El Calafate to Puerto Natales

Although there is pavement most of the way from El Calafate to Puerto Natales we elected like most of the other cyclists we were in touch with to take a bus. Our reason was that it was mostly out in the pampas and likely to be windy and without much scenery. That turned out to be the case. The bus we took down there had to slow down numerous times for the wind. The bus was a very nice modern one like many tour buses in the area. They decided to show a disturbingly violent American made prison movie that was hard not to keep looking at. It was a good thing the bus was built to be so quiet so we could appreciate all the grunting noises in the non stop fight scenes.  It is so comforting to see American values being exported around the world. I googled the news last night to read about this week's shooting rampage in the US, this time by a high school student. The bus was the only bus we could find the next day out of El Calafate and did not go quite to Puerto Natales but rather to Rio Turbio.

Rio Turbio it turns out was the polar opposite of El Calafate. It is a booming coal mining town and as far as we could tell we were the only tourists. We had to ask quite a few places where there was a restaurant and we were on the main drag. Also we did not see a single hotel of any sort. We ended up getting something to eat at the supermarket to go. We were actually wanting to experience a non touristy Argentinian town so we got our wish. The plan was to ride the twenty five or so kilometres from Rio Turbio over to Puerto Natales before dark and maybe find some place to camp in between.  Just out of town there is a long but not too difficult climb up to a ski area and the border crossing back into Chile. The border crossing was uneventful and we sped down the other side. At the bottom of the hill it started to spit rain and did not look so good to the west closer to the ocean. Welcome back to Chilean Patagonia. The north cross wind was blowing so hard all of a sudden at the bottom of the hill we had a hard time staying on the bikes. After about fifteen minutes of this battle I became concerned we might become seriously cold and stuck my thumb out as far as it would go for the next vehicle.  He stopped! I was so thankful to be saved I picked up the fully loaded bikes directly into the bed of the little pick up. One of these days I am going to throw my back out. The driver said the wind was blowing a hundred kilometres an hour but it was unusual. He was commuting to his job at a pizza parlour. I kept looking back expecting to see the bikes blow out of the bed of the truck on to the highway. Riding in windy conditions on a not so sleek fully loaded touring bike is harder than just going up a steady grade. It is like you have some guy who weighs a lot more than you do grabbing the back of your bike off and on. This puts you in about as good of a mood as if someone actually was doing that.
The guy took us into Natales where there was no wind! The local variation in weather in southern Patagonia has to be experienced to be believed and there is not necessarily any consistency to it either.  We immediately liked Puerto Natales better than El Calafate.  It is touristy being the gateway to Torres del Paine but nothing like El Calafate.  At least half the stores here are for non tourists and it is a port town.

Luckily we found one of the better hostels in the area right off the bat. After a little recon we decided to take one of the many buses up to Torres del Paine with a couple of rented backpacks from the hostel. This was a good call as well as much of the ride would have not been all that scenic and there was a fair amount of gravel plus lots of big buses. We started out doing one of the main treks that people do called the W for the pattern of the trails in and out of some valleys. This is no seldom visited trail that is the domain of only seasoned adventurers. On the first day of this hike up to the Torres or towers we must have seen three hundred day hikers or backpackers. The majority of the backpackers looked like total beginners based on their bulging packs with lots of items dangling off here and there. Most of the beginner backpackers were young so they will probably figure out better ways to do it with more experience. We encountered this before on the West Coast trail in Canada and wonder how much of it has to do with hostels that rent gear to anyone with the cash.  We remember an oriental guy who owned only flip flops reading about it on the bulletin board and thinking it sounded like a good idea.  The guy at the front desk had to convince him he needed better footware. They evacuate about a hundred people a year there. Here probably many young backpackers thought that having all the other foreign backpackers to party with in the kitchen areas was a really cool deal.  Laurie commented more than once on the number of good looking adventurous single women from around the world in the Hostels here. Young guys in America need to ignore all the media fear about world travel other than Europe and come on down! It is so dangerous here most of those women are hitch hiking around.
There are more Americans here than anyplace we have encountered in Patagonia so far but still they are way outnumbered by Europeans and Australians. German speaking people again get the prize for the most well represented. Not bad considering Germany is about the size of Montana. Laurie learned that the Germans are all required to take several languages in school and speculated this may have something to do with the travel bug. Most of the Germans seemed to be better equipped for back packing as well. Interestingly many of the Americans were foreign exchange students in Santiago on summer break mostly from Universities in California.  In one twelve person train of day hikers being led by a guide, an overweight American guy, who looked like he was going to have a heart attack any second was explaining to a perplexed looking Australian guy how all government workers do nothing all day and are a drain on the economy. Laurie wanted to ask him what he was going to do without Medicare down here if he had a stroke.
The other thing we saw a lot of was love bird couples that made you think that being lovey dovey was the standard for international backpackers. Well Laurie did a little survey and was three for three for couples that were on their honeymoons. So after that we did not feel so dysfunctional for not passionately French kissing at some breath-taking view point we just spent four hours hiking too. The newlyweds came up for air occasionally too. Nothing like massive rock towers to get the romantic juices flowing.  Laurie and I are just thankful that after nearly two months of traveling and sleeping in a small tent that we are still talking although I am sure Laurie wishes I would stop talking especially on some of the more frequent themes.
Torres del Paine being a national park is heavily regulated although surprisingly they do not limit the numbers of hikers and backpackers. They do require you to stay at certain campgrounds which because they are limited pretty much determines your itinerary depending on weather you do the W or the circuit tour. Because of that you end up seeing a lot of the same people every day.  Even though we must have seen a thousand people in four days amazingly the park was not too trashed. Forget about solitude unless you manage to get a climbing permit. I could see that there were some good routes that could be had from valley to valley passing by some of the more impressive towers but that would not be permitted. Those sorts of restrictions common to many national parks are not real conducive to the kind of back country exploration I prefer to do so I have to suppress the frustration. The climbing permits from what we could gather were hard to come by. We had extremely good weather both in El Chalten and Torres del Paine when hiking but only saw one couple coming out with climbing gear.  I kept scanning the areas shown on the maps with climbing icons but never saw any climbers.
After seeing many magnifico places in Patagonia further north it got me to wondering why Mount Fitz Roy and Torres del Paine are about a bazillion times more popular than the rest of Patagonia. About all i could think of is that in addition to having granite towers and glacier covered mountains in close proximity is that they are also famous climbing destinations in lots of pictures and movies. But just because a mountain does not have grade A rock for climbing doesn't mean other mountains are not scenic. The vast majority of the tourists here are not doing any climbing. The human propensity to do what is popular always amazes and scares me. You never know when you are going to go for walk  downtown one day and everyone is going to be wearing polka dots or swastikas. But here i am down here doing the W hike in polka dots so I was influenced just the same.
Most of the Torres del Paine hiking routes could be done by staying at refugios next to the campgrounds if you made reservations well in advance. They served meals as well but that route would run around two hundred a day per person. The refugios sold a few things to people who weren’t staying there. All of them even the private ones stocked five things canned potato chips, Oreo type cookies, chocolate bars, wine and hard liquor in bottles. Curiously things like power bars are pretty uncommon even in the more sporty places like Puerto Natales and El Chalten. There are a couple of shops in Puerto Natales that did have large selections of dried fruit at reasonable prices including my new favorite dried Kiwi. The fruit and vegetable store we like in Puerto Natales also stocks hard liquor but not much else. You have to be in the right mood for chopping vegetables with a sharp knife.
Ironically for all the tramping around we did inside the park the best views were on the ferry boat back and on the bus a couple of miles after being dropped off from the ferry but the bus did not stop for that.

