Cape Town shimmered and blushed like dying embers of a camp fire as I
said my silent goodbye to her in the pre-dawn glow. It had felt good to have
had a brief stomping ground and a familiar place to roam although once
again I had to say goodbye to new friends and itchy feet was an
understatement, the urge to move again for those last few weeks was unshakable. In all I
had spent three and a half months in the city, living and working
in a backpacker´s hostel, waiting out the alternative,
the callously bitter winter of Southern Patagonia. My African sun tan had long since faded and the beer
belly was making a come back. I´m six whole kilograms heftier thanks in
no small part to Castle Lager, regular braais (barbecues), indulgent days and hedonistic nights in the city.
I perused my Spanish
phrasebook for the first time on the flight to Buenos Aires. On arrival
the Argentinian customs official poked curiously around my bike box, I attempted to
explain that I was cycling around the world. The look of confusion etched
onto the official´s face told me that my cramming hadn´t worked, although I
couldn´t be sure if he had failed to understand my ropey Spanglish or
just the concept. Maybe ropey doesn´t quite cover it, the only
response I heard for days was “como?”. It began to feel like I was in a
Fawlty Towers sketch surrounded by Manuels, but really I´m the idiot.
I studied the dictionary daily whilst
staying with an Irish friend Sarah and her lively posse who were all busy living,
loving and learning Buenos Aires. A Spanish disaster was imminent when Sarah
asked me to pick up some strawberries from the local Supermercado. I entered the shop only to realise I had forgotten the Spanish
for "strawberries". I did however recall the word for "red"
which led me
to a regrettable decision - miming a strawberry. An audience of
bemused customers and staff gathered and after an awkward few minutes,
several
tomatoes and a red pepper later, the store keeper delivered me what I
was after. If things don´t get better then I may forget about learning
Spanish completely and concentrate instead on my fruit impressions. I can already
master a particularly convincing lemon.
I
spent hours strolling through the streets basking in the creative buzz
coursing through Buenos Aires, a city where artists, musicians,
bohemians and performers clamour for attention. Eye contact is
important in Argentina and most people speak more with their eyes than I
am used to coming from
London where intentional eye contact on public transport could leave you
liable for prosecution for Grievous Bodily Harm. It is also an
undeniably
sexy city - tango dancing, the luscious
Spanish accent, the patent good looks, all that eyeball love and public
shows of affection abound. But exchanging my bike for a
tandem not really an option and with no space for a Latino senorita on
my bicycle I left Buenos Aires and flew south to the wild Land Of Fire -
Tierra Del Fuego, further North the vast lonely windy plains of the
Patagonian Pampas unfolded for miles.
As we made the approach to Ushuaia the plane dipped
in low over dramatic snow encrusted peaks, so low that tourists and locals alike
began to fidget nervously in their seats, the elderly man
next to me clutched the hand of an angst-ridden backpacker on the other
side in an effort to reassure. The plane seemed to lurch and pitch suddenly downwards as it flew a
heart-thumpingly minuscule distance over the Southern Ocean, but just
as it looked like we were about to land in the sea a runway appeared out
of nowhere and we touched down at latitude 55 degrees South. Ushuaia -
"the end of the world" - is the most Southerly city on earth and
closer
to the South Pole than it is to Argentina´s northern border with
Bolivia. I
had arrived in early summer, the snow line sat just fifty metres or so
above
the city and there were around eighteen straight hours of sunlight each
day.
Night is slow to materialise here, the sun lazily edges towards the
horizon and remnants of day remain for hours after it sinks and before
the brief gloom descends.
From now on my front wheel would be pointing vaguely North until I
reached the top of Alaska and could go no further, perhaps around twenty
months from now. Panniers packed I realised that my gear was much
heavier than I had planned for and I rode out of Ushuaia with an
impending sense of doom - where had all this extra weight come from? But
within the hour I was sporting the sort of excessively broad grin that
makes you suspect someone is mad or on drugs or both. I
was chuffed to be cycling
again, it was as simple as that. The tortuous road
swung through a forested
valley presided over by imposing and ominous snow capped peaks. Automatically I scanned the trees for
monkeys and then remembered I wasn´t in Africa anymore. Melt water
tumbled down
sheer cliff faces collecting in the mountain streams hidden under the
green coat of conifer. The weather was as flighty as my mood with polar
shifts from bright sunshine to rain, hail and gale force wind. The
unique fauna of the island made a fleeting appearance. Beavers, birds of prey and Patagonian fox observed me briefly from afar
and then made off into the smattering of eery lime green trees with
long spindly wisps of moss draping from the stunted branches. In the
twilight I could imagine those ghoulish trees animated, creeping
onto the road to carry me off into the murk. The end of my first
day of my new venture north was spent with a young family who invited
me in off the road to join them for an "asado" - a barbecue Argentinian style - and the kind offer of a bed for the night.
