San Martin de Los Andes to Panguipulli

Laurie and I are having a little hard time figuring out the Argentinian national parks. On the way out of San Martin de Los Andes in the national park they had a moto cross course, an Indian reservation, a military area, properties for sale, private residences, restaurants and inns, and were doing some old growth logging. Also in the national parks there are relatively few government campgrounds or day use areas. We haven’t taken the time to ask any government officials what exactly a national park status means besides a green area on a map but might if our Spanish was better.

Speaking of multiple use national parks on the way out of San Martin we were seeing a mountain bike downhill trail that looked similar in character to the better freeride trails in Bend like Whoops and Tiddly Winks.  They appear to have done a lot of trail building from when I was here last. I remember now running into an American in Santiago headed down to do a couple of races one of which was in San Martin de Los Andes.

On the way over from San Martin to the Chilean border we encountered something we have seen many times and that is where various road signs have conflicting or erroneous numbers for distances.  It is not uncommon to find signs where the distances disagree by ten kilometres often in close proximity.  Laurie recollects that the engineer couple from Kansas who were traveling with a odometer and were very numbers oriented, that they said something like “all the roads sign distances in Argentina are wrong”.  Either the people making the signs or reporting the numbers, do not know how to do basic math or do not care.  You sort of take it for granted that most people would be able to do basic math on this level but in San Martin we showed a policeman a map to ask the way out of town and it became apparent like we have seen over and over again that he did not know how to read a map or when we pointed to the town we wanted to go to he could not read the name of it. So then you politely draw attention away from the map and try to pronounce the name in a way that will be close enough to the way they know it to ring a bell. That got us to thinking we haven’t seen very many “escuelas” – schools like high schools except for catholic ones and then only rarely boys of high school age in Argentina. I am not saying just sayin it may be a possibility that….. A couple of days later in the Chilean town of Panguipulli we were seeing more boys of high school age that looked like students. I remember now seeing high school boys in other towns in Chile earlier in the trip. In Argentina they must go to school in secret underground bunkers either that or we just happened never to see the high schools.

At the Argentinian Chilean “frontier” we ran into a touring cyclist from Germany named Barbara. We rode with her after the mandatory ferry ride into Chile and then found a nice place to free camp on the Rio Fuy. Barbara was from Bavaria. When I asked her if she could yodel or play the accordion as a joke she said very seriously that they do that in southern Bavaria not northern Bavaria where she was from.  She turned out to be a doctor and had spent a few years as an orthopaedic surgeon and some years as an emergency room doctor in the Alps.  She didn’t like being an orthopaedic surgeon because all the docs were arrogant and didn’t like emergency room work because of the crazy hours.  She is going to do a year of anaesthesiology in order to be a doc on a helicopter or something like that.

During the strike in the Aisen region that we missed Barbara was in Coyhaique for a week visiting friends when she left there was little or no food to be had in town from the road blocks. The upside was that out on the road there wasn’t much traffic which is especially good on gravel to limit the dust and allow you to seek out the smooth parts whichever side of the road that might be.

Barbara was like us that she would rather primitive camp than stay in pay campgrounds or hostels.  She had gone for a couple of weeks without having to pay for camping. Before paying for camping she would ask to camp in peoples yards and they would often take her in being a single woman.

That was made easier In part because of a medical internship in Santiago so she could speak fluent Spanish.  Barbara had traveling for cheap wired. For instance when we got to the ferry she was very focused on trying to find a pickup to put her bike in as then she would not get charged the five dollars for the bike. I was trying to decide if she was a really savy traveller or maybe just obsessively frugal or both. 

We were hoping to ride with her a bit but she was slower having to carry everything herself, so every hill we would have to wait. It is surprisingly difficult to find people who travel in the same way as there are so many little variables that are different like people’s budgets, their speed, their willingness to cross a fence to camp, how often or if they took breaks, how often they were willing to stop for scenery, what constitutes scenery to stop for, do they break camp as soon as they get up, is their itinerary determined by a guide book and an odometer or wine and strudel signs, are there tight time constraints, is a hot shower every day a must and so on.

Sometimes bike touring you feel like you are just a pedal powered food processor that can also set up and break camp.  Setting up or breaking camp takes us about an hour.  The first thought is that this is just meaningless drudgery and just a waste of a life. But think about this, if you have a home you have to have a job to pay for the mortgage or at least most people do. At work I would think that most people have some repetitive task they do every day.  That repetitive task may have taken years of training to learn how to do but once it becomes second nature it is just a program you run all the same.  How about all the people in the world that have totally repetitive jobs almost the entire day? How about that commute to work where you are not supposed to be talking on a cell phone or texting?

For cyclists reading this blog the gravel from San Martin de Los Andes to the pass on the Chilean side is pretty bad ripio with a fairly big climb out of town.  There were not too many views of the lake but there were some impressive stands of Beach trees one of which we camped in after hopping a gate. The ripio in Chile to the ferry is good but after the ferry it is not so good and there is a surprising amount of traffic given that the road ends at the ferry.  It is also fairly touristy along the Rio Fuy.  The pavement is good around Lago Panguipulli with a shoulder even. The scenery on this segment is segment is ok with the highlights being the volcano Choshuenco and the Rio Fuy.  The Rio Fuy has what a tourist told us is one of the biggest waterfalls in Chile. It is a straight drop of about two hundred a fifty feet but is on private land so you have to pay a small fee to walk to the overlook. 

The Rio Fuy looked like excellent kayaking from what I could see. The tourist information guy in Panguipulli had a poster up of a South American championship whitewater slalom held there. He was a kayaker and said the Rio Fuy had a very intense class four section that we saw part of.  The rapid I saw from the bridge looked like one of the best I had ever seen for kayaking.  It looked to be running about three or four thousand cfs not near the volume of the Futa where it is so big you deal with features within features. Oddly there was more traffic up on the Rio Fuy than there was going around the lake on the pavement.  The volcano and much of Argentina that we road through would be more scenic in the spring with more snow in the mountains.

