Back in glorious Argentina

We are now in San Martin de los Andes, a lakeside town 200km north of San Carlos de Bariloche in the Argentine lake district.  We got consistently rained on in Chiloe and slightly fed up with the busy roads so have hot-footed it back to Argentina, where it´s cheaper and the food is better.  Chile must be the 'comida rapida' capital of South America - they are obsessed with chips and hot dogs and are proud to call 'Pichanga' (a dish consisting of a huge mound of chips topped off with deep fried chorizo, hot dog, beef, cheese, pickles, avocado, olives and hard boiled eggs) a local delicacy. Safe to say the novelty of fast food was wearing very thin so we sped up to Puerto Montt from where we planned to cross back into Argentina via the Cruce de los Lagos, a border crossing which involves some 200km of cycling, four lake crossings and finally drops you on the Argentine side of the Andes just below Bariloche.

We arrived in Puerto Montt in torrential rain, it definitely felt as if Autumn had arrived and we were thinking our luck with the weather may have run out.  Puerto Montt came as quite a shock after emerging from Patagonia - it´s a dirty port town that looks like it´s definitely seen better days.  We found out that the lake crossing into Argentina is now only sold as an all inclusive excursion and would have set us back 200 dollars so we made a snap decision to jump on the bus to Bariloche in a bid to escape the rain, grotty Puerto Montt and more hot dogs!

 Getting blown away in Bariloche

After a night in Bariloche gathering supplies we headed north out of town on Ruta 40 pedalling through the Valle Encantada, an eerie valley with strange rock formations.  The terrain looked so similar to what we´d seen much further south in El Calafate so we felt slightly like we´d backtracked on ourselves.  After a solid day´s cycling we were overjoyed to see a sign for camping and parilla.  Ben´s eyes lit up at the thought of the juicy barbecued cordero that he´d been craving pretty much since the day we left Argentina at El Chalten. The campsite was on the site of what had once been an old Almacen built in 1914 by the current owners´ grandparents.  The old store is now a small restaurant and you can still see the worn out dip in the wood floor where the old counter had once been.  Apparently Che Guevara stayed there on his motorcycle tour, so we felt in good company. Unfortunately our day´s budget didn´t stretch to both cordero and camping so poor Ben went to bed still dreaming of lamb.

The Valle Encantada

Next morning we turned off paved Ruta 40 and onto Ruta 234 also known as the Ruta de los Seite Lagos.  It's a 150km gravel road that winds past 7 beautiful lakes, through rain forests and 3 national parks before ending up in San Martin.  The scenery was fantastic, marred only slightly by the terrible head winds that hit us from Lago Traful. We finally made it the 50km to the small lakeside village of Villa Traful at 7pm that evening. Exhausted and starving after some rough stretches of gravel, some unexpected climbs and a big dose of head wind we hit the local mini mercardo with a vengeance.  Our campsite that night had a genuine parilla so we treated ourselves to a leg of lamb and a bottle of Malbec, it was the most incredible dinner after a month of rubbish food in Chile and what felt like a Tierra del Fuego style day of cycling.  I don´t think I´ve ever seen Ben look so happy.

Finally arriving at blustery Lago Traful after a long day

From Villa Traful we had another 100km to San Martin and a big climb up to 930 metres mid-way.  Happily the wind had died down, Lago Traful was completely calm and we were so happy to have another beautiful sunny day again. After only 17km we stopped for a lengthy lunch break at a great beachy spot on the far western shore of  Lago Traful and fell asleep in the baking mid-afternoon sun.  We didn´t get moving again until 4.30pm so we had to do the last 40km of the day in about 3 hours.  Luckily we managed to find a great wild camping spot just before the sun went down.

After another late start we got on the road at midday and started the last 60km stretch into San Martin.  The scenery was amazing, more than making up for the constant climbing. We´d been told that the last stretch to San Martin was a piece of cake - all downhill apparently - 40kms in and we´d seen very little sign of this promised downhill.  Just as I was beginning to wonder if we´d ever stop climbing we reached the top of the pass and had the most incredible view of a blue sparkling lake and the Andes rolling on and on ahead of us.  We saw San Martin below us and finally there it was ... 15km of paved downhill.  This was the first serious downhill we´ve come across that hasn´t been a totally horrendous gravel road so it´s hard to explain how exciting it was.

We sailed down into San Martin in 15 minutes, overtaking lorries and finally breaking the speed limit. A cold beer on the sunny lakeside was the perfect end to a day that I´ll remember for a long time and this time for all the right reasons!

We leave San Martin tomorrow and head 900km north to Mendoza where hopefully we´ll be able to find some time to do a tour of the surrounding vineyards.

"Capitan. Vuelve El Don Baldo!"

