the road has ended, the journey continues. Tomorrow we ferry across a lake and cross to Argentina, hiking and biking across the border to El Chalten (of FitzRoy and Cerro Torre fame). Then the road continues, southward of course. We may even continue rolling al the way to Tierra del Fuego, making use of our newly leathery butts.

Best wishes to all. Que le vaya bien.

Ty

¿Como se dice busted rim?

So, ideally when you´re biking the best place to break down would be in front of a bikeshop, or maybe just close to a town. Or, maybe even just on a road that sees some traffic. A less than ideal place for your bike to fail catastrophically would be the more remote sections of the Careterra Austral, a few hundred Km from anywhere. Unless you are really lucky and happen to be a creative bike mechanic.

We left Coyhaique about a week ago after a wonderful visit with some folks at the NOLS Patagonia branch. A few days out from Coyhaique, first thing in the morning, Ty´s rear rim failed at the top a pass. Being a few hundred kilometers from the closest town with a bike shop where we could potentially buy a new rim, we got to wondering exactly how far a person can ride on a broken rim, with a disconnected rear brake, over bikeeating washboard gravel roads. Visions of waiting days for somone to stop and pick up two fools trying to hitch with loaded bikes ran through our heads. We contemplated the complexities of trying to make cheese out of milky glacial river water and looked on sorrowfully at our ever-diminishing cooky supply. We shuddered at the visions. So, Ty put some duct tape over the rupture, we ate our second of three breakfasts, and crossed our fingers. The tire held all that day and most of the next as we rode through valleys with milky glacial rivers flowing through them, and rocky mountains with cascading waterfalls. We stopped waiting expectantly for the creaking sound of the semicircular rim morpheing suddenly into an exact oval. And Ty made an art form of descending mountains with only a front brake.

But, to our dismay the rim blew again just a day´s ride from Cochrane, where some bikers we passed heading north assured us rims were available. Ty went to work again with the duct tape and superglue and (in honor of Wyclef) many many many many tire patches. We held our breath all the way to Cochrane (okay, maybe we took a couple of breaths on some of the passes) and made it! We rolled into town last night in time to take part in Cochrane´s 54th town anniversary celebration. We feasted on empanadas, Concho y Toro boxed red wine, and enjoyed the company of some very toothless, very drunk gauchos. Today we´re enjoying the beautiful fall weather after a couple days of heavy rain, and filling up on the apples, plums and pears growing in our campground. And Ty´s buying a new rim as I write this. Turns out you can ride at least a few hundred kilometers with a loaded bike on a broken rim. ¡Que suerte!

We send our love,

Rose

On the Road

Greetings from Puyuhuapi, Chile! We are 550 or so kilometers into our ride and have just arrived a lovely, lush green, seaside village on the Carretera Austral. The trip has been going fabulously, with fine, dry weather, amazing scenery, and (perhaps most importantly) good fishing. The blackberry bushes have been consistent, and just far enough apart that we actually make some forward progress each day. We have settled into a rhythm of eating, riding, thinking about eating, riding, eating, and then finally stopping to camp and fish and eat. Been catching mostly brown and rainbow trout so far (but we´ve seen a couple salmon, and fully intend to catch some before the trip is out), including one of the biggest brown trout of my life. This lunker lived right under a log by our camp on a trib to the Fu, and I raised to my lure (yes lure you flyfishing snobs) three times before I hooked and landed him - a true monster, lots of centimeters in length, and several kilograms in mass - I still haven´t figured out this damn metric system. But the kilometers fly past pretty quick, and the distances sound impressive, so we are sticking with it.

Rose has taken to cycling like a bear to blackberries. I can barely keep her in sight on the uphills and have to use my superior mass to catch back up on the descents. Our thighs are becoming ropey with dramatic tan lines, and our butts are now solidly leathery, with the brand names of our saddles indelibly tatooed on them. Lots of gravel and washboard down here, with occasional smooth sections on which we slow nearly to a crawl just to revel in their smoothness.

In other news, there are too many cows in Patagonia. There, I´ve said it. I love the taste of Argentine beef as much as anyone, but there are too many of the stinky beasts around. Why just the other day in Parque National Los Alerces back in Argentina, we saw two surly steers ruthlessly harassing a poor huemul, an endangered andean deer species. They were heckling him mercilessly, boxing his ears, and unleashing the occasional nasty kick, while two park rangers looked on impassively. Wyoming isn´t the only place with an overstrong ag lobby I guess... Just so you don´t get the idea that it is all spectacular vistas and daisies, there is plenty of devastation from mismanagement with fire (to improve the grazing, of course) down here, as well as plenty of ugly gravel mines and undersized culverts. That said, we have passed more miles (I mean kilometers) of absurdly gorgeous river in the last 10 days than I had previously seen in my entire life. Milky white glacial streams, gorgeous green torrents, deep blue rivers, gin clear streams, I am truly in heaven.

We´ve also met some intersting folks, including a kid attending (listen close all you parents) a ¨whitewater academy¨, which is apparently a high school where you travel the world and kayak instead of studying, excellent! Also a very driven French/Russian/Colombian Brit (who speaks Korean too) intending to ride up to Alaska, with a jog into the Amazon to do a first bicycle criss-cross of some muddy logging roads, plus a French couple chainsmoking and dragging a kid along in a trailer on the bumpiest road on earth (just kidding about the chainsmoking actually), and lots of friendly Chileans, all of whom have really cool wood cookstoves in their homes.

Anyhow, internet time is more precious than smoked salmon down here, so I´ve gotta sign off.

All our love,

Ty

The Slow Road South

After a fantastic visit with Rose´s folks and aunt Gwynne in the Bariloche area (hopefully we´ll get some photos posted eventually), we have hit the road south by bicycle, headed for the Carretera Austral in Chilean Patagonia.

Right now we are in Trevelin, Argentina, after surviving the aggressive bus drivers on Route 40. Our trip almost ended early in a gorgeous valley just south of El Bolson, a paradise with ripe, sweet blackberries lining the roadside for miles and miles. Had the rancher accepted our (admittedly lowball) offer for his property, we probably would have settled down there permanently. Unfortunately, the days of buying Patagonian ranches for under $500 US are gone, probably forever.

On day 3, a few hundred kms into our trip, our introduction to ¨ripio¨(Spanish for hellishly washboarded gravel road) began. Frankly it was a bit disturbing, considering the next few thousand kilometers are unpaved. Fortunately the grim gravel led us into the gorgeous granduosity(kind of alliterative, eh?) of Parque Nacional Los Alerces, where Rose got a jump start on her major goal for the trip: learning to love camping in the rain. I, on the other hand, gave up even trying to enjoy wet camping long ago and will be happy to survive with a minimum of new fungal growths on my body. In other news, our butts are in the ¨rawhide¨stage (emphasis on the raw), well on the way to being leathery, which is another primary goal for the trip.

So now it is over into Chile and the legendary Futaleufu and then south, south, south... Internet cafes are few and far between down here so be patient loyal readers...

Ciao,

Ty