Rio Gallegos and Points North

Rio Gallegos wasn´t on my original itinerary, or on my revised itinerary, and now that I am here I understand why. It is a rather grim place, with lots of concrete, autopistas, trucks and a few slummy barrios. I am passing the day in a nice enough hostel, where there are several young Argentine men looking for and finding work. Tonight I leave on a bus for the town of Trelew.
To arrive here, I cycled 300km in two days, completing my first real American century (100 miles) from El Calafate to a wide spot in the road called La Esperanza, where I camped next to a gas station. The winds were at my back and at my right side for both days, and though it was better than encountering headwinds it was not always helpful. It was not exactly tranquilo, but I prefer to ride hard for two days and rest on the third than to ride slowly for three days. Eu sou assim, as we said in Portugal: I am like this, or I am that I am (this is the title of Peter Tosh song, so I like this translation better).
There is not much to do here in Rio Gallegos, and I am already ready to leave. I am feeling a bit nostalgic for Patagonia, as this is the southermost point I will reach on this journey. I have been lucky enough to develop bonds with people in El Chalten, and while I am reluctant to head north and away from Patagonia I am content with what I have done and what has been done for me to get here to where I am.
As far as cycling goes, I am not done, only shifting gears a bit. I will take the bus tonight to Trelew, where there is a Paleontology museum, and I hope to see the Dino exhibit tomorrow. Then I will be back on the bike riding past Rawson to the coast, where I will camp on the beach. There are two big penguin colonies to the south from here, and I am going to visit them before I ride back north to Puerto Madryn, Puerto Pyramides and Peninsula Valdes. And then, well, maybe I´ll be ready for the big city after that.

Ventisquero Perito Moreno

I visited the glacier. Sure, put a check mark next to that great destination for me. But, here´s the experience: I pedaled the eighty kilometers from El Calafate, a route that many cyclists prefer to rent a car for, or hop in a bus, because you go out and back on the same route. I, being stubborn, battled the fiercest winds I have ever encountered in order to enter the park at night, traveling in near silence under a full moon. It was spectacular. There was a trickle of rain as I entered the park, and so I wrapped my gear in the scraps of a torn poncho I got from the hostel in El Chalten. It was strangely warm, so I slept outside by one of the many streams without pitching a tent. I had to work very hard for the experience, but I arrived at the glacier near 8am, and was in the company of only a few other spectators.
The wind was really something. I never knew winds like this could ever exist, but with the adoption of a certain inward stare and indifference to the world around I managed to stay on my bicycle and keep crawling along until the road turned south. At one point, I walked. Yep, maybe the first time since Bariloche, I walked, because I could not handle the work to progress ratio, and I had come more than 100km already that day. I was beat, and so I walked.
As well as the strength of the wind, the sound is really unbearable. I say it as if I have faced it for days on end, but even for only a few hours, having to constantly hear the roar of passing wind is quite disruptive to the experience. Other than the wind, the land hardly speaks. I read it in a book somewhere, that traveling Argentine Patagonia is like chasing the horizon. It is flat and large. The horizon always seems to be uphill from where I am also. At times, people like me just have to see for ourselves, disregarding the conveyances of other people. Maybe it will be different for me, I think...
On the route back to town, where I´ve stayed two nights, I noticed that the roadway is littered with carcasses. Cows, sheep, birds, hedgehogs, maybe a guanaco, rabbits, a fox, all sorts of things. I found two more cow horns but threw them back. I have to carry everything, and they didn´t hold the same weight as the one that I, fortunately, still have with me.
Today I am heading south east, on a paved road towards Esperanza and then Rio Gallegos, a big industrial town from where I will hop on a bus and head a long way north. Change of plans, and maybe they will change again, but I am thinking I will take the bus all the way to Puerto Madryn, rather than cycle the route. I feeling a bit tired of this, wanting rather to be among friends, or making friends. And also, with the change of gear, I have to ride with a backpack on my back, and it´s not very comfortable. So, I´ll probobly get on a bus. Ciao.

Leaving El Chalten

My mom joked with me that 'Stillness' is an appropriate title for my blog, and I've probobly lost most of my audience in the last weeks of inactivity. I'm in danger of being wiped off the bookmarks page.

