May 15 - New York City
It's good to be home. It's been a few weeks already, I can't believe it. One of the things I always noticed on the road was that time passed a lot slower there, I guess because I was always experiencing something new, and also being on a bike you have no choice but to be in the moment all the time. Now that I'm back in NYC weeks go by as fast as days did before... and soon I'll have to be working again. But not yet. My goal is to start working after June 20 - a year from when I left my last job - and thanks to "Joey Taxes", my friend's accountant, I've got enough back from the government to survive until then.
I tried to leave Montevideo April 16, and nearly didn't make it. I had my bike in a parking lot across the street from my hotel, and had no idea that they closed at 1:30 pm Saturday and didn't reopen until Monday. The night before I was in an internet cafe and met two guys from Peru - they were from Huachaco, the beach town near Trujillo, and were thrilled that I knew the place. I was going to show them my website but as I opened it up I realized I described Trujillo as a wasteland, and thought the better of it. The next day I gave myself a walking tour of the old city, and ran into Victor, one of the two guys, and he insisted I come up to his apartment for a beer. He was a merchant marine sailor waiting for his next assignment, and he tried to get me to stay in Montevideo to go to his girlfriend's birthday party, but I was ready to leave, so I begged off and went to go pack my bike. I'd spent a half hour at his place and then arrived back at the parking lot at 1:45... to a locked gate.
I had some tools but nothing that was capable of taking the lock off - if I'd had a hack saw I probably would have gone to work on it. I spent the next hour trying to find someone to open it, or someone who knew how to contact the owner, then finally gave up and went back to my hotel. I explained my situation to the guy at the desk and asked for my room for another night.
He thought about it for a second as he reached for my room key. "Well," he said "it's not good for the hotel, but I do know where you can get a key to the lot." He sent me across the street to a German restaurant, and within 15 minutes I had the bike out and was packing. The clerk also helped me carry some of my bags down, and when I tried to give him a generous tip he refused, saying I'd given him one when I got there, and that was enough. He and the owner of the restaurant watched me pack and then saw me off. As I was leaving Montevideo I realized it was probably the friendliest place I had seen since Tierra del Fuego.
That afternoon was my last real ride, about 150 miles to Colonia del Sacramento, an old colonial town originally settled by the Portuguese, and across the Rio Plate from Buenos Aires. The town was cobblestoned and filled with restored houses and museums - it reminded me of one of those New England towns specializing in history tourism. Colonia had been founded by the Portuguese and then was traded back and forth between Spain and Portugal up until the era of the independence wars. It was then that the proto-Argentina and Brazil made their rational agreement that neither of them would get the territory they both coverted and Uruguay became independent (this effectively ended when thousands of Argentines from Buenos Aires discovered the place as a weekend getaway a few decades ago). I passed a pleasant day there with the autumn leaves falling in April and then got on the ferry for Argentina.
I found a hostal in BsAs called Che Lagarto ("Che" is a nickname for Argentines, as in Che Guevarra, and Lagarto is lizard.) It was a converted townhouse in a dicey area near downtown, and the whole setup made me feel like I was in Hells Kitchen on Manhattan's West Side. The wide avenues ran in a single direction and there were tall buildings in the distance, the bus shelters and bank facades all looked more like home than anything I had seen in 20,000 miles. The hostel had once been a mansion, and like the other grand houses of the neighborhood had been converted to cheap multifamily housing decades ago. I spent my first night in the third tier of a set of bunkbeds about 12 feet off the floor, expecting the rickety structure to collapse around 2am.
My first night on the town was with a group from the hostel, and we hit some pretty standard giant clubs that reminded me of the coke snorting heyday of the New York City club scene at the Palladium and the Limelight which I was barely old enough to remember and knew better from Bright Lights, Big City. People were snorting off of the counter in the bathroom - no attempts at subtlety here with 30 other people in crowded around. The place was also a little thuggish - it didn't look like there were going to be any gang fights inside, but you wouldn't want to get stuck in a dark corner by yourself. Unlike New York no one was having sex in the stalls - at least not in the men's room. In some ways it made me nostalgic for New York before Gulianni.
Two of the other guys I was with were my age - about 5 or 10 years older than everyone else - and not too into techno, so they were looking for me to get out of there after about 45 minutes - I was having fun dancing, but since I had a girlfriend waiting at home I didn't mind going. We couldn't find the last member of our crew, an 18 year old from England. He'd been the reason I'd gone out - he'd missed his friends and was moping around the hostel all pathetic because he was missing a night of partying. After about another 45 minutes of searching pretty thoroughly and waiting outside we gave up, feeling some misgivings about leaving him there - but we found out the next day that he'd had the time of his life.
A day after my arrival Ulf and Anke got into town, and we spent the next few days working our way through the tourist sites. We saw Eva Peron's grave in a very exclusive cemetery that catered only to the creme de la creme of Argentine society. Ricoletta is described as a city within a city and the pathways were complete with streetlights - I almost expected to see miniature mailboxes. There were giant mausoleums complete with rotunda and ivy covered parthenon knockoffs, things resembling the tomb of Lenin in Red Square, and small monuments for famous generals, who while not of good enough families to lie there deserved an honorable mention for their work.
That day I also bought some relatively expensive Cuban cigars ($15 each in Argentine pesos, but probably worth $50 each in the U.S. even if there was no embargo). Anke begged off for the evening Ulf and I started at an Irish pub with some glasses of whiskey and set to work on the cigars, which always tend to outlast my interest. After finishing we went back to my hostel to round up more people to party with.
In Buenos Aires nothing really starts until 1 or 2am, and this means also that a typical place goes until dawn, but even at the hour of 7am you can reasonably expect in certain parts of town to keep going. We had the goal of seeing just how long we could keep going before we ran out of places. We started with Ulf and I and two others, but we lost one of the guys at the first disco we went to and the three of us continued on to a rock nacional club. I talked to a giant of a man at the bar while he and his girlfriend shared my rum and coke for half an hour, and then we were surrounded by an exodus from the main floor as the place started closing up - and I'd never heard any music.
We jumped in a taxi and gave him the name of a place that was still supposed to be going, but he suggested another place, with "a lot of women." As drunk as we were it took us a few minutes to get that we were headed to a whorehouse, and we then redirected the taxi to find us a bar - any bar that was still open.
The one who was still with us was a Norwegian kid who was 21 or 22. He was pretty drunk, and started going on about some "fat German" guy he met once who had abused his all-you-can-eat privileges at a buffet - generally this story is told about Americans. He went on and on about how Germans are at great length. Ulf was glaring at him, then gave me a glance and sighed.
"Hey kid," I said.
"What?"
"Shut the fuck up."
He looked surprised, then remembered Ulf was German, and shut the fuck up. He then hit on the waitress and tried to take her tip back when she wouldn't talk to him.
I saw my second live football (soccer) game of my life in BsAs, a match between the Boca Juniors and the Newells, at the stadium in Boca. Boca for some reason immediately reminded me of Brooklyn... a little bit more working class than the center, more industrial, but with a strong local character of soccer and tango. This was Borgia's favorite part of town, in the same way that writers from Manhattan would idealize ethnic neighborhoods in other parts of town. We were herded into the stadium through a maze of side street detours that started a few blocks away, and by the time we got through the gate the mad vibe of the game was already going.