 |
| Halloween in Cape Town |
Buenos
Aires was a city
that demanded my attention, no matter how much I felt a burning urge to
fly south and get cycling, and it had it immediately. I meandered through
the streets of
the new city, map-less, aimless and carefree, now one of my favourite
pursuits, and couldn´t help admire the dapper Argentinians. You can sit
in the centre of Buenos Aires for hours and people watch and it´s just
one big parade of Adonises with not a blemish for hours. No prominent
noses, no flapping ears and despite the long history of Irish and Welsh
migration to Argentinian soil people´s eyes are a shockingly
conventional
distance apart. God bless the watered down gene pool. Half the
population of Argentina if transported anywhere else in the world would
be courted by model agencies and photographed for glossy magazines. Most
of them of course know this, the girls mince through
town, swaggering and strutting and playing up to the audience. Confronted
by all these stunning ladies there was only one thing to do. I started
learning Spanish in earnest.
I studied the dictionary daily whilst
staying with an Irish friend Sarah and her lively posse who were all busy living,
loving and learning Buenos Aires. A Spanish disaster was imminent when Sarah
asked me to pick up some strawberries from the local Supermercado. I entered the shop only to realise I had forgotten the Spanish
for "strawberries". I did however recall the word for "red"
which led me
to a regrettable decision - miming a strawberry. An audience of
bemused customers and staff gathered and after an awkward few minutes,
several
tomatoes and a red pepper later, the store keeper delivered me what I
was after. If things don´t get better then I may forget about learning
Spanish completely and concentrate instead on my fruit impressions. I can already
master a particularly convincing lemon.
I
spent hours strolling through the streets basking in the creative buzz
coursing through Buenos Aires, a city where artists, musicians,
bohemians and performers clamour for attention. Eye contact is
important in Argentina and most people speak more with their eyes than I
am used to coming from
London where intentional eye contact on public transport could leave you
liable for prosecution for Grievous Bodily Harm. It is also an
undeniably
sexy city - tango dancing, the luscious
Spanish accent, the patent good looks, all that eyeball love and public
shows of affection abound. But exchanging my bike for a
tandem not really an option and with no space for a Latino senorita on
my bicycle I left Buenos Aires and flew south to the wild Land Of Fire -
Tierra Del Fuego, further North the vast lonely windy plains of the
Patagonian Pampas unfolded for miles.
From now on my front wheel would be pointing vaguely North until I
reached the top of Alaska and could go no further, perhaps around twenty
months from now. Panniers packed I realised that my gear was much
heavier than I had planned for and I rode out of Ushuaia with an
impending sense of doom - where had all this extra weight come from? But
within the hour I was sporting the sort of excessively broad grin that
makes you suspect someone is mad or on drugs or both. I
was chuffed to be cycling
again, it was as simple as that. The tortuous road
swung through a forested
valley presided over by imposing and ominous snow capped peaks. Automatically I scanned the trees for
monkeys and then remembered I wasn´t in Africa anymore. Melt water
tumbled down
sheer cliff faces collecting in the mountain streams hidden under the
green coat of conifer. The weather was as flighty as my mood with polar
shifts from bright sunshine to rain, hail and gale force wind. The
unique fauna of the island made a fleeting appearance. Beavers, birds of prey and Patagonian fox observed me briefly from afar
and then made off into the smattering of eery lime green trees with
long spindly wisps of moss draping from the stunted branches. In the
twilight I could imagine those ghoulish trees animated, creeping
onto the road to carry me off into the murk. The end of my first
day of my new venture north was spent with a young family who invited
me in off the road to join them for an "asado" - a barbecue Argentinian style - and the kind offer of a bed for the night.
