Ushuaia to Rio Grande the first leg

Up early as usual for me on big days. Getting that pre rowing race feeling in the pit of my stomach. This was going to be a big day if we were going to get over the mountain pass ahead to somewhere reasonably warm and sheltered. For some reason it pelts rain in Ushuaia till 11 or so when the sun raises the cloud cover over the mountains so we ignore the weather outside while packing.
It takes us till 11 to pack, we post our postcards home on the way out of town getting odd looks from traffic and the post office staff. The road out of town is very scenic and the mountains look even more spectacular up close. Theres even a tail wind to send us on our way.
We´ve heard the pass ahead is tough from the other cyclist but we just put one foot in front of each other and cycle, getting used to the wobbliness of the bikes with a full load on and keeping an even steady pace. This might be a long day!
In the excitement of leaving town we forgot to pick up bread so I ask at a winter ski centre along the road. They give us a load of bread and refuse to take any money. The Argentine people are very hