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The blog is so out of date now, I think we must be almost 800km north of our last blog entry so we have lots to update on.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.