Link #10
09 Mar - 15 Mar, 2000
Villa O'Higgins, CHILE to El Calafate, ARGENTINA (362 km)
With no more road to ride, we spent a day in Villa O'Higgins organizing
other means of transportation. There's plenty of water, but no boats.
There's a tiny airport, but charter planes too costly. There's lots of
horses...
So horses it was. A couple locals pointed us to a small blue house on
the corner and told us to talk to Gomez Florentino.
"Is it possible to ride horses over the pass to the Argentina border?"
"Sure, no problem," Gomez replied from the other side of the
fence. He was an attractive, young man with leathery hands and squared-off
shoulders. The faded denim he wore appeared more fitting on him than on
me or you or anyone I know.
"We are four and have bicycles... large bicycles with large bags."
From under a black wool beret, his obsidian eyes flitted about the horizon,
perhaps looking for our bicycles, and then casually came back to rest
on us.
"Sure, no problem," he answered just the same.
"Great. When can we leave?"
"Whenever you like. This afternoon if you want." There was
no manana in him. He struck us all as a man who knows his business.
Gomez asked us about our riding experience and seemed all right with
the responses. His fee was a bargain at US$10/day per horse. We agreed
we would leave that afternoon, after we picked up a few things for the
trip.
We bought five days worth of food, including 55 freshly baked bread rolls,
and returned to the small blue house. Gomez had already saddled the seven
horses and was sitting back enjoying a smoke. We later found that he eats
once a day - in the evening. While we scarfed our cyclist meals he would
be perfectly content with his maté and a cigarette.
For two days we rode over the Andes, up through the Rio Mayer pass, towards
the Chile-Argentina border. The sight of a single horse carrying Bob,
Nicole's panniers, handlebar bags, the tent roll, and two bikes piled
high overhead, needling its way along precipitous alpine trails is something
to see, certainly something to write home about.
At the end of the second day, Gomez delivered us to the Chilean border
post.
The word in O'Higgins was that the continuation from the Chilean post
was an easy, straightforward trail. The word was wrong. There was no road,
no trail, no map. After much cajoling I talked one border guard into drawing
us a rough map. The map got us going in the right direction, but that
was about it. Our immediate goal was the Argentine border post, some unknown
distance, but somewhere around 20 km over the bridge, under the fence,
through the trees, and on the way to grandma's.
Our first day out, we covered a total of 9 km. Pushing bikes through
swamps, forests, and crossing many rivers. The craziest crossing was over
a foot bridge made in 1887, or thereabouts. Driftwood and hand-hewn wire
I think. Purportedly it was a "suspension" bridge; for us, it
was more of a suspenseful bridge. Not even wide enough to walk bikes across,
so we were forced to dismantle everything and ferry loads. Each step was
a question which the bridge usually answered with a loud groan and a sizable
sway.
We camped that night somewhere between Chile and Argentina. Strange sensation
lying in the bags that night wondering where we were, where the next food
would be.
Our "To be continued..." was over by noon the next day when
we spotted smoke wafting over a wood thicket. At the Argentine post, we
got stamped and talked them out of a handful of onions. We picked up a
two-track road from the post and pedaled over 90 km that day through sheep
pastures and pampas with a heavenesque Andes backdrop.
We were getting desperate for water when we came across an estancia in
the middle of nowhere. After banging on all the doors and almost declaring
"Estancia Los Faldeos" a ghost town, a hinge creaked and a small
man came out. He seemed happy to see us and invited us in. Soon we would
be enjoying warm maté and later a full lamb meal. That night we
slept in one of his stone shacks normally reserved for the seasonal ranchhands.
Funny how the most remarkable feat perhaps of our entire trip almost
went completely unnoticed. Right before we were about to to go to sleep
Stephane casually observed that for one whole day we did not hear a single
motor of any kind.
Next day rode another 45 km until we hit the main interior Argentine
road - the infamous, often slandered, eternally windy, dirt, rock, and
sand laden, ruta 40. This curiously desolate thoroughfare cuts through
the heart of the Argentine pampas. Like the southern Camino Austral, there's
hardly a car to be seen on it. We rode the 40 for three long days and
counted a grand total of 11 vehicles.
Merriam-Webster defines a pampa as "an extensive generally grass-covered
plain of temperate So. America east of the Andes : prairie." Yet
they seem to have omitted a key phrase: "...windiest place on earth."
Just south of where we picked up the 40, we came to a lonely truck stop
that on the map looks like a complete town by the name of Horquetas. There
we provisioned, if you can call it that. Soda crackers and cookies was
all they had. We bought by the gaggle and saddled up once again at 5 pm
and sailed a glorious tailwind 50 km to the only grove of trees in the
country. Shortly before reaching the trees, Nicole decided to take a long
look around while pedaling and ended up eating a gravel sandwich. Chalk
one up for Cole - at one digger a piece, we're now even. Bruised and only
a little bloody, she picked up her bike and got back on with a smile.
We broke camp and were rolling before an unprecedented 9 am. We hammered
50 km before lunch. The winds picked up and beat us for the next 40 before
we stumbled across another estancia. There we found a saint dressed up
like an Argentine. He cooked us up a feast to end all feasts, brewed the
best coffee we've ever tasted, and sent us to bed. Since we didn't have
much Argentine currency, he charged us a fraction of the normal rate,
and fortified our spirits and renewed our stomach linings.
Woke early again and cranked another 60 km before stopping for lunch.
We were wearing every reasonably accessible article of clothing and the
Patagonian wind still numbed us to our cores as we cowered behind the
only shelter in sight - waist-high boulders. On this section of the 40,
it doesn't matter which direction the road veers - south, southeast, southwest,
west - you always seem to be pedaling into a headwind blowing anywhere
from 20-60 km/hr.
We had turned the cranks for over 6 hours and had just clocked our one
hundredth kilometer of the day when a minibus stopped and asked us if
we wanted a lift to El Calafate, still 160 km to the south. Nicole jedi-mind-tricked
us, even though it wasn't really necessary, and we nodded our heads yes.
The dapper Argentine driver said $50 pp, I dickered him to $30 and then
we spent the next 1/2 hr puzzling the bikes and gear into the bus.
El Calafate is the gateway to Argentine National Park Los Glaciers, and
springboard to El Chalten, home of Mt. Fitzroy and Cerro Torre.
On the way there the bus stopped at a vista overlooking Lake Viedma and
the Argentine Andes some 100+ km in the distance. To the extreme right
of the panoramic you can see Mt. Fitzroy rising from a cluster of lesser
peaks and swirling clouds.
Panoramic
In El Calafate we found a treasure of a cabana or suite for $10
PP/per night. It came complete with a kitchen and cable TV. Even though
we all really wanted another night of tuna-pasta surprise, we decided
to support the local VISA-accepting pizzeria. Two extra larges and four
liters of beer please.
Geek Update
Everything holding up well. Bob has given the 'puter a hell of a vibrant
ride, but, knock on wood, it's still working fine. Camera is snapping
away - I've taken somewhere around 2000 photos so far, 875 good enough
to catalog and archive. To date have filled up nine 40 MB Clik! disks.
Getting internet connections is another story. Not sure what's harder,
cycling 50 miles into Patagonian headwinds or trying to establish a modem
link. Have been trying to use iPass client to dial access numbers within
Chile and Argentina, but it works less than 5% of the time. Typically
it takes anywhere from 2 to 4 hours of persistent tweaking and finger
crossing just to get a 9600 Kbps connection. I like to think of it as
a great opportunity to recite my verb conjugations: cago, cagas, caga,...
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