A Wedding at the End of the Earth

Boda al fin del Mundo

Hopefully this is old news to everyone by now, but Rose and I got married on April 21 in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina! Click on the picture above to have a look at some photos of the event. Also, click here for more wedding photos at our friend and cycling companion Eva´s website, which is unfortunately in Danish but the photos sure are nice (the wedding photos are at the bottom of the page).

Anyhow, we decided that Ushuaia, at the end of our long journey south, was the perfect time and place to formalize our committment to each other. Words in a blog entry can´t really do justice to how excited we are to be embarking on this new journey together. Thanks so much to everyone for your words of congratulations and support. And sorry that we have been slow at getting the word (and photos) out to everyone, but our access to communication technology has been limited. You, our friends and family, have been very much on our minds and we wish we could have shared the news with everyone personally.

So about that wedding:
Just wading through the Argentine bureaucracy to get our marriage paperwork in order was quite an adventure. I believe we set a new Argentine speed record by completing the entire process in a single day (Friday). At least three times on Friday, when we told them we were planning to get married on Monday, we had officials shake their head and say it could simply not be done . But thanks to some very helpful folks, particularly the ladies at the hospital who reopend the lab so we could have a blood test (for what we are not quite sure, but thankfully we don´t have it), we were able to get all the dozen forms and innumerable stamps and signatures collected.

The wedding itself was at the Registro Civil, in a sunny room with a big wooden desk, a few benches, and an Argentine flag. Eva was able to stay with us as we signed the documents and filled out the last few forms, and then we sadly had to say goodbye to her as she left to catch a plane to Buenos Aires and then back to Europe. We feel so fortunate to have gained such a wonderful friend and shared so many great times with Eva, a truly amazing and inspirational person. After warming up with her 11 month solo Andean cycling tour (Quito to Ushuaia), we are certain to hear more Danish woman firsts from her in the coming years - trans Greenland ski tour, unsupported polar expeditions, Everest summit, etc.

As we didn´t want to get married in bike shorts or fleece jackets (comfortable as they might be), we went on a shopping spree and bought some new wedding duds. Man you should have seen Rose. In spite of all the spectacular things I have seen recently, she was the most beautiful sight I have seen in South America.

Our witnesses for the ceremony were Alejandro and Francis, a wonderful Argentine couple (and the owners of the bed and breakfast we stayed at in Ushuaia) who also were married at the same Registro Civil and are about to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary! Alejandro and Francis took their job as witnesses very seriously, giving us some helpful tips for long-lasting marriages and even bringing rice to throw on us as we exited the building. The ceremony was in Spanish and culminated with us signing the official marriage book, that will be stored for all time in the Ushuaia archives. So if you make it down to Ushuaia some day and want to look it up, just remember: April 21, 2008.

After the ceremony, we returned to our apartment to find Eva had arranged for us a bottle of champagne on ice, with grapes and chocolates. This sidetracked our plans for a hike, but made for an absolutely lovely afternoon, followed by an equally lovely evening meal at the nicest restaraunt in Ushuaia with a table looking out over the moonlit harbor and the Beagle Channel beyond.

We departed Ushuaia early the next day and spent our honeymoon on a series of buses (35 hours to Bariloche, where we dicovered that one of our the backpacks we had stored there during our bike tour had been stolen) then 20 more hours to Buenos Aires. Mind you we are not complaining, as we have been for all practical purposes honeymooning for the last year solid. Anyhow, now we are in Buenos Aires, enjoying big city life and preparing for the next leg of the trip - Brazil! In fact, we finally got our visas today, and depart tomorrow by bus for southern Brazil, where we will start riding again (and hopefully surfing too if there is any swell). We were quick to adjust to the Buenos Aires schedule of staying up til 2 AM and sleeping til noon. Unfortunately, our bodies have not been quick to adjust to anything but cycling, so after every short run we take we are crippled for two days.

Anyhow, that is all for now.

Love,

Ty

End of the Road!

Deep South

First, for all those who don´t bother with the boring text, a new photo album! Just click the photo above, you know the drill...

Here we are in Ushuaia, Argentina, the southernmost city in the world. No more roads extend south of here so I guess we´ll have to stop cycling, at least for a while. The last few days of cycling have been fabulous. From Punta Arenas we took a nauseating ferry ride (and it was a ¨calm¨day) across the Straits of Magellan and then cycled out along Bahia Inutil (Useless Bay). The next day, aided by powerful (90 km/hr) tailwinds, we whizzed across Tierra del Fuego back into Argentina and all the way south to Rio Grande, which is famed for its of sea run brown trout. While 175 kilometers is not that far in grand cycling scheme, it was an all time record for Rose and I and we certainly felt it the next day. A motorcyclist we met the very next day put us rather to shame with his claim to have ridden 1,150 km through southern Africa, with one hand broken and useless due to a recent crash, just to attend a party. Just when we start to think we are pretty tough... Anyhow, after a rest day in the oil town of Rio Grande (the Gillette, WY of Patagonia! - for those of you who have not had the pleasure of visiting that city, that is not a compliment), two more days of glorious weather (as warm as 7 celsius!) and light winds brought us to Ushuaia.

Along the way, Eva has been regaling us with tales of a pair of Italian bicycle tourers she rode with in Peru whose blog included such dramatic exaggerations that it bordered on fiction. Inspired by this idea, I am tempted to include some hypothermic crossings of huge mountain passes, close scrapes with vicious wildlife, or at least some fish stories, but I just can´t bring myself to do it. Beautiful fall colors (the lengas here color up nearly as nice as a maple), golden fall light, grazing guanacos, and smooth asphalt roads, as enjoyable as they are, just don´t seem very dramatic. In fact, our closest brush with death involved a couple of speeding Hondas in the Ushuaia city limits.