Profuse apologies for the lack of recent updates.  Since our last post we´ve completed the final selection of the Carretera Austral from Coyhaique to Chaiten, and taken the boat over to Chiloe.

After five days loafing around Coyhaique and getting rather bored of haemorrhaging money it was great to go back into the wild.  The road out of Coyhaique follows Rio Simpson through a beautiful valley, before joining another valley and heading north.  We spent one night camping in a beautiful clearing on an estancia by the river, and one night at the Casa de Ciclistas in Villa Manihuales (which is highly recommended - it´s right by the river so is a good spot for swimming and fishing, and provides free beds for bikers).  

200km North of Coyhaique we reached Parque Nacional de Quelat.  The Carretera goes straight through the park, with a brutal climb up towards a huge glacier.  This section was as steep as anything we´ve been up yet, following a fast flowing stream with countless hairpin bends and with a surface that looked and felt more like a dry stone wall than a road.  At the top of the climb we came to a forest known as "El Bosque Encantado" which was well worth a visit.  The area below the glacier is very well watered and so we found vegetation growing from every possible surface.  It was full of incredible wild flowers and creepers hanging from huge trees.  Park rangers had cut a path through the forest but the vegetation quickly sneaks in to reclaim the space so all of the bridges and steps look like they are made out of moss and greenery.

 El Bosque Encantado

 

Ventisquero Colgante - hanging glacier

After a night camping next to the river we followed the road as it continued through the rainforest, past an immense hanging glacier, and on to Puyuhaupi - a welcoming German settler town at the end of a fjord with beautiful views.  We stayed by the lake in Puyuhaupi and then added to our collection of wierd camping locations over the next few nights by spending a night in the fire station in La Junta, and on a runway at Puerto Cardenas.  

The beautiful Fjord at Puyuhuapi

A week after setting out from Coyhaique we finally reached Chaiten and the end of the Carretera - at least the end as it currently stands with the road north of Chaiten closed due to landslides.  We´d heard all sorts of things about Chaiten, but I don´t think anything could have prepared us for such a strange experience.  In May 2008 a volcano went off in a valley 10km to the north of town.  The ash from the erruption poured into the Rio Blanco, Chaiten had been evacuated so nobody was hurt, but the river burst its banks and the force of the flood destroyed whole streets and washed many buildings out into the sea.  A few weeks later when people came back to try to rescue their posessions they found the whole town buried under metres of ash and sand.  The Chilean Government made the decision that it was too dangerous to try to repopulate the town and offered people the chance to settle elsewhere. 

The final stretch on the Carreterra Austral- paved road at last!

The majority of the 5,000 inhabitants seem to have taken their offer and relocated, but there´s a group of people who don´t want to leave and have tried to stay in Chaiten despite the fact that since the eruption nothing has been done to reconnect the telephone lines, electricity, or water supply.  Chaiten was a pioneer town, and the story of the lady who owned the hostel we stayed in demonstrates why some people just don`t want to take the Government´s advice and leave: her grandfather was one of the founders of Chaiten, and it´s the only place she has ever lived. 

Estimates vary, but most people will tell you that there are a couple of hundred people still living in Chaiten trying to carve out a living from toursists and passers-by.  Those who have stayed seem to have spent most of the last two years trying to salvage their property but now they are literally living in a ghost town and the main pastime seems to be binge drinking and eating Pichanga.  The population is gradually dwindling.  The streets are empty and shops, hotels, offices, and homes remain untouched since the day the volcano went off, submerged in ash, gradually corroding.  We passed a greengrocers with trays of fruit and veg that were fresh on the day the volcano went off and still sit there now, shrivelled and coated in silt.  In the Plaza de Armas there´s a tourist office with two desks visible through the dusty window.  The desk nearest the window is exactly as it was at the moment the town was evacuated with paperwork and a cup of coffee left unfinished.

After a strange two days in Chaiten we were more than ready to hop on the ferry to Chiloe.  We got up early and were cycling over to get on board the Don Baldo at the advertised hour when we suddenly noticed the boat edging away from the dock.  The captain had inexplicably decided to leave a whole hour early and the next boat wasn´t until a week later.  The thought of another week in a ghost town was too much to contemplate.  As the boat disappeared towards the horizon we rushed to the booking office and remonstrated with the man who had sold us the tickets.  Happily, after 45 minutes, he saw our point of view and picked up the telephone to the Captain:  "Capitan.  Vuelve El Don Baldo a Chaiten!"  We couldn´t believe our luck as the ferry swung round on the horizon and headed back to Chaiten to collect us and five other passengers who had been left high and dry.  This is possibly the coolest thing that has happened to us so far, if not ever.  The Don Baldo is not some glorified fishing boat, it´s a fully grown car ferry.  And it turned back to collect us.  Safe to say, once we´d finally boarded we weren´t the most popular passengers (at the very least the crew spat in our coffee) but we were on our way to Chiloe!