We really like Panguipulli mostly because the tourist influence is pretty minimal and it is so quiet compared to the towns in Argentina.  I only saw and heard one loud car! At sunset the town becomes quitter instead of louder. I was beginning to think the tired hung over look was genetic. Panguipulli appears to have a disproportionate number of young people and young families. This is partly due to the regional high school being right off the plaza.  Panguipulli really represents what we most like about Chilean culture in that the people are generally calm, honest, amicable, modest and peaceful. The town is in the heart of the Lake District with lots of fresh local produce. The countryside is green rolling farm land and with the volcanos to the east it very much reminds us of Oregon and the Willamette Valley only like everything here “on steroids”.   On a layover day here I did a little ride to the south shore of the lake where you look across the lake with a big island surrounded alternately rolling green pastures or woods with the huge snow covered active volcan Villarica in the background.  Even without the camera that should be an easy image to remember.

When making a phone call from a call internet store an American looking couple spotted us and came in to see where we were from.  The man knew of Bend from having skied there with the US ski team.   The couple had moved here to buy a farm. The man who we didn’t get his name had ski raced in Bariloche so knew of the Lake District and Panguipulli. Bariloche is no place to farm though being more like Bend than Salem.



The camera fell on the rocks at the falls yesterday and died so that may be the end of the photos for a while. I have one more batch to upload. The electronics that we brought on this trip that we have needed to replace for one reason or another like a digital translator, kindle and the GPS camera are very hard to replace in all but the biggest cities.

Today we decided to go somewhere totally different and changed the return plane ticket around so we are now going to Columbia for a month.  I ran into a couple from the US who rode their bikes all the way down here and they said that Columbia was their favourite place to tour by far. Also we have some friends in Bend who spend a lot of time sailing in the Caribbean on their own boat and they always have a lot of good things to say about Columbia.  Fall is on the way here and this should fuel the touring flame but maybe we will just go sit on a beach for a while. Barbara was taking a bus to Bolivia and the Swiss couple we toured with really liked the stark desert scenery there. But there is also stark poverty and it is high altitude.  I think the Germans and Swiss had not experienced deserts but we have and Colombia sounds more appealing to us.

Last batch of pictures before our camera died.

Bariloche to San Martin de Los Andes

We were told by a bike shop guy that the bike tour between Bariloche and San Martin de Los Andes was one of the most popular in Argentina. Well it was good alright but we did not see any other touring cyclists which is probably due to it being more of the fall shoulder season.  Most of the ride is off of route 40 so not as much traffic especially once you leave route 231 and head north on 234. We had good weather on the ride up 231 around Lago Nahuelhuai including no wind which we heard could be a big problem. Lago Nahuelhuai is yet another huge natural lake at almost a hundred kilometres long. At the east end of the lake which is more arid and treeless we were surprised to find a number of health food stores at the small town of Dina Huapi.  After picking up some fruit and vegetables we stopped in a fast food place of sorts for quick lunch. They were busy packaging up an order of about thirty lunches to go for maybe some construction workers. This lunch included a scoop of vegetables like potatoes and beets and a slab of steak that was about four by six inches and about an inch and a half thick.  That was a bit more “protein” than we had in mind plus a meal like that takes energy to digest so not so good for a long ride. We opted for a couple of small empanadas.

At the west end of the lake you come to the town of Villa La Angostura.  It would seem high end even by American standards plus it does not seem to have the low end of Bariloche with all the noisy smokey cars and trucks. The big places on the lake here have big boats only like pretty much all of Patagonia you hardly ever see anyone out in a boat of any size on a lake. Sea kayaking these big lakes would be a great way to do an extended vacation as many of these lakes have mountains all around and hardly get used.  Treking in Patagonia is not so great as the trails are often very poorly made and often the few there are get lots of use. In a sea kayak you could get to some remote places with only the wind being an issue you would have to work around. Another good option would be a small sailboat or possibly a sea kayak with a sail.

Back to bike touring…..We free camped up stream from a pay campground on Lago Nahuelhuai a bit before Villa La Angostura.  It was a decent camp except for there was about two inches of ash all over just about everything.  We had heard from other cyclists about the ash from nearby Volcan Puyehue that even though it had erupted the previous June the ash was still a problem. Villa La Angostura had put a great deal of effort into cleaning up after it you could tell.

The bike shop guy in Bariloche had recommended a couple of places to camp the following day on Lago Correntoso and Lago Traful but they were too short of a ride plus they were heavily impacted by the ash which had destroyed the first one.  We keept going but it got late and we were just trying to find any old place that did not have a lot of ash which was very difficult as the volcano was just a short distance west of here.  We ended up basically camping beside the road under a beach tree which at least had dropped enough leaves to cover the ash a bit.

The next day there were a couple of excellent free camping spots on Lago Villarino and sister lake Lago Falkner. The ash was starting to thin out this far north of the volcano and these were pretty lakes. There is about 35 kilometers of ripio on 234 but they are in the process of paving it so that will be a heck of a bike tour when they finish that. The pavement started back up at Lago Falkner and it was an easy scenic cruse into San Martin de Los Andes for the most part. This area and the area around Bariloche would probably be prettier in the spring with more snow still in the mountains but if it is anything like the Pacific Northwest that same evaporating snow would make it more consistently cloudy as well.

We stopped to take a break just shy of San Martin de los Andes on a little stream but the place was so nice and private we decided to free camp there even though it was only about three in the afternoon.  We sleep the best when primitive camping out of often noisy organized campgrounds or often noisy hostels. We have been to San Martin de los Andes before and even though it is a charming little tourist town we are mostly looking forward to the tour back into Chile on route 48 that we have heard so many good things about.

Shortly before pulling off to take a break and then deciding to camp we came upon some cars parked on either side of the highway. At first I assumed maybe it was some people looking at wildlife. It turned out to be wildlife of a different sort. It was young guys drag racing. Just as we pulled up they lined up two cars and had a guy in the middle wave his arms to start them off. They went off in the straightaway in the direction of a blind wooded corner for about a quarter mile and appeared to be hitting speeds of about a hundred miles an hour. What was a little more disturbing is we rode up the road after they took off and when we were about halfway up their drag strip they turned around and came back at us. Needless to say we pulled off the road. Not long after that when we were taking our break they quit and we did not think anything more of it. That is until about nine thirty when what sounded like quite a few more joined the fun and drag raced up and down the valley until about three thirty in the morning. Laurie slept through most of it and I slept some. The whole valley is in the national park with cows and horses that are not fenced in and can cross the road! Sounds like a great place to race cars in the middle of the night to me. Boys will be boys some probably not for long though.  Laurie mentioned that the Lonely Planet guide book said something about San Martin as being a “rowdy” town.