One thing, however, that has made our last few weeks really memorable is the truly amazing southern hospitality we have recieved. One afternoon last week, while riding across northen Tierra del Fuego, dusk found us out in frigid temperatures and steady 80 km/hour winds in the open pamapas. So we headed to the nearest estancia and asked if we could pitch our tents somewhere out of the wind. The gaucho caretaker (Jose) graciously invited us into the house, sat us down around the wood cookstove, and poured us a hot cup of tea. Then he explained that we could sleep in the bunkhouse and proceded to pull out a fresh leg of lamb and a hacksaw and prepare us a truly amazing lamb stew, complete with homegrown carrots and potatoes.

This is just one example of the generous hospitality we have recieved during our recent travels. Since we hit the pampas around three weeks ago we have crashed at ranches (and one police outpost) nearly every night spent outside of the few towns, and have always been welcomed graciously. In Punta Arenas, a gaucho explained to us that Chilean law requires that estancias give shelter to all travellers who stop by. He went on to explain that this includes 4 night´s room and board, plus feed for any livestock and laundry facilities. He may have just been pulling our legs, but, considering the hospitality we have seen, who knows?

So for now we are relaxing in a lovely bed and breakfast, kicking around Ushuaia, trying to negotiate the complicated Argentine marriage process, and exploring future travel options. The distance we have come on bikes hit home to us when we realized it is going to take us three days in a bus to get get back to Bariloche - ugh, maybe we´ll just ride back up...

All the best,

Ty

Oh the wind and the rain

Torres y Pampas

Yes folks, that is a photo album above, click and enjoy!

The weather is one of those topics a person might bring up when there aren´t other stories to tell. But if you are in Patagonia spending most of your waking hours pedalling a bycicle the topic becomes more interesting. Our first day riding in the Pampa out of El Chalten brouught strong tail winds that gave us the enjoyable, though probably false, impression that we were becoming supercyclists; we covered 115 kilometers in a few hours, which for us, was unprecedented (I should mention here, that ¨we¨ and "us" now include our new friend Eva, a thouroughly inspiring and good humored Danish woman of 22 who is biking solo from Ecuador to Ushuia). Of course the winds haven´t always been in our favor, and we have on occasion found ourselves working up a sweat, pedalling down hill. A clever Argentinian man we met our first day riding in the pampa gave us this tip--when the wind gets too strong to pedal, ride at night. During the day when the winds are strongest, just wrap yourself in a tarp, a sheet of plastic would do, and make yourself into "a cyclist empanada." Although, he also warned us that many fisherman and bird watchers get attacked by all the pumas lurking in the pampa and we should be very loud everywhere we go and avoid putting fish in our pockets. As Americans, being loud is no problem, but frankly I thought the cyclist empanada idea damaged his crediblity a bit - but Ty is known to store fish in his pockets... Luckily the winds have been pretty mellow and we haven´t had to try any of this empanada business yet.

After leaving El Chalten and El Calafate, where Ty spent a few long days waiting for promised bike parts to arrive and building himself a 3rd (and hopefully final) wheel, we headed to Parque Nacional Torres del Paine. There we celebrated Ty´s birthday by drinking copious amounts of Ty´s new favorite beverage, Nescafe (friends at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, we are really desperate, any chance you can get some French Roast down here?). We hiked up to a mirador del Torres trying to wrap our eyes around the outragous beauty of these 3,000 ft granite towers, and that of the surrounding mountains. We spent the remainder of our time in the park trying not to belittle those other (lame) tourists who had not arrived in the park by bicycle and enjoying some of the first wildlife we´ve seen in Patagonia, including Darwin´s rheas (think ostrich), guanacos and foxes.

We´re now in Peurto Natales where we arrived last night after one of the rainier, colder days on the bikes. It started at 6 AM on the edge Parque Torres del Paine 90 kilometers of gravel before Peurto Natales, where we camped the night before . We awoke to rain and 35 degree temps; Fresh snow had fallen on the peaks above us. Our food was running low as we had been unsuccesful in procuring food from any of the stores in the Park, either becuase they didn´t have anything on the shelves or they wouldn´t sell us what they did have: (Rose: Could we buy that box of oatmeal? Storekeeper: No. Ty: Why not? Storekeeper: It is not for sale. It is for the restaurant. Eva: Could I buy some pasta? Storekeeper: No. Ty: Is anything for sale here? Storekeeper: Yes, the cookies, the potato chips, and the pisco (a strong grape brandy). The rain persisted pretty much all day, as did the cold temps. And I can´t say I didn´t miss our usual 5-meal-a-day habit. But, writing from a warm, dry internet cafe while looking out at the falling snow, yesterday´s pedal seems strangely fun. Ty and I agreed that if someone would have stopped and offered a ride, we wouldn´t have taken it. And the cold and rain made a warm meal and a dry bed seem the height of luxury when we did make it to Puerto Natales.

PS--With all the rain and cold, we´d like to thank our rain gear sponsers, Gwynne Axelrod, Dan and Dianne Hendricks, our fleece sponsor, Judd Rogers. We´d also like to thank the kind gauchos from Estancia Cancha Carrera who gave us a few kilos of fresh sheep steaks and fresh baked bread when we asked if they sold any meat, and a palace when we asked for a spot to pitch our tent. They´re just the most recent of the many fine hosts we´ve had during the long road south.

Much love to our wonderful readers,

Rose