Both teams were from the BsAs area, and the away section of the stadium was nearly full. The fans waved their banners, some of the Boca ones being huge flags several stories tall, or checkered banners that stretched across an entire seating section. Every program that had been handed out at the gate had already been sailed down onto the playing field, and the game began quickly with no fanfare. While things progressed Anke and Ulf explained red and yellow cards to me, the offsides rule, and the corner kick. I came out of the game pretty much understanding what was happening. The Boca Juniors won 3-0, and we left thinking that since the home team won, everything was going to be pretty jolly around the stadium . We walked two miles further down into the barrio to El Caminito, a cobblestoned street with multicolored houses, Boca's principal sightseeing draw. As we walked down we even saw some groups of friends where most of them had blue and yellow Boca Juniors jerseys on but one was wearing the red and black for the Newells - the rivarly didn't seem too bad. The next day we found out there had been a riot between the fans of the two teams and something like 9 people died in the neighborhood of the stadium - on a street we had walked down earlier.
The next day was Monday, April 21. It was my last day in South America, but in a lot of ways I was already mentally on the plane when I woke up. My motorcycle was already shipped, and I'd packed everything. I spent the day killing time, until finally I was at the airport, killing time. I picked up some havanettes, a type of Argentine cookie made with dulce de leche, at the request of someone from back home. I bought some magazines. By the time I was ready to get on the plane I had my duty-free items and I looked just like every other jet plane tourist.
I'd taken one flight during my trip - in Ecuador, where the only other option was a once-a-month ferry - and the whole point of my trip had been to avoid airplanes. The jet makes it possible to get from any corner of the world to most others in a day, or two at the outside, but in the process it turns our world into a series of points with no more context than the revolving globe graphic on CNN. This trip had restored meaningful distance to my world, and now in one overnight flight I was undoing the work of 10 months.
We touched down and culture shock began to sink in very gradually; the airport in BsAs had had English and Spanish speakers, just as Kennedy did, and the signs were bilingual. If anything the airport in BsAs looked nicer than Kennedy. I got stopped in customs and had my bag searched which turned into a cursory check of my first bag and then a longer conversation about my trip and I was free to go. I walked out into a cold rainy day in Queens and hopped in a cab. The houses that I saw lining the Van Wyck Expressway were probably almost as alien to me as to any new immigrant.
A lot has happened since I got home. One of the reasons I cut my trip short was to get home to my now ex-girlfriend Cathy, but after I got back the situation between us got worse instead of better, and I broke up with her a week ago. Sometimes I now wish that I'd stayed in South America and done at least part of the Brazilian coast, but one of the things wearing me down at the end was the feeling of uncertainty about what was going to happen when I got home. I don't think either of us could have been happy if we'd stayed in a state of being halfway together, and separated by 10,000 miles. It's a worse kind of loneliness that you're feeling when your girlfriend is in the next room, though. It didn't take long to know that our problems weren't only caused by distance, but the only way to know that was to come home and try to live together again.
I had shipped my motorcycle home by air, and I also screwed for $400 by the shipping agency (Carlos Soto at Hawk Air) in Buenos Aires. I paid them half of the price up front, and they never passed any of this money on to the shipping company they ended up using. They created a bunch of new fees not in our contract - additional hazardous materials charges, and so on - after the guy I shipped with knew I was no longer in the country. They also created a crate that weighed almost as much as my bike because they were charging me by the kilogram. I should have guessed something like this was going to happen when he asked for a copy of my ticket so he could figure out what flight I was on.
Despite the huge wooden crate they managed to bend or break a few things, and they carelessly dismantled parts that I had offered to remove in BsAs, but they had assured me were fine. To get the bike out of Kennedy required several hours of customs procedures and a week of argument over the new costs - a week which was basically time for me to come to grips with the fact that I could do nothing to Soto. Once I finally got the bike out I spent another few hours in the parking lot trying to make it roadworthy enough to get home.
I was hoping to reach Ulf and Anke before they left the country - Ulf can be pretty menacing and I figured a little face to face negotiation might help. Unfortunately by the time I got him he was already booked on a flight the next day to Spain, the next leg on their journey home to Germany. I had to be happy with giving Soto a bad rating on Horizons Unlimited, which might prevent a few other motorcycle people from falling into his trap.
The weeks since then I've been settling into settled life. It still doesn't feel normal, perhaps because I'm not working. Even without work, it's pretty dull. I'm still using the bike as my main way of getting around, not helped much by the fact that the weather has been like Seattle.
April 11 - Monteideo, Uruguay
I've just arrived in Montevideo, Uruguay - I crossed the border yesterday from Argentina and spent a night in Fray Bentos. This is my last new country, and I hope to be in Buenos Aires in 2 days, and then head home in about a week.
The last week has been pretty uneventful. I've been crossing Argentina from west to east, through the pampas. The pampas look a lot like the American Midwest, and are about as interesting, but the people are very friendly, and extremely surprised to see someone traveling by motorcycle through their towns, especially someone who isn't Argentine or Brazilian. Three days ago I was in Colon, a small town about 200 km from Buenos Aires, and orderd dinner at a restaurant where the only people there worked there or were friends - they were all watching a football (soccer) game between an Argentine team and a team from Uruguay - theirs lost 4-0, which in football is a humiliation... They seemed to bounce back quickly, though.
The town on the whole is very nice - a mixture of the best parts of a small Illinois town with one in Italy - but about a quarter of the shops are closed, reflecting the economic depression that has hit Argentina in the last few years. You can also see this in Mendoza, where hordes of people beg and hawk things in the outdoor cafes at a level I'd only seen in Cuzco or Arequipa in Peru. The desperation is in some ways worse, because while Peru is improving the situation in Argentina has with a few breaks generally been getting steadily worse for decades. The people are well educated and act European but are falling behind Chile and soon will be headed below Brazil, if current trends continue. Things are still very safe, and I never worried about crime, but there is definitely an atmosphere of pessimism about the future.
The biggest thing that happened in the last few days was yesterday I had a run-in with the Argentine police. I was cruising through the state of Entre Rios - the delta between the Uruguay and Paraguay rivers - an area that strongly resembles where New Jersey meets Delaware. I crossed a large suspension bridge with a speed limit of 90 km/hr. I would never have speeded in Chile - the Carabineri there are make New York State Troopers look jolly and easygoing - but the rest of the highway was 120 km an hour, and I've been taking my cues from the Argentines, who regularly blow past me when I'm doing 120 or 130. Speeding is a national sport here - everyone seems to think that they are a racecar driver. What I failed to notice was one of the cars slowed down suddenly, as I passed it.
On the far side of the bridge was a policeman, waving people over. He didn't have a radar gun but he waved me to the side anyway, and once he'd stopped me and looked at my plates he changed his mind from getting me on speeding to getting me for not having Argentine insurance, which was actually very lucky for me, since I was clearly guilty of speeding. He asked me to follow him inside the small cinderblock station on the side of the road, and I ended up at a desk talking to his supervisor.
"I've crossed the border between Chile and Argentina 4 times, and no one ever mentioned this. I also talked to the Caribineri in Chile (which is also in Mercosur) and they never mentioned it." I've been technically uninsured since I left Belize - I bought insurance in Mexico and Belize because it's obligatory at the border. My American policy only covers the U.S. and Canada, and anyway I let it lapse in February because it was useless. In Peru or Ecuador if you get in an accident as the foreigner you're pretty much screwed regardless of who's fault it is, and they hold you at the scene until a cash settlement is negotiated. Anyway, on a motorcycle you probably have bigger problems like your smashed femur to worry about - so I've just been concentrating on not getting hit.
"This insurance is only for the Mercosur countries," she told me.
"Tiera del Fuego and Bariloche are part of Argentina... yes? I am sure that the border police as well as the other police that stopped me in Ushuaia would have mentioned this." Our papers were in fact looked at intensively twice in Tiera del Fuego by the transit police.
She explained to me that it is not required that the border check for insurance or mention it to tourists. Perhaps the other police were being derelict in their duties. Which is where I started getting suspicious. Then she said that I had two options - either pay it there, or at the bank. And I knew what she was going to say next. "The fine at the bank is 380 pesos (over US$100) but you can pay 80 pesos here."
Pay a mordida in Argentina? Fuck that, I thought. I'd been suckered by this exact line in Costa Rica - another country where the cops are supposed to be fairly clean. She'd caught me on the wrong day. Earlier in my trip I would have cared more about getting where I was going, and I knew less about how all of this worked. "Well, it was an honest mistake on my part. Perhaps I can buy the insurance in the next town."
No, I would have to pay the infraction.
I explained that I was crossing over in Uruguay that afternoon, and I would be happy to pay it at the bank when I returned to BA in a week.
"You will not be able to cross the border without paying the fine."
"Where is the closest bank to pay the fine? I'll pay it today and cross over to Uruguay tomorrow."
"Buenos Aires." BsAs was more than 200 km south of here, and I was only 60 km from the border to the north. The more heavy handed she got, the more pissed off I was, and the more certain I was that I was going to walk away from this one. If I didn't and I had to go all the way back to Buenos Aires she had a pretty good idea by this time that I was going to rat her out to my embassy and anyone else who would listen in their police, causing her no end of grief. And the way that I knew I had her was she quoted me over US$100 for the ticket, and when I got back to BsAs it would turn out that she was lying. I didn't threaten her with this - I didn't need to. Argentina does not have the storied history of police corruption that much of Latin America has - I've heard that things like this have only started becoming widespread since the economy collapsed two years ago. So it isn't really an accepted part of the culture yet.
"Fine. Give me the ticket. I'll go back to Buenos Aires."
She left the room and conferred with someone, and came back with a somewhat defeated and pissed off look, and told me to go. I said thanks, gathered my documents, and yessed her to death as she told me to go slower in the future. After all of the bullshit in Mexico and Central America with the police it was a sweet moment. I did keep it slower after that, though.
An hour later I reached the "International Bridge" and crossed over to Uruguay - the only holdup being that the Aduana (customs) officials for Uruguay didn't have the form for non-Mercosur nationals - people from Argentina and Brazil breezed past me while they looked for it. Apparently the Mercosur countries now have a common passport, much like the European Union. Once that was done, I headed for the first town over the border, a place called Fray Bentos. It looked like an Argentine pampas town to some extent, but was more run down. I'd assume it's much like the U.S. and Canada - when Argentina or Brazil sneeze, Uruguay catches a cold. Tiny Uruguay was created as a buffer state between between Argentina and Brazil back in 1828, when both countries wanted the territory - a seemingly extremely rational way of resolving the problem. It feels to a large extent like an Argentine colony.
I headed out for Montevideo, the capital this morning. I got threatening storm clouds and winds worthy of Patagonia, which the locals told me were not normal, and couldn't wait to get off the bike and get my gear into a hotel room. As I saw Montevideo on the horizon I remembered what travel in Latin America outside of Chile and Argentina has typically been like, and as I drove through the town I realized that two months of western living had made me a little soft. The city looks Argentine - there's a pretty strong German and general European influence - but the depressed look of some Argentine towns is far worse here. Buildings in downtown look like they've been vacant for a long time, and there's a lot of graffitti. This is also the first time I arrived in a big capital city without a guidebook or a map, and it was interesting. I figured Lonely Planet has screwed me so many times I would do fine without it, and actually, I did. I came in along the waterfront, with huge breakers whipped up by blasts of wind smashing over the sea wall onto the highway - I timed it right and narrowly avoided getting soaked. I headed for the big buildings, and drove around for about an hour, but the urban core was so dense that it was hard to drive slowly to look around, or stop anywhere. Finally I decided to get out of the centro, and randomly drove out for a bit and found a restaurant. After lunch I asked the waiter where the nicer part of town was with the hotels, and within 20 minutes I'd found one.
The place actually is not as bad as it first looked, but the clerk at my hotel recommended seeing the old part of town - but not after dark. I'll probably do that for a little bit tomorrow, and then head out to the town of Colonia de Sacramento, which apparently is where most of the actual historical stuff is. It's also across the bay from Buenos Aires, which means that this will probably be my last ride on the trip of more than 20 km. The trip is winding down, and I'm looking forward to getting the bike on a plane or a boat, then enjoying Buenos Aires with only a backpack. I'll probably write one more entry from Buenos Aires, but the end is in sight - and happily after today's marathon of writing I've more or less caught up with my journal before it's time to go home. Home. Bed. One bed for more than two nights. Speaking English and not feeling funny about it. Seems like a dream.
April 1 - Mendoza, Argentina
I'm currently in Mendoza, the center of Argentine wine country, on my way to somewhere. I'm not sure exactly where yet. My options are to drive about 1500 kilometers to Iguacu Falls, then back most of the way to Buenos Aires to ship home, or I might skip the falls entirely and just loop through Uruguay and take the ferry into Buenos Aires. I don't want to miss one of the highlights of South America, but I'm not sure if taking an extra week for it makes sense when I'm at the point where I'd really just like to get home. I don't think I'll be awed (or for that matter shocked) by the sight enough in my current jaded state. Now I'm trying to think of this trip not as my only chance to see tourist attraction x, but more as my first major tourist foray into South America. It takes a lot of the pressure off not to miss anything that everyone else thinks is the sole reason for coming down here.
I've also not been writing much because I've been obsessively watching the disaster unfold in the Middle East, something I'm trying to stop doing. This has been absorbing a huge amount of my mental bandwidth for months now, long before it became the only news story, and was getting to the point where lately my voyage was becoming riding breaks in between BBC World, Salon and nytimes.com marathons. I'm not completely successful at breaking away though. I long for the time when you'd get the news from home in three week old newspapers, or at least for the countries a few months back like Peru that didn't have cable everywhere.
