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.
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.