In the whole time Laurie and I have been in Argentina and Chile we have never seen anyone pulled over for what appeared to be a traffic violation.  It is also obvious that many people do not drive anywhere near the posted speed limits. The scene here was like out of some James Dean movie in the fifties. At the military check point at the east end of the lake near Bariloche there were about a dozen totalled cars in a lot presumably waiting to be towed off. In case you haven’t gathered I am not too shy about making generalizations and I would have to say that Argentina definitely fits the car culture description.  Many towns including touristy ones like El Calafate have race tracks. At one point near there we saw a car carrying semi-truck that had a load of what looked like mini coopers that were used in some sort of racing show.  Many of the towns like Trevilin had motocross venues just out of town. In El Bolson the owner of the fruit and vegetable market had a wall full of large motocross trophies.  Trevilin is known for its Welch tea houses and El Bolson for its magic naturalness. Well I think the locals capitalize on the rustic mountain lodge look for the tourists but they are not really into the quiet mountain experience themselves. In many of the towns like the above mentioned and including Bariloche there are dirt bikes running around town that I believe in the US would not be street legal but I could not tell you why.  In the US most places where they went to the trouble of building a rustic looking lodge it would probably be in a quiet setting. I am going to have to re work some of my mental associations.  Hopefully my generalization about Chileans not being such motor heads will hold up and we will be there soon.  That said Bend has its fair share of motorheads but it would be unfair to jump to the conclusion that everyone in Bend is a motorhead because you had been assaulted by them somewhere. Probably the deal here is that like everything else it is so much less regulated so it is more noticeable. San Martin is much quieter than most other towns like El Bolson or Bariloche. It is also a pretty active town with a ski area and mountain biking. They even have a multi sport race like the Pole Peddle Paddle in Bend only they have a real lake to do the paddle portion.  The big thing to do here for tourists and locals alike is to walk, jog or ride your bike out the highway we came in on which has a view of the lake.  We noticed that when we were here before. It is a little sad that the big outdoor thing to do is walk on a highway though.  In most towns the people doing the activities are the international tourists or south American tourists from the big cities. Here the locals are pretty active. I have checked on the mountain biking before and it pales in comparison to Bend. We are going to buy a few supplies and hit the road to the Chilean border. It is ripio but it should be a low traffic road and i would think that there wouldn't be drag racing on dirt roads.

Bariloche Part II Backpacking

After a couple of rainy days of chocoloading in Bariloche the weather turned fair and we were ready to not be in a hostel.  In spite of the fact that we heard good reports about the backpacking nearby we had to work hard to resist the urge to peddle out of town.  It is becoming pretty clear to me that I have a tourist town allergy.  Although  it was not the remote wilderness experience we were both glad we did the mini backpack.  The most popular local option is to take a bus to the base of the ski area where most hikers take off for a couple of backcountry huts or “refugios”.   Refugio Frey is about a four hour hike in on a well-used trail unless you take the gondola up in which case you have a four hour scramble across a boulder field marked by painted dots. We opted for the gondola ride up partly to see the ski area. That turned out to be a good call as the scenery was the best you could buy for sure.  The Santa disguise worked for the substantial senior discount so the ride cost us about $14 a piece. They have a nice refugio (hotel) at the top of the gondola that I will have to admit would have been a nice place to hang out even if there were a lot of tourists wandering around taking pictures. When we first got to the top it was in a cloud and it was a good thing it cleared up right away or the route finding would have been real sketchy not to mention the views would have been only of naked ski hill.  The ski terrain looked very good with lots of steep expert runs, full of natural jumps and rock outcrops. If I were an avid enough skier to want to fly south to winter in the summer this would be something to experience with the views and different culture. assuming they have good snow.

Originally we planned on going to a couple of huts but it was hard to imagine better scenery than that first days hike to the Frey hut.  You could stay in the hut with or without food or camp outside.  The full meal deal with lodging was only about $50 but our cheap genes are so dominant we packed in our own tent and food with the pannier adaptors.  Camping with a couple dozen other people is not what I usually associate with backpacking but I am starting to let go of that programing in order to experience the huts with the international tourists. Frey is also a climbing destination with well-known climbing starting a short hike from the hut. The granite did seem appealing for that being grippy for the shoes but oddly had a slightly polished feel to be easy on the hands.  We had to do a lot of low fifth class climbing (you have to use your hands) to get to the hut from the ski area. The tenters could use a portion of the hut to cook and hang out so we got to meet some of the other campers which followed the typical Patagonia mix of international origins. It was interesting that at the hostel in town Laurie talked to a few Israeli girls who hardly looked old enough to be traveling on their own who had gone off to Pucon and did the volcano hike there but decided to return to Bariloche mostly because it had better ice cream and chocolate.

Satisfied with our little backpack and the stellar views we hiked out the next morning on the trail most people use to hike in.  We had an hour to kill waiting for the bus so we had a beer at the outdoor restaurant while listening to real Bavarian accordion music. We decided we need to get some of that music to listen to in the car for skiing back home in order to get in the proper mood. How can you not be in a good mood listening to that? Even the old Argentinean ladies waiting in line for their hamburgers were doing little dances to it.

Back in town there were three new bike tourists at the hostel one of which was from Bend! This turned out to be the guy from Bend we had been hearing about.  He turned out to be not exactly a typical Bend resident as he was originally from Istanbul Turkey and he runs some sort of import export business out of Santiago. Also he was not exactly the typical bike tourist either in that he had a passion for telemark skiing and spent a lot of time down here bike touring with skis. His favourite experiences were paying local Mapuche Indians to take him into snow-capped volcanos and then having them come pick him up in a few days. He said they were willing to do it for cheap like ten or fifteen dollars but he paid them more like twenty. His bike was something to see as he had old trap type bindings bolted to the top of his front rack where he could clamp his ski boots into for transport. I’ve seen everything now.

We are headed out of Dodge so gotta go but we are going to miss the completion of the giant fifteen foot tall chocolate Easter egg in the town square.

El Bolson to Bariloche

We stayed in a campground in El Bolson that like many campgrounds had horses and farm animals to keep the grounds trimmed.  Included in the five dollar per person price was wifi, nice clean hot showers, a kitchen and best of all a free washing machine.  (the washing machines seem to take a long time here for some reason. This one took an hour and a half but did a good job) The owner was also in the middle of building a huge hundred foot high zip line.  They also have a open air bar at the campground. Try combining that with a hundred foot high zip line in the United States where you could potentially hit a horse on the other end.  Insurance companies would laugh at you for trying to buy that level of protection from the American legal profession.  Currently there are about twenty people here. The owner said that in high season a month ago there were more like two hundred. One dreadlock couple here, he from Germany and she from Valiparaso Chile are making healthy whole grain empanadas to sell at the market by just walking around main street with a sign. Laurie helped out and we had a quite a few. They sold for about a dollar each.

