· Hola everyone and saludos from Bariloche, Argentina, the busy mountain resort town!
Ok, so we are finally back on pavement and have completed the Carretera Austral road in Chile. Thank goodness because between the two of us, we had 12 flat tires since beginning the Carretera Austral, which is mostly all gravel roads. And not nice gravel roads either. Despite still having plenty of large climbs, our average speed going up a hill on pavement is about the same as when it is perfectly flat on rough gravel. We are excited to be in Argentina again, where the climate is drier on this side of the Andes... And we are excited to begin our next stage of riding which will take us up a few hundred km through Argentina back into Chile at the Mamuil Malal Pass, right by the Lanín volcano. From here, we will ride up through Chile along the Pacific Coast then to capital Santiago and finally to the coastal city of Valparaiso. Next, we plan to cross back over the Andes to Argentina in the shadow of Cerro Ancongua- the highest mountain in the world outside of the Himalayas. From there we will visit Mendoza and the vinyards of Argentina only later to work our way east to Buenos Aires to see some Tango! Finally, we will cross into Uruguay to ride north towards Posadas, Argentina where we will enter southern Paraguay. We've decided to change our route again because it took us much longer than expected to complete the Carretera Austral which means that by the time we made it all the way to northern Chile it would be the beginning of South America's winter and thus the passes at over 14,000 feet would be dangerously cold, snow covered, and most likely closed. You never know where the road will lead you, but you have to be willing to change course when the time arrives.
Before getting into the beef of our travels since La Junta, we want to recognize and thank once again a few of the people who have helped to make this trip possible. Alex Gleason, who let us borrow the BOB trailer... it has made it through the toughest of ripio roads and we thank you very much for lending us your baby. Aaron Ostrom, the manager of the Outdoor Store in Arcata, CA who gave us amazing deals on our bikes and gear.. our bikes were not meant for all of this gravel but they have held up beautifully and will really get us flying now that we've hit the pavement. Also to Dane who got us some good deals on bike tools! Carin Paupore in Paraguay, for dealing with our mountain of bags and mail and storing them for us! To Tim Griffin, Sam Hagler, our parents and Beth Chronister for helping us get our gear from the U.S. to Paraguay. To our parents again for all of their support and for their help getting the word out about our trip and helping us along the way. To Charles Brennick, the big man at InterConnection for supporting our cause and contributing to the project by donating used computers. To Ken Weiderman for helping spread the word to the press in Northern California as well as Barb Schlatter for taking care of business in Central Illinois. And lastly to all of you who read this blog, have donated to our cause, and are interested in our project. There are many more people who have helped us along the way, and we thank you as well. More thanks to come later...please don't be offended if we didn't mention you yet we just don't want to make this part too long like a bad Oscar acceptance speech.
Congratulations to the winner of the last mystery picture...Doug Correia was the first one to send in the correct answer just minutes after the pic was published! Nice moves! The last mystery picture was of a Salmon farming opperation. It should be noted that Chris Haynes also sent in the right answer with the added note that "fish aren't for farming-don't eat farmed fish." Also the ever correct Angela Mallon also sent in the right guess. The mystery pic this time around should be much more challenging...check it out and send us your guesses. Good luck!
We left La Junta, Chile on a drizzly day with high spirits and Karen's toe on the mend. After such a long resting period (5 nights! an infected ingrown toenail is no joke), it felt great to be back on the road. Not long after we started however, Joel got a flat... not an uncommon occurrence. And sure enough before we camped that evening, he got another flat. Although he is now a pro at patching tubes and replacing them, a flat tire never fails to dampen the spirits a little... especially when you get as many as we do. We camped next to a clear stream with plenty of mosquitos around that night. The next morning was chilly and misty, but just as we were climbing the first hill of the day, the sun appeared as well as a bunch of goats. While Joel is rather fluent in cow (he gets a good deep nasal sound), Karen seems to be talented in speaking goat. Mmmbbbbaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Goats are funny. We continued up and down up and down and finally turned east to head to the Futaleufú pass into Argentina. The roads were bad but the sites amazing. We dropped down a huge hill and had an ice cream break in a teeny town. We rode on and right before stopping for the night, Karen got a flat. It's always good to eat cookies while patching tubes...we eat a lot of cookies. We climbed up a big hill and camped above the river next to a stream... exhausted but happy with a campfire and a clear, starry night.