Not that we had a lot of goals to start with but now that we have ridden the Carratera Austral, seen Monte Fitz Roy and the towers of Torres del Paine we are not sure what to do next. There are some other really cool looking glaciated mountains to the west but my map doesn't show any trails. Maybe I need a more detailed map. We are told the penguins outside of Punta Arenas are a must see but we are thinking the climate penguins like would be even colder than here so we are having some reservations about continuing further south. Touching the South Pole is not on our bucket lists. Today we are looking into a bus ride back to the Lake District on the Argentina side or possibly a flight to Buenes Aires to tour the coast of Uruguay. We road past Futaleufu on the way down and we haven’t been to the El Bolson area which are on our to do list.

We miss the adventure of the Carratera Austral and the camaraderie of fellow cyclists we met sharing the adventure. Maybe if there were only a handful backpackers in Torres del Paine it would feel the same instead of just being one of thousands.

Here are some more pics

El Chalten to El Calafate

The weather seemed good for cycling so we pressed on from El Chalten at about three in the afternoon. It was great to be back on good pavement. Once out of town and headed down the 90 kilometre long Lago Viedma we had a modest tail wind and made it to the other end of the lake in about four hours. Nothing like good pavement and a tailwind to make you feel like superman. We kept having to turn around to look at the view as Monte Fitz Roy and all its neighbours were visible almost the whole way. Assuming you didn’t have a head wind riding into El Chalten from the east would have to be one of the most scenic easy rides in the world.  All the hills around the lake except the west end are barren and treeless. The entire west end is nothing but snow caped peaks with the huge glacier Viedma flowing in to the lake. It is one of those glaciers that looks like a river of ice which I think there is a geologic name for but I don’t remember it. The traffic was pretty light but it was astounding the number of tour busses headed in and out of El  Chalten. That place has to be a money making machine.

We talked to a fit French woman in her sixties trying to compare the mountains in the area to other mountain ranges we both had seen. I said we had the granite towers of Yosemite in the US but it lacked the glaciers. She said there were a few places in Europe that were close like the dolomites but they were much smaller in scale. She could not really think of anything quite as grand in her travels around the world. She spent three hours at the top of the knoll taking it in. This is the hike we did that you had to climb thirty five hundred feet to get to.

About half way down Lago Viedma there was a little shallow lake on the opposite side of the road and we noticed what looked like pink flamingos. It turns out they were.  I happened to be listening to cowboy themed pedal steel guitar jazz music which made the pink flamingos in this little desert lake seem very bizarre.

After a good night sleep by the side of the road on the leeward side of a little hill, we got an early start hoping to avoid likely windy conditions on the outlet end of Lago Viedma. Not long into the ride when stopping for some reason or other I saw an odd round bush silhouette on a ridge only it had a snake like limb sticking out that went up in the air and then down to the ground.  It was a Nandu. Nandu are a type of a wild ostrich about a meter and a half tall according to a trekking book of Laurie’s. Earlier in the trip we kept thinking we were in the animated movie UP where they go to the mythical “Paradise Falls” were the falls come impossibly off the top of lush flat toped crags.  Now we have seen large flightless birds like in the movie as well. Imagine wild ostriches running around in south eastern Oregon.

The only commercial activity on the 230 kilometers of road between El Chalten and El Calafate is a historic lodge and restaurant at the outlet of Lago Viedma. The reason it is historic is that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid hung out there and had tea and banana bread for several months just like all the tourist buses in route to El Chalten.  It is sort of ironic that the restaurant owners here have to be legally hauling money away by the bag full without having to be on the lam.

Not too much longer after that we saw our first Guanaco.  They are a wild lama of sorts and used to number in the millions. They look to be almost as tall as an elk and they ran up a steep hill away from us like the wind. They appear to have keen long range vision like an antelope and make noises like high pitched horses.

We could have pressed on to El Calafate which would have been a 130 k ride for the day but found a very nice camp where the large Rio La Leona from Lago Viedma dumps into Lago Argentino the next huge natural lake to the south. Lago Argentino is yet another glacial fed lake looks fake blue like a backlit computer monitor. Where we camped some sheep herder went to a lot of trouble to plant willows in rows for wind breaks and a corral. There were the remains of the floor of a shack. It currently appears to be used as a place to slaughter sheep now and then as there are hides around here and there. But it could be just a place where they get together and traditionally roast a whole sheep which we have only heard about. We seem to sleep better “primitive” camping so no hurry to get to the next town with a location like this one. We will hopefully have a pleasant short 40 k ride into El Calafate in the morning. At least out here in the desert your odds of getting rained on are slim. Camping in the rain or even the occasional drizzle gets old. That said there are not many waterfalls and glaciers to look at out here in the desert. But it is a different kind of beauty that I have learned to appreciate after living many years on the plains east of the Rockies and in Central Oregon.

The ride into El Calafate turned out to be not so pleasant. We had a head wind and the traffic as soon as we turned off of route 40 got very heavy even by US standards. That was a long stressful thirty k.  Many of the little cars now, although of dubious performance pedigree, are sporting loud mufflers and dark enough tinted windows to be certified for drug dealing. It is a bit hard to tell the difference between the cars with the “performance” sound and the junkers. Maybe if I was in the know it would be obvious. Speaking of the side effects of el testosterono the road signs now in Argentina have bullet holes unlike Chile.

The roads in both Chile and Argentina have frequent Christian shrines. The one just outside El Calafate was made of an old front loading washing machine painted bright red with a little doll inside the glass door that kind of looked like Ken of Ken and Barbie only with a little moustache. We were guessing it may have been Saint Kenmore. Laurie noticed that the towns in Chile and Argentina have few churches. It appears that instead they do all their praying out on the highway.

The reason for all the traffic into El Calafate is that it is very touristy. It is bigger and more touristy than El Chalten although there is far less to do here out doors anyway. The main tourist activity seems to be driving out to look at a big glacier that dumps into the lake. As far as I can tell there is not much hiking compared to El Chalten. The tourism appears to be more about the town. There are far more light skinned people here than just about anywhere outside of Santiago. There are even Asians here which were practically non-existent in Chile.  There are some nice arts and crafts for sale, many made by local artists but I am having an allergic reaction to the place and am eager to move on. The main street is packed with cars and people. To get out to view the glacier in the National Park it costs twenty dollars US per person. The bus ride is another twenty and there is no camping in that part of the park. El Calafate has an airport big enough for fairly large passenger jets. There is a decent bike shop which is one of the main reasons we made the side trip in off route 40. Some other bike tourists we know are taking the bus out the sixty k to the glacier so I suppose we should too but I am more hopeful for a big tail wind out of here. I hope Torres del Paine will not be so touristy. It probably will be but, at least there will be hiking and camping.

The nice restaurant downstairs in the hostel was totally empty at nine pm. I felt sorry for the guy waiting to seat people because they had such a nice looking salad bar that was going to go to waste. The restaurant was packed at ten pm with people streaming in.  It is a Monday. Maybe the reason so many people in Chile and Argentina look morose and tired is the lack of sleep. It may have something to do with stores closing for two or three hours in the middle of the afternoon as well.

Here are some more pictures. I added a picture page to put them in one place hopefully in order. You may not think so but these are a subset of all the pictures taken.