I stayed in Ushuaia for a few days, giving myself a good rest from the marathon ride down from the Lake District of Chile. I'd already seen the main attraction in town - the prison - so I spent my time working on my bike. Ulf and Anke arrived in Ushuaia a few days after me, and we partied a bit to celebrate our arrival in the deep, deep south. They flew down from Puerto Montt to Punta Arenas and sent their motorcycles on the ferry to Puerto Natales, and raved about the view from the plane of Fitz Roy and Torres del Paine, two of the many natural attractions in the south. They'd met a couple, Doug and Mary, from Colorado who had already made it to the "End of the World" after starting in January. We all split town in an Enduro biker convoy as the daily rain started changing to snow. We crossed the mountains in the south of Tierra del Fuego cautiously, looking out for patches of ice that might have formed in the shady places on the road as the temperature danced around the freezing point.
As I think I've beaten to death in my past logs, riding a motorcycle gives you a very different experience than you get in an enclosed, 4 wheel vehicle, and the best (worst?) example of this is the wind. On the way back across the island of Tierra del Fuego, we got the usual antarctic blasts, which then intensified into "wow, this is almost dangerous", to "this is insane" and then went beyond that to something worthy of a Buster Keaton movie, during which when we were stopped at a police station we had problems keeping the parked bikes upright even when we sitting on them. I could tell when the wind was about to hit me in a burst by watching Anke's bike - it would look like the wind was about to sweep her wheels out from under her, and she would go from the center line to the shoulder in a second. Doug found out later that the wind had been over 100 kph, going up to 120 in gusts, which Doug said was hurricane force. We stopped in Rio Grande for the night - the next day promised 200 km of gravel and probably the same wind, and it was also around freezing which for seem reason makes you very tired at the end of the day even if you haven't gone very far.
I'd stayed at the same hostel on my way down and it was probably the friendliest place I've stayed at during my trip. One of the owners gave me a cup of coffee within a minute of my walking in the door. It was real coffee, not the Nescafe which is almost all you ever find in South America - despite the fact that we get our coffee here. (For some bizarre reason the closer you are to actual coffee production - i.e., Ecuador - the worse the coffee is. But this isn't just a South American phenomenon - look at the non-dairy creamer you get all over Wisconsin...) I ended up sitting in the kitchen near the wood burning stove for the next few hours and was given dinner and a beer by an Australian couple who were cooking for themselves and then the owner returned with wine, cheese and a special kind of chorizo and insisted I have some. I finally saw my room and unpacked at around 10pm, full, warm, slightly buzzed and content.
On the return trip the hostel was just about full, and ten of the guests and two of the owners congregated around a long wooden table lit by candles and warmed by a woodstove. One of the other guests was a photographer from France who jumped ship midway on a round the world sailing adventure and has spent the last eight months taking pictures of the gauchos (Argentine for cowboy) in Tierra del Fuego and southern Patagonia. As anyone who has traveled in Argentina knows, 90% of the food here is beef, 9% is potatoes, and the rest is pizza. He explained that the diet of the gauchos was one or two kilograms (between 4-5 lbs) of beef with some potatoes every day - and nothing else for months at a time. He said that the reason that the gauchos don't eventually congeal into something fit for display in Madame Toussaud's is they are constantly drinking yerba mate.
Yerba mate is not only the national drink of Argentina, it is also the national ritual, which involves group sharing of a gourd with a metal straw filled with superheated water poured over what tastes like grass sweetened with ashtray. You can observe this ritual everywhere - for example while you wait for an hour at the border control between Chile and Argentina in Tierra del Fuego, as the entire office shares a gourd. The next day we were able to observe exactly this, but eventually we got through the border at San Sebastian and were once again in Chile.
The wind had died down to merely dangerous and we headed through the wilderness towards the ferry. The inland of Tierra del Fuego on the Chilean side was grasslands with only occaisional hills, with random gravel tracks leading off our road into the middle of nothing - we stopped several times to guess where we were, and eventually found our way to the port where the ferry was. Upon arrival we found two other couples there on bikes - one couple from the U.S. that Doug and Mary knew, and another from Germany. All told we were 6 bikes, which made us a little more of a force to be reckoned with and a pain in the ass to pack onto the ferry. The little catch was that on the way over from the mainland a bus had broken down on the boat, and we couldn't load until it was off, which took an hour. They squeezed us all on in back behind the double tractor-trailers, pulled up the Normany-landing door, and we were off for our 15 minute ride to the mainland of South America. The bus had made us late - and this was bad because for 3 hours in the middle of the day the tide was too low to land on the other side.
We reached the other side, and the captain attempted to land, but couldn't get close enough to the shore. He turned around (the boat had landing doors which became vehicle ramps on both ends) and we were invited to ride off into 3 feet of surf if we wanted to - if I didn't have any gear on my bike I would have done it, because how often to you get to try an Evel Kneivel off a ramp over water? But we all realized that the sand and gravel were very soft, the water was deep and salty, and whoever gave it a shot would probably crash and then get salt water inside of their engine, a very bad thing. So we declined and the captain moved further down shore and found a place where people could get off, and we went up to the restaurant and had to wait for the tide to come back in.
So all of the bikers wound up hanging around for two hours in the restaurant - wherever we went, the fact that we were adventure touring bikers made us pretty much automatically a posse, regardless of nationalities, though most of the time the Germans talked together in German and I talked to Doug and Mary. I liked Doug - he was a pilot in his early 50's who'd been working in Colombia for Customs - i.e., for the DEA. We shared some basic attitudes towards life, and I respected the fact that he was able to ride from Colorado starting in January and hit Ushuaia two months later. While we were waiting for the ferry to land I was a little astounded on the ferry when we were talking about the war and he said -
"So, you're from New York, why don't you want to go kill those ragheads?"
I was a little shocked. No, I was dumbfounded. Two nights before when we'd had dinner he'd seemed anti-war. I wasn't sure if he was serious or not. "Well, I guess it's because some of those 'ragheads' are my neighbors, friends... my relatives." My uncle is Saudi. "Two guys I'm friends with in Queens have a Lebanese grocery, and they came to NYC after 15 years of war looking for a peaceful place for their families - and now they are living in NYC after September 11th. I look at it like the fanatic religious rednecks of their world and our world want to have a war - and I wish we could find a nice, peaceful place for them to kill each other without the rest of us being involved."
That more or less ended that discussion, and then when we were in the restaurant I found out more about his job in Colombia, which was a little more than simply being a pilot. We agreed that the FARC were definitely a group of people the world would be better off without, but at the end I felt like I was talking to one of those people who asks "before we resort to diplomacy, is there a military solution?" Nevertheless I still liked the guy and began to see the wisdom in the fact that Ulf rarely talked politics.
We finally got our bikes off the boat, and we headed off - Doug and Mary were headed north, along with the other American couple, and I was headed west with Ulf, Anke and the other German couple, Eric and Hanke. We stopped along the road soon after the ferry to see two boats that had been wrecked on the shore of the Straights of Magellan - two metallic skeletons slowly dissolving in the salt spray. The town where they wrecked was also slowly dissolving, English style buildings gradually losing their windows and roofs. Both Chile and Argentina during their earlier history and especially during their dictatorships tried to populate the south in a manifest-destiny style, but much like Canada and the U.S., a lot of the wide open spaces are starting to lose population now.
