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.