There are also lots of hawks in the campground that the chickens chase away. It is interesting the number of large wild birds around in Argentina. Although some of the signs have bullet holes you almost never hear the sound of guns being fired for target practice or enjoyment.  The number of raptors, condors and other large insect eating ground birds makes me think that they don’t get shot at as they would be easy target practice. I think most of those birds would have long gone the way of the buffalo in America. Guys with guns in the states just could not help themselves with such easy targets.

The timing happened to be good for us to catch the big market in El Bolson which was mostly jewellery and woodwork.  Intricate macrame jewellery is commonly for sale in Patagonia as a handicraft art form. There was some good looking produce and not all the vendors were hippies.  I later wondered how many of the vendors actually made their own work. Laurie said she ran into a woman on a ferry that got by selling jewellery she bought cheap in other South American countries. El Bolson other than market day is not so dominated by hippies and even on market day is like other medium sized towns in Argentina in that it has lots of loud cars and barking dogs.  Loud cars and hippies is not something I would normally put together so I doubt El Bolson will make it all that far as an international hippy retirement community.  The official theme of the town is something like “magically natural”.  At night around eight thirty it is like there is a magically natural volume knob on the town that gets turned up about thirty or forty percent with cars, barking dogs, chain saws etc. Laurie joked that now is the time if you have anything with an engine to fire it up! We have encountered that elsewhere where even middle aged middle class adults will talk and laugh much louder about that time. Sometimes the laugh and the volume sound a bit forced.  A fake laugh is discernible no matter what language you don’t understand.

Some of the hippies by the way were smoking pot in the plaza around the market but we seldom see anything like the class of drug users you see in the US on meth. I am sure you have seen the posters of the physical effects on users of that.  You seldom see people who look like that here. Laurie can pick them out from her experience at work. People in South America do abuse alcohol which in case you forgot from your high school health class has some pretty nasty side effects as well but, those thankfully are socially acceptable or even glorified.

The 125 kilometer ride from El Bolson to Bariloche was nice enough, being all paved and with about half of it in a National Park. I do have to complain though that Nahuel Huapi Natanal Park was a bit underdeveloped. There was no fee to enter but there also was no tourist information at any point in the park. Apparently there is an office in Bariloche if you are coming in from the north.  Usually in the case of the US I would be complaining that the parks are over developed and over regulated. This one is so under developed that there are little or no pull out parking for views, day use picnic areas and only one pay campground presumably run by the park that you don’t know about until you are right on it. At one point we saw about seven cars pulled off the road and wondered what was going on. Maybe there was a bear only they don’t have bears. Well it was some families who pulled over and walked up the side of a hill to have a picnic lunch. Not surprisingly all the wide spots in the road were pooh outs with invasive feces.  The park needed to be a little more pooh active.  The park backs wealthy enclaves of Bariloche on the north end so maybe the thinking is if you want to be by a lake with a mountain view then you should buy a place. It is like the Palm Springs area with hardly any public lap pools. If you want a lap pool then buy a house with one and stop complaining! The other problem is that the road through the park is Route 40 which is the main north south route in central Patagonia. That meant there were lots of trucks and an astounding number of big double decker tour buses in route to the other touristy areas further south even though the high season is over. We did manage to find a place to camp just inside the park that appeared to be an old overgrown access road for a ranch near a stream. It was gated but for a bike tourist that is not too big of an obstacle. Many bike tourists we talked to would balk at that and would never cross a fence or a gate but Laurie and I are usually not too worried about it and it has not been a problem so far. We are pretty low impact and do not leave trash so it is hard to get too worried about it with say cow pooh around in a pasture.

Bariloche is very well known around the world if not so much by Americans.  I got to talking with an interesting bike shop guy who said it is the most expensive city in South America.  Besides the huge natural lake with mountains all around it is also well known for its skiing. He said that the skiing is so expensive that most of the locals can’t afford it.  He threw out some number like the average family spent $2,500 to $5,000 a week on skiing which doesn’t sound that far off what a US ski vacation would cost only the average person probably makes quite a bit more. He also said that in high season that there are roughly sixty thousand tourists to the one hundred and sixty thousand residents. We came in from the south end of town that we had never seen before and there were pretty large slums there that looked like worse living conditions than most normal towns we have been in. It always seems like the more supper wealthy there are the more poverty there is. 

Bariloche besides the natural beauty has lots of chocolate shops, breweries, fondue restaurants and of course high end clothing stores. Some of the chocolate shops were huge being the size of say a whole foods store in Bend at maybe hundred by a 100 x 150 feet.  In general though it seems to have gone downhill since we were here last. It has more of a big city feel and they are not doing a very good job of controlling the graffiti most of which is not very artistic.  The La Bolsa hostel where we are staying has a lot of character with extensive rustic woodwork. Our private room with bathroom with the ten percent biker discount is only about thirty five dollars. The woman who owns it assured us that it would be quite. We brought our stuff into the room and no sooner did I lay down to relax a bit when someone upstairs started playing very intense complex drums.  Laurie went to ask the owner about it and she said it was her son but he only practiced for a half hour a day. Actually he was very good and was headed off in a couple of days to music school in Buenos Aires.  He had this forehead though that stuck out in front about an inch more than normal making him look like an alien from a Hollywood movie where they attach all that stuff on their face to mold it.

American beer enthusiast will be glad to know that happy hour here starts at seven thirty but a real beer enthusiast might be disappointed to know they don’t open until then either.  We went to a brew pub and had a sampler of about ten beers they made.  They were all excellent even better than Deschutes Brewery offerings including the porter.

It is raining here today so I am going to keep up the patter.  Last night Laurie got to talking to two American guys that were here with the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS). They had just evacuated out of Coyhaique in Chile where the civil unrest in the Aisen Provence is getting really bad. We luckily missed all that. We did wonder why there were all these army guys walking around Coyhaique though. Thousands of locals are blocking the Carratera Austral to protest high gas prices and the fact that they do not have a good hospital with a trauma center. We have seen a dozen cyclists that were headed that way.  The Americans said that they locals did not have any animosity toward tourists though. Their beef was with the government in Santiago.