El Chalten and Monte Fitz Roy

The weather broke and turned sunny which was great as we were now getting views of Monte Fitz Roy from up the valley. We did the short hike up to the glacier from the campground at Lago del Desierto. Fitz Roy and the rest of the valley was in the clear and the views were fantastic. From there it was 40 k into the town of El Chalten. We did not have much of an idea what to expect like much of the tour as we did not do a lot of research before leaving. The ride into town had incredible scenery but the road turned very rough about halfway in. The unsorted large river rock gravel was some of the worst we have seen since the early part of the trip north of Hornopiren. We had a blasting tailwind so that helped at least although it was hard enough that it made taking pictures difficult. From El Chalten the road is back to pavement although we are worried about the barren landscape to the east and the possibility that wind will be a problem.

It turns out that El Chalten is quite the tourist town with tourists outnumbering the three hundred or so locals about five to one. There are more hostels, hotels and restaurants than houses. There are also lots of high end sports shops and gift shops. The restaurants are thankfully more than just the "typical" Chilean fare with some gourmet options. There is plenty of tourist money in circulation in El Chalten. Most of the tourists appear to arrive in buses and there lots of them walking up and down the main streets. There are American tourists here but the Europeans mostly German outnumber them considerably. Most of the tourists are actually from South America some now from Brazil speaking the lovely sounding Portuguese. I had to do a double take to hear English spoken without some sort of what would be an accent to an American.

Monte Fitz Roy, Cerro Torre and surrounding mountains are close to town and stunning. The landscape in town and to the east remind me of southeast Oregon, being largely treeless mountains with similar looking rock outcrops. The mountains to the west change dramatically with the large granite spires and then the glacier covered surrounding mountains. There is a huge ice field just to the west. The rapid switch from arid mountains to huge glaciers is amazing.

We did a nice hike on a gradual trail that climbed thirty five hundred feet to a lesser hill to the south for some amazing views of Monte Fitz Roy and Cerro Torre. We could see from there down to Torres del Paine. There was also a complementary condor flying around. We were high enough we could look down on it at one point at close range. We were joined by about fifty other day hikers that day in all manner of clothing but most with appropriate footwear. I kept expecting to see some guy jogging up it in perfect form and a heart rate monitor like you would see in Bend but we never saw that.

Wikipedia has this to say about Fitz Roy:

"First climbed in 1952 by French alpinists Lionel Terray and Guido Magnone, it remains among the most technically challenging mountains on Earth for mountaineers. Monte Fitz Roy is the basis for the Patagonia clothing logo following Yvon Chouinard's ascent and subsequent film in 1968

The mountain has a reputation of being "ultimate", despite its average height (although being the highest peak in the Los Glaciares park, it is less than half the size of the Himalayan giants), because the sheer granite faces present long stretches of arduous technical climbing. In addition, the weather in the area is exceptionally inclement and treacherous. It also attracts many photographers thanks to its otherworldly shape. The area, while still fairly inaccessible, was even more isolated until the recent development of El Chaltén village and El Calafate international airport. The mountain climb, however, remains extremely difficult and is the preserve of very experienced climbers. Today, when a hundred people may reach the summit of Mount Everest in a single day,^[7] Monte Fitz Roy may only be successfully ascended once a year".

So much for hiring a guide to do a low fifth class accent of Fitz Roy. There are other day hikes in the area but the national park ranger said the one we did had the best views. The other recommended one takes seven hours to get to and puts you at the base of Fitz Roy at a lake. We may press on from here today as the weather is good and there are no winds at the moment.

Just FYI we are averaging about twenty dollars a day for lodging with free camping in the country side factored in. We could easily average less than that if we opted for always staying in the cheapest accommodations in town. For instance we elected for a hotel stay in El Chalten at about sixty US dollars but there was private camping available with a common kitchen for about eight dollars apiece. We wanted to have Internet in the hotel and not have to worry about security on a hike. Some campgrounds offer lockers in places where hiking is common. Also often you can get the proprietors of private camp grounds to watch your stuff in a special spot they keep an eye on.

Here is a link to some more photos. The connection at the hotel in El Chalten was slow so sorry no pictures of Fitz Roy etc but you have probably seen pictures of that becuase it is famous.

O’Higgins and the Glacier tour

On a chilly morning with off and on drizzle which we are getting used to we peddled the eight kilometres down to the ferry launch. The night before someone came around and knocked on our door to tell us that the ferry was leaving a half an hour earlier.  It normally doesn’t run on a Tuesday but they had high winds the day before and had to cancel the glacier tour boat trip. Apparently they go around to all the inns to tell people of schedule changes. The ferry sold out and had fifty passengers. Most of the passengers were from Santiago and were returning to O’Higgins which would have ended up being nearly sixteen hours mostly on the boat.  The weather cleared up a bit and we were able to ride up top and take in the views for a while.  The other two American cyclist couples were there in addition to the Swiss couple. Having this many American cycle tourists together is very rare down here.  The other couples had only seen one other American couple in at least a month of touring.  In the log book for the popular hotel we stayed at in O’Higgins the number of American entries was very statistically very low. There were quite a few entries from European Countries.  We are not sure what the stigma is for Americans about South America but we have never felt safer traveling for us and our possessions internationally or in the US. Someone that Laurie works with warned us how dangerous it would be once we left the big cities in Chile. We and the other two bike touring couples had a good laugh around the picnic table about that. If anything it is the otherway around. Generally like big cities everywhere it is the cities where you have to worry more about theft but even in Santiago we felt at least as safe as in a US city.

I forgot to mention that at the hotel a large Chilean group from Santiago showed up with a half a dozen teenage girls. They had appetizers prepared by their guides at about eight thirty. Dinner was ready by nine. They had plenty of time to prepare food earlier but this just shows you what the customs are for eating down here. These were family people not party types. They were shushing the girls at about eleven thirty which is early by Chilean standards.

 The wind picked up on one of the arms of Lake O’Higgins and it was high seas for the tour boat. Laurie and a couple of other people got very sea sick. Luckily behind the glacier it was calm enough to be outside. The O’Higgins glacier that comes out of the Hielo Sur Ice field Laurie was told is the biggest in the world not on a polar ice cap. It was pretty impressive where it met the water and looked to be about seventy five feet of exposed ice that calved off every once and while. 

The ride back to the south shore was uneventful in terms of sea sickness and most of the passengers slept. The ferry droped us of on the south shore for what was for all the cyclist slated to be the most difficult bike adventure of the trip. There are no cars on the road and trail to the next ferry at Lago del Desierto. The first twenty kilometres or so were on a four wheel drive road that was steep enough to require a fair amount of pushing the bike uphill for the first five k or so. The 6 k at the other end that was trail did not seem to be as bad as rumoured although it had some erosional gullies made just wide enough for panniers by panniers. It would have been tough coming from south to north on that stretch.  One guy we ran into coming up from that direction was not a happy camper as he had to hike his panniers up in a separate trip.  Some of the trail was fun “mountain biking” at least for me anyway. The cyclists with the heavier loads had a more difficult time. At the start of this segment on O’Higgins you have your passport stamped by Chilean military and on the other end by Argentinian military but it was all very low key.