One
inescapable trial for
the long distance cyclist is the occasional grapple with boredom. After
Tierra Del Fuego came the Patagonian plains, a seemingly limitless empty space which has all the ingredients for a dull day - flat, bleak, featureless
and uninspiring terrain. Add in a vicious headwind and desolation and
boredom is inevitable. If you are reading this from the stale interior
of an office on a rainy morning in the UK then I apologise. I know I
have no right to complain but I wanted to try to illustrate the price
you pay for being too stubborn to take a lift. Some places in the world
are simply too dull and boring for anyone to want cycle through. This
was probably one of them. Eventually a bend in the road, excitement
builds only to evaporate as bleak uniformity stretches out to infinity
and the road returns to it´s undeviating course. Everything´s been put in
place just to taunt me. I ignore the speedometer but the roadside kilometre stones serve as a painful reminder of my leaden crawl. The constant
motion of
oil pumpjacks in the fields - up down, up down, up down, adds to the
sense of drudgery and my
building lassitude. Most of the time I manage to let my mind
visit weird and wonderful places but there are times when stubbornly it refuses to shift beyond the mundane monotony of the present, and for times
like these I try anything to escape, or to at least avoid clock watching. I strive to remember all the
places I
slept in a country I passed through seven months ago. I try to recall
all the causes of Chronic Renal Failure. I do innumerable calculations
involving hours, kilometres and average speeds. I ask myself questions I
could never know the answer to (Does
Argentinian Patagonia have more guanacos than people? Answer, after three
hours of deliberation - not sure) and more recently I have taken to
conjugating Spanish verbs
although my imagination sometimes then flits to unlikely scenarios
involving beautiful and lonely Chilean farm girls.
In
the last couple of weeks I have run into lots of fellow cyclists,
almost as many as I met in the whole of the African continent, including
a breed who to me will always remain an
enigma. Head low, back almost horizontal, maximum two panniers and eyes
scanning the trailing asphalt, nervously stealing fleeting glances at
the odometer. It´s The Speedster. Over the last few years Speedsters
have become as ubiquitous in this world as drunk British nineteen year
olds on Gap Years. This entity seems to exist only on busy
highways and dreary parts of the world, never on rough
roads, never in those wild places. When we do cross paths the
conversation follows a predictable pattern, often beginning with “So how many kilometres have you come?” Followed swiftly by “And how long did that take?”
Cue
furrowed brow, mental arithmetic is in progress as The Speedster tries
to calculate exactly how many more kilometres they cover per month than
you do. Perhaps I´m verging on being one of those conceited
know-it-alls, the type of irritating traveller who seems convinced they
are exploring the world in a superior way than most, but to me it doesn´t
make sense. The bicycle is the best medium to explore a country in
detail, why race through? To see a lot but to experience little? To
any Speedsters out there who may be reading this I have a few
suggestions to make life easier. First off - a urinary catheter, to
obliterate the need for all those time wasting toilet stops. A straw
into your mouth connected to a huge hat containing carbo-rich liquidised
mush, the kind of stuff NASA gives to it´s astronauts. And lastly, a
tiny video camera on the handlebars recording everything that occurs
outside your twenty degree visual field. That way if something
interesting happens to your left or right there´s no need to turn your
head, creating drag and sacrificing velocity. Just watch it on tape
afterwards from the comfort of your own home whilst you tell your
friends
and family how amazing the experience was, although you wish that
puncture on the N2 hadn´t dented your November average. And next time we
meet - have some empathy, please. We´re not all like you, so lets not
talk in numbers. Tell me a good story instead.
There´s
a reason why so few people inhabit these southern lands,
why the birds fly so low over the ground, why there are so few trees and
why the ones that do exist bend out of the ground at bizarre
tangents. El Viento - The Roaring 40s - the famously imposing Patagonian
Wind. It´s the wind, not
the hills nor the rain that is the real nemesis of the cycle tourer.
These southern latitudes are amongst the windiest places on
earth. I happen to be riding through them against the prevailing winds
in November,
the windiest month of the year. The cool air rushes across from the
Pacific,
sweeping over the glaciers and ice fields of Chile and then icy and
unchallenged rages across the open plains of Patagonia. When
it blows there is nothing to break the attack and nowhere to
hide, aside from the tubular storm drains which run beneath the road,
the
same drains in which I hid from the merciless midday sun in the
Sahara a year ago. It´s inside these I gulp down strong coffee and ready
myself for
another blasting. These are conditions, which if they occured back home, the
media would issue severe weather warnings about days in advance and then
document the destructive aftermath on the front pages. In Patagonia,
this is business as usual.
As
I rode across the plains the reputable wind bore it´s teeth day after day, my weather meter
displayed constant wind speeds of forty miles per hour with gusts up to
sixty.
Again and again I found myself suddenly lying prostrate in the dust,
tangled up in bicycle and panniers after being blasted off the road by
yet another punchy gust. On days like these seven kilometres per hour
was the best I could expect. It´s common to see cyclists pushing their
bikes through these extremes in Patagonia, not able to ride, not
worth the
effort or just too disheartened to bother. So it´s coffee, music,
scream
frustration into the windswept void and then keep on pedalling. I
opened my handlebar bag to retrieve a snack but the muscular arm of the
wind
wrenched several items out, sending them skyward. Collect,
curse and continue. The howl is sonorous, angry and unyielding. Less a
force of nature, now an animated being in my mind conspiring with the
road to test my resolve and hinder my passage north.