The two NOLS guys had been on some serious adventures. They had spent a month on an ice field and another month in sea kayaks.  On the ice field they covered a hundred and sixty kilometres and at one point were pinned down for a week with bad weather. They said there were only a few ways up onto the ice field that did not include technical climbing on either ice or bad rock.
The sea kayak trip they did they carried thirty days of food.  At the beginning of the trip it took twelve people to carry a kayak into the water!  It rained for thirty days but being in a kayak is not a bad activity in the rain. They had tales of dolphins, whales, sea lions and bio luminescent water. They also had tales of extensive salmon farms where in order to feed them they dredge the bottom of the ocean and then take everything and make it into pellets. Most of that gets shipped to the US but only before they die it pink because before that it is a sick white color.  How is that for cheerful environmental news?
At first I was jealous but then got to thinking about the kind of weather they had to deal with.  For a commercially guided sea kayak  trip we have been hearing prices in the neighbourhood of several thousand dollars per person a week. There is that kind of gear to buy hear but the NOLS  guys said you have to have it all checked out with the Chilean navy plus carry a uhf radio where you check in with them every day. That does not sound too impossible but it would take a serious commitment.
The NOLS guys also mentioned a famous granite climbing area that is a four hour hike in from the ski area that we are now thinking we should do. Even though I don’t climb much I like to visit climbing areas to experience the rock at a lower level.

By the way the LDS has a big sterile looking church here and rumor has it they are advancing through the region.  Forget about communism do not let Mit Romney get elected or they will be poised to take over the world!

Other than that we are hearing good things about the tour up to San Martin de los Andes so that is looking like the next leg rather than heading over to Buenos Aires from Bariloche to then do the coast of Uruguay which we also have heard good things about. Who knows if that will happen?

Here are some pictures from El Bolson to Bariloche.

Cholila to El Bolson all is well

After the very pleasant afternoon ride out of Cholila the next town of any size is Epuyen. We try not to be focused on towns as goals as we would rather primitive camp but it takes a bit of effort not to think that way when you are looking at a map and planning your route. In this case Epuyen was in a valley that as we rode up to it I thought it looked like someplace I would like to spend some time. We could have ridden more but now without having to any goals to check off like making it to the far south before it got too cold or trying to somewhat gauge our progress against other riders on the Carratara Austral, we are enjoying the freedom really leisurely touring. When you are heading south and the weather keeps getting colder and colder you become unconsciously uneasy about your mission. Now that we moved north about a season warmer and are continuing to head in this direction we are more comfortable with the mission whatever that is.

Anyway even though we could have pressed on we were looking down the valley into Epuyen that we knew nothing about previously and decided we wanted to go down to the lake to camp. The town and lake are a bit off the road so there is a little commitment. At the tourist information kiosk on the highway we heard some puppies crying and decided to see what their situation was. They were crossing the highway and were very frightened especially one yellow lab mix one that was shaking with anxiety.  We got them some water that they drank a lot of and tried to calm them down by petting them which helped a bit. We decided to take them into town and at least get them off the highway. Once into town we got them some food and after more petting they calmed down quite a bit. Being on our bikes we could not really help them much more but took them over to a school yard with some bones in hopes that someone would fall for them. They maybe had a lesson that some people can be a source of support and to seek them out.

From there we headed down to the lake and ended up in a camping place owned by a couple in their sixties from France who had lived in Argentina for most of their adult lives. They had spent many years as ski instructors in Bariloche.  On their farm by the lake they had apple, peach and walnut trees all of which happened to be in season.

The seasons here in Patagonia are quite a bit off what they are in the US. In the US peaches and blackberries are a mid-summer crop, at least they are in Hood River. It is now what would be about the middle of September in the US.  People still have lots of flowers blooming in there yards like roses and irises even.  The walnuts on the farm here were so good they almost tasted like pecans.  The owners did not have any problem with us helping ourselves to the peaches and apples. They had camping and a room inside the main house but we opted for the room off the barn where you had to supply your own sleeping bag and we could store our bikes. They had a new little puppy that was being raised as a country dog in the barn but the puppy decided it really liked the curling up to people in down sleeping bags. It went in and out of the barn at will but cried to get back up on the bed. In the morning we went for a canoe ride on the lake before leaving.

One thing you get used to here is that pretty much anything goes. If you want to rent out a room in a barn well that is your business. Houses are clearly not built by licensed tradesman of any sort.  If there is a light bulb socket right over the shower head you shower at your own risk. If the toilet is not attached to the floor then you just can’t lean over very far. If there is a wall heater that faces a cabinet in a corner that gets real hot then you probably better not hang clothes in front of it. I read where recently in my home town they were going to pass a law that food carts had to have a certain number of parking spaces and some sort of sewer drain. That seems laughably absurd compared to here where if you wanted to start a chainsaw store that sold hard liquor and toys next to a campground well you never know what might feed a family so go for it.

The road out of Epuyen was on route 40 which is the main north south road on the east side of the Andes. The traffic was a bit heavier than the day before. Laurie, after having been hit by a car two day ago was sticking to the side of the road like glue. We both much prefer touring without much traffic no matter what the scenery looks like. We followed the populated mountain valley into the next town of El Hoyo and decided to take a detour into Lago Puelo National Park on the way to El Bolson.  Lago Puelo has a view of Tres Picos that we admired from the south in Cholila. The town of La Puelo is very touristic with about a mile long strip of dining and logging right up to the border of the park. We decided to forgo that and hopefully camp inside the park. The camp inside the park after a short kilometre or two ride was disappointing in that it was huge and had no view of the lake or mountains.  We walked along the shore with all the no camping signs until we got to the river delta where the sign said there was no more law enforcement so we forded the shallow fork in the river and camped as stealthily as we could in the willows of the delta. We were glad to take the risk to have a view of the lake and Tres Picos that evening and the next morning. Luckily the weather was clear so camping without propping up the tent and hiding behind some driftwood worked out ok.

The next morning we had a nice short low traffic ride on pavement into El Bolson. We passed one dapper old guy dressed in sort of cowboy clothes and a neatly trimmed moustache several times as he stopped to tinker with his ancient Renault to keep it going.