We tried to make Puerto Natales, but the weather was against us - near freezing rain - and we'd lost most of our daylight waiting for the boat, so eventually we decided to head into Punta Arenas instead. The next day we saw the local cemetary - full of bizarre family shrines with photos of the deceased - and then tried to see some penguins at what, in-season, is one of the largest colonies in the world. Since it was now approaching winter in the south this meant a 100 km round trip through mud and a huge puddle/pond to see the remaining 50 or so penguins. My feet were soaked, and once again in near zero temperatures we ended up trying to beat sundown. We made Puerto Natales just as it was getting dark.
I'd been debating whether to hit Torres del Paine for about a week - I kept talking to other gringos who had been flooded out of the park the week before, or got two days of snow. Sitting in a restaurant in Natales in my soaking boots, freezing even inside a building, it was easy to decide my next move. The next day I said goodbye to Ulf and Anke again and got on the ferry from Puerto Natales to Puerto Montt. Puerto Montt was at 42 degrees south - about the same as NYC or Seattle - and the ferry would get me out of the winter in 3 days.
That night the war began. The nice thing about the ferry was we couldn't get any news for three days, which didn't stop the war from being the main topic of conversation. The weather was calm but foggy, so there weren't the masses of seasick people that I'd been warned about, but there also wasn't much to see. Most of us spent the trip reading, playing chess and cards, and drinking. I ended up meeting James again (he was one of the pair of bikers that I'd tried to catch up with in Quito several months before.) The last night the social activity organized by the crew was a semi-karoake act by some of the kitchen staff, a few rounds of bingo, and then dancing to your favorite Latin and 80's pop tunes. This got a little old, so I gave the DJ a techno cd, which he dutifully played for half a track and then killed the volume on at the first graceful opportunity. Some of the other gringo tourists (we were the vast majority of the passengers) went up to request it again, and he played one more track and then went back to Madonna. It was hilarious to watch the people on the dance floor try to do something with it, though.
I woke up the morning that we arrived about an hour after everyone else had gotten off the boat thanks to a massive hangover - I was a little embarrassed, and now sick. I spent three days in Puerto Montt getting over my cold and watching CNN, and finally couldn't stand watching the TV in my room anymore and decided to ride north the next day, well or not. I had an uneventful two day ride 600 km up the autopista to Santiago and went to SCS Habitat again.
There I ran into Rob, the guy from the NYC Burning Man community who I'd chanced upon in Patagonia. I'd arrived Friday night, and as it happened just hours later there was some kind of "Dance for Peace" happening in the eastern outskirts of Santiago that he knew about. We collected two other guys from England, and grabbed a cab with the vaguest of directions to go far past the last suburb and up a road 8.5 kilometers. It turned out to be way up in the mountains in a desert canyon, and the event had a rave feel to it but the anti-war angle was hard to find, especially with the corporate sponsorship. The event seemed to be supported by Smirnoff Ice - they had showed up with a truck of the stuff and were giving it away, presumably because most of the people at this event were the children of the rich and influential who lived in the Los Condes suburbs (I had been to Los Condes several times for the BMW dealership - it all made perfect sense that this event was here). Some guy was walking around with a big plastic Smirnoff Ice bottle dispenser on his back - we took to walking up behind him and just grabbing a few whenever he was talking to someone. Rob had helped me party in true Burning Man style, so I was stuggling to make conversation in Spanish after a few drinks, but we had a great time and partied until after full daylight.
Then of course the question was how the hell we were going to get out of this place - we were miles away from civilization. Rob had had this idea that we'd easily scam a ride off of someone leaving - but no one seemed to be in a hurry to leave, and we were way beyond being able to beg in Spanish anyway. So the four of us hitchhiked on the road that ran below the canyon, and within minutes we caught a ride with a pickup truck. The guys in the truck seemed to have the idea that they were going to have some fun with us to punish us for the having the temerity to ask for a ride - they took the switchbacks through the canyons at over 100 km an hour, running into the gravel on both sides as they took the curves, but for Rob and me it was like being on the bike but not having to worry about any driving, and all four of us were way beyond being scared. We were cheering every time they slammed around a curve and into the oncoming lane, and after a while the guys up front gave up and drove more or less normally.
I spent the next day recovering, and then Rob took off the following day. I once again had problems shaking free of Santiago and Scott-Land as Rob dubbed SCS Habitat (our hostel was owned by an American named Scott - he was a little odd). I'd planned on two days to work on my bike and file an extension for my taxes, but when I went to change my oil I found out that BMW Santiago had overtorqued the oil pan bolt, and I couldn't get it off and it was halfway stripped as well. So I took it in for them to remove it and give me a new one, but they didn't have the bolt in stock. Two days turned into four. People asked me if I wanted to go out and party, and I said no, not wanting to prolong my time in Santiago, which is a pleasant but dull place.
Finally I gunned it out of town and headed for the Andes. The Pacific Ocean and the west coast mountain chains that run from Alaska to Argentina had been the constant on this trip, and now I was leaving them behind for the last time - it left me feeling all choked up and nostalgic (or maybe that was just the altitude sickness kicking in one last time). I headed up to a pass that went over at 4000 meters, with the weather going from tropical to frigid in a matter of hours. I did the formalities and was in Mendoza just after dark.
Mendoza is beautiful and fairly laidback - like California with a heavy northern Italian and German influence. I could get used to this. The war hasn't stirred up as much overt anti-Americanism as I thought it would. People sometimes mention the war without much surface virtiol, except for one incident. When I was doing a took of a vineyard in Mendoza there was one worker there who heard that I was American, and then exclaimed something to me that I had to ask him to repeat, not being familar with the Spanish colliquialisms for terrorism - the tour guide looked at him with reproach. an Israeli in the group caught it and I asked what he said. "He said they're going to bomb New York." I turned to the guy and said "So what's new?" in Spanish and then added "asshole" in English, which thanks to the dominance of Hollywood movies world wide is now understood by 99% of the planet. The Israelis laughed - I think they could identify. The English guy that I'd been sitting next to on the bus said under his breath "Well at least they're not bringing up the bloody Falklands again."
The tour was otherwise great - Mendoza is the center of Argentine wine country, and the wines they make are pretty good (by my plebian standards) and extremely cheap - I came away with a bottle of the local specialty variety, Malbec, for $2.50, and I think it would have cost $15 at least in NYC. The vineyards were also really good about plying us with samples, and we hit two of them, so by the end the entire tour group was rather happy. We rounded off the evening with an asado (a huge amount of barbequed meat) in the hostel, and some live music in the hostel's bar, and I went to bed a few hours later happy to be back in Argentina.
March 14 - Ushuaia, Argentina
The only thing on my mind as I departed from Puyehue National Park was getting to Tierra del Fuego as fast as possible, sights be damned. I made Bariloche early in the day - it was on a mirrorlike lake surrounded by forested, snowcapped mountains, often compared to the Alps. It was the last beautiful place before the Patagonian desert, and within 30 km I was on a dry, rolling open plain. Esquel was the last town on the tourist circuit around Bariloche, and then it was into the true Patagonia - tiny towns surrounded by sprawling esctancias of grazing land the size of small countries.