The forest about halfway over to Lago del Desierto became very nice and appeared to be the equivalent of old growth at least for the tiny leaved beech trees that I am assuming are the same ones we have been seeing for a while now. The forest continues to look very lush on the valley floor from here most of the way to El Chalten,  Big trees in this forest though only get to be maybe two and a half feet in diameter and not much more than seventy five or a hundred feet tall. They look in size and shape the way the native oak trees look in Hood River. The little leaves of what I assume are beech trees do a good job of holding back the rain though. Plus they seem to be good for a lot of thing like house construction, building bridges, making tools out of and firewood. It is a much denser hardwood than fir and pine used for some of those things in the States.

We stayed at a nice campground at the other end of the lake with the Swiss and Kansas City couples. There was a popular short hike up to glacier through a beautiful forest with yet again, a most stunning view of my life moment, of the glacier and the valley to the south with a view of Mount Fitz Roy. It is 40 k or so to El Chalten on gravel and that is it for the gravel for us hopefully for as much of the rest of the trip as we can manage. We are all bracing ourselves for the amount of tourists we are likely to encounter for the next week from here to Torres del Paine. The last week on the Carretera Austral has been pretty remote with not much traffic.

One thing that just occurred to me is that it appears that most of the couples touring have tents large enough to put their panniers either inside their tents or inside the vestibules. We could not do that with our little tent but I am not sure why that is necessary as the ortleib panniers we and practically everyone else is carrying are water proof. On river trips you would generally not put drybags inside a tent as they are often wet and too bulky. Bike panniers inside a tent for a couple would basically take up the room of a third person and they would not make for a very cozy roommate as they have lots of stiff plastic parts protruding. We do carry a little cable lock to lock them up but only once felt like that was maybe necessary when camping in a jamb packed front yard campground in Chiaten. I think requirements like keeping all your gear inside your tent cause the loads to snowball. You need a bigger tent for panniers and then more panniers for the bigger tent and so on. Also in terms of being cramped if the weather is real bad we opt for the hostels or hotels which often cost only slightly more than camping so we have not been miserable hanging out in the little tent for hours in bad weather like sometimes happens when backpacking. Buy still I am not going to carry the weight of a big tent just for that even in the mountains. When backpacking we put our rather small ultralight packs in the tent as pillows but they are not waterproof and have no internal frame. We keep our food bags up off the ground to keep them away from rodents although curiously there do not seem to be any here squirrels or otherwise. We also out of habit would not put food bags in the tent as that would be a no no in the US for bears. It is nice not to have to hang food in trees for bears.

We made it to El Chalten and have a faster internet connection so may have some pictures today.

Tortel to O'Higgins

Tortel to OHiggins

This post was posted only shortly after the previous post as there was no reliable internet in Tortel so you may want to go back and read that first. The Inn here in O'Higgins has WiFi along with hot showers and a nice warm wood stove. They also have a suana and hot tub out back. Nowonder it is a well known hotel. There are a half a dozen touring cyclists staying here.

The ride out of Tortel was easier than the ride in even though it was uphill was easier than the ride in as with the rain the road had gotten packed out smooth and fast.  Waiting for the rain to stop in Tortel proved to be a good gamble. Although it was not totally clear at least it wasn’t raining. After rejoining route 7 it was a bit of a climb up and over to the ferry in Yungay but the road was good.  We had to wait for the last ferry from Yungay  to Rio Bravo at 6. There is a little restaurant at Yongay and Laurie ordered a great salad with potatoes and a small portion of meat.  It was great but expensive. We passed the rest of the day talking to the bike tourists from Kansas and Laurie did some painting and drawing with the daughter of the restaurant owner.  The ferry was free so there were no communication issues about payment and reservations.  On the other side it was raining a bit and it was permissible to camp in the ferry shelter which was fairly new.  We stayed there with the couple from Kansas and a French cyclist. The French cyclist had interesting racks he created himself after arriving from France. They literally were held together with bailing twine and zip ties but he had made it the same distance we had on rough roads so it is possible to bike tour down here on a shoe string.

The next morning we rode with the Kansas couple for about thirty kilometres. They were both electrical engineers and it was interesting to note how that influenced their riding. The guy, Greg had a log book where he tracked how many kilometres they did and how long it took them all very neatly laid out in a notebook with columns. They also were traveling with some elevation profiles they had obtained from another cyclist. The Greg had done a fair amount of racing and was pretty focused on keeping his numbers up. He would rather ride fast then take a break than ride slow as that made the calculations on the odometer look better in terms of kilometres per hour. The woman, Tiffany was also into numbers and kept track of her distance travelled by looking at the frequent little hand written highway survey markers. When she asked her husband how far they had gone based on the odometer if he rounded up or down it would through her off and affect her disposition if it seemed like she thought she had gone further according to their calculations. Although we enjoyed talking to them campong and riding with them when we got an idea how the numbers were affecting their riding we decided we didn’t necessarily want to be riding on that bell curve. It is really interesting to see all the different traveling styles of various cyclists. Also as with the swiss couple they were not competitive in camp and the women liked to laugh. Laurie enjoyed hanging out with them a great deal especially Marilee the Swiss woman who liked to cook and talk about food.

The road to Villa O’Higgins after the first few big climbs was easy with a huge tail wind plus there was almost no traffic due to the ferry that carries only a half a dozen vehicles three times a day. We made about 80 kilometers and bypassed the two free huts for camping. We found a nice place to camp by Lake Cisnes about fifteen kilometres from O’Higgins. It required hopping a fence.  There must have been a couple dozen waterfalls on the route and not just small ones either. We could see the bottoms of some big glaciers which were possibly the ice field. We also had the good fortune to see some condors one at close range about fifty feet overhead.

Villa O’Higgins is the end of the road for autos.  It is also the end of the Carretera Austral which is a big milestone for us. Cyclists and hikers can continue on by ferry into Argentina although it requires about six kilometres of pushing a bike on a horse trail on the other end of the ferry.  There is a lot of talk about by cyclists about securing horses on the other end to help carry panniers up the horse trail. Apparently the wranglers are very unreliable. If they are not there it involves a couple of trips back and forth with bikes and gear as the ruts are too deep for bikes with panniers. Luckily the ferry was delayed today due to high winds and put off until tomorrow which we were able to secure a place. We chose the one that does a side trip to a big glacier that ends at the equally huge lake. It costs more but almost all of the cyclists are opting for it so we thought we should too.  There are at least a dozen cycle tourists here waiting to take the ferry across on one day or other to Argentina. Once on the other side there will be pavement again from the town of El Chalten. El Chalten is at the base of the famous Mount Fitz Roy so I am looking forward to that. Treking up into the mountains here is not too appealing at least with the weather we have been having plus most of the trails are in bad shape and poorly engineered by American standards. They tend to go straight up to their destinations.  With bad weather like mountains everywhere it is worse with more rain, wind and cold temperatures.  The owner  of the inn we are staying at in O’Higgins says it is unusually cold here for the time of year but was unusually warm here earlier in the summer.

Cochrane to Tortel

After checking email and doing an update for the blog in Cochrane we waited around for the main grocery store to open back up at three.  We killed time by cruising around town on its paved roads and went into the museum that was open. It had a few interesting natural history things but of course was all in Spanish.  It was possible to interpret some of the graphs etc without knowing Spanish although Laurie was able to read and interpret most of what I was interested in. There was a display on hydro power and judging by the age of the display the effort to put dams in on the Baker is not a new one.  The display text said that the dams would supply 35% of the electricity for all of Chile. Later on a wiki page I saw a number of 25%.  If you remember from the last post that one of the main messages of the outfit that wants to build the dam is that they have the interests of the locals in mind and the people who oppose it are all from out of the area. Well that math doesn’t hold up if only 5% of the population lives in Patagonia then that means that at least 30% of the power would get shipped out or be used for some industrial purpose.  The wiki page said that the the power was actually slated to go to Santiago and some mining operations.  So anyway the power company posters are clearly manipulative and dishonest. This info is relavant to Cochrane because the dams will be going in near it.