Moments before we saw the Don Baldo disappearing to sea directly behind us!

The infamous Don Baldo

A quick footnote on the Carretera.  In Rita´s hostel in Chaiten we found some amazing photos taken at the time of its construction.  Building a road through 1,500km of rocky wilderness was an insane project.  But we had a wonderful time cycling along it so we´re very grateful to General Pinochet for deciding to build it.

Another sunny day on the Carreterra

Puncture news!

We have an update on the puncture sweepstake, and it´s not too late to enter if you still haven´t made up your mind how many flatties we are going to get by the time we reach Lima.

Ben has managed to pick up four punctures in the last few weeks. Laura still has none (touch wood).

The first puncture came about because Ben cycled (with disdain) over a large thorn that was visibile from a long way off but ignored.

The second, third, and fourth were more like flats than punctures, and were all the result of Ben´s hasty approach to puncture repairs: not putting the right patch on, not putting the right patch on the right way, putting the right patch on the right way and then dropping the patched tube on concrete. You get the picture. Incompetence all round...)

Another flat tyre on the path to Lago O´Higgins

From now on incompetence is banned. Come to think of it so are haste and disdain.

Ben 4 - Laura - 0

Backlog on the blog

We´ve been really bad about keeping up to date in the last few weeks, but it´s not entirely our fault - we´ve been in the middle of nowhere and it´s hard to find a shower, let alone an internet connection. Most people are still communicating with CB radio round here! Anyhow we´ll try to give a rundown of the last few weeks:

We spent a few days in El Calafate having made it there from Torres del Paine. As well as treating ourselves to a nice hotel for a couple of nights we went on a hike up the Perito Morreno glacier. The glacier was incredible but the highlight of the trip was a Japanese man who had forgotten to pack any warm clothes and so decided to wear a hotel bathrobe and some flannel exfoliating gloves to keep out the cold!

                                          The Perito Moreno Glacier

From El Calafate we rode north to El Chalten to walk amongst more glaciers and get some incredible views of Mt Fitzroy on a bright sunny day. Then we took the virtually untrodden path between Argentina and Chile through a border crossing that can only be done by bike, on horseback, or on foot and involved two boat trips (across Lago del Desierto and Lago O´Higgins) and crossing several raging rivers with no bridges...

And since then we´ve covered the first 300km of the Carretera Austral, picked up a new cycling buddy and sustained one injury that´s left us grounded for a week in Coyhaique. We´ve done and seen so much that it would be difficult to capture it all but a run down of a few of the wonderful/bizarre places we´ve slept in the last few weeks might be the best way of summing it up:

1. The Kitsch Lounge

On leaving Torres del Paine we stumbled into Cerro Castillo (a small collection of huts and a rodeo stadium that sells itself as a buzzing metropolis) at about 11pm after cycling blindly in the dark for an hour over some very shoddy road. Needless to say we were exhausted and starving and very much hoping we´d find a bed after a long stretch in the tent. Sadly Cerro Castillo didn´t offer much in the way of hostels so we found ourselves sleeping on a local cafe owners´ living room floor surrounded by an extraordinary array of trinkets, including a diamante encrusted sombrero, at least 100 rodeo trophies and a life-sized model of a flamenco dancer.

2. The Sheep Pen

On the road to El Chalten we passed up the opportunity of sleeping with a pile of animal carcasses that were scattered amongst the only group of trees for hundreds of kms to bed down in a sheep pen on the shores of the spectacularly beautiful Lago Argentino. This was a truly incredible spot, miles from anyone and anything.

3. Butch Cassidy´s hideout

On the road to El Chalten there is an historic Parador called La Leona (Lewis) where we camped the night and Butch Cassidy once hid for a month having robbed a bank in Rio Gallegos. Presumably that was before it became a popular stop for coffee and cake and sold a range of souvenirs. Still, it was a great camping spot and made all the better by their herd of pet guanacos.

                                          Swirling clouds above Butch´s hideout

4. The best view in the world

On leaving El Chalten we cycled 37km along a staggeringly beautiful valley to reach the boat crossing across Lago del Desierto. The sun was shining, the wind had gone and for the first time we were surrounded by trees and streams, rather than flat and arid scrub. We´d been thinking about this leg of the journey with a mixture of excitment and trepidation. This marked the start of the difficult and somewhat untrodden border crossing to Villa O´Higgins in Chile where we would begin our journey up the Carretera Austral.

