Battered and bruised but nothing a pizza won´t fix

It has been a seriously eventful three days since we left Punta Arenas on Thursday morning.  I´m sure you must all be sick to death of hearing about the wind but it is literally becoming the focus of our lives.  We thought the Fuegian winds were bad but we have now felt the wrath of the Patagonian wind and it ain´t pretty.

We set off from Punta Arenas after a lovely day visiting Isla Magdalena in the Magellan Straits where there is a huge colony of Magellanic Penguins.  The first stretch out of town was bliss we had the wind in our favour and were feeling like the weather might finally be on our side.  We were making great progress until we met a cyclist coming in the other direction.  He´d covered about 150km that day and was sailing with the wind behind him which meant that our luck was about to change - from now on we´ve decided to stop talking to cyclists on the other side of the road; they are smug, bring bad news and always seem to turn our luck.  Sure enough as we watched this guy sail off into the distance the wind picked up and we were soon battling against not only a head wind but a strong side wind too.  Still, we were determined to make it at least 50km that day.  We were forced to walk for long stretches as the side wind kept blowing us off the road and every lorry or bus that passed us sucked us into the middle of the road.


At about 8pm we started to think about finding somewhere to camp for the night.  It´s quite hard down here to find a spot that is sheltered from the wind and hidden from the road as you just get mile upon mile of flat grazing land.  After finding a few dud spots, including a creepy abandoned house by a lake the light was fading fast and we were beginning to think that the petrol station 5km ahead was likely to be our best option.

Luckily for us there was a small Estancia opposite the petrol station.  We pedalled up to the main farmhouse and asked one of the farm workers if we could camp somewhere. They were so kind to us and offered us a caravan to sleep in.  Actually this turned out to be more of a chicken shed on wheels with a huge hole in the roof and a bunk bed with two heavily soiled mattresses but after the day we´d had it felt like the height of luxury.  Best of all it had an ancient wood burning stove in it which Ben soon got going and in no time we had supper on the go.  Next morning it was hard to part from the chicken shed and the wood burner, it was so cosy.

The "Caravan"

I´m not going to go into too much detail about Friday, but to sum up it was absolute hell.  I had a breakdown every 3kms which poor Ben patiently dealt with, then I got picked up by the wind and slam dunked onto the road smashing my head and my hip. Luckily I had my gimp helmet on and there were no cars coming otherwise there might not be much left of my head.  It was at this point that it became clear that pushing our bikes was the only option, which we did for HOURS.  Frankly it was exhausting, slow and  f***ing boring particularly when you repeateldy jab yourself in the back of the leg with your pedal.  Anyway it wasn´t all bad, the scenery is getting more and more impressive and we made it to a roadside cafe that night and managed to wangle a hot dinner and a bed in a drafty shed for the princely sum of 5 quid. 

Let´s just say yesterday brought us more of the same but I´m trying to forget about it now.  We arrived in Puerto Natales feeling rather bullied and fragile.  We treated ourselves to a double room with a clean mattress and a huge pizza and after a long sleep we are both feeling repaired, refuelled and ready to take on the Torres del Paine National Park which will be spectacular.

Rio Grande is a hard place to leave

Not because it´s fun or anything, just because there´s a 70kph gale that keeps blowing you back. We left Rio Grande last Tuesday and battled for two hours against the wind.  Let´s just say that after two hours of fighting our progress was laughable. The road from Rio Grande to the Chilean border at San Sebastian runs directly alongside the Atlantic and is completely unsheltered so it´s hardly suprising that it´s a pretty blustery stretch.  It´s also a partly gravel road so we felt like we were being repeatedly whipped in the face with tiny pieces of glass.  It was becoming fairly obvious that there was no way we´d make it to San Sebastian in a day so it was with heavy hearts that we decided to retreat back to the nuclear bunker that is Rio Grande and assess our options.  Most depressingly of all, what had taken us two hours to cycle that morning, took 20 minutes in the opposite direction!  We were feeling slightly defeated to be heading back to our hostel and seriously disgruntled at being forced to spend another night in Rio Grande.  There is literally nothing to do in Rio Grande unless you´re a keen gambler - there are 3 casinos and not much else.  The one highlight of our stay was watching Rio Grande vs Ushuaia which given that there are a total of 3 towns in Tierra del Fuego is pretty much like watching Arsenal vs. Tottenham in terms of rivalry.  The only notable difference was that the pitch would have been more suited to either mud wrestling or swimming.
Luckily for us there was a bus first thing on Wednesday morning and we found ourselves crossing the Chilean border and the Magellan Straits by mid afternoon. We made it to our next big stop, the Chilean town of Punta Arenas, late on Wednesday evening.

