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CHAPTER 3: On to Tierra Del Fuego
1st February 2004 – Argentina – Moreno Glacier Today we drove 70km from El Calafate to visit the Moreno Glacier. The road wound and twisted through the National Park and we had first little tempting glimpses of the river of snow & ice. The Moreno Glacier is quite special as it moves relatively fast, advancing several metres per day (it is one of the Earth’s few advancing ice fields). The result of this is that huge multi-storey building sized chunks of ice from the 60 metre high leading edge continually break off & come crashing down into Lago Argentina – a sight worth seeing as wave upon wave of sharp ice peaks advance in a phalanx down to the lake to die in spectacular fashion.
We parked the car and walked down the narrow approach paths to the viewing galleries. The whole experience was like approaching the front line on a battlefield – we could actually hear the action before we saw it. First there were the odd rifle shots as we heard the ice cracking. Occasionally these would merge into a staccato of machine gun fire as a fissure forms when the cracks all join up. Finally there was the heavy artillery when a huge chunk would break off & smash into the lake. The sounds served to heighten the anticipation of seeing the glacier in action.
We were not to be disappointed. The first impression was how amazingly blue the ice is – with every shade & hue of the colour represented. The waves of ice are formed from individual peaks, which in turn are stretched and holed creating an impression that you are looking up lots of crazy giant upturned snobby nostrils poking out into the sky for air. All in all it was quite a breathtaking sight to behold but a little strange to take it all in. We couldn’t really comprehend how massive the beast was as you can actually see it all - it just fits into the full peripheral of your vision and this has a diminishing effect on the scale. The viewing galleries contribute to this sensation as they are set well back placing you eye to eye with the glacier (you used to be able to walk up to it but there were a number of deaths from falling ice so they built the galleries at a safe distance). I think the first give away as to the size was when one of the huge chunks broke off – we saw it fall & splash before we heard it (light travelling faster than sound)! Then a tour boat approached and it was like a bathtub toy bobbing against a New York skyline of jagged ice. We spent a few hours at the galleries just staring at the Moreno and watching the spectacular ice-crashes, which occurred roughly every half hour. There were a lot of visitors (but not crowded) and everyone was strangely silent in awe and respect of this lethal majesty. It was a very peaceful and humbling encounter and as we left the park we both felt elated at having witnessed this vivid, dynamic piece of nature in action. 3rd to 8th February 2004 – Torres Del Paine National Park We left El Calafate and drove in a day, back into Chile, to Puerto Natales where we had a one-night stop over to buy supplies for a 5-day visit at the next highlight of the trip – the Torres Del Paine National Park. The park is 170km from Puerto Natales mostly on ‘Ripio’ dirt roads and there are limited and expensive resources there, so it was best to stock up in town.
The Torres Del Paine are huge clatter of mountains all gathered up in one area to form a fantastic arrangement of sharp peaks and rock formations. It looks like someone baked a 3-tier wedding cake from the finest rock ingredients and then dropped it from a great height onto the ground. As with the Moreno Glacier, scale is part of the equation as you can view the whole assembly as you approach it. Consider yourself as an ant looking at the dropped wedding cake and you’ll get the picture. There are layers of rock in every colour imaginable – sharp black granite, softer rocks in various hues of yellow & mustard, rusty reds (the jam in the wedding cake), bluey greys and a liberal icing of snow and ice with a huge slab to one side forming the Grey Glacier. In the debris fields surrounding this centrepiece there are lakes aplenty and the whole area is teeming with wildlife – guanacos, rheas, condors and Grey Patagonian Foxes. In short it is perhaps the finest piece of mountain scenery in the world that you could ever hope to lay your eyes on! Our expectations for Torres Del Paine were high and they have been not only met but surpassed.
Of course it is a hikers paradise with campsites and Refugios (shelters) dotted across the park. The main walk is called the ‘W’ and takes 3 – 4 days to complete. The ‘W’ is formed by the Grey Glacier on the left, The Valle de Frances in the centre and the walk up to the Mirador Las Torres on the right. We weren’t up for the whole walk (we didn’t have the right gear for the 2/3 day outings on the Grey & Valle de Frances sections) but we did manage to complete the walk up to the Mirador Las Torres (a 10 hour all-day effort to see a lake under the 2,800 metre ice-smoothed towers) and we got to see the views of the other parts from shorter walks around Lakes Nordenskjold, Pehoe & Grey. The weather has been astounding throughout. In fact it has been lovely all through our trip to date with sunny blue skied days – not too warm as to be oppressive and sunsets at 10-ish every evening, giving a wonderfully long day.