We followed the river the next day, spotting a huge flock of Austral parakeets in the morning squawking away and eating some seeds off of trees. They are so noisy! But quite a site. When they started to dive bomb at our heads we knew that it was time to leave! The Futaleufú river is a quick one and is supposed to be one of the best in the world for rafting. We often heard shouts of rafters as we rode along on higher ground. Joel got a flat in the morning (yeah, weird) and patched it up. We stopped in the town of Futaleufú for a picnic lunch in the plaza. School kids were out and being classic teenagers in the park. Not sure what the styles are like in the U.S. anymore, but teenagers here have a lot of mullets and funky looking hair. It's kind of 80's-ish which goes with their tight-at-the-ankle jeans and hanging-off-the-shoulder striped shirts. It makes Karen wonder what her soon-to-be 14-year-old brother is looking like these days....shaggy? We continued on after the town on beautiful smooth pavement until reaching the Argentinean border. Even a stretch of 12km of pavement can do wonders for the mind, body, and bike. And yet Joel still managed to get a flat on the pavement... actually the patch on his tube just blew out, so he had to fix it up again. After entering into the country of Argentina for the 3rd time no mas, we biked a little further and Joel's patch blew out once again. In times like these, patience is not only a virtue, it is required. After he patched it up for the 3rd time (it was a charm), we rode a bit more and camped next to the river at a place where it was wide, deep, cold, and blue.
It was a beautiful morning and we were happy to be in Argentina once again. The people are friendly and the landscape drier. We got to the Welsh-settled town of Trevelín by lunchtime. It was a surprisingly large town, with a few Welsh-style houses and Welsh people walking about. We did a big grocery shop and had a late lunch in the plaza. We started to head out of town but realized there was very little water available now that we're on the rainshadow side of the Andes... we decided not to risk it as we had very little water with us and we were exhausted, so we turned around and stayed in a nice hostel in Trevelín called Casa Verde. The next day we climbed up some tough gravel hills in the midday heat and entered the beautiful Alerces National Park. The Alerce is a type of coniferous tree which is said to be very similar to Redwood trees. The oldest tree in the park, El Abuelo (the grandfather), is 2,600 years old... it was the one of the only trees spared by logger's axe because there was some bug damage to the wood. Most of the park consists of young Alerce trees, pines, and other native species. Unfortunately, we didn't get to see El Abuelo because it cost an arm and a leg to go there (you have to take a ferry and pay an additional fee to see the tree), but we enjoyed the lakes and views the park had to offer. It is autumn here and some trees are starting to turn. The very tops of the mountains were a rust red color which faded into green further down the slope. We rode and camped in the park for 3 nights.
The day we left the park was a sunny one, and fairly hot during the day. That seems to be the trend lately... it starts off cold, like 35 or 40 and warms up to 75 or 80 with the midday sun. We rode on in the dry Argentinean landscape... back to yellow grasses, flatter land, and lots of pastures. We ate lunch at a random cross-roads, enjoying a little shade and the local atmosphere...aka old Ford Falcons as well as sweet beat up Ford and Chevy trucks from the 60's. That evening we pushed on, encountering another Argentinean friend, the wind. Although nothing like it was back in the Tierra del Fuego, it slowed us down a bit and made the last part of the gravel road especially challenging. Cars would pass and send up huge clouds of dust that would make breathing difficult and seeing impossible. By the end of the day Joel had a beautiful dirt-stache, and Karen had twin dirt patches on her cheeks. We FINALLY crossed onto pavement and rejoiced since most of the road from here on out will be paved. Although the Carretera Austral officially ended when we turned east in Chile, for us, it felt like getting back onto pavement was really the end of this grueling but beautiful southern road. Not to go on and on, but pavement really is a fantastic thing for a biker (especially for those that have slick touring bicycles and not tough mountain bikes). We surprisingly sped along up a hill and down into a valley to camp next to a little river surrounded by blackberry bushes.
We flew down the pavement the next day , enjoying our speed but definitely not the traffic. Along with pavement comes a lot more cars and a lot more fast moving cars and trucks. It was scary at first and took some getting used to again. We passed by countless houses advertizing homemade jams and sweets since this area is famous for it's fruit tree and thus, delicious jams. Sour cherry, sweet cherry, blackberry, raspberry, peach, rose hip, calafate berry and plum jams abound. YUM! We sped into El Bolsón around lunchtime, a fairly good sized "hippy town" boasting a funky atmosphere and a different view. It was the first "non-nuclear" town in South America. The nearby mountain is said to be one of the energy centers of the earth... and so a lot of people go there to feel the vibes. Oh yeah, there are a lot of UFO sightings in the area and the highest percentage of yoga classes per capita in Argentina. We ate lunch in a park but didn't stay long there. Only long enough to check out a beautiful plaza and a few cool statues. The wind picked up a bit and we rode out of town climbing up and up... Just when we couldn't climb any further, we dropped waaay down into a river valley and camped next to the Foyel River.
