We met some Mexicans in Ushuaia who were bicycling north along the same route as us, and met up with them again on the ferry to Punta Arenas. (From left to right Geronimo, Felipe, Will, Trev, Felipe)
We decided to set off together, headed for Puerto Natales.
Trev struggles to push his bicycle back onto the road after he was blown into the gravel by the amazingly strong winds.
We bicycled 50km in the wind that day, then decided to hitch a ride. We rode in the back fo this sheep truck for 35km. It was nice to let an internal combustion engine do the work again.
And suddenly, I´m in Torres del Paine National Park!
We weren´t planning to do any trekking, but young Felipe, who was a guide there for five months, convinced us to enter the park. We are grateful.
Reclining on the rocks with Trev, Geronimo, and Felipe. Our pictures of the Torres themselves, which are spectacular, are locked on Trev´s memory card. Locked, I say, for his camera got wet during a day of biking some time later and is non-functional.
After the hiking, it was back on the bikes...sort of.
Who says we have to ride all the time? We hitched the last 30km into El Calafate to catch Felipe before he headed north. The winds were, again, ridiculous.
We rented a car with some Austrian friends and fellow cyclists and went to see the Perito Moreno glacier before sunrise.
Oliver and Petra (who we met biking to Calafate), were wonderful companions for a day of fun, rest, and philosophical conversations in the national park.
Bye bye little glacier!
Trev´s much anticipated disease bump. It´s that little lump sticking out of his right wrist. Oliver and Petra, who both happen to be MD´s, said it was encapsulated and there was nothing to worry about. Unless of course it started to hurt, grow, or talk.
On and on we ride...
Tadaaa! (It looks much less spectacular in the photo)
Morning mountains and wind.
Pushing our bikes into Chile.
I thoroughly enjoyed my own joke about the Mexican teaching us how to cross international borders.
Hiking with bikes...it was worth it, but I don´t recommend it.
Bathing in glacier waters after our hard push to the boat.
Our bikes on the boat to Villa O´Higgins
Trev´s rear tire got destroyed during our push to the ferry, and seeing how there wasn´t a bicycle shop for many hundreds of kilometers, we bought a tire from a man who had some extra bikes in his yard. It has worked surprisingly well.
And off we went, into the dirt and the wet. And beautiful.
Getting warm and dry in a little hut while waiting for a ferry to take us across another gap in the highway.
Our camp spot for the night. It was gloriously dry.
Trev and I took some time to pray together this morning, and I´m reminded of a certain inspiring anecdote.
There are a lot of sheep in patagonia.
One of them wasn´t fast enough, and we´re going to eat his leg.
Around three kilos of salty, tasty, deliciousness.
Powdered desert.
Powdered breakfast. (no, Trev´s teeth aren´t rotting out)
There is a never-ending supply of amazing mountains and lakes along this road.
Whiskey... (is the spanish version of ´cheese´)
Our delightfully bumpy road.
Our first bad spill. If you know anything about biking, you might just notice that the fender isn´t supposed to cover the front of the wheel. It wasn´t too bad, though. We were able to bike on.
We come across Felipe in the road (we´ve been leap-frogging and camping together often enough).
In a vain attempt to dry some clothing that we´d washed the previous evening (before the rain started), we build a large white-man-fire.
When the clothes wouldn´t dry and the rain didn´t stop, we decided to retreat to the tent for a rest day...
The mountains outside Cerro Castillo, about 100km from Coihaique. We made camp in the rain, and woke to this. Thank you God!