We camped at the main Torres site for the first 3 nights and then had 2 nights at Lake Pehoe at the other end of the park. The campsites were superb – very clean and well maintained with the most impressive backdrops possible – just throw your tent up anywhere, open the door & you have a view to die for! At Lake Pehoe we had the best camping site in the whole world, down by the waterside with the impressive array of the snow covered Paine Grande mountains and the massive 2500 metre Cuernos (Horns) formations towering across at the other side of the lake. Early morning at sun up produced whole series of ‘magic mountains mirrored in the lake’ photographs – suitable for any wall calendar!
Leaving the Torres Del Paine after our 5 nights, we both feel totally revitalised – full of life! We have exercised with our walks every day and eaten extremely well - canned tuna with pasta in red-wine sauces as the staple, accompanied by stream or lake cooled wine or beer. Oh and we have nice sun-tans (faces & arms only) into the bargain. It is simply one of the best places we’ve ever been and have spent hours debating the qualities of this park and how it compares with Yellowstone (our current number one best-ever-spot in the world). The jury is still out for now but it is a close contest! 12th February 2004 – Chile & Argentina – The End of the World! - Tierra Del Fuego & Ushuaia Well we have now reached the bottom or should I say the start of our trip! Ushuaia – the southernmost city in the world, sited on the shores of the Beagle Channel. To get here, we left Torres Del Paine and drove south to Punta Arenas. Just outside Puerto Natales we stopped the car at a ‘Difunta Correa’ (see the January log for the story behind these shrines) to take some photographs and Mags wanted to leave a bottle of water – the traditional offering for safe conduct on the road. There must have been several thousand plastic water bottles around the shrine – it was quite a fantastic and strange sight. Even stranger then, when we returned to the car to find the clock & the trip meter both reset to zero! The trip meter was showing around 450km since the last petrol fill and the clock had been set to the correct time. To change these you have to deliberately push in the trip meter reset – not something easily done by accident, as you have to put your hand through the steering wheel. Resetting the clock is even harder as you have to twist & hold the reset button to advance the hours & minutes. We still cannot explain how this happened. I checked the battery connections just to be sure they weren’t loose but everything was OK.
At Punto Arenas, we spent a day catching up on Website updates & e-mail from home, adjusting to the cooler climate and then set off to Tierra Del Fuego. We stopped en-route to visit the Penguin colony at Otway Sound where there are around 10,000 Magellan Penguins just finishing their breeding season. They are amazing little animals – they burrow nests in the grassland quite a distance from the sea (up to 750 metres away) where they lay their eggs and raise their young. The parents pair for life and return to the same burrow each year for breeding. They make trips out to sea for food for the chicks, walking on their stubby little legs down to the sea in gangs with all their mates. They looked like little nuns in wetsuits carrying a bag of spuds in each hand as they waddled down to the beach and all of us watching them wore smiles of amusement at their comedy performances. The whole area resembled a battlefield, with dugouts (the burrows), communication trenches (they always take the same routes to & from the sea wearing lots of little pathways everywhere) and assembly areas, where they could muster and plan their next raid out to sea. The noise was quite incredible – Magellan penguins bray like donkeys and it was another class comedy act watching them bob up and down on their feet to pump up pressure in their lungs ready for the next call. Then they slowly release the air with a sound like the pick-up wail of a demented bagpipe drone, slowly turning it from something slightly tuneful to a full-blown donkey bray. Magnify this by several thousand penguins and you can create quite a din!