The road started to deteriorate as soon as I left the junction for Esquel. I was on the infamous Ruta Quarenta which runs all of the way down to Tierra del Fuego next to the Cordillera, the mountains that separate Argentina and Chile. The road eventually fades out into a potholed gravel track which is known for its extremely high winds and long distances between any human habitacions, and I'd decided long before that given that there is a paved road along the Argentine coast going to the same place taking this "adventure" would be an exercise in masochism. I hadn't realized it went so far north, or that part of it was paved until a few days before, and I was hoping I didn't hit any of the bad parts of it until I got off onto the road to the coast.
I made a town of about 1000 inhabitants 75 km south of Esquel at 7:45, and after gassing up looked for a hotel or a place to put up my tent, but they had neither. The lady in the shop mentioned a place where people sometimes camped by the river - no water, no bathrooms - but said the next hotel was in Governador Costa, a town 80 km south. I decided to try for it - sundown would be in 30 minutes, followed by another 20 minutes of half light. Riding in the dark through a minefield of potholes would become difficult as the light got dim, and nearly impossible after dark. Of course, at this moment people gassing up there wanted to start asking me about my trip... I restrained the impulse to just cut them off, and answered the usual questions, which took another precious five minutes.
As I sped out of the gas station, I was thinking that 80 km in 45 minutes would be no problem, as long as the road didn't get any worse. I would just have to ride at 100 or 110 km per hour the whole way. Naturally once I got 15 km outside of town, I saw a sign that said the road would be in a "bad state" for the next 40 km, and soon after I was hitting stretches of loose gravel for 1-200 meters. I was doing 110 km - 75 mph - and could barely make out the change in color of the road ahead in time to slow down to a more reasonable 80 km/hr before I hit the gravel. One time I missed it coming up and was still doing 100 km when I left the pavement, with an eirie feeling of gliding slightly out of control until I hit the other side, and after that I slowed down a bit. Then I hit the first of a few detours - the road went off into the desert at the side onto a jury-rigged gravel track for 5 km. As the sun went below the horizon I was wondering whether this was going to be one of those times where you get to the end of the bad 40 km - only to find another sign saying that the next 40 is going to suck too.
I got lucky - even after the sun set, it took a very long time for complete darkness to fall, and the road got better as I approached Gobernador Costa, other than a few jolting potholes that I only found out about when I hit them. I grabbed a room in the first hotel I found. The next day I headed out, had lunch in a lakefront town called Sarmiento in the middle of the desert, famous for its oil and dinosaur fossils. Right after I left I ran into two other motorcyclists going the other way. One was living in NYC in Maspeth, about a mile from my apartment, and we had knew my friends who own the Venus Room in Manhattan as well as a bunch of people that I know in the NYC Burning Man community. We started talking about parties, wondering if we'd nearly met before.
We spent about an hour and a half on the side of the road, and afterwards I tried to make up the time so I could get far enough down the coast to make it possible to reach Rio Gallegos the next day - the final city on the mainland of South America. This required doing more than 600 km that day, so I could do the final 650 km the next day. I bypassed a major city on the coast called Rivadavia, then went through a big town called Caleta Oliva, and then from there my map showed little dots of towns all the way down the barren coast. I'd filled up one of the extra water bags I have with gas, because I figured that much like northern Canada and Alaska the distances between gas stops would become much greater. South of Oliva the wind started to reach the power that Patagonia has a reputation for, and at 120 km (75 mph) I would suddenly find myself riding the center line. The wind increased in power as I went south, and at points the bursts made me feel like the bottom of the motorcycle was going to be swept sideways out from under me. The skies were totally devoid of clouds - once a day from Esquel I'd spot a tiny wisp and it would look out of place like a scratch on the surface of the sky. I was only a thousand kilometers from Tierra del Fuego, and it was still so hot that a few times I pulled over because I thought that the heat must be coming off of the engine and I was about to overheat.
At 7pm I found myself in a town called Fitz Roy, a few blocks of houses with a gas station and a camp ground. In other experiences in the desert I've noticed the wind seems to pick up around sunset - I'm not sure why - and it was already powerful. I couldn't tell from the map whether the next town, Tres Cerros, would be large enough to have a hotel, so I thought I'd be better off stopping to give myself time to set up camp. I picked a spot in the campground with some trees - a row of them had been planted at one edge, and they were the first trees I'd seen since Sarmiento. They gave a tiny bit of cover against the wind but it was still a major undertaking to try to put up the tent as the wind tried to send it south across the pampas. I through my gear inside and hoped that the poles wouldn't break in the night.
The town had a feeling was more desolate that even the most remote places I had seen in Canada and Alaska. The wind bent the grass flat, and tumbled plastic bags that might have just blown in from Buenos Aires. Every dog in town barked viciously in sequence as I passed, and no people were visible. I had dinner that night at a lonely restaurant that was run by an old woman. After she cooked she sat down at the next table to talk to me, and we talked about the wind, and the weather, and then drifted into politics. In the next election she would be voting for "blank" - none of the above - and she blamed the leaders of the country for stealing the people's money and driving them into poverty. This is a common theme here - while democracy is preferable to the military, there aren't any leaders or parties left who have any credibility. Argentina went through 4 presidents last year, devalued its currency by 2/3, and confiscated all accounts that Argentines had in dollars. The military was disgraced after the Falkland Isl - pardon me, the Malvinas conflict, and there are really no institutions left that anyone trusts.
The next day was the longest ride I had done in months, arriving in the city of Rio Gallegos, which sits at the southern tip of the South American mainland. The cold had finally started to arrive. After a few tries I found a hostel, then an internet cafe for the first time in 5 days (need that daily dose of doom and gloom from the NY Times), and then some food. The next day, as I got ready to head out I met Jorge, a 20 year old who had travelled from Colombia all over South America. His family had lived there on the street, and he had headed out on his own at 17. He told me that as he travelled he scraped by working in various places, doing hacky sack or juggling on street corners, and making jewelry. He had about 30 pesos ($10) left, but didn't seem worried, but he was a little upset that his bag had been stolen in Peru, including his street performing gear. I really admired the way he was traveling - without any plans or commitments back home, living by his wits. As it happened, I had 6 juggling beanbags that I'd been looking to get rid of since Iquique, Chile - I'd bought a set of devil sticks and couldn't justify the weight of the beanbags anymore since I hadn't used them in months. I gave them to him, and he then took me into his room and using his jewelers pliers created an amazingly intricate flower out of wire, which he gave me as a gift.
An hour south of Rio Gallegos I crossed back into Chile, then hit the ferry, which looked a little like a landing boat used in World War II. The crossing to Tierra del Fuego took 30 minutes, and then unbelievably I was actually in Tierra del Fuego - a place that I'd been talking about as my goal for the last 9 months, or even the last 2 years as I planned this - it was a little unreal. The roads had been wavering indecisively between gravel and pavement but gave up on the other side, and the plain here was as open as in Patagonia - so finally I was faced with the gale force winds on a loose surface, something I'd been dreading, but it turned out was not as bad as I expected. I crossed back into Argentina - I wanted to be in Ushuaia, but knew I wouldn't make it with the ferry and two border crossings, so I stopped in Rio Grande, wishing I had enough daylight to keep riding for four more hours.