Here are more pictures with captions

Futa to Cholila - Laurie gets hit by a car

After riding from Futa into the Los Alerces National Park the big news is Laurie was hit by a car.  She is okay but the back wheel is badly damaged. We had come out of the mountains and big lakes of the park to a broad valley filled with small ranches. I had just passed some pedestrian tourists who were on the side of the gravel road three abreast walking to the little market the other direction. The next thing I know is I hear something and turn around to see Laurie pinned under a small car. Although Laurie doesn’t remember much about the whole incident including the three tourists, I speculate based on the fact that the tourists were helping Laurie out in seconds after it happened,  that Laurie had moved out into the middle of the road to go around the tourists and was in the process of turning back in when hit. One of the German tourists said he had just commented that the driver was going way to fast and he wouldn’t want to ride a bike around here.  The driver was driving one of those cars that would maybe fetch fifty dollars in the US .  He left the car on because after a while it just quit. Before he left we had to push start the car to get it going. The guy did not seem to be the slightest bit concerned or nervous about what he had just done.    

The incident got me to thinking that it is probably very likely that the odds are high that many of the Argentinean junkers probably do not have good brakes.  Also the odds are good that there are a lot of drunk drivers because A:  alcohol is for sale in all the little markets.  B: Dinking a lot of wine and hard liquor is a BIG part of the culture. C: There doesn’t seem to be much law enforcement for driving violations.  Laurie said this morning that she has seen drivers in the cars from the vantage point of the bike that are drinking from large glass bottles. So I think it would be a little more than naïve to think that there are not a lot of drunk drivers around in cars that have bad brakes. One of the river guides in Futa said that maybe the reason for all the loud cars in Argentina is that they keep the junkers on the road because cars cost a fortune. He said that even a junker would cost upwards of three thousand dollars.

Most of the drivers here slow down for bikes and in general seem like safe drivers however maybe due to the lack of law enforcement the bad drivers are often more blatantly obvious like driving way to fast in town or on windy roads. Laurie has often commented on how divers in town often seem to be going many multiples of the posted speed limits, if there are any speed limits.  I am having second thoughts about doing much more touring in Argentina.

As long as the subject of highway safety is dominating the post we did learn that most of the little shrines on the side of the road are where someone died. However the bigger shrines are for a female saint Difunta Carren who travelled accros the pampas with a small child. She died of thirst but her child made it. So these shrines typically have lots of large empty plastic water bottles which I guess are little easier to appreciate if you know the story. Most of the small shrines are in places you would expect like blind corners tops of hills where passing would not be recommended but then there is the universal necessity to go as fast as your brain stem deems reasonable once you get behind the wheel of an automobile.

The school principal who owned the guest house where the tourists were staying took us into town to talk to the local bike shop guy and then drove us around until we found a place to stay. So I am not quite ready to condemn all Argentinians.

There is a mountain just outside of Cholila with rock towers that rivals Fitz Roy in appearance called Cerro Tres Pecos but for some reason is not on the map for tourists like Fitz Roy and Torres del Paine.

The next morning we made it over to the bike shop with Laurie riding on the back rack of my bike. When we arrived the guy was trueing the wheel much to are amazement.  I thought the wheel was way too bent to repair but they are probably better at repairing things down here than they are at ordering new parts on the internet like you would most definitely have done in this case in the US. We came back a couple times and he finally got it done to his satisfaction by noon. His charge was going to be about ten dollars US but we gave him twenty.

All in all we are feeling very fortunate that Laurie was not more badly hurt and the bike repairs were possible and cheap.

The tourists on the side of the road where Laurie was hit by the car included a couple from New Zealand now living in Thailand and two gay looking guys,  one from Alamenia (Germany) and the other Italian.  The only reason I keep bringing this sort of thing up is to point out what a variety of international travellers and residents you run into in Patagonia.

That afternoon we rode out of town on a road that turned out to be new pavement rather than ripio as shown on the map.  This turned out to be one of the better touring days of the trip with fine scenery, perfect partly cloudy weather and little traffic.  The landscape and vegetation reminded me a bit of the east side of sierras on 395 south of Bishop. The mountains were a little less dramatic looking that they would be if they were closer to the pacific only because they didn’t have the snow and glaciers that those mountains would. There were ponderosa plantations in the area that are not native and they seemed to be thriving.

I did end up kayaking a stretch of the Futaleufu on a beautiful day and it was BIG all right. It was still running higher than normal and was a handful. I managed to make it down without having to roll. I thought I was a fan of high volume whitewater but this was so big and fast that there were features within features forcing you to constantly react. Holding a line of direction was a constant challange being almost constantly batted about.

Esquel to Futa

On the morning we left Esquel there was yet another accident in town where at least one of the cars looked totalled like it was in a highway accident.  Esquel more than other towns we have been to in either Argentina or Chile seemed to have a dearth of stop signs, yield signs or traffic lights.  Generally everyone yields to the first one in the intersection and in some cases they did not slow down much to sort it out hence the accidents.  I was thankful to see that in one case the totalled car was one I had seen and heard around town that was particularly noisy.  YES! They should make video games for adults where you get to blow up loud cars and motor bikes in addition to all other sorts of common rude behaviour. 

The cars in Argentina are mostly European makes like Fiat, Renault and Volkswagen.  There are also Fords but they must be a made in Europe.  Many of the models you see are either very old or they had longer production runs of them than they did in the US. There are models of Renault that look like the ones seen in the US in the seventies but have all been laid to rest many years ago there. One car you see a lot of in Argentina is a Ford Falcon that looks very much like the ones made in the US in the sixties.  Those did not sell well in the US only because gas was practically free and why not have a living room couch on wheels that had a V8?

There was good pavement for the thirty kilometres out to Trevelin on the way to Futaleufu.  Trevelin is fairly small but in a beautiful farming valley settled many years ago by Welch immigrants.  It was a bit odd seeing all these pretty white girls around town that lived there and spoke Spanish.  At one time they grew wheat in the valley that won international competitions. They no longer grow wheat because the Argentinian government in the late forties decided that no wheat would be grown south of some town and that the people of Trevelin should breed cattle.  Good old boy government at its best I imagine.  You would be naïve to think that sort of thing does not happen in the US.

The pavement turns to relatively bad unsorted river cobble gravel after Trevelin on the way to Futa but we had been warned by many people so were mentally prepared.  We probably could have ridden to Futa in a day but Laurie was still recovering from a stomach bug so we pulled out at a refugio type campground on a river with hot showers in a central communal building.  There was a German family there with two boys ages 8 and 10 who were taking a year off to travel in the area on horseback.  When we pulled up the boys were out in a field playing polo with mallets and a ball they had made from scrounged materials. The family had six horses to travel around with. They were talking about places that they had ridden to that were several hundred kilometres away.   Mom and dad were a doctor and a nurse but we are not sure which was which. They home schooled the boys. The boys had long blond hair and we thought they were chicas at first.