We crossed the Magellan Straits in around 15 minutes on a small open deck ferry (similar to the one at Portaferry back home in N.Ireland) to enter Tierra Del Fuego – The Land of Fire and the island at the end of the world. Early explorers named it from the masses of smoke they observed rising from native Yamana Indian campfires. The locals too proved to be unfriendly and there were several deaths arising from the early contacts between European sailors & the Yamana, who were thought to be cannibals. Coupled with the dangerous navigation of the rock / island strewn stormy waters, the area gained a fearsome reputation amongst seafarers. The coasts are littered with shipwrecks and the few survivors who escaped told tales that only enhanced the areas reputation. For many years it became an area to be avoided and ships stayed well out to sea rounding Cape Horn.
As to our arrival, almost immediately we were dumped off our nice paved road onto a nasty bit of Ripio leading us on into this barren god-forsaken piece of land. For our first day we were beginning to wonder why we’d come here. It is a depressing place with nothing to please the eye. There are low rolling yellow/brown grasslands that merge with a horrid leaden sky to drain the soul & spirit. The sky yielded big splots of rain on our windscreen, rain that never came to anything – not wet enough to drive with your wipers on – just big splodges that blurred the view and depressed the scene even more. And the land is still on fire – literally, although they are no longer Yamana campfires. There are gas wells spotted across the landscape burning off massive exhaust flames, adding to the impression that we really have come to the end of the world, temporally as well as physically. It would make an excellent prison if the punishment to be meted included some sort of sensory deprivation (actually Ushuaia started life as a penal colony). As to wildlife we did spot one or 2 Guanacos, but here the sub-species all have sooty, blackened faces and all were sorry looking specimens.
We crossed from the Chilean side into Argentinean territory and things picked up a little when we were granted paved roads once more. It was getting too late to make Ushuaia, so we decided to stop for the night at Rio Grande, a fairly large city on the coast. Rio Grande is another oil/gas industry town with a bit of sheep farming thrown in and, according to our Lonely Planet Guide, it has tried to brighten up its image by claiming itself to be ‘the Garden City of Patagonia’. ‘Garden Cities’ are a bit like Greenland – so called to entice settlers to come & live there, when there isn’t really much attraction to the place. True there were lovely little flower beds up & down the streets, filled with Marigolds and other blooms, but the effect was lost against the backdrop of derelict and crumbling buildings - battered no doubt by the wicked looking steel grey South Atlantic. Still we did find a nice warm and friendly hotel to end our first day of travel here. For our evenings entertainment we sat in a restaurant eating Patagonian Lamb and watching an escaped guard dog dragging a huge chain up & down the street. He didn’t look like much of a guard dog - a big lollopy mongrel with his tongue hanging out and looking totally confused and bewildered at his newfound freedom. We spent the rest of the evening contemplating if this really is all there is to the end of the world? If so it deserves better – something to please the eye once again and a more fitting statement to mark the termination of the South American landmass.
Next morning we left Rio Grande, or we tried to and promptly got lost. We stopped to ask a parked up Police Patrol & they smiled & led us through the town to set us on the right road. On the way out we passed a huge statue of a Trout! Apparently another of Rio Grande’s saving graces is that it is surrounded by some of the best trout rivers in the world. We drove across some of these on our way south and they started to break the dismal landscape up and make it more interesting. The ground started to rise and we saw forests of trees up ahead but there was something wrong with them. As we got closer, we realised that the trees are dying – slowly being killed of by a grey-green lichen that hung suspended from dead branches like wispy battle flags after a particularly horrible slaughter. It was Hammer House of Horror stuff! – you know the trees that surround Dracula’s castle or the haunted house? All we needed was a bed of mist and a driverless coach with black horses snorting flames to complete the scene. We drove for miles through this eerily impressive landscape and then spotted the welcome sight of a few mountains up ahead. For the last 25 – 30 miles of the road to Ushuaia, we were back on Ripio, but good well-graded stuff. The mountains developed into an awesome snow-capped range barring our path and we were soon up into them along the shores of Lake Fagnano, our spirits lifted by this welcoming sight. It got better & better, with the road clinging to the side of a huge cliff face with breathtaking drops off to the other side as we crept higher & higher through the gap in the mountains that allowed us over the range. It was cold and the landscape was wreathed in dense Valkyrian clouds splotting our windscreen once again – we could even hear the hammers of the gods at work somewhere up in the gloom. This turned out to be roadworks, as an improved & paved road was being installed from Ushuaia, which provided a smooth gentle ending to our crossing. We glided down the last few kilometres to the deep blue waters of the Beagle Channel and into the lap of the Martial Mountains where we found our ultimate destination nestled along the coast – Ushuaia – City at the End of the World! 