I finally got going late the next morning, but I only had the last 220 km to go. I went outside to pack and the weather had dropped to near freezing. Clouds were blowing in, and the wind was as hard as ever. Of course. I'm not even sure if I would have wanted it to be easy - which was good, because it wasn't. As I hit the last stretch of gravel going into the mountains the rain finally set in, and I had to laugh. I pulled into Ushuaia in the afternoon, with all of my cold weather and rain clothing on, including an electric vest and hand grips, and still colder than I ever was in Alaska or Newfoundland. But I had made it. A rock could go through the oil pan of the bike the next day, and I could still go home happy.
Ushuaia is a city of 40,000 people, set on a bay of the Beagle Channel that is surrounded by glaciated mountains. The city was originally founded as a penal colony and a prison for repeat offenders and political dissidents - in the 18th century the idea of colonization by populating an inhospitable area with a penal colony was very popular. One of the prisoners wrote a book about the prison archipelago, which sounds like it might have had some influence on Solzhenitsyn, but Peron closed the prisons in 1949, and now they are a tourist attraction. It looks very much like Seward Alaska - and it feels that way also, since the principal - perhaps only - industry is tourism. There is the main departure port for ships to Antarctica. Having too many tourists can really distort the character of a place - Rio Grande, a city of similar size 200 km north in Tierra del Fuego is much friendlier (as well as much cheaper.)
I was extremely excited in the days before my arrival here, but for the first two days I was here I felt only exhaustion and relief. I'd been riding hard for a week, and ever since Machu Picchu this has been my main focus - I'm glad that it is done. I made a few calls home when I arrived - one of my friends asked me "So what did you learn?" I was completely blank. I was supposed to have learned something from this? I thought, and I got that he meant something other than Spanish and how to ride a bike on gravel and sand. Right now, I think I'm just too close to the trip still to really be able to see the big picture of it - when I think of "my trip" I'm mainly thinking about the leg from Cuzco, Peru down to here, and then when I purposefully go through all of the places I've been to since June it's a little bit of a blur - it has just been my normal life for 9 months now. For the first time I can really think about getting home - and the idea of life back in New York City is almost alien to me now, but at the same time the fact that I can go home at any time, and sleep in the same bed every night, and not have to work hard at having a conversation seems wonderful.
March 7 - Villarica, Chile
I had a hard time tearing myself loose from Santiago. I finally got out of the hostel at 2pm March 2, and headed down towards Temuco. I'd once had an ambitious plan to reach Termuco - 677 km (400 mi) away in a single day, using the autopista where I could do 120 kmph (75 mph) but by this time I was happy just to get out and be riding south at all - I had some errands to finish in Santiago and finally left the city at 4pm. Luckily since we are in summer in the southern hempishere and Chile has a weird time zone, it gets dark around 8:30, so I still had enough time to go 300 km.
I stayed one night in a nice hostel near San Clemente, got back on the autopista and made it to just north of Conguillo National Park. I was also about 60 km east of the Argentine border. My original plan was to get over the border, hit the paved road on the coast of Argentina, and blow down it all the way to Ushuaia. I talked to Scott who runs SCS Habitat in Santiago, and he told me right now the weather was unusually good, and if I wanted to do the Lake District route I should take this opportunity.
Scott had mentioned that he had never ridden a motorcycle, which should have set off little alarm bells for me. He gave me some photocopied maps on which he outlined a recommended route, which I started following. The gravel towards Conguillo was fun - I've actually started enjoying gravel riding in the last two months, and I took the first 30 km at about 80 kmph. Then I entered the park and the road went to pieces - about 2 meters wide, windy, hilly, and crossing volcanic flows where the people in charge of the park decided to use the volcanic material on the road, which means it is surfaced in dust.
When you're riding a motorcycle on an unstable surface you really want to have your center of gravity low and forward, but when you're touring this isn't really possible to achieve - I have about 80 kilos (200 lbs) of equipment with me, clothes, camping equipment, parts and tools. A dual sport motorcycle is a compromise between a bike that can be comfortable for long hauls on the highways and one built to withstand offroad, or at least unsealed roads, and the suspension needs to be high to have enough travel to withstand all of the shocks without bottoming out. In my first experiences on gravel the bike seemed too high to be stable, but over time I got used to the experience, and learned that although it feels like the bike is about to slide out from under you, it really isn't - as long as you don't brake with your front brake, or hit a really deep patch of gravel, or sand, or snow... or dust.
Dust is actually I think the worst surface I've had to drive on - it's much finer and smoother than sand, and unlike snow it never packs to the point where it becomes stable. I'm fairly tall - 1.8 meters (6 ft) and can barely stand astride my bike because it has a high suspension. So the overall effect of riding my Dakar in the volcanic sand was like ice skating on stilts. The park was 40 km of lots of sand and hills, with sharp dropoffs and trees at the sides and in between quick glances to admire the view I spent the rest of my time there recovering from near falls (often a quick tap of the ground with my foot to right the bike) and as I cruised down the last narrow crumbling defile to the park exit I was amazed that I'd never gone down - with all of that weight, once it starts to go over there is no stopping it if you can't get good footing, and the only place you can usually do that is pavement.
I did admire the araucaria (Monkey Puzzle) trees, the volcano itself and the massive lava fields that in the last few decades have dammed rivers to create new lakes. The araucarias were the best part of the ride - a species of tree native to only a few hundred square miles in the foothills of the Andes, with huge umbrellas of platelike spiky leaves at the top of a columnar trunk. At the same time, I cursed Scott and his advice, and wondered whether I should try to continue on his route. I'd bought a map from a local gas station chain called Copec, and it showed the road through the park as "unpaved secondary" and one of the roads that I was to go on the next day was not supposed to be as good as that. But I hadn't fallen, so I thought I'd put in Reigoli, and there was no way they were going on this road. It wasn't really wide enough for a bus and went up the hill at an angle only possible for my bike or a four wheel drive vehicle (a real one, not one of those suburban SUV's that are a minivan with an overload of testosterone). With all of the lose sand on the incline going up I was hoping that I was going the right way because I sure as hell didn't want to have to go back down. At the top of the hill the road narrowed further to the width of a car, and was covered in a deep layer of sand, and I slowed to a fast walking pace, thinking that where I was if I got into trouble it was unlikely that I'd see anyone for days. Then a few turns later, I ran into some farmers on horses herding cattle, who confirmed that this was the right road - but seemed a little shocked to see someone riding a motorcycle on it.