Occasionally I pass Refugios and small empty shacks by the road, but
these are often used
as toilets by passing motorists. Hundreds of miles of nothing and the
truckers have to shit in the only retreat Patagonia has to offer. Brave
the stench or brave the cold and the gale.
24th of November 2011 was a washout. I´ve had a few, and I´ll have some more. Days that stand out for all the wrong reasons and usually due to a mixture of circumstance, misfortune and misjudgement. Freezing my arse off trying to traverse the French Alps in mid winter. High fever, headache, vomiting and diarrhoea after a dodgy kebab in Egypt. Or the perfect storm of crap that descended on Nyomi and I in Tanzania, a catalogue of disasters including nine punctures in three hours, two broken bike pumps, a measly thirty kilometres and a drenching in a thunder storm. The 24th of November 2011 makes the list. Here goes my tale of woe...
24th of November 2011 was a washout. I´ve had a few, and I´ll have some more. Days that stand out for all the wrong reasons and usually due to a mixture of circumstance, misfortune and misjudgement. Freezing my arse off trying to traverse the French Alps in mid winter. High fever, headache, vomiting and diarrhoea after a dodgy kebab in Egypt. Or the perfect storm of crap that descended on Nyomi and I in Tanzania, a catalogue of disasters including nine punctures in three hours, two broken bike pumps, a measly thirty kilometres and a drenching in a thunder storm. The 24th of November 2011 makes the list. Here goes my tale of woe...
I wake up with a start to the groan and
murmur of the wind, the shudder and flap of my tent. As I pack up my
gear I make a School Boy Error - I forget to weigh down my brand new tent as I unpeg. In an instant the wind heaves it into the air, transporting it expeditiously
across the plains, skimming over gorse and then snatching it again,
throwing it into another broad loop. I give chase for almost two hundred
metres, the tent appears
static at last, only a few metres and a fence separate us, I attempt to hurdle the
obstacle, my trailing leg clips the wire sending me crashing into earth
and gorse. I
shriek from pain in my knee and blood starts to ooze from my shin. I
get up and limp across to retrieve my overly mobile home only to find
two
holes
ripped into the outer lining. I bellow profanities into
the wind but count myself a little fortunate, at least I actually have
the tent, things could be worse. It´s not long until they are. The
headwind is unrelenting and I trundle
along despondently at six kilometres an hour. I cover my face with my
Buff and put on my IPOD, at least I have music to wile away the hours.
By 2.30 pm my speedo reads 31 km. At last the road abandons the plains
and drops over the lip of a wide valley. The wind keeps up it´s torment
but I´m grateful for the downhill. After an eight kilometre descent I
notice my IPOD is no longer attached to my handlebar bag, the wind must
have
ripped through the leather attachment. Slowly I backtrack up
the valley. At the very top I spot the IPOD, and then to my dismay note
the dusty
tread marks on the case and the smashed screen. Someone has driven over
it.
I pedal off delirious with rage and frustration and now thirsty as
well, the
slow progress and backtracking has left me waterless. Eventually I
reach a small farmstead, my knee delivers shooting pain on every turn
of the pedals
and I have no choice but to rest here. I knock on the farmhouse door
and explain to
the farmer in Spanish my problems, I tell him about the strong wind, about my
sore knee and about my need for a little water. He looks straight back
into my eyes, slowly the corners of his mouth begin to curl up, soon his
whole face is
contorted and creased and beaming back at me, he holds his arms aloft and
in loud
English bellows "WELCOME TO PATAGONIA!" before erupting into belly clutching fits of mirth.
So
the end result of November 24th 2011 was a broken tent, a broken IPOD, a
broken
knee, a broken spirit and 45 kilometres further Northwest. Not a great
outcome. The
next day the knee was twice the size than the day before so I rode the
40 km to El
Calefate at a snail´s pace and it´s here I´ve been stuck for the last
week, held up
in a
Backpackers with an ice pack on the swollen joint, growing steadily more
impatient and frustrated. There´s now one Spanish word I
will never forget - El Viento - etched onto my memory forever through
hard won kilometres and the horrifying recollection of my tent doing
aerial acrobatics across the Patagonian plains.
Next
up is an unusual and adventurous border crossing into Chile, the
renowned Carretera Austral, some of which I have ridden before, a few zigzags and
hopefully back into Argentina with a rough plan to reach Bariloche
for the New Year, but only if my knee behaves.
I also wanted to let everyone know about the new page on Facebook - check out the box below, get liking it and sharing it and I´ll keep everyone updated...
