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).

Futaleufu to Coyhaique

I tell you, I was booking it. There´s nothing like near-solitude, a rough road, and determination to get me to work myself into near-exhaustion for several days. I covered more than 400 kilometers in four days, and even feel that I had time to enjoy it. At only a few points along the route was I feeling weary with the frustrations of an impolite hotel desk clerk in La Junta, the blazing hot sun that day, and the lengthy and merciless construction on the road. After riding past a very calm and amicable middle aged (American?) couple walking along the road, I resolved to have a good time at all costs. The past four days were spectacular, and after a two night stay in Coyhaique I will head out tomorrow for more of the same.

I jotted down notes after or during each day on the road. Here are some of the things I was thinking about:

• I´m in Patagonia, watching the rain spill over the sides of my tent. I will stay dry as long as the tent stakes don´t pull out of the ground. (I did stay dry, because fortunately there were very little winds. The ground was very loamy, in part because of a recent explosion of the volcano at Chaiten. I have, however, woken up with condensation on the inside of my tent, but so far it has not dripped on my sleeping bag.)



• I chatted with the old ladies by the side of the road. They were waiting for the bus in what felt like the middle of nowhere. She was fiddling with my soccer-ball bell as we were talking, which was very cute. I misused the word ´claro´ and came across as either stupid or rude, or both.



• I was protected by a carful of giggling but alarmed ladies as I was riding along. Unbeknownst to me, there was a large dragonfly resting under my right shoulder-blade, and from the tone of their voices and behavior this insect can be dangerous. They came by at just the right time, and I am grateful for it.



• I think I saw two eagles this morning, among the curves where the cows were roaming free. I am not much of a birdwatcher, but the shape of their beaks was very interesting, and they didn´t look like the other birds I have been seeing. I took it as my gift for getting an early start among the mist.



• Felice Compleaños, Mama! I am working hard to get to Coyhaique so I can call you. I am drinking the last of my hot chocolate from Christmas and thinking of you.

• Waterfalls make me sad. Not that I am not delighted to stand beside them, and bask in the freshness of their mist and air. And not that I am not thankful and dependent on their rivers and streams for drinking water, and not that I do not enjoy the many bridges over these streams which provide short bits of pavement between the rocky, bumpy stretches of road. But here, looking at the glaciars on the mountaintops, the waterfalls signal the melting of the glaciars. While the route is spectacularly dotted with views of Andean peaks and several glaciars, and I am impressed that the snow and ice stays while I am baking under the hot sun, I cannot but imagine that at one point not too many years ago, this entire land was covered year-round in ice and snow. It is a bittersweet feeling to gaze at the expanses of barren rock on the mountains, and know that along with the paving of the route will come more melting of these glaciars.



• I was standing at the confluence of two rivers, one great and mighty and a rich turquoise blue, the other much smaller and practically clear. I was washing my hands and face, and wondering at the power of these waters.



• The Patagonian must be the dumbest and least fit for life of all the world´s horseflies. If any predator chose to make it´s home out here, the tamaño would surely be eliminated. They are slow, and not built with a hard shell, and while mostly I just shun them away, at times I dispatch them.
  
• Churrascos are hot dogs, and not very good quality ones at that.

So, that´s certainly a lot of things, and I have tried to edit myself, but there´s a lot of time for ruminations and meditations while riding ten hours each day. I have been meeting other travelers along the way, and have entered at least one town with a market each day, but I am finding that I prefer to camp outside of the towns, and prefer to ride and camp alone for now. There are many more kilometers until the end of the road, and I am enjoying this lifestyle immensely. Onwards!

Bienvenidos a Chile!

I made it to Futaleufu, a small town that is best known internationally as a premier rafting location. I cycled 50km through a wind and sometimes rainstorm yesterday, crossing through the gorgeous Paso Futaleufu amidst hovering clouds and puddles on the road. I cannot reallybegin to express all that I have thought along the way for the past few days, as there has been much happening around me. I rode out of El Bolson in the morning, up the hills to where my first serious dirt road began. 30km later I was in the small village of Cholila, where I camped with the German couple Dirk and Frederika, let the local kids climb around in my tent, and ate a parilla at the Butch Cassidy Parilla. Apparantly, Butch Cassidy lived just outside of Cholila when he was on the run from the Pinkertons, and so I visited his house and went for a swim in the creek nearby. Cholila had the feel of a strategically developed colonial outpost, which I think it sort of is.

The next day I entered the Parque Nacional de los Alerces, the road through which traced the eastern edge of three impressive lakes, was dotted with hitchhiking Argentine backpackers on vacation, and was frequented by vehicles that kicked up an enormous amount of dust. It was scenic and lovely, yes, and I camped at a free campsite by Lago Futaleufquen, but I was glad to leave the park the next day, especially as the 30km road to Trevelin was paved.

Trevelin was a nice town, with a feeling that people actually lived here on their own accord. The guide book describes it as the most Welsh of the cordillera towns, but apart from the tea houses it felt rather working class Angentinian to me. I spent one night at the campsite in town, where I was befriended by a family fromTierra del Fuego, a couple from Rawson, and a man and his two sons from Buenos Aires. January is the time for everybody´s summer vacations, so all these people are on road trips through the lakes region.

And then I left Trevelin for Futaleufu, through the uneventful customs and immigration offices. The campsite here is run by a very friendly couple that is feeding me homemade bread with jam, mate with sugar, and has been entirely welcoming. There is a rodeo today, so I am staying to build up calories and enjoy the sites. This is another quite wonderful place, and I think the next stretch of riding will be tough and far between rest stops for food supplies. La Junta, two days away, and Puyuhuapi, and then Coyhaique are my next goals.

There is certainly much more to tell, but the rodeo is calling me. Hasta la proxima! Here is a short clip of me riding my bike:

See What I am Seeing at Flickr!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aspekt19