La Difunta Correa

As we have been cycling along through Argentina we kept seeing small red shrines with a statue of a woman (who we wrongly assumed was the virgin Mary) surrounded by water bottles and red flags. We met an Australian cyclist who told us the fascinating history of the shrines which are semi-pagan in origin. Wikipedia has good article about it: http//en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difunta_Correa

Deolinda Correa was an Argentinian woman with a small child who got lost while travelling in the pampas in 1840. When her body was eventually found her young child was amazingly still alive, supposedly drinking from her ever flowing breasts. From this story people started to visit her home town of Vallecito, and gradually travelling people started making roadside shrines with a female figurine, where they left water bottles to 'calm her eternal thirst'.

We've seen many of these shrines in Argentina and also a couple on the southern Carretera in Chile. Cattle drovers used to use them for a backup source of water when the weather was particularly dry.

Finally we meet Dan, Alice, Koby and Ava Fei

About 6 weeks ago at a Conaf campsite above Cerro Castillo in Chile, we met an English couple who told us about a Canadian family travelling in the opposite direction who we would meet the following day. We didn't! We never saw them and we were left wondering what had happened to them? Had they found another route? We assumed we would never see them as we were going South and them North.

Amazingly, yesterday we pulled up at a supermarket in Villa la Angostura and were approached by Dan and Alice with Koby (6) and Ava Fei (4) in tow. They had crossed into Argentina at the end of the Careterra and we had flown North to almost exactly catch up with them. The bad weather had made them stop in the town and we just happened to cycle through as they went shopping. Coincidences are great!

We sat and had lunch with them for a few hours before leaving. It was nice to hear how they were doing it, with a tag-along bike for Ava Fei and an attachment that allowed them to pull a small bike with Koby on it that could be removed at the end of the day! Behind Koby they also had a Chariot trailer to carry luggage.

It would have been nice to have ridden with them for a while but we need to get to Santiago and time is gradually running out.

Bike problems

All I did was buy a new chain!

This led to a 'chain' of events that lost us several days.

Firstly 35km after leaving Bariloche I noticed that the chain kept slipping under pressure and with mountains ahead we had to return to get it fixed. We found a cabaña 16km from Bariloche and I replaced cables, jockey wheels, took two links from the chain and gave everything a really good clean. No joy!

So I cycled back to Bariloche and begged Ricardo Zuber (ex Argentinian national team mountain biker) at his wonderful bicycle shop to help. With his help I replaced the rear cassette and the two smallest rings at the front which also involved some angle grinding to get the smaller one to fit over the bottom bracket and amazingly everything worked. I even got  a 34 tooth gear to replace my 32 for the hills! Using rings and a cassette for 20,000km isn't really recommended!

I then rode back to Isabelle, really relieved and looking forward to the ride ahead.

The next day I had two punctures on the rear wheel, which the following day, (after the third puncture) we traced to some rough rim tape. Probably the use of the compressor at the bike shop had rubbed the inner too hard on the already slightly crumpled rim tape.

This was then covered with duct tape and finally the bike was fine. This had been really hassly because we kept having to take off the trailer and all the bags to mend the inner tube, losing an hour each time.

Then it started to rain, then sleet, then snow! Overnight at least the snow on the road started to melt but after a really cold 55km and a tired hunt for the owners, we reached a gorgeous 'eco-cabaña' where we have dried and warmed up!
Now Leo's teething has got really bad so welcome back to the land of 'no-sleep'! Oh well, as we keep saying...'It is what it is!'

Trying to get to Santiago via Bariloche

After being blasted by the pampas winds and running out of time to cycle all the way back to Santiago, we managed to get a flight from El Calafate up to San Carlos de Bariloche for a reasonable last minute price, which would deposit us about 1200km North and a manageable distance from Santiago. From Bariloche we can cycle North and cross the Andes in a multitude of places depending on our rate of progress and the weather.

The flight entails getting bike boxes and packing tape and fitting the bikes and all our stuff in to our bags and boxes. It is hard work and always a little stressful. Our biggest problem turned out to be a delayed flight and we arrived in Bariloche about 2 hours before it got dark with 2 bikes and a trailer to be assembled as well as a (now)16 month old Leo to be entertained.

This proved to be impossible to do quickly, so we rolled the 14km into Bariloche in the dark with no lights apart from our head torches, hungry and a little bit stressed. Leo just slept and then we did find a hosteria, kindly woke up for an hour to be sociable and then went back to sleep.

Perito Moreno glacier

80km from El Calafate is this amazing glacier which ends just in front of a peninsula of land on which a series of boardwalks have been built to give really good views of huge chunks of ice falling off the end of the glacier, something that happens quite regularly in the early morning sun.