16th February 2004 –Argentina – The City At The End of the World! - Ushuaia Ushuaia could rightfully claim itself to be a jewel of a city. It does not contain beautiful buildings – it is mostly a collection of tin roofed single story dwellings built to withstand the horrific winter conditions of wind, snow & ice in this extreme land – nor has it a pleasing layout, built like most South American towns & cities in neat, square blocks. But it does have situation and atmosphere in trumps. A jewel on its own is not much to behold, it needs to be mounted in an ornate surrounding that displays its beauty to maximum benefit. Ushuaia has a hillside setting nestling in a cusp formed between the deep blue waters of the Beagle Channel and the stark backdrop of the snow capped Martial Mountains, with their glacier aproning the left flank as spied from the sea. Beyond these views there are more massive mountains – to the right, Monte Olivia is the dominant peak from the massed ranks of the Sierra Alvear, whilst to the left the Tierra Del Fuego National Park is trimmed with the distant Chilean Montes des Pyramides, completing the encirclement of the city on land. The Beagle Channel itself is dotted with rocky outcrops and small islands with a view across to the coastline of the larger Isla Navarino. A jewel is best viewed from many angles to appreciate its fine qualities and the opportunities exist to take boat trips out onto the Beagle Channel, whilst a pleasant 15-minute ski lift will take you to the Martial Glacier and walks abound in the nearby National Park all providing backward glances at this lovely setting.
We spent 4 nights in Ushuaia in a superb apartment – La Costa Serena, which allowed us the opportunity to cook our own food for a change (you do get tired of eating in restaurants after a few nights!). It had the added benefit of being right in the town centre, a few minutes walk from the harbour and the bustling Avenida San Martin, with its collection of fine shops & restaurants. The harbour attracts Southern Hemisphere cruise liners and every day there was one moored to the jetty adding yet another extravagant presence to the city. The harbour was also dotted with Antarctic exploration & cruise vessels – sturdy, tubby, strong little ships resting between their journeys south through the bleak wild oceans to sneak views of the white continent.
We spent a few pleasant hours at the Naval Museum set in the old prison at one end of the town. There was a superb collection of model ships – all built by a Ukranian exile, which provided an excellent timeline for the history of the area. It started with Magellan’s ship and those of other early explorers of the area. Francis Drake was portrayed as a notorious pirate, which was a bit of a shock (well maybe not as he did terrorise these waters). Then of course there was Darwin’s Beagle & the collection also included several models of boats used to serve the early missionary settlements in the area. It concluded with some fine models from the era of Antarctic exploration – Scott’s Discovery, Shackleton’s Endeavour and Amundson’s Fram. There was also a French vessel of the period called the ‘Pouquoi Pas?’ – the ‘Why Not?’ whose name tickled us.
We next learned of the fate of the native Yamana Indians. The Yamana were a simple semi-nomadic people who lived off the land around Tierra Del Fuego and the sea which they explored in their bark canoes. They were a hardy lot, going unclothed apart from a loincloth (we were amazed at this as it is freezing cold in Ushuaia with summer temperatures averaging only around 10°C) but apparently the wind & rain provided a natural cleansing that kept their bodies clean and free from infection. Initial contacts with European explorers were hostile and the tribe had a fearsome reputation for many years. However in the 1800’s this all came to an end with the installation of Christian missions and attempts to ‘civilise’ the Yamana. They were not an attractive people – eye-witness descriptions from the turn of the century portrayed individuals with long arms & legs dangling from short bodies – a posture attributed to the amount of time they spent squatting in canoes and in shelters. Darwin visited them and thought he had found the missing link, describing them horribly as a sub-human species. So it was decided that they needed to be educated in Christian ways. They were forced to wear mission clothes, which then got wet and dirty becoming breeding grounds for bacteria and disease, against which the Yamana had no in-built immunity. Coupled with other European imported diseases, such as typhoid and tuberculosis, this decimated the tribe and by 1925 there were only a handful left. Within another decade or so they were all dead and gone.