A large part of the Patagonian’s would never have access to the hydro power as it would be way too expensive to get it out to them.  Micro hydro would probably make more sense or in the case of Coihaique wind power. For the first time yesterday we were seeing small solar panels on some of the little ranch houses.  In the early days of solar electric in the US the cost of running power lines out to rural homes drove the industry. It was just not cost effective if you were on the grid already. For the price of the damn and running power lines I bet they could put fairly large arrays on most of the rural homes here.

The save the Rio Baker backers are not above deception as well. There is a huge environmental picture book you see in many places here that it is my understanding was in a large part due to the efforts of Doug Tompkins mentioned in a previous post.  I believe the title is Sin Represas which means something like without dams. There are quite a few bumper stickers around with those same words.  The book has quite a few photo montage pictures of how the mountains would look with huge power lines in front of them.  The only thing is it would be nearly impossible in reality to make powerlines dominate the view like they do with the pictures doctored in photoshop.  Power companies do GIS studies to route power lines in the least objectionable places and would try to avoid supper scenic places if they could.  The picture they use in their billboard was the same old historic photo of a rural sheep herder drinking mate that they had in the museum not that life style has changed much but still. The guy did look more like a sheep herding local than the plump pale people in the hydro asyen billboards at least. The anti damn folks have also done a good job of hyping the beauty of the Baker in the area that they want to put the damn.  Pretty much all the cyclists were talking about the Baker as this must see place coming up.  The kayak guides from Futa were also talking it up. Well that river is pretty but the white water is not all that great from what I saw and was told, especially if the one outfit that is running it commercially is taking neophytes down it in sea kayaks. One of the cyclist couples from Kansas who has been doing river trips when they can, said they were disappointed by the lack of white water and did not do the excursion. The mountains in the area of one of the dams are nice but nothing like other mountains in the area.  The other dam is proposed to go in by some very scenic mountains and a national park.  The Baker is Chile’s largest river by volume. It is unusual in that most rivers have the most scenic mountains at the head of the river but the Baker runs into some magnificent mountains quite always downstream.  I can’t think of any other rivers in the US that do that.  Anyway it is kind of sad that both sides have to resort to psychological tricks and photo deception or similar tactics to meet their objective. The five dam project was approved in May of 2011 by a panel of appointed staff of the new conservative president but is being appealed. Chile imports all of its petro chemical energy.

On the subject of modernization we were talking about how the last three towns of any size only had one internet café and a lot of the locals relied on them. Plus there was no WiFi in these towns either. Laurie’s comment was that she felt a bit miss led buy all the claims of how “flat” the world is because most of the world has cell phones and internet.  No doubt much of the world is gaining access to the internet like say the Chinese but,  Chile considers itself to be a first world country and universal internet is far from a reality.  Locals here are not buying and selling things from Amazon or Ebay. Here in Tortel there is a lot of communication done on walkie talkie. The Swiss guy Martin that we are sharing a cabin with says it is like face book because all the people are tuned into the same channel.

In Cochrane after we got a couple of day’s supplies of food from the market we headed out of town for an evening ride as the weather was perfect for touring. It was a good thing as the scenery out about twenty kilometres was yet again the most beautiful we had ever seen including a big fifty foot waterfall that was part of it.  Luckily the mountains were totally visible. It would be really rare for you to be able to see all the mountains visible from the road in a Patagonia tour due to the nature of the weather here and the fact that mountains tend to attract clouds everywhere but more so here because of the amount of moisture coming in off the ocean. When Laurie was cleaning up after a yogurt container that did not survive the shaking on the road I was taking in the sudden incredible scenery and made a note of the reaction of the motorists passing by. Very few even turned their heads to look at the scenery and none saw the falls. Most, and they were tourists not locals, had their eyes on the road or where carrying on a conversation.  Seldom have we seen tourists stop to take in view and some of the best are only momentary.  It is fairly common to see the passenger stick a camera out of the window to take a picture from a moving car. Even on a bike I have to make an effort not to get too focused on the next town or campground and making mileage.

The first nights camp out of Cochrane we found some field near a firewood operation with a spring and a view of the mountains. Shortly after we pitched the tent some dogs from a nearby cabin heard us and started barking a lot so we spent the rest of the evening whispering. Usually the dogs here seldom bark even if you are right in their yard. 

The next morning touring about half way from Cochrane to Tortel on the way down to the Rio de Los Nadis there was a steep long descent. At the river there is a road to the Baker River with a couple of campgrounds and Inns listed at the base of some of the grand mountains we were seeing the evening before. It was raining and we did not know if the inns were full so we elected to push on in the rain.

It rained off and on all day. The miracle of modern fabrics is really apparent in those conditions as your sweat can evaporate between showers. One of the storms was so windy we stopped to ask a rancher (think sheep herder with a one room shack when I say rancher) if there were any rooms to rent between Cochrane and Tortell the next town 120 kilometers away. The answer was no but he invited us in for tea, pan cheese and jam which is a main stay for the Chileans. His stove was of course going and the water was already hot.  We tried to carry on a conversation with me asking questions and Laurie trying to interpret in Spanish. His living quarters was about twelve by twelve and he had lived there for twenty five years since when the road first came through. He had three kids all of whom lived in Cochrane.  One of his kids he said travelled a lot and had mucho dinero or money.  It is interesting that none of his kids pitched in and helped him fix up his place that had to be worth all of two hundred dollars in building materials.  He still had contact with them though as he had artwork from the kids on the walls. It cleared up after tea so we thanked him l and pressed on.

After we left the gauchos’ place it kept raining off and on and we were pretty focused on trying to find a room or some sort of shelter.  About seven in the evening Laurie spotted a shack by a river that looked unoccupied. I was doubtful but she walked over and it was open and the report was it looked promising.  It was a converted garage with a cement floor and plywood covering the walls. There was a wooden platform for a wide bed, stove, table and no trash.  Plus there was room for bikes which had chains that needed oiling. We were also able to hang up wet clothes and the tent.  It was not exactly five star but we were grateful.  We noticed in the Coihaique newspaper where the local hospital had opened up a hanta virus wing. This is probably not due the number of rats and mice but more to do with how “breathable” the houses are.  Only recently are have they been built using plywood or insulation.  House framers might be interested to note that of the dozens of homes I have seen being framed not one has anything like a header over a window opening.  Not surprisingly it is common to see cracked windows.

One “campground” we looked at a couple of hours before where the herders wanted a fee had a building with a fire pit but it was full of trash and the shack had lots of personal junk in it. It was pretty much a sheep herders bachelor pad or somewhere they used to skin animals or something. The owner was mean looking and hadn’t put much of any effort into the camping facility so we passed on that. Although it is not raining this morning we are probably going to make the twenty kilometre detour into Tortel as there are apparently no other supplies to be had on the last 120 kilometre leg into O’Higgins, not even little markets.

Another thing that is interesting we found out in asking for the locations of rural supermarkcados is that most of the locals do not know how to read a map, maybe they just do not know how to read. We pulled out a map at a highway construction camp yesterday that was only one kilometer from a major road intersection. They could not find it on the map. We were hoping they could tell us by looking on the map if there were any markets on the way to O’Higgins.  Like other Chileans they would put their fingers on the map and follow the road lines around where ever it lead them on the map hopping they would recognize the name of a town I guess. We would have mercy on them and try to divert attention from the map at that point.