We pushed on to Futa the next day in the rain that we hoped would have stopped by mid-day but didn’t .  At the border crossing on the Chilean side they examined our food bag for the first time at a border crossing. They also were searching many of the other vehicles, also a first. We never did hear why. This same border crossing would not let the German family through even though their horses had all their shots.  In case you are imagining stereotypical corrupt border guards they were all pretty friendly and nonchalant – just doing their job.  From the border the ten k to Futa there is good pavement which oddly ends there.

 Futaleufu  is a big whitewater and fishing destination.  A big whitewater festival was just finishing up when we pulled into town.  Futa is to kayaking as say the north shore of Oahu is to surfing.  It was unusually rainy and the river was up higher than it usually runs so much so that they were cancelling trips. It came down a bit and Laurie and I rafted one of the big but runnable sections. Still the guides had two safety catamarans in addition to a safety kayaker for only one paddle raft with eight people in it. That should give people with white water experience some idea of the risk as that sort of back up would be pretty much unheard of in the US.  We paddled around some of the features that are commonly run and they were huge.  I was hoping to kayak the same stretch today but the problem is the river is difficult enough that they will not just take anyone down in a kayak so you have to show them what you can do on less big water. Even then it is not cost effective for them to take just one person out as they still want to have the catarafts for safety. This is not something you would do kayaking typically even with people you didn’t know but these guys reputation are on the line.  The guide who owns the company we are working with, Chris Spelious,  has a reputation as big as the river in addition to being about six foot five.  He had just gotten back from a private trip with a very wealthy American who chartered a plane just for him at a cost of twelve thousand dollars to have Chris meet him in Argentina. This was for a sea kayak trip on a remote river trip in the pampas.

On the raft trip there was a couple from New York, a couple from Switzerland (also bike touring) one Israeli guy and another red haired American guy with a doughy look originally from Montana. He was traveling around central and south America.  One of young big armed safety raft guys with long hair and a beard was somehow also finishing up a degree in Math and Economics in Walla Walla.  The other two very cheerful safety guys were from Ireland. There was a fair amount of talk about the trip the day before where a couple of Russian guys insisted on being in the front of the raft and then put their paddles down and pulled out their cameras right before heading into one of the bigger rapids. Devon the long haired guide at the oars apologized for “losing it” with them.  

It was curious to see the rafters many of whom had little or no white water experience get upset about not running every rapid in the teeth. They were really focused on the numbers.  “Was that a class five?”  “Can I write my mother and tell her I did a class five?”  The guide kept trying to explain to them that if they flipped it would be very difficult to gather them all up with the water so high and fast but it did not seem to matter to these tourists as they were intent on marking off their big South American adventure checklist or they wanted their money back.  It was no surprize that some of them were headed off to Tourist del Payme and El Chargem as soon as possible to check those off their list.

Last night we ran short of cash. The place where we are staying in addition to the one and only bank do not take Visa. They only take MasterCard which up until now we have not needed. Think you can get by without a lot of cash and just a credit card, well not unless you stay at the more high end hotels and eat at the finer restaurants and in the less touristy areas those don’t exist. Back to the story…… The whitewater service called one of the hotels to have them act as an ATM.  So off I went  to see about the money and maybe renting a room from them. Even though I needed to tell Laurie about the deal  first, the guy insisted on handing me the cash because “I needed it” and that I didn’t have to show him the visa card until tomorrow.  The is the first time I have ever had a total stranger hand me a hundred and fifty dollars cash as a loan without any collateral.

 Most of the tourists used to come here from Chaiten but they had the volcano eruption there that destroyed a lot of the town so now much of the business comes in from Argentina. The problem is that it is very difficult to take rental cars across the border and Futa is only ten k over the border. The money situation here is also a bit jumbled up with the Argentinian currency needing to be exchanged.  Many places will take both.  I joked about stealing a chicken to get by and was told the penalty for that was five years in prison. In Argentina the tax man mentioned a couple of times that there was no penalty for not paying your taxes.  He knew as Americans we would be incredulous to hear that. Chris Spelious said he thought about opening a bank account in Argentina to help deal with the clients now coming in from there but was told by an Argentine that no one uses the banks there. The collapse of the peso is still very fresh in their minds. Word has it the wealthy were tipped off and they flew out of the country with cash.  That doesn’t sound too terribly different than the way the mortgage security meltdown was handled in the US.  The English woman we met living in Buenos Aires said that if you really want an education about Argentina ask the cab drivers as many of them are former professionals and successful business men who lost it all.

Laurie just came back from the supermarkedo of which there must be a at least a dozen in a town of about a thousand people and said there are no eggs anywhere. That is amazing as the chickens running around town must outnumber the people five to one.  Futa is very much like most of the towns where there is no zoning and no real big supermarket so the little grocery stores are all over town. You frequently have to shop them all to get what you want.  One has integral (whole grain) crackers but not integral cookies. One has good carrots but the tomatoes are terrible but the little house three doors down does have good tomatoes.  Let’s see the only thing left on the list is oatmeal and we forgot to look for it so we might have to go to all twelve stores again to see if anyone might have that.  Did I ever mention there is no peanut butter in Patagonia? What I wouldn’t give for a jar of that. What they have here is a caramel spread everywhere called Dulce de Leche. We draw the line at having that stuff every day or even at all for that matter. There is a whole grain bakery in a house here in town that Laurie says has big loaves of integral banana bread for cheap. The lady who runs it looks like a typical fifty year old Chilean woman not some hippy transplant.

That is enough blogging for today. It looks like the river has come down and the kayak trip with Chris is on for tomorrow plus it is supposed to be sunny and warm!

Puerto Natales to Esquel

If you know Argentina you know that we did not go from Puerto Natales to Esquel in two days by bicycle. We took buses for this stretch to go back north where the weather suits our clothes a bit better. Bike touring is not a good arctic activity in a windy climate we have decided. It seemed like the further south we went the windier and colder it got which is no surprise. This is one of the reasons we elected to do the Lake District last or latter and to go down Torres del Paine while it was still summer. It did not get necessarily any rainier the further south we went but the odds of strong winds did seem to increase and those two things typically go together. Cold wind and rain in a remote location for a cyclist is a bit unnerving and my survival instincts are front and center. Some of these areas there were no trees for shelter and the ranches were few and far between.  Higher risk adventure due to weather is not something I seek out, maybe it appeals to some who need the extra challenge. The elements can be battled with extra robust gear but that requires that you schlep it all around.