Another part of the museum was dedicated to the old prison, where one of the wings had been restored, with each cell describing various aspects of prison life and telling stories of the more notorious inmates. One that caught our eye was the story of ‘big-eared little man’ a nasty psychopath who murdered a number of children around the early 1900’s. Once in prison it was decided he was a psycho and his condition was attributed to the fact that he had sticky-out ears. Plastic surgery was duly performed to correct the condition and remove his psychosis. It didn’t work, in fact it was said that his ears quickly returned to their mad ‘wing-nut’ profile! He subsequently died from a ‘burst ulcer’ but it was rumoured that other inmates killed him, as he was a child killer.
To view Ushuaia from the sea and to take in some of the wildlife on the surrounding islands, we took a trip on the ‘Yate Kam’ a little motorised fishing boat. The islands are home to colonies of Southern Fur Seals and there were hundreds of them lazing in the sun like giant slugs, but it was the bird life that was most fascinating. Another isle held a huge colony of White Breasted Cormorants. These have reached the end of this years breeding season and the chicks have all been reared and were getting ready to take to the sea & sky for the first time. This is a very risky business as there are teams of Skuas and Giant Black Petrels surrounding the rocks on sea and in the air, waiting for a youngster to wander too far from the parents. The Giant Black Petrels were fascinating – they are huge ‘industrial sized’ seabirds, of a roughly seagull shape, but jet black with enormous menacing beaks – real stealth bombers of the maritime bird world! They are so big they have to run along the water to take off on their vast wings, but once airborne they are masters of the sky and it was amazing to watch them swoop and soar. Just as we were about to leave, a young Cormorant strayed just that little bit too far out to sea and was immediately pounced on by a Petrel. It was a grisly sight. The huge seabird sat on the little Cormorant holding it under the water until it drowned and could then be torn apart with no further struggle. But such is life and such is nature. Other spectacles included a huge Albatross, who appeared like Concorde at an air display to steal the show and a little Magellan penguin that popped up near the boat looking lost and alone.
We landed on one of the bigger islands and ate some wild berries – some ‘Calafate’ (a sort of blueberry) and some rosy red berries called ‘Manzanitos’ that tasted like little apples. We also saw some curious ring shaped mounds, creations of the Yamana. Apparently they ate lots of shellfish, which are abundant in the area, and they would discard the shells outside their circular tents such that over the years little circular walls arose around them. Back on Ushuaia in the evening we also sampled some of the shellfish, including the local speciality ‘Centolla’ – King Crab.
The Tierra Del Fuego National Park provided a number of short easy trails for a pleasant days walking and we saw some eco-terrorists at work – North American Beavers, introduced to the area to try & create a fur trade. Neither of us has witnessed such a splendid or impressive piece of vandalism as a Beaver Dam! They utterly trashed the surrounding forest and made a huge lake on the little river they had chosen to call home. But the ultimate thrill of our visit to Ushuaia was the walk up to the Martial Glacier. This starts on a ski lift 7 km outside town followed by a 1 hour hike up the trail to take you to the bottom of the glacier, which in itself is nothing special – it is fairly small and looks more like a mountainside covered in snow (it is a different type of beast to the Moreno Glacier). No, the reward for the hike up here is the awesome views back down the valley looking over Ushuaia and out to the Beagle Channel. As I said a jewel needs to be viewed from many different aspects, but this view was the best! On our way back down we rescued a Geography Teacher called Betty from Buenos Aires who had ventured up the mountain with her daughter Caroline, in inappropriate footwear. She got stuck on a steep section and could proceed neither up nor down. We had a pair of walking poles and with these we were able to return her to more stable slopes. We had a free geography lesson on the mountain formations thrown in!
Good news in Ushuaia was that Mag’s 20 days in her plaster were up & it was duly removed by the local hospital. Her arm is a bit tender and it will take another while to restore full movement and strength to the elbow. Meanwhile we will now proceed slowly back north to Comodoro Rivadavia to return the hire car and conclude this first part of our Pan American Adventure!
Saturday 21st February 2004 –Argentina – Comodoro Rivadavia
We are now enjoying a short break from our travels. We left the car back last Wednesday and have been resting up in Comodoro Rivadavia in the rather pleasant Victoria Hotel. Mag’s arm is gaining strength every day and we have arranged for Lito, our van man, to pick us up on Monday to return to Rio Mayo and rejoin the bikes.