The Road to Rio Grande ...

.... Isn´t all that much fun!  We left Tolhuin yesterday morning at 6am hoping to outsmart the Fuegian winds, which we did for a few hours at least.  We had the most fantastic three hours of cycling, the roads were peaceful, the sun was shining and the road was a gentle mix of manageable hills and some good bits of downhill free-wheeling.  This was definitely our best cycling so far and we spent most of the morning spotting herds of wild Guanaco (basically the same as a Lama), enormous birds and marvelling at the impressive landscape.  At about 10am we met a pair of Argentine cyclists who had come from Rio Grande. Just as we were thinking how well we were getting on they decided to tell us about the hell that we were about to hit - 40km an hour winds, no trees and a totally flat, desolate landscape.  We pushed on, and as we rounded a big corner in the road sure enough the trees stopped and we could see the white horses of the Atlantic ahead of us.  Sure, the wind was pretty bad but we could see a bit of a drop in the road ahead and our thoughts turned to some freewheeling.  Clearly we had never cycled downhill into the 40kph Fuegian wind (Ben says it was 80kph but I´m not so sure).  You have to cycle with all your might and if you´re lucky you´ll hit a top speed of about 5kph.  This is not good for morale.
Memories of our blissful morning´s cycling were fading fast so we decided to try and make it to a camp site which we´d heard was 50km out of Rio Grande.  We´d already made it 60km from Tolhuin so techinically it should have been just over the hill and round the corner ... unfortunately our legs gave out before then and we decided to stop for lunch.  We looked around for some shelter, turns out whatever you do the wind will still seek you out so in the end our picnic spot was the grass verge of the road.  Still, we managed to get our wonderful stove working and feasted on packet soup and then managed an hours kip on the roadside huddled under our bright orange groundsheet from Poundland - this has turned out to be the best investment.  With warm soup in our bellies and a good roadside kip under our belts we felt ready to take on the next 50km to Rio Grande.
We made it to the top of the next hill, battling every step against the winds.  We were relieved to see a sign for the campsite and were thinking about bedding down for the night when the rains came.  On closer inspection the campsite was not looking all that inviting, in fact we were pretty sure it was an episode of Midsummer Murders just waiting to happen.  In a moment of blind desperation I flagged down the next car which handily happened to be a little pick up truck with room in the back for two bikes and a couple of weary cyclists. 
We´d managed to hitch a lift with what I think was Argentina´s answer to the white van man - a copy of Las Noticias tucked between the dashboard and the window rather than The Sun and a flask of Mate rather than a Wild Bean Cafe coffee cup but basically the same principle.  There was some fairly filthy chat going on between the two of them, also I´m pretty sure they were trying to work out how much our bikes were worth and how easy it would be to either push us out of the door as we were going along or get rid of our bodies if they killed us.  They seemed to spend quite a lot of time working out how much we both weighed - maybe it was much less sinister and they were just working out how much petrol money they should charge us.  Anyway they were very kind to us and we are eternally grateful to them for getting us to Rio Grande in one piece.
Rio Grande looks like a massive nuclear bunker but it has given us a warm shower and a bunk bed in a dorm with 3 other long distance cyclists and a Canadian motorbiker.  As you can imagine, it smells pretty good!  We were suprised to wake up this morning to find that the police armoury opposite our hostel had blown up during the night, we were so exhasuted that we´d slept right through it.  We have a day in Rio Grande to steel ourselves for the 80km to San Sebastian where we cross into Chile.  The road to San Sebastian runs alongside the Atlantic coast so we´re not expecting a break from this wind anytime soon.  From San Sebastian we head west and inland towards Porvenir where we cross the Magellan Straits to Punta Arenas.  This is about 200km and will be our longest stretch of cycling without a stop off point.  We hear there´s a petrol station in San Sebastian and then nothing for 200km until you reach Porvenir so it´s going to be a tough stretch but we have the thought of Penguin spotting in Punta Arenas to keep us going.

