Villa O´Higgins



The end of the Carretera Austral. A frontier town. For the last four days nothing but stunning scenery, porridge and pedalling. Oh, and other cyclists. I teamed up with two Spaniards, Martin and Juan plus Anke from Germany. Martin is a Biology teacher on unpaid leave - you´d think those work-shy holidaymakers got enough time off already. Nice to have company in the evenings.



In the ´80s Chile was pushing it´s road and people in this direction towards Argentina hoping to link up to it´s Southern territiories. Hard to imagine a war raging amidst these peaks, lakes and glaciers. Thankfully the Pope stepped in, everyone said twenty Hail Marys and Chile ended up with the frontier town Villa O´Higgins.



Had my closest encounter yet with a mighty Condor as it came at me over the trees like Ian Paisley, all white collar and beady eye. Apparently if you play dead in the road they come even closer.

For motorised folk Villa O´Higgins is the end of the road but for pedallers and pedestrians there is a way through the mountains to Argentina. Nothing is certain but it can be done using boats, horses, a path through trees and a lot of struggling. As I write, it´s breakfast time and the boat is cancelled for today due to the weather so a day of waiting lies ahead.

Cochrane

Face down in the dirt, surrounded by dogs. Not how I´d imagined the first day back on the bike ending. For the first time all day I was actually going at a decent speed when they came at me across a field. Four bloodhounds and a wee shitey thing. Poor quality hunt sab. footage played in my head. Foolishly I took my eye off the road to persuade the nearest one I wasn´t a fox and I was heading for the dirt.

On the positive side, it stopped them barking and they scattered. Only the wee shitey one hung around, taking a pee, making it´s point.

A hard day all round. From early it was dry and hot with no shelter, numerous ups and downs and a road best described as corrugated iron with a gravel topping. Then in the afternoon the wind woke up in a bad mood and, when gusting, the only option was to stand and hold on as it lifted the gravel surface of the road and pelted it against your legs.

On the positive side, it beats marking jotters and my legs are nicely exfoliated. No more wind stories. Only a fool brings a bike to Patagonia and then complains about the elemental nature of things.

Fell in with some jolly roadmenders, drinking Mate. Its a herb which grows in Northern Argentina and you fill up your gourd with it, add water and pass it round. There´s a straw with a filter on it so you only get the juice. It´s an important social event and I felt honoured as we sat round the flask of hot water which continually tops up the tea. First impressions were akin to sucking the dregs out of a sodden ashtray. It´s meant to be curative and in a sense it was as it cured any desire in me to try it again.

That was yesterday, this is Friday. Ahead lies four days on the remotest section of the Carretera Austral, to the end of the road. No internet access. Lucky you.

Degrees South: 47.25

Miles cycled: 461

Buenos Aires

It´s warm for January. 30 degrees C at midnight. Oh for the cooling caress of a Ben Nevis spindrift avalanche. The sensible portenos (locals) come out at night.

We arrived yesterday by way of two remarkably similar overnight bus journeys. Stereo snorers directly behind and a ´courting´couple directly in front on both nights, the only difference being on the first journey Kirsty didn´t set about the snorers with the complimentary pillow. Oh, and the young lovers actually knew each other before the first journey started.

We spent the day between buses in a bit of real Patagonia. Ask tourists what they know of Patagonia and we´ll reel off lakes, glaciers and peaks. However, the vast majority of Patagonia is flat, featureless former sea-bed between the Andes and the Atlantic. Miles and miles of nothing. ´If nowhere is a place, Patagonia is nowhere.´ On our day we took a fossil trail across a bit of it. Shadeless, dusty-hot and we´re looking at a 15 million year old Penguin skeleton. An hour later, down at the Atlantic, in similarly arid conditions we´re in the middle of the largest Penguin colony in South America. Half a million Magellanic penguins in burrows, under bushes, on the beach, in the sea, under foot, not one of them related to our fossilised friend apparently, and not an iceberg in sight.

We´re in transit just now and after a special night of Tango stories, open air opera and midnight dining, today Kirsty flew homeward and I´ve another nightbus on the cards.

Dogs of Patagonia

Puerto Montt

You travel to the far end of the world and you end up in a boat on Loch Maree.



There´s two things I loathe about travelling; carrying heavy luggage for no good reason and boats.

The Navimag ferry from Puerto Natales to Puerto Montt is the longest ferry journey in the world and a necessary one as the Southern Patagonian Icefield lies between the two towns, effectively cutting Chile in two, except by boat. On it´s way the ferry goes through the narrowest navigable channel in world shipping, across the Gulf of Distress, stops in at the only settlement, Port Eden, cutting through a maze of uninhabited fjordland (English Narrows, White Strait) past glaciers calving into the sea, shipwrecks and an active volcano or two. It takes three days. Sometimes fear and loathing have to be swallowed along with the sea sick pills.

To relieve the boredom and presumably to stop us all throwing ourselves into the sea, our entertainment officer, Marcel, was giving lectures, including one on glaciation. Yeah, like that´s gonna work.
"And now I´d like to move onto Glacial Deposition and the differences between fluvioglacial and glacial deposits."
"Man overboard!"
As a geography geek and teacher though, the whole ship is a moveable classroom (with a few non-geographical feasts thrown in) and it was illuminating for me to be listening to the lecture in Spanish on Ice Ages and Global Warming and find myself thinking "I don´t know what he´s on about ... but nice pictures."

We were very lucky to have two very calm and clear days lounging, playing bingo, reading Agatha Christie and staring as Wester Ross floated past. It was incredible how Scottish it looked at times. Well, apart from the ice-clad volcanoes.

Puerto Natales

Torres Del Paine National Park. Not part of the Andes. A huge intrusion of magma (yellow rock in photos) pushed up the overlying sediments (dark rock in photos) and then they were left out in the wind and rain. Just concentrate on the physical geography and don´t worry about the ´human´interest.

Chile Chico.


The joys of the world wide web and it´s cafes. Out of the wind, comfortable seats and cheaper than a coffee house.


This is the end of Kirsty´s cycling road. A time of much content. It seems mildly appropriate to have ended up on the shore of South America´s second largest lake, in Argentina known as Lago Buenos Aires. An incredible wind sped us here yesterday, so strong we hardly pedalled the uphills.






Patagonia Sin Represas! Car stickers, coffee table books, posters and billboards all proclaim this message wherever we go. It encourages people to imagine the worst, environmentally, with a view to conserving their wild nature. Compared with a similar area in Europe, the Spanish Pyrenees for example, the places we have cycled through seem relatively untouched. We´ve seen three wind turbines, one mine, two radio masts and a healthy collection of National Parks in 500km.


200km of this arterial road we´re travelling is, however, in the process of being dynamited and widened, ready for it to ´fir up´with tar. I can´t imagine such improvements are to give a few dozen cyclists an easier ride. Such are the plethora of green energy resources down here (we didn´t need to pedal uphill!) that Patagonia is surely set to become another battleground between the conservers of habitat and the conservers of carbon.

My bike stays here. Our rather circuitous route is now by bus, plane, ship and foot to the glaciers and penguins of the far south before swinging back towards Buenos Aires. Will the wind have changed direction when I´m back in two weeks?

Degrees South: 46.5

Miles cycled: 344 miles