This has been a good time to reflect on the first part of our trip and to answer the question ‘what is it really like here?’ Well, it is not like being on holiday! No - the past 6 weeks really has seen us living life to the full and we continue to marvel at it all. Everyday there is something different - new sights, new sounds, new food, new people. We start each day with only a rough idea of where we are headed but don’t really know where we will end up in the evening. Jack London, the author of ‘Call of the Wild’, ‘White Fang’ & other stories about Alaska, once said that he would rather die having lead his life as a blazing comet, leaving a fiery trail across the sky than to have lived as a dull and lifeless planet, spending an entire existence orbiting the same sun every day. Not that we’re looking to die in a blaze of glory, but I know what he means and our trip has highlighted the sentiment of his statement. We all experience our lives through the 5 senses, spending each day looking, touching, smelling, hearing & tasting the things that surround us. Life’s encounters and experiences are a mix of these 5 elements and in South America we are simply maximising the possibilities, the combinations and the sensations. The result is fantastic! Even Mag’s tumble on the gravel road was an experience we will remember – not as a bad time, but for the helping hands and friendships we made that helped us get our trip back on the road. Sure it spoiled our plans to ride south to Ushuaia on our bikes, but the key thing in long-duration travel like this is not to rely too much on plans and we did get there by other means. As Ted Simon (author of ‘Jupiter’s Travels’) once said, the trip only really gets interesting when the plan goes wrong. So our motto now is…”The Plan is…there is no Plan!” – well nearly!
As to the countries we are travelling in, both Chile & Argentina have what we would describe as an ‘old’ European flavour to them – like it was at home in the 1960’s or 70’s. This doesn’t for one minute mean that they are old or out-dated. Facilities such as hotels and restaurants are very good and it is also very cheap at the moment. Argentina in particular was until recently the most expensive country in South America (Argentineans used to travel to Europe a lot because it was so affordable) but a few years ago they tried to stem economic recession by pegging their peso to the US Dollar and their currency value has tumbled. As an indication, our Lonely Planet guidebook (2002 print) gave a rough exchange of $1.44 pesos to ₤1 Sterling. A reasonable hotel costs typically $80 to $120 pesos per room per night, so for long distance travelling this would work out to be very expensive on the 2002 exchange rate and was one of the reasons why we originally didn’t plan to stay too long here. The current rate is over $5 pesos to the ₤, which makes everything not only affordable, but very cheap as well. Another difference we have noticed, comparing things with Europe, is that there are a lot of people employed to do everything. At home a lot of businesses try to get by, by employing the minimum number of staff possible in order to maximise profits. This often leads to poor service, as staff are run off their feet trying to do everything. Here there are lots of staff and it results in better service as they have more time to devote to your needs.
South America is a beautiful place. No, it is a staggering place. Where Europe has history, architecture & tradition, South America has geography in trumps! Mountains, volcanoes, lakes, rivers – everywhere you look there is a view. It is a photographer’s dream (or maybe even nightmare!) as everywhere you look there is a stunning view begging to have its picture taken. Thank heavens for digital cameras, as the film bill would require a small mortgage for conventional photography (we have taken nearly 600 digital photographs in our first 6 weeks – this is even after deleting all the ‘not so good’ shots!). Add to this the fact that the people are lovely (even with our dodgy Spanish) and the food and drink are excellent. The initial reception in Chile was but a foretaste of things to come in Argentina, surely one of the most beautiful countries on Earth. Our initial plan was only to spend a short while in Argentina, really to get to the south & then back into Chile for the ride north. But we have now modified this idea and we are off next to see more of the Argentine Lake District further north of Bariloche. From here we will head towards Mendoza and Aconcagua the highest mountain in all the Americas. Well this is the new Plan! All we have to do now is wait for it all to go wrong and then the fun begins again! Saturday 28th February 2004 – Argentina – San Martin De Los Andes Well what excitement! We are finally back on 2 wheels again, having returned to Rio Mayo to collect our bikes. Teresa had looked after them well in our absence (they were sat in the hotel function room draped with dust covers). We had a lovely footnote to our adventures in Rio Mayo on the Tuesday morning before we left. Having come to grief on the Ruta 40 and been rescued & aided by our Mexican friends, the 3 Amigos, we were granted the opportunity to assist another biker! Teresa’s hotel, ‘El Viejo Covadonga’ at Rio Mayo, is something of sanctuary for road victims – a last outpost of civilisation before heading out into the mountains on the rugged Ripio. At breakfast on our last morning we met a young chap who wanted to know if the BMWs in the function room were ours. With our poor Spanish we assumed he wanted to know why they were there & if there was a problem with one of our bikes and we thought he was offering to help. We told him our story and he told us he had a Kawasaki KLR 650, which we assumed was at home. We thanked him for his kind offer to help us but explained that no, it was all OK now and we were fully sorted to get back on the road. We parted, wishing him a safe journey, and we both thought he looked a bit dejected as we left. It was only when Mags went into the function room to start loading the bikes and found a KLR parked with our bikes that the penny dropped! We replayed the breakfast conversation and realised that he had a problem with his bike and had been asking us for help!