The first 100km...

We´ve just completed the first 100km chunk of our journey to Lima.  We didn´t break any world records doing it, but we made it in one piece and it was enjoyable (mostly).

                                   Our first experience of the icy Fueguian winds outside Ushuaia airport

The first 5km out of Ushuaia were unmitigated torture.  So thorough was our preparation for the trip, neither of us had ever cycled weighed down with 25 kilos of junk before.  Nor had we experienced the kind of winds that are commonplace at the end of the world.  Add in the sort of hills that you just don´t find at home and by the time we reached the city limits we were about ready to sell the bikes to the nearest passers-by (some bemused policemen and two young boys who couldn´t work out how we were making such hard work of it) and invest the proceeds in a bus ticket or the next flight home.

Just before we contemplated selling our bikes to the nearest passer-by

Fortunately we persevered and as we crawled up into the Sierra Alvear the sun came out and we started to get used to carrying the extra weight. 

By the time we ran out of steam that evening we´d covered a good distance and began to look for somewhere to stay for the night.  We came to a bend in the road with a sign to a "complejo turistico" (a tourist complex) called Haruwen so went in to investigate. 

Haruwen is in fact a cross country ski station that has been there for many years and closes down for the summer months.  There was something really eerie about being in an old ski resort out of season.  There was a restaurant, some snowmobiles, and a big piste map showing the various routes, but there were also some wierd things that you don´t normally see in ski resorts, like an old shipping container with blacked out windows and locked doors, and a wall with leathery objects that looked a bit like human scalps ritualistically nailed to it in pairs. 

Feeling slightly unnerved by the place we were just about to get back on our bikes and get away (while we still could) when a man appeared on the verandah of the restaurant and greeted us.  Like Jack Torrance in The Shining he had been employed to look after things while the resort was closed out of season, and like Jack Torrance he was there for the peace and quiet.  Fortunately the parallels with Jack Torrance end there.  He introduced himself as Roly and said we could stay for the night and he even offered us a bed in a hut round the corner. 

The bed was quite small (and quite soiled) so we declined and said we´d put our tent up in the garden instead.  It was a lovely spot by a bustling stream with views of the snow-capped mountains and suddenly seemed far less freaky.  We asked Roly about the scalps on the wall and he told us that they were in fact beaver tails.  It turns out that the river that runs along the valley is absolutely teeming with beavers.  Once the ski season is over there isn´t much to do here except kill beavers, and what´s more the Government actually pays people to do it - you just need to hang on to the tails to keep the tax man off your back....

The next morning we had breakfast with Roly and then said farewell to carry on cycling up to Paso Garibaldi and over to Lake Fagnano and Tolhuin where we planned to stay the next night. 

Buenos Aires - city of steak

Our first blog entry since arriving in Argentina ... mainly because we´ve been too busy 'stockpiling' or rather busily and meticulously testing the quality of Argentine beef.  Happily we are now pretty much assured of the fact that not only is it incredibly good but also unbelievably cheap.  Good food and wine comes cheap here and we are ever conscious that our stay in B.A is short-lived so we´ve certainly been making the most of it.  Come Tuesday when we hit the road I suspect we´ll mainly be enjoying boiled rice followed by biscuits for pudding.

B.A. is a fantastic city with so much to do and see.  We have tramped miles of pavement taking in the sights and soaking up the atmosphere.  So much so that we already have 5 blisters between us and the hard part hasn´t even started.

While I imagine we´ll miss the bottles of Malbec and steak dinners once we head South, I think we´re both eager to get going and see what the rest of South America has to offer two novice cyclists.  So I think a week here is probably just about right.  We head for Ushuaia tomorrow and can´t wait to see what the end of the world looks like.

Feeling Charitable?

Although we were initially resistant to the idea of doing this for charity we´ve decided that actually it seems like a wasted opportunity to try and raise some cash for two hugely worthwhile causes - The Teenage Cancer Trust and The Army Benevolent Fund.  We´d also like to raise awareness for a Latin American charitable foundation called Alliance for the Family.

We have set up two Just Giving pages which are linked to on the right hand side of this page.  We would be so grateful to anyone that felt like making a donation.