The truth is, I've been living quite thrifty the last three weeks, for I lost my backpack. Yep, just about all of it: tent, sleeping bag, cookpot, cherished copy of Moby Dick, moleskine journal, passport, clothes... just about everything that had enabled me to live autonomously, buying only food, cooking fuel and the occasional hour on the internet. I have had to change my pace quite a bit. Since the event, which I would rather not recount in full detail, as there is certainly a fair amount of culpability and excess of faith on my part involved, I have been working and getting to know many people in this beautiful town that sits at the base of Mount Fitz-Roy and Cerro Torre, two world-class mountaineering destinations.
I've been living in a refugio/hostel, where much of the time I have been the only guest of Jesus and Natalie, who have two sons with red red red hair, and are expecting a third maybe next week. It has been an amazing experience, listening to the music of Jesus' band Siete Venas, drinking mate, listening to them banter at the dinner table. I have had to pay for it, and for many new clothes and for my food, by working during the days. I have been employed in one fashion or another just about every day for more than two weeks: mostly I am fixing bicycles, and as there are no bicycle mechaincs here and I still have my toolkit, I fixed maybe fifteen bikes in town. I'm not making much money, but enough to pay for the hostel and my food. I was also employed for six or seven days building a wire fence, installing posts for the fence, and then painting the underside of a wooden roof to protect it from the fierce winds.
All the while, I have been waiting for a dear friend I met along the way to send me a tent and sleeping bag and some clothes from his house in Cordoba. Thank goodness for friends! Many people have really helped me during my time here, and I now have several good friends who live here. Part of the triple bottom line we talked about at the CCC, in a way.

I have all that I need to continue my journey, and though it has changed quite a bit, I am excited to continue. I cannot go to Chile and the Torres del Paine, but I can visit the Perito Moreno Glacier, for which I am setting out today. After that, I am heading east towards the coast, to try to ride to Buenos Aires. I don't know if I will make it all the way, but there are buses and it is safe to hitchhike, I am told, so I will have options. And, at least, an adventure.

For all those of you who have been worrying about me and my whereabouts, I apologize for my negligence in communication. If you have experienced the frustrations of computers in Argentina, you can understand that this has not been at the top of my concerns. Thanks to everybody who has helped me through this difficult time. Your patience and love is greatly appreciated. I'm still soaring, though I crash landed back to earth for a moment.

Bahia Exploradores!

On something of a lark, I decided to make a detour from the not so beaten track of the Carreterra Austral and head west, to a place called Bahia Exploradores. The map showed a road in construction heading towards the sea, and the Campo de Hielo Norte, and Laguna San Rafael. I decided to give it a try and see what I could see. I feel that I was rewarded mightily for my curiousity.
Along the rainy and cloudy route I was given great views of glaciers, waterfalls, and forest. For whatever reason, I was keeping my eyes out for a horn of a cow. Ever since Futaleufu, where I drank mate from a horn, I had wanted my own. My quest was answered when I spotted a carcass by the roadside. Feeling very man versus wild, I used a stick to drag the skull out of a bog. It´s brains were leaking out of it´s eye socket and it stank something fierce, but before I knew exactly what was happening, there was a horn in my hand. I washed it thoroughly in another bog across the road, wrapped it in a plastic bag and attached it to my heap of goods on top of my backpack. I had got it.
I rode on towards the west, charged by this experience. I continued to admire the glaciers and mountains, and even the rain that was beginning to fall harder. After 52km, I came across a small cabin that served as a center for glacier viewing and trekking. I asked where the road led, what I could see from the end, and where I could camp for the night. I pressed on another ten kilometers to the end of the road, and then headed back to the Sendero Interpretivo, where after drinking mate and walking up to see the glacier (this is where I dropped my camera, and could not longer see the screen. Pictures from here on are taken blind), I was invited to stay the night inside. Mauricio, Tabatha and another young guy whose name I forget served me bread; Tabatha and I walked to the river to fetch a chunk of ice that had floated from the glacier. Along with two other Chilean travelers, we drank rum with ice from the glacier and cooked dinner. It was great company.
The next day I walked on the glacier. Yep, I walked on the glacier, Ventisquero Exploradores. It was incredible. They outfitted me with crampons, gaiters and a small backpack, and a group of six of us went hiking for six hours or so. It took about an hour and a half to reach the clean, white part of the ice where the amazing blue and turquoise caverns and crevasses are. I was given great latitude to peer into these cascades of ice-water, drop rocks into deep holes in the ice, try my hand at climbing with axes. It was a great experience.
The ice in general was much dirtier than I imagined, as the rocks tend to rise to the top and the ice goes to the bottom. There were many incredible rocks, ones that seemed to be fused together out of several different ones by the immense pressures of so much ice. I felt very fortunate for this experience.
I was a bit worried about getting back to Puerto Rio Tranquilo, as I wanted badly to get back this same day. After many hours hiking I was hungry, and only had pasta for dinner. I stuck out my thumb, and after twenty minutes the first pickup truck that came by took me 52km back to Puerto Rio Tranquilo, where I camped for free by the lakeside and went to eat dinner at the nearest restaurant. Yeah! I was back.