We have heard from other bloggers on the Carratera Austral that their blogging audience died off and people probably just got tired of vicarious bike touring.  I am going to keep writing as I like to write and maybe some cyclists coming down here will get something out of it.

We have figured out the ropes a bit with the getting the bikes on the buses. Typically there is no set fee and you pay cash to the driver. That means there is no formal policy and the price can change.  So the best bet is to show up with your bike but take all the panniers off so it doesn’t look so impossible.  Also taking the front wheel off makes it look more packable. The less you make the driver think he has to deal with bike the better. Usually there is no problem getting the bikes on the big modern touring buses. Most of the drivers do not seem to mind if you load it on the bus yourself. Maybe that way they are not responsible for any damage. The extra fee is usually only ten or twenty dollars per bike do it yourself or not. We have yet to have any damage.

When we got to the big terminal in Rio Gallegos there was a guy hanging out there from Portland Oregon who had been there for a few days waiting for his bike to show up. He flew into Buenos Aires and was told by the bus company that the bike would have to go truck freight. He should have shopped the different bus lines. Hopefully he will connect with his bike.

We pulled into Rio Gallegos about five and asked about a bus to Esquel quite a ways north in Argentina. There was a red eye one leaving at eight thirty. These red eye trips are better on buses than planes though as this one was modern with “cama” seats that recline quite a ways back, not all the way flat but you can sleep in them.  I had a few Ambien for special occasions like this only they showed two movies back to back until twelve pm, which is what I guess you do after you have dinner at nine thirty here. One of the movies was the Bucket List with Morgan Freman the late night one was a violent cop show with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. Fourteen murders commited by cops in that one. We got to relive each one. It was educational.

After getting the tickets in Rio Gallegos we had couple hours to kill ad decided to go into town to get some Argentinian cash and dinner.  Rio Gallegos is a fairly big costal town and appeared to maybe be fifty thousand or more. As we rode toward the center of town we asked this guy on his bike where the banks were. He told us to just follow him as he was in no hurry on his way to the gym.  It turns out all the ATMs were not working for us or anyone else apparently because it was payday. So it turns out this guy is the tax collector for the whole town and is well connected. Horacio the tax man took us over to a friend of his who owns a hotel and the hotel owner was nice enough to run the Visa card and get us some cash.  Horace then took us to a sandwich place. Being seven thirty we were way early for dinner but they had the Simpsons on TV while we waited for them to cook the chicken for the sandwiches.  The simpsons are very big in Chile and Argentina.  I had a chocolate head of Homer on a lolly pop stick yesterday that Laurie got me. The sandwiches were “complete” sandwiches so that meant in addition to ham and eggs on the sandwich we got a plate full of hot dogs wrapped in dough. We were hoping for a subway type sandwich where you could ask for vegetables and get it but in this case asking for vegetables got us one piece of lettuce on top. There may have been a tomato.  You learn to smile and enjoy what you get. They do  and it is not worth being upset about. Plus you have to admit that all that saturated fat does taste good and no need for chap stick for a day or two. Horace had been to Cape Cod and Martha 's Vineyard as part of a Rotary club trip. When we brought up the timing of the evening meal he thought it funny that Americans ate so early like seven thirty. "What do you do after that?"  Laughs all around.

Laurie went into a fairly big modern grocery store next to the bus stop to get some food for the long bus trip while i waited out side to watch the bikes.  At the check out they had one big line with multiple checkers like at the bank or airport in the US. When she got to the front of the line she waited to be motioned by a checker only several of them just sat there reading or fiddling with their phones. No one in the long line seemed to pay much attention to her. Finally she turned around to ask the woman behind her if she should go and the woman lost it and yelled at her to go. The women here seldom show much of any emotion and seemingly have a great deal of patience but maybe underneath they don't or are just joining the modern world.

It appears to be a requirement in all Argentinian cities that anyone under thirty has to drive a car without a muffler. About half of these hot rods are such a laugh as they would have to be worth fifty bucks tops at a junk yard. Esquel would be a nice little town if it weren’t for that.  I would say in Chile they are far less prevalent and would even go so far as to say that it is a reason to chose to travel in Chile over Argentina. 

There are joggers here in Esquel and not just one or two! We went out for a ride without the panniers and there were fitness riders.  The riders were all coming back on this nice paved low traffic road about two thirty in the afternoon. Laurie figured it out.  They were doing a bike ride on their siesta! A two or three hour siesta in the middle of the afternoon for a bike ride how cool is that?

On the bus ride up we sat next to an English woman from Buenos Aires who was a manager for a big drug company there.  She told us a few interesting things about Buenos Aires and Argentinian culture.  She said that Buenos Aires is a high stress city and that they have the highest percentage of psychologist visits of any town on the planet or so she claimed. They apparently talk about it pretty openly although one on one they do not typically talk about their problems. But in big groups then they do! 

Managing the drug company was a challenge for a number of reasons. One was that they do not do compromise well. This is apparently do to many years of political culture where you just do whatever the party in charge wants no ifs ands or buts.  They also do not have a word in Spanish for accountability. If she asked someone to do something that person would then fire off an email to a few people about the task so they would not be on the hook for it.  Also because they are used to a top down hierarchy if you do not have a title and are above them then nothing gets done you ask. So this woman had to have a title made for herself.  She was involved with quality control of some sort.  Also if you are a guy who can get things done at the last minute you are considered a valuable employee so they try to make situations happen where they can show this ability off. 

Then there is the kissing on the cheek thing which is very big in Santiago and Buenos Aires. She said that co-workers would keep track of whether or not you kissed them.  They would say I passed you in the hall twice already today and you haven’t kissed me yet what is up with that! Laurie just loves the kiss on the cheek thing.

Because of how much she made she was entitled to better insurance than most argentines and the office girls told her that on her plan she was entitled to one surgery of her choice every year.

That is it for this evening off to Trevilin and Futaleufu hopefully tomorrow on bikes!

After going out for a fitness ride today we have decided we much prefer cycling as tourists better. It is easier to go the distance if you are trying to get somewhere and then just keep going and going and going.

Tom