As I came down the hill I spotted a narrow stream that I'd have to cross, filled with large rocks. Water crossings are usually not too much of a problem as long as you don't slow down - but after I was almost all of the way across I spotted a small bridge right after the embankment on the other side, made out of a few uncut logs, and a 45 degree angle to the direction of the road. I was trying to figure out how to surge up unto it without falling off the other side when I slowed down and the bike executed a slow U-turn on the big rocks as I tried to keep it upright, finally toppling over on top of me in the stream. I ended up lying in 6 inches of water, and was more annoyed than anything else, until I realized my foot was trapped under one of the aluminum boxes on the side of my bike. I tried to pull it out and got nowhere.
I knew that there were some people around, but probably too far to help in the next hour or two, so after some struggling I looked carefully at the bike and figured out that if I turned the handlebars I could brace some of the weight, and finally I got my foot free. There was no way I'd find good enough footing in the middle of the stream to right the bike with all of the gear so I disassembled everything and put it on the other side of the log bridge, and then went back and got the bike up on its side stand in the water. It took me another 20 minutes to rock it back and forth over the large stones and onto the bank, and then I repacked. My foot was a little sore, but so far there was no harm done.
I carefully went through the hills until I reached a small town, and I saw a sign for Reigoli, only 4 km away. I smiled and breathed a deep smile of relief, suddenly happy that I hadn't turned back, and came around a corner and crashed again. I was going down a hill, with the normal ravine on one side and an embankment on the other, when I realized that the hill side had a second ravine - some kind of crevice that had opened up, narrow at the top but several meters wide and several deep towards the bottom of the hill - and I spotted it about 3 meters before my front wheel rolled into it. Since I was coming around a curve on a sandy hill I'd had my feet down on the ground and couldn't hit the rear break, so I hit the front and as the bike slowed to a stop it toppled over again - with all of the weight of the bike down the hill, lower that the wheels.
This time I was really pissed off, and just heeved the bike back onto its stand gear and all using my back (ouch), just before two men ran over to help me. I was back in the saddle within a minute and starting up, thinking again, no harm done, and then one of them handed me my mirror, and as I looked at the place where it used to sit I noticed my windshield was cracked in two. The other mirror was spinning free after the crash because overenthusiastic "repairs" in Quito at Hostel Dejavu had destroyed the threads for mounting it, and it had been held in place with local JB Weld that has the tensile strength of chewing gum. That's it, I thought, no more offroad until I get down to Ushuaia. Soon I was back on the gravel, and loving it, even the parts where the rocks were loose and deep.
On the way out past Reigoli I met a bunch of Chilean mountain bikers who were crossing over the mountain into Argentina - we compared notes on the roads - we agreed they sucked - and I tried to help them with some flats using my compressor but it wouldn't fit the the valves of their tires. I headed down the last 5 kilometers of gravel and a wasp flew into my shirt and bit me twice because he was trapped - somehow I had the presence of mind to slow down, find a level spot on the hill to park the bike and then crush the little bastard. I stripped off my riding gear and found his mangled corpse, then had a cigarette - welcome to fucking Marlboro country - and noticed that I wasn't having any problems breathing. Oh good, guess I'm not allergic. (I'd never been stung before.) It hadn't exactly been a banner day.
I made Pucon, saw a zillion tourists, and slowed down only to be sure that the hostel that was recommended to me was overpriced. I stopped in Villarica 24 km away and after a few beers from some sympathetic bicyclists felt a little better. There was a Swiss couple there, both motorcycle touring on the same model of motorcycle as me, and we compared notes on the problems we'd had with the bike - they'd started in Europe and were doing South America before heading home. For the most part none of us had had any major problems, and it was nice to see two other Dakars making such a long trip.
I spent the next day making repairs on the bike - I put a few braces across the windshield made by cutting L-braces for furniture in half, and a taller (repairguy) in town drilled holes for me in the plastic and ground the sharp edges of the braces, and after he heard where I'd come from didn't charge me (in fact refused to accept money from me). I found deep in my spare parts bag a special bolt for the mirror (it's designed to break away at one place in a crash) and had at least one working.
I skipped the rest of the Lake District after some locals told me that the ferry on Scott's map - past another 60 km of gravel - didn't actually take vehicles. So I headed down the autopista to Entre Los Lagos, and then camped out in a national park that straddles the border and headed into Argentina the next day.
I think one of the big problems that you confront on a trip like this is tourist fatigue - after 9 months going through North and South America you can have the tendancy to not appreciate the places that you are traveling through, because they are similar to other places you have been before. Volcanos? Seen that. Yawn. I noticed this also happening when I was at the ruins in Peru - and it is something I'm trying to combat now while I'm riding, otherwise there isn't much point in continuing. On the other hand, I am so close now... maybe after I reach Tierra del Fuego I'll feel released from a major obligation to myself, to complete the ride there, and will be able to enjoy being a traveller again. Otherwise, I might cut things short in Buenos Aires and come back another time.
February 28 - Santiago, Chile
I got my bike back from BMW yesterday, and put a new set of tires on it today. The BMW people seemed sort of competent... I'd asked them to fix the bearings in the steering, but they don't have the parts, so I'll just have to get by without it until BA. They did the valves, the oil, and the other fluids, and I have a new chain on there. I also finally got my left mirror fixed. When I picked it up yesterday, it was standing next to another 2002 Dakar with the same paint, and I thought Santiago looked a little battle-scarred compared to it, not as pretty, but tougher and tested on some of the worst roads that South America has to offer.
The bike is now ready to roll, and after a week hanging out here playing chess and cards, watching lots of movies, drinking and wasting time, so am I. I don't have the same enthusiasm I had a few weeks ago - now that I'm past Machu Picchu, there isn't really anything I feel like I must see going south - I'm just doing it to finish up. Maybe once I'm finally gotten down there it'll start being fun again - no more sense of obligation.
Then again, it could also be the wine from yesterday... memo to self, never buy two bottles instead of one of anything with a screw cap that you haven't tried before... "Mmmm... a faint taste of acetone, with a touch of aluminum... GOOD GOD that's sweet!" (I never touched the second bottle.) I've learned to play scaat (a German card game) and have taught a few people to play 25, an Irish card game typically played out in the country. I'm trying to work the people in the hostel up to poker... which we could play for pesos (at 750 pesos to $1...)
I think I've decided to end in Rio, and fly the bike to Miami - and this means that after Ushaia I get to see a chain of South American cities - Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Ascuncion, Curitaba, Sao Paolo, Rio and maybe Belo Horizonte - and Santiago is probably the easiest of them to deal with. Then again, maybe its the blandness of Santiago that takes a lot of the fun away. On the positive side, I've heard that it might be possible to reach Antarctica for as little as $600 - but it is getting very late in the season, so I'll have to see what happens when I get to the docks in Ushaia.
I'll put in one day of actual sightseeing tomorrow, just so I won't feel bad if I don't come back here on the way up from Ushaia. I've decided I don't want to see another museum of pre-Colombian art, another church, or another presidential palace. Maybe the art museum will be cool. Anke and Ulf are leaving tomorrow morning, and they've decided to go as far down through Chile as they can - I'm cutting over to the good road on the Argentine coast about a third of the way down - so unless I catch them in Temuco, 700 km south of here, I won't see them again unless we have a chance meeting in Ushaia. Could happen if I go to Antarctica.