Puerto Rio Tranquilo and the Capillas de Marmol

I left Villa Cerro Castillo with a bit of a hangover. The return to ripio (the dirt and rock road) was tough going for the first ten kilometers, and I was tempted to walk my bike up parts of the hill. But I stubbornly persisted for sixty kilometers, and by the next afternoon I was in Puerto Rio Tranquilo, a mellow town on the shore of Lago General Carrerra. This is an enormous, rich blue-green lake that extends into both Chile and Argentina, but is called by a different name in Argentina. I stayed only on the Chilean side of things, and as it was the afternoon and I met up with another cyclist in town, the two of us together paid 25,000 pesos (about 20 bucks each) to visit the Capillas de Marmol, marble rock formations I had been told in Coyhaique were spectacular. They are. For about an hour, we puttered around through tunnels, into caves and into a bay where the capillas sit. There are pictures of these wonders all over the internet, and hopefully mine will appear on flickr. It was grand, and writing about it here without having the pictures to really demonstrate the emotion generated by being in their presence is difficult. I sat contentedly in the boat gazing at these giant lumps of marble floating thirty feet from the shore. The more luxurious way to visit the Capillas is to rent a kayak and a guide, and maybe someday I will have this opportunity. On the ride back, I sat in the front of the boat, feeling the spray from the water against my face, bouncing along with the growing waves of the late afternoon.

Coyhaique to Villa Cerro Castillo

I departed Coyhaique and the awesome Kooch Hostel (Kooch is the name of the local indigenous gods) on a Saturday, and I had been given word that there was a festival in the next town, Villa Cerro Castillo. I determined to make the 100km trip in one day, and as it was entirely paved this proved to be no problem. For much of it, I was not very excited by the landscapes. That, and the long ascent up Paso Ingerio Ibanez, was making for an unexciting day. But the last twenty kilometers were astounding. Along with the two Chilean guys I caught up to, I entered this canyon that had cool rock features and colors on both sides of the road. I was beginning to be pleased.
And soon thereafter, the canyon opened up into an amazingly vast valley, and I could see Cerro Castillo and several other mountains. I was kind of blown away, because I hadn´t quite put together the ´cerro´(mountain) part of Villa Cerro Castillo, and wasn´t really expecting the rocky, glaciared brilliance that I was now so near. A long, twisting descent (Villa Cerro Castillo Bomb!) that made me long for a mini-bike, my yellow glasses and a helmet cam, brought me into the midst of the villa, where, true to the gossip, there was something of a festival going on.
In town, I bought myself a beer, watched some gambling game kind of like bocce, took some photos, and ended up making friends with some hoodlums from Coyhaique. I desregarded the ´Viva los Chargers´shirt one of them was wearing, and proceeded to drink red wine from a leather bag or bote, white wine from a melon, and visit the aunt of Robinson to drink mate in her ante-room. Eventually, I passed out in Robinson´s tent, and, as they were all ¨camping¨without any sleeping bags or other gear, Alvaro joined me after he partied for a few more hours. It was cute and awesome.

I´m in El Chalten!

It´s not a very catchy title, I know, but I´m faced with two weeks of this awesome life to recap, and I am going to have to approach it episodically. Consider this as an introduction, and something of a recap. Amidst all the great experiences I have had, the overriding feat is that I rode to the end of the Carreterra Austral! Through many beautiful sparsely populated places and small towns, crossing two lakes on ferries, smashing some singletrack touring, hiking around another lake, I have come to arrive in Argentina´s frontier town of El Chalten. Among all the Gore-Texed gringos with trekking poles and leather boots there are some serious ice-climbers here, as we are very close to Mount Fitz-Roy and Cerro Torre, two very impressive peaks. This is known as Argentina´s capital of trekking, and I just got back from a four day hike in the rain and cold at the bottom of those peaks. I could not really see the tops of these biggest mountains, but breathing the air, sleeping near glaciars, hiking through the rain while most everybody else was in town was a pleasant and rugged experience. I´m back to the free camping on the outskirts of town, spending my money instead on bife de chorizo, empanadas, cookies and ice cream. I´ve got to bulk up for the next leg of my trip to El Calafate and the Perito Moreno glaciar, which are a few days away by bike. If the weather clears, I may throw in another hike of a couple days to try to see the mountains again. This is marvelous.

Notes: I just waited about thirty minutes to load a few photos of the cloud-shrouded mountains, and me, elated, free of the bicycle on a hike around Lago del Desierto, and found no progress. So, I will count on Flickr later to push through some pictures. Also, as will be recounted in another post, I dropped my camera a couple of times, and while it still takes pictures, the screen is irreparably damaged, and I cannot see exactly what I am taking a picture of until I find a computer. So, some of these pictures may not be impressive. I will be cherry picking, to be sure. (In case there was any doubt, this is still marvelous).