The border crossing involves two lakes, a 20km hike through mud, rivers and along horse tracks that had been described to us as trenches. Every cyclist we´d met coming south had an even worse horror story about the crossing. One couple had done the crossing in 5 inches of snow, another had ripped his panniers on the thorn bushes that lined the paths and others just said it was exhausting, muddy and hellish and involved relaying your bags up first and then your bikes.

Anyway, we set out from El Chalten in high spirits, boosted by the beautiful weather and wonderful scenery. We arrived on the southern shore of Lago del Desierto and took the last boat across arriving an hour later on the northern shore.

Looking back at Mt Fitzroy from our camping spot on the shores of Lago del Desierto

We camped that night on the shores of the lake and felt like the luckiest people alive as we had the most unbelievable views of Mount Fitzroy and there was noone there besides a couple of other cyclists and two carabineros keeping a vague eye on the border. We swam in the freezing lake and watched the sun set behind the huge peaks of Fitzroy. It was a brilliant start to the most adventurous leg of our journey so far.

5. The car park/dock

On making it safely across the border after an amazing and exhasuting hike with the bikes we caught the boat across Lago O´Higgins, the final part of the crossing. Unfortunately the boat picked us up at 8pm rather than 5pm which meant that by the time we finally reached the northern shore it was pitch black and too dark to cycle the 10km into Villa O´Higgins. Added to that we were now soaking wet after being rained on all day and we had no option but to pitch our tent on the concrete dock. This was definitely an anti climax after our spot on the shores of Desierto.                                

6. The Mosquito farm
After a brief stop in sleepy Villa O´Higgins we rode north to Puerto Yungay and had our first taste of the Carretera Austral. The road carves it´s way over mountains, beneath glaciers and along enormous valleys. The size of the landscape is hard to take in, we just have nothing comparable at home. Although the road is completely unsurfaced, and resembles a quarry more than a road at times, the scenery more than makes up for the bumpy ride and the ridiculously steep climbs. There are streams and waterfalls around every corner so there´s no shortage of fresh drinkng water and freezing cold showers.

Day one on the Carretera was brilliant and we were still feeling so lucky to have avoided any prolonged bouts of rain. After about 60kms on the hard-going surface our legs gave out and we happened upon what looked like a pretty good camping spot in a protected spot by a stream and decided to bed down for the night. As the sun went down a cloud of mosquitoes appeared and had a banquet at our expense. Our only defence was to build a fire and literally smoke ourselves in it, oh and eat all our chocolate for the next 4 days and down a huge carton of wine.

As well as it being our first day on the Carretera it was also our first day with our new friend Danny, a Californian medical student with the same interest in Choripan, bargain red wine, chocolate and fishing for wild salmon with crude fishing equipment (an old sweetcorn can and a fishing line). Our fishing attempts have so far been fruitless but it´s a good excuse for lengthy fish-spotting breaks after a hard stretch of cycling.

Ben and Danny contemplate the fishing situation

So that pretty much brings us up to date. Now we´re enjoying a break in Coyhaique while Ben´s back recovers and are looking forward to taking on the next stretch of this epic road before heading across to the island of Chiloe where we´ll need to re-think our route north in the aftermath of the terrible earthquake.

A typical day on the Carretera Austral

Emerging from the wilderness

Thanks to everyone for your messages and donations to our Just Giving page.  Just wanted to reassure everyone that we are ok and luckily are nowhere near the area that has been affected by the terrible earthquake.  It has meant that all of the phone lines are down as far South as we are and that we´re unable to get hold of any money as the ATMs are all out of service but apart from that we are unaffected.

We are now in a place called Coyhaique about 500km up the unbelievable Carretera Austral - a road that connects the most remote parts of Southern Patagonia with the rest of Chile.  This is the first time we´ve been somewhere with a total population larger than about 300 for the past 3 weeks and we are enjoying some rare treats like a bed and a shower.  At last count we´d done 14 consecutive nights of camping and managed only 2 showers in 11 days although we have found some freezing waterfalls to jump into at the end of a hot day`s cycling.

The blog is so out of date now, I think we must be almost 800km north of our last blog entry so we have lots to update on.  The change in climate and terrain since we last posted is almost unbelievable, we have left behind the desolate Patagonian Pampa and the awful winds and are now cycling up and down huge mountains, through lush forests and passed dazzling blue lakes and rivers.  The weather has been amazing and we are feeling so lucky to have had a week of sunshine on the Carretera.  Every cyclist that we met coming South told us to stock up on waterproofs because they got constantly rained on but for us it finally feels like Summer.  We were beginning to wonder if Summer actually existed in Patagonia but it definitely does and we are now working on some excellent cyclist´s tans which mainly involves very brown hands and fairly leathery looking faces.

We´re going to be in Coyhaique for a couple of days so we´ll be making sure we get the blog fully up to date before we head back into the wilderness.