We just happened to be looking when a massive piece fell off. (see the flickr photos below)

Leo became a second tourist attraction as he lay on the boardwalk dropping bread through the holes for the birds below him to eat. Lots of people gathered around this strange blonde-haired, wrapped-up creature and took photos of him. He also kept spotting pic-pics below him and constantly tried to reach them despite their inaccessible distance.

At the end Isabelle got in a real strop (blaming me!) because she was convinced we had missed our bus back, only to realise half an hour later that her watch was set wrong. Oh how we laughed!

Perito Moreno glacier, a set on Flickr.

Pampas wildlife - rheas and guanaco

There might be fences either side of the road but these do nothing to stop the free movement of the wildlife around here. The flamingoes had left the dried-up soda lakes so we'll need to visit the 'zoo' in El Calafate to see them.

Forced to stop by the wind

We turned a corner and nearly got blown off our bikes. We went back to a more sheltered area and waited a while. Then we had another go and failed again, on our return to shelter we were being blown uphill without pedalling at 25km/hr.

We tried to hitch, but no cars came past. For 2 hours Leo amused himself on the road, trying to walk down the yellow lines, or doing 'walk like a dog'. We were getting bored.

From our sheltered area we could hardly believe that the wind was so strong, so we set off again, careering from side to side across the road, angled sideways on our bikes with the trailer sides pressing onto Leo's face and billowing upwards if the wind got inside. He seemed to be enjoying it, we were most definitely not! It was scary.

Finally a pickup went past, slowed down, drove on by, then finally stopped and reversed.
'Are you going to El Calafate?'
'Si'

We were out of the wind and finally safe, our faces were still burning 8 hours later from the wind. We will not be cycling in the pampas any more.

The Pampas

This is meant to be fairly representative of the next thousand km of Argentina. It's beautiful but harsh and on a normal day, crazy windy. We were lucky on the first day to El Calafate, almost no wind at all and managed to camp on the southern shore of the 70km long Lago Viedma in a convenient hole in the ground. An evening fire on the beach made our last night of wild camping for a while almost perfect!

Cerro Torre and Cerro Fitz Roy

El Chaltén is dominated by these two unmistakably iconic 'peaks'. Fitzroy is the biggest, Torre, the pointiest set of three.

Reaching El Chaltén the hard way

Once in Argentina we still needed to get from the customs buildings across the wonderfully named Lago del Desierto and with the weather deteriorating there was some uncertainty about whether the twice weekly (maybe more often - uncertainty rules here!) boat might be able to reach us. Sitting on the shore with Jefferson's binoculars (a Brazilian travel agent checking out a new route) we could see huge waves on the lake and a storm blowing down from a glacier to our West making it hard to even stand on the shore.

We were really relieved when we finally saw the boat coming an hour and a half late with a slightly stressed looking crew. The bikes and trailer were quickly tied down at the back and the boat aimed for some sheltered water. Later on the captain offered us a lift the 37km to El Chalten in the back of his pick up to avoid the bad weather - Argentinians are really friendly! I sat in the back surrounded by bikes and bags while Leo and Isa squashed in the front seat.

We finally found a room in the dark at about 10.30 in El Chalten and crashed out feeling wind burned and exhausted.

Incredible border crossing to Argentina

This is the weirdest way we have ever crossed a border, and also the most physically challenging.

It involved a 3 hour boat journey on a boat that goes twice a week until April when it stops for the year, to a small harbour called Candilario Mansilla above which one family have some land, a house, a campsite and some solar panels. Two people live there all year round and the rest of the family leave for the winter. This is a hard place to survive! We arranged for a horse to carry our bags over the pass the following morning and that we would push our bikes and trailer containing Leo.

1km from the harbour there is a seasonal Chilean border post reached via a steep, rocky, 'road' which allowed cycling for about 5% of the time, the rest involved just pushing. After the border post the road climbed steeply for 4km and was more or less impossible to cycle. For the following 10km we were able to ride as the track improved and passed through gently sloping fields and forest.

We then reached the actual marked border (where we had lunch between the Argentina and Chile signs so that Leo could have his first meal in no-man's land) and the track became a very difficult 6km single path into Argentina, up and down through forest, winding around roots and between trees, over rocks, crossing streams and even through occasional boggy areas. We had to lift the trailer to get it around and over obstacles while amazingly Leo either giggled or slept through the chaos. At times he was stuck in mud or sat in the middle of a stream while we grunted and swore, trying to stay dry or upright.

The last section down to Lago del Desierto was madness, a path deeply eroded into the hill, only as wide as the trailer, dropping steeply and winding constantly. We could let go of the bike and trailer and it just stood there wedged between the sides of the path. Leo woke up for this bit, and seemed very interested in some of the angles that he found himself at.

Finally after 4 hours of struggle we reached the shoreline and the Argentinian border post only to see a storm blowing our way across the lake, our only route to more food and eventual civilisation. The horse arrived a couple of hours later with our bags. We had done it!