In a previous post I said something about the lack of ethnic restaurants that we take for granted in the US well that is probably because there are no minorities or ethnic groups that I can see other than old German immigrants in the lake district. For a glass of water in a restaurant we have decided the easiest thing to do is to just bring in our water bottles for water with a meal. The glass of water concept is just too foreign.  Our little international steri pen has been working well for when we think we need to sterilize water which is not very often. Meat in the markets and elsewhere is often not refrigerated and so nicely aged I guess. Many Americans would probably be horrified by this but the animals are probably raised and slaughtered in much more sanitary conditions than feed lots or giant slaughter houses.  Even more natural and local than that is the custom of cracking horse flys in half and squirting the juice in your mouth.  Some American cyclists saw a guide do this. He called it Meil or honey.

I have a couple of other things I wanted to comment on but can’t think of any way to Segway into them. One of them is the kind of hokey tourism you see down here occasionally like signs for “canopy”  well there is no tree canopy ecosystem here to speak of like say in Costa Rica but what it means here is they have rigged up a zip line. The quality of the gear they use is probably not at attorney proof American standards.  

The trees in Patagonia are mostly deciduous and those while often big are nowhere near the size of the big conifers in the Pacific Northwest.  The climate seems very similar so I am surprized they do not try to grow something like Douglas fir here.  When I come across little plantations of what look like Scotch pine my senses tell me I am in the mountains only I have been all along the trip.  Related to ropes and climbing in Cochrane we saw a couple with serious glacier travel gear like small diameter ropes and ice axes. That made me think how few people we have seen that looked like serious mountaineers.  Mostly what we see are back packers most of whom are just hitch hiking around with maybe an occasional hike probably done without a pack.

We are getting a fair amount of comments that our loads are the lightest that any of the other cyclists have seen. That appears to be true only we do not feel like we are sacrificing much. I do have about six pounds of electronic gear including the netbook.  I think one of the big items is that a lot of the folks are carrying much bigger tents and pads. Ours can fit inside our panniers instead of in bags across the rear panniers like most of the tourers have. So far we are happy with our gear and choices although I did forget a chain tool which has me a bit worried and I should have looked for one sooner.

Tortel is an interesting town in that it is at the mouth of the Baker where it meets the sea. The Baker here is about the size of the Columbia in Portland.  The whole town is connected by wooden walkways and the houses are all on posts because the area is all granite. It takes more than half an hour to walk from where you can park to the main plaza with many flights of stairs. It was good to get a work out in after the day’s bike tour.  I counted five hundred stairs from where the cars park to the library with the internet and one of the main supermarkets. There is a mountain behind the town with a big glacier even though it can’t be much more than three thousand feet tall. We rented a nice cabin with a kitchen and wood stove for about eighty dollars. It sleeps five and a Swiss cycling couple we had camped with before showed up and shared the cost. They were riding with an Australian hippy they met that day who also shared the cost. We had a nice communal dinner and got to hear stories of travels around the world. The Australian is headed off to India in a couple of weeks to bike tour there. I did not ask about how he financed the whole deal.

The library internet browsers in Tortel crashed whenever you pasted anything so this post will have to wait.

The other day I was thinking Patagonia would be a good place to find the Lord because when the weather is clear you want to praise one and when the weather is bad you want to start praying for forgiveness.  At dinner we commented on how many times we had said something was the most beautiful view we had ever seen.

Tranquilo continued then to Cochrane

We elected to stay in a hospedajae (hotel) in the event that it might rain and to dry things out. We are at about the cheapest room in town which is about thirty dollars. When we went around town looking for a room they ask if we need a matrimonio room which to them is one and the same meaning something larger than single beds.  The proprietor of the inn also has a supermarket up front that has good produce.  You walk through her kitchen to get to the rooms. Yesterday at one point there were six people in the supermarket  and there was a serious traffic jam.

One interesting custom at the restaurants is that you can’t split a meal. The waitress will just look at you in a befuddled way. This is not just because Laurie can’t speak the language well enough either. A couple next to us from Santiago said that it is not the custom and you are just trying to buck the system by asking. In our case we just wanted to split the large portion of meat we were seeing on other people’s plates. We get the impression that foreigners often get charged different rates than the locals. The place we stopped at outside of Bahia Murta the waitress if you could call her that charged the Kansas couple for every cup of tea they had and they had several. But today in Bertrand Laurie ordered one tea and we both had hot water and they charged us for only one. They never expect a tip even in restaurants and it is a good thing as they serve you and forget you pretty much. I am not sure which I like more, that or in the US where they come to your table constantly to serve you water trying too hard for a tip.  Speaking of water even though most of the towns have great water coming from some mountain fed stream when you buy a meal they don’t serve it - ever. If you ask for it they try to sell you bottled water either with or without gas or hot water.   Laurie has learned how to ask for a glass of water which doesn’t seem to be problem. 

On the way out of Tranquilo we stopped for a very good bowl of soup which was basically vegetable beef but homemade. It is called carbonada locally which in this case was served with extra special deep fried pan (white rolls). That cost us about eight dollars apiece which is a common price that seems to get charged for meals for foreigners.  They don’t call it high season for nothing. Also it dawned on me the other day that you almost never see any sort of ethnic choice when it comes to restaurants like Mexican or Chinese.  In some of the bigger towns you may see a Chinese restaurant but they are very very rare even in Santiago.

You can cook up your own meals for much cheaper and produce is very reasonably priced. Often the produce looks bad compared to what you see in US supermarkets because typically it is not refrigerated or sprayed with water but surprisingly to us and other cyclists it often tastes better than the US produce.  That may have something to do with our rather constant hungry state from the amount of calories we are burning.

The afternoon touring of fifty k south from Tranquilo around the lake was one of the best we have had. There were beautiful mountains all around the lake with the mountains to the west nearest us having huge glaciers often from the edge of the ice field. The lake, like a lot of glacier fed lakes looks like some fake green blue color like a cheap touristy post card. Luckily it was a clear day and the dirt roads were good. We had heard that the riding from Tranquilo to Cochrane was difficult but that must be from the other direction with head winds.  Also we will be following the Rio Baker which is the outlet of the huge lake to Cochrane today so we are hoping the warning pertain to travel from the other direction.  The Rio Baker region is supposed to rival Torres del Paine. We ran into some kayak guide from Futtalafu who talked about the Rio Baker for whitewater.

We spent the night in an abandoned gravel pit with little or no garbage just outside of a very high end lodge complete with an activity director. The rooms there started at a hundred and sixty US but from the looks of it the cabins went for a lot more than that.  There was a hotel at a hot springs back in Puyuhuapi that went for four hundred a night. The hot springs on the other side of the lake near route 7 was twenty eight a person! Some of the attractions down here seem like they are priced for status appeal for wealthy South Americansso they can clarify their status when mentioning where they stayed and what activities they did. We have a better view here from the gravel pit than they do down at the Hacienda Tres Lagos although they have landscaping done by a professional landscape architect unlike our gravel pit. They however do not get to walk around naked around the grounds. We pulled in a bit late and have been seeing some of the best scenery of our lives so mostly we were just looking for some place that was conducive to snoring.The gravel pit appears to be sediment from a glacial moraine and is of wildly unsorted sizes with a large variety of rocks. I wish I knew more about geology as there are a lot of different types of rocks like granite of all colors some fine grained and some course, there is a fair amount of what looks like metamorphic rock and the tourist feature in the lake was marble.