Mauricio was a Chilean biker and had broken down on the road yesterday, waiting seven hours for a passing pick-up truck to rescue him and bring him in to Rio Mayo. He arrived late at the hotel, which explained why we hadn’t seen him or his bike until this morning. The problem was that the bike would start fine & then it would cut out as he went to drive off. Fortunately I had encountered this problem before, when I helped a young German on the road in Scotland with the same problem on another Kawasaki. There is a safety switch fitted to prevent riding off with the side-stand down and for some reason Kawasaki’s are prone to this switch failing - when you go to drive off the bike thinks the side-stand is still down and the motor cuts out. It took a while to explain the problem and persuade him to cut & short the leads going into the switch to cure it. When he did this, Hey Presto – the bike was working again! His face lit up all at once with a big beaming smile when he realised his bike was fixed – it was a priceless moment as I think he was in the depths of despair at breakfast thinking how he would recover his bike back to Chile, it was the end of his trip etc, etc. We all loaded up & parted after a bout of photographs, hand shaking, hugs and kisses!
Eventually after a sad farewell to the Saint of Rio Mayo - Teresa, we set off and retraced our route north, taking it easy for a few days as we wound our way back through Esquel to Bariloche and on to San Martin De Los Andes at the heart of an area known as ‘Los Seite Lagos’ – the seven lakes. Riding back over a previously travelled road can be tedious and we normally avoid this practice but we had no choice, as we want to get up north to Mendoza. As it turned out, the road was even more beautiful heading north as we were climbing back into the mountains and the views this way were even more spectacular. Mags is really elated to be back on her bike again. Her arm is still a little tender so we are covering moderate distances each day and she is coping well. After a few days we arrived at San Martin sat in a pine-clad valley, at the head of Lago Lacar. Our friends the Volcanoes where out to greet us with the awesome splendour of the 3600 metre Volcan Lanin (classic pointy snow-topped cone) dominating the road into the area. San Martin de Los Andes is a very fashionable, up-market ski resort in winter (July / August) but the climate is marred by 3 months of non-stop rain from April to June – a local weather effect due to it’s situation in the mountains. Junin de Los Andes, a smaller town only 25 miles away, gets only ¼ of the rainfall that San Martin receives. The town itself is really pretty with streets lined with rose bushes all in bloom and lots of little stone & wood buildings more reminiscent of Bavaria than Patagonia. We found a delightful little Cabana where we set up base for a few days to explore the lakes.
This morning greeted us with grey skies, the first since Ushuaia and we set off to explore the lakes riding the bikes without the clutter of their touring kit. The twisty road under grey skies wound close in amongst the looming mountains, giving the impression that we were riding in Wales rather than South America. The road was dotted with ‘Miradors’ – scenic viewpoints where we stopped to admire and photograph the different lakes. However the heavy clouds eventually began to yield some rain and we returned for a lazy afternoon in the Cabana followed by a mooch around town in the early evening. For dinner tonight we cooked up some pasta and were joined by Mario – a friendly gardener who we’d been chatting to yesterday. He was a crazy guy – he loved to talk and we learned a lot about his family and a little of life here in sleepy San Martin.
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