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