For some reason there are more upscale places on this end of the lake in fact they are some of the most upscale ones we have seen but for some reason the next valley to the north that we thought was more stunning had just cheap sheep herders shacks. It is all about the marketing and development I guess like Pronghorn or Sunriver in Central Oregon.  It turns out if we would have grunted up one last hill and made it back down to Lago Bertrand in a couple of kilometres we could have had our choice of great camps with mountain views right on the lake. The only reason we did not do that is because the map showed three towns within a couple of kilometres so we thought it might be pay camping only if any.  The three towns amounted to three houses and they were just low budget herder houses.  Those people could care less really if you want to sleep out in a pasture.

When we made it to Bertrand on the Rio Baker where it exits the big lakes it was raining and the wind was howling from every direction. A Canadian river guide there said it had been that way for at least a couple days. We thought that was odd because we had had some real nice weather just relatively a short ways away the day before. The weather was so bad we thought it was a front or something and considered getting a room.  After a hot cup of tea we decided to push on and not far out of Bertrand the weather got quickly better including the wind.  As near as I can figure the weather in Bertrand was created because the winds were coming out of the northwest for a couple of days so they would have been blowing across the huge ice cap. Bertrand is at the south eastern end of the ice cap so it had its own weather system created from the cold most air off the glaciers as it collided with air that wasn’t.  When we looked back in that direction the weather still looked nasty.

The Rio Baker was big and that beautiful blue green color but the white water did not look all that great. They were taking people down it in sea kayaks. It kind of reminded me of the Hells Canyon of the Snake River or the Grand Canyon with mostly flat water punctuated with some big fast moving rapids with typically some easy route through them. There is a big controversy about an effort by the Hydro Asyencompany who wants to put a dam in on the Rio Baker.  You see bumper stickers and graffiti all over against the dam.  The company has a couple of billboards in the area explaining that the anti dam folks all come from  Santiago and they do not understand the locals with a picture of a grandma looking woman  or some very wholesome looking person.  Ironically the people they chose do not look like they are from here but rather from Santiago. Also the dam will not likely benefit many of the locals most of whom live out in the country where there is no way it would be cost effective to run power out to them.  The most likely customer if not some industrial concern would be to ship it across the pampas to the bigger cities in Argentina or similar.  Only a small percentage of the population lives in Patagonia Laurie says she read fiver per cent.  Carl Rove or the republican play makers must have been hired by Hydro Asyen to come up with that campaign.  The dam actually would seem to me to be in a good location about like damning the Missouri between Helena and Great Falls.  Running power lines to the population centers to the north in Chile would cost a fortune through all the mountains. By the way billboards and signs in general are very rare thankfully.

About ten k below Bertrand we got a taste of what we had heard was some difficult ridding. There was one big hill that was so steep it was difficult to push the bikes up even.  It was steep on both sides and big. At one point I got on the bike and put on the brakes without peddling as a test and the bike was sliding backwards down the gravel road.

One thing that is different here is that this sort of country in the US or Canada would be crawling with motor homes and campers.  Those are very rare here and the ones you do see look homemade or some sort of safari set up owned by eccentric Europeans.  A camper would actually be a nice way to see the area and would probably hold up to the roads ok.  Getting one down here would probably cost a fortune though. As usual there are mostly full buses still going back and forth from somewhere all day long. We will probably take buses to Punta Arenas or Ushuaia from Puerto Natales (Torres del Paine) to see the penguins we have been hearing people rave about. It won’t be too many days and we will come to the end of the Carratera Austral which is the end of the road in Chile but you can continue by ferry on a bike or on foot. We have been told that is a hundred dollars a person for the short ferry ride from O’Higgins across the lake.

The connection here in Cochrane is very slow so no way am I going to get any pictures off. Cochrane is a nice little town of maybe a thousand or two. The weather has cleared and the day is a beautiful summer day.

I can afford to be chatty because i can write to something for the blog on the laptop in camp which I am enjoying. So far the laptop has been holding up to the brutal shaking it is getting. I pack it with great care.

Chau

Villa Cerro Castillo part one and two

Well we got all our to do list items done in Coyhaique including purchasing a netbook.  It is a nice new pink one because that was the only one in town that had not already had its operating system loaded in Spanish. Other than the quirky Spanish keyboard it works great and we got all of Laurie’s books loaded on to my kindle using a wireless connection and the netbook.

 We are in Villa Cerro Castillo after a very windy ride from Coyhaique, half with a tail wind and the last half mostly uphill into the wind.  The mountains got a dusting of snow yesterday which made for good photo ops and helped with the motivation on the ride. The first look into the Rio Ibanez drainage near the end was jaw dropping. We had no idea.  The steep descent into Villa Cerro Castillo was a bit scary with the gusty winds blasting somewhat unpredictably. 

At the camp ground-refugio we elected to stay at in Villa Cerro Castillo there were a couple of guys who had hiked around the stunning  Mount Castillo nearby and said it was so windy up there that at times they were on their hands and knees.  Our camp mates here are from South Africa, Germany, England and Switzerland. The German guy can speak Spanish and English fluently. The four other campers have been bike touring in the area and have lots of interesting things to share about things to see in Patagonia and elsewhere around the world. The camp ground has hot showers, electricity and a cooking \ gathering cabin (refugio) for $6 a person with a front row view of the mountain.

The South African  camper here had been bike touring but sent his wife home with the bikes as his alloted time for the trip is about up.  He is now traveling around with a back pack on buses or hitch hiking which is fairly common.  There are a lot of mostly young people here traveling this way.  They seem to get rides fairly quickly which is a testament to the friendly generous spirit of the Chilean people.   The buses run everywhere even in rural areas.  One thing that we are seeing are groups of motorcycles that appear to be rented with a support truck that has at least one spare bike and tires etc.  The motorcycles look high quality,  go anywhere type bikes with extra sturdy metal panniers.  Unlike the US they have stock mufflers so are quiet.  Maybe at some point the Chileans will get with the modern world like the Americans and chop off the stock mufflers and make their bikes as loud as possible.

Speaking of noise on the road the Chileans often will honk and wave to cheer you on like you were in some sort of event.  The positive honking took a bit to get used to but we are starting to get in the spirit of things. The Swiss girl said that honking is illegal in Switzerland unless it is just for safety.

Conversation at the shelter last night turned to how late the Chileans frequently stay up partying or not which is often a problem for tired cyclists whether camping or staying at an Inn.  Laurie speculated that the late night schedule is part of the overall rhythm. You get up at ten, have a small breakfast of pan and tea then go to work until one. Then at 2pm you eat a big meal and take a nap for a couple of hours before returning to work until eight or so. Then you eat a late dinner, socialize until the wee hours and repeat.

From here south for quite a ways it is back to the ripio (REEpeeo) or gravel.  There should be some inspiring scenery to keep us motivated.  The locals say this is unusually cold and windy even for Patagonia. For point of reference the latitude here is about 46 degrees or roughly the same as southern Washington State.