The morning was cold and we woke up early, knowing we had a big day ahead of us if we wanted to make it to Bariloche. We climbed up back out of the valley and dropped again... Only to begin a 14km climb through a mountain pass. The climb was incredible and although it was long, it wasn't crazy steep and we slowly made our way up. We felt pretty good about ourselves at the top and then dropped down to a lake and had lunch. It was up and down the rest of the way to Bariloche, a town of 100,000 inhabitants.
After being on the road for a while, it is a weird feeling to enter a big city again. Upon entering Bariloche, we first encountered a huge dump... it reeked and plastic bags and trash in trees could be seen for miles afterward. We then entered a poor, undeveloped part of town with little wooden and tin shacks and people living on the edge... eventually we dropped down a big hill into the center of town. Here is where all of the shops, tourist sites, fashionable people, and chocolate shops reside. It is so busy and there are so many people buying things... We always feel a little self-concious when entering a town for the first time in a while as we usually have on very dirty clothing (which involves spandex and hasn't been washed in a looongg time), wild looking hair, dirty hands and nails caked in bike grease and dirt, some rocking b.o., and everything else. We are used to not caring about our appearance too much on the road (the only mirror we have is the rearview mirror on Joel's bike) and suddenly it's like woah, I look kind of uhhh dirty. Some of the first things we do upon entering a town are: take a shower, shave, trim nails, pluck hairs, wash clothes, and put on clean clothes. We even got haircuts this time around so we are looking pretty good. It's only a matter of time though...
Bariloche is "a busy mountain resort town", says the guidebook, but we are here in the off-season, luckily. We have been enjoying our stay at a hotel which Joel's parents reserved for us as a surprise (THANK YOU!!!) and taking in the sites. Bariloche sits on the big Lake Nahuel Huapi and in the Nahuel Huapi National Park. Nahuel means "tiger" in the Mapuche language and Huapi means "island". The weather has been nasty ever since we got here and it is a perfect time for a rest. The cold wind has been gusting up to 120 kilometers per hour and its been raining on and off. They say that this is a normal weather pattern for fall here. Hopefully tomorrow is nice because we are setting off again. It is basically a race against Mother Nature from here on out until we arrive in Mendoza. We hope to make it though Chile before the REAL cold weather sets in, that will make it tough to cross the Andes. We'll see...we should be fine.
Before we close the latest chapter of our travel blog we'd like to share some information with y'all about what the Patagonia really is. Its more than a outdoor clothing brand, its more than a small piece of land at the end of South America, it is so many things...The region known as the Patagonia spans both southern Argentina and southern Chile. It is an immense area covering in total 1,043,076 square kilometers. It is sparsley populated with only about 1,999,540 inhabitants. The Chilean Patagonia is a lush, water-rich paradise of dense temprerant rainforests that are like cold jungles with seemingly countless waterfalls, rivers, and lakes. Glaciers abound on the mountain tops of this area and are fed by storms and the precipitation that they bring from the Pacific Ocean. The topography is undulating as mountains abound. The Argentinean Patagonia is a very different place from that of Chile. It is very arid being in the rainshadow of the southern Andes Mountains. The area is largely covered in mesas, low rolling hills, and flat plains that are covered in shrubs, small grasses, thorny plants, and very few forests in the higher areas. During the summer the wind is constantly blowing from the north and it blows hard. Large sheep herding estancias abound here and populated areas are far and few between. These of course are great generalizations about this region. It has to be one of the most beautiful places on earth as it offers such variety and is relatively untouched still. It is an amazing place. We don't want to paint to biased of a picture of the Patagonia and we really don't have any more time to write about it either as one could write volumes about the area. If you want to know some more check out the following links:
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patagonia
National Geographic: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0401/feature3/index.html
Chile Austral: http://www.chileaustral.com/html/index.php?lang=en
There are sooooo many more....just google it and go crazy! You can also read the great book by Bruce Chatwin "In Patagonia". It is a story of his travels throughout Patagonia and paints a very vivid and unique picture of many of the different people, history, and geography of the region. Enjoy!
Well its that time again...its late here and we have to get up early and ride. We hope you enjoyed reading the latest installment. Thanks again for all of your support and positive energy!! WE REALLY APPRECIATE IT!!
Until next time, hasta el proximo, jajatopata lata'i pe he'i burro kavaju pe!!!
- Joel and Karen