Villa Cerro Castillo part two

We took off from Villa Cerro Castillo onto the now gravel route 7 into a yet again fierce head wind.  Hiking shoes we are finding better for gravel roads in the event you have to walk up a hill or get blown off your bike by a gust of wind.  The weather is still quite cold and further to the west near a big ice field the weather looks rainier.  We saw a ranch with a camping sign and decided to do a layover day in hopes that the weather will break. The ranch is apparently the last opportunity for a 120 k for a shelter other than a tent.  The family here has a few options including a nice room with a hot shower for $30.  The room however has no heat and instead if you need to warm up you go into the main house where like many houses in Patagonia the cast iron wood cook stove is going 24 hours a day.

Laurie originally was keen on a home stay situation to learn Spanish so we decided this would be a mini home stay opportunity as opposed to battling the winds for the privilege of camping in the rain near the ice fields to the west.  They asked if we wanted lunch and Laurie wanted to do that. It was lamb, potatoes, corn soup, cucumber salad and cherries for dessert. This was a two in the afternoon meal and the woman of the house’s sister and husband were here from Villa Cerro Castillo. Pretty much everything besides the corn in the soup was grown or raised on the farm or ranch.  I am not exactly sure what to call it. Probably livestock puts meat on the table so to speak. They have a greenhouse garden made from plastic sheeting and bamboo which grows wild in the area.  This type of greenhouse is very common and probably why the local “supermarkados” do not have a lot of produce.  I guess the rural Chileans are way ahead of the Americans when it comes to eating local and organic. There are lots of chickens running all around the yard.

Speaking of food the reason for the can opener is we have discovered that most of the little markets have small cans of Cholgas which are a large shellfish of some kind.  They come from the sea near here and are delicious.  I am sure there is some reason why we should not be enjoying them like they are full of mercury or are farmed or something but we are not going to ask questions about that.  They make a great snack with crackers or go good with the peppers in the market boiled with trigo de mote which is a very quick cooking grain a bit smaller than a kernel of barley. It also is easy to clean up a meal made with boiled grains which is a pretty big plus for camping. Laurie asked a couple of locals how they use it and it appears that it is primarily used in a desert like recipe with dried peaches which are also pretty common in the little markets.  We tried to eat the dried peaches without boiling them like prunes but quickly came to the conclusion that they were not intended to be eaten that way.

The house has no TV and electricity only at night unless otherwise needed.  The lack of TV is great as I am about equally unfond of TV here as I am of TV in the US.  We are particularly glad not to be exposed to all the election year posturing and news coverage especially the absurdly conservative republicans in their effort to appease the extreme right wing elements of their “base”.

The other day in Coyhaique getting my hair cut they had some show on like judge Judy. There seemed to be a repeated scenario where an attractive young woman had a domestic dispute with an absurdly dressed older woman in loud clothes and dorky glasses.  Even though the girl who always led off with a complaint looked to be making a reasonable and intelligent case for herself the judge would then explain how the dorky looking older woman was actually right for some reason.  The camera man would usually pan the young woman up and down from behind more than once apparently this was to help the TV audience ascertain the reasonableness of her arguments.  The message seemed to be that even if middle aged people are really embarrassinglyunfashionable they may deserve a certain amount of respect.  Then of course there is the other common Spanish TV where everyone is over the top emotional about something and talking real fast and loud to get there point across. The women, like with American TV have important essential attributes that do not necessarily have any correlation with acting ability. The only thing is that in real life the Chileans are rather morose looking and seldom smile or get upset or emotional about much of anything. It could be from the lack of sleep.

Laurie spent a great deal of time talking to the family in our mini home stay. I helped by asking questions for her to try and translate. She is getting better and I am learning a bit as I go but not with the diligence or effort of Laurie. In the evening they ran the generator and we charged up a few things like the camera batteries.  When we left in the morning we noticed that in the tree right outside our room there was the skinned head of a sheep complete with drying eye balls hung from a hook about our head level. We are not sure if that is some sort of custom or what and we forgot to ask. I am sure we will remember to ask about that with some local. Hopefully it is a good luck charm and they were being perfect hosts.

Electing to quit early for the weather to break turned out to be a good call. It did. The wind howled all night but by morning was relatively calm and clear.  We got to see more snow-capped mountains and scenery than if we had continued, not to mention having been wet and cold camping in the rain.  You would think we would be getting tired of the snow-capped peaks but no. Hopefully more pictures of that will not become too boring either. The dirt roads south of Villa Cerro Castillo about thirty kilometres were very good and not too hilly so we made good time. We are traveling up and down these immense classic glaciated valleys complete with hanging valley on the sides. We took some breaks including one to swim and lay in the sun a bit with yet another snow-capped peak in the background.We met one touring couple headed north from Ireland and the woman was Swiss. They had come here after touring in Australia on the east coast. We then ran into another touring couple headed south and they were from Kansas City of all places but originally from Iowa. They talked about some group ride in Iowa that has fifteen thousand people. Holy cow that is a big group ride.

The Swiss couple we kept running into were carrying this little Carratera Austral bike tour log by a German guy. It had kilometre by kilometre descriptions of what to expect. They were relying on it heavily but the recommendations for camping were total BS. It said there was no camping or water from Villa Cerro Castillo for 70 or 100 kilometers or something.  That must be bottled water and camping with toilets as we saw dozens of great free primitive camp sites with water and fantastic views in some cases. It is interesting in that that is the way the locals refer to camping as well.  As far as we can tell that means with a toilet of some kind or maybe agua caliente – a hot shower?  Anyway going by some mile by mile book with an odometer is not our idea of a way to travel. The Swiss couple was fun to be around and they spoke English well. The girl Marilli was very talkative. She also was a “professional” rower with a bit of a competitive streak on the bike and we did not want to be racing them down the Carratera Austral so the lay over afternoon gave them the lead. They were half our age.  I have a bit of a competitive streak that I don’t want to encourage on a trip like this.  We will probably run into them again and exchange stories. One other bit of camping news is that the big horse flies have packed it up for the season? There were no bugs of any kind at today’s camp.

It started raining lightly in the middle of the night and we took our time getting going hoping the rain would dissipate after it warmed up a bit but no such luck. After a morning ride in nonstop rain we made it to the first inn with restaurant in a 100 k or so in Puerto Murta and had a hot meal with the couple from Kansas who were soaking wet. The food was good but the owners were unfriendly from the get go. Apparently cold wet cycling tourists were not the type of clientele they had in mind.  It was still raining when we decided to press on to Puerto Rio Tranquilo the main city of the region with a population of a few hundred at the most.  The rain stopped shortly after we left the restaurant and there were some nice views of the giant lake General Carrera which must be about a hundred miles long and the color of the Caribbean in Bonaire from the glacial run off. There is no wi fi in the town but a couple of places have Internet. There are a couple of other guys here from BC cycling and they are in a bad mood about riding in the rain as well. The sun is out now and the lake is beautiful. Apparently there is some marble formation sticking out of the lake that is quite the tourist attraction. You have to pay to be taken out to see it in a boat. That is a must do thing for the couple from Kansas so I suppose we better check it out. The other thing to do is to go up about forty k to the Campo De HieloNorte Ice field which is one of the biggest in the world someone said.

That is it for now. I was hoping to post some pictures but with the limited Internet situation that is probably not going to happen.

By the way here is some bike touring trivia. The couple from Kansas has been having a heck of a time finding either 700 c tubes or 26 inch tubes with presta valves even in Bariloche they could not find those items. So besides 26 inch being a safer bet than 700 c even better is twenty six inch with schrader valves like on your car. 

Here are some more pictures to look at be sure and double view the locations in the map Hopefully the link works. It is a little hard to trouble shot this stuff from an internet cafe set up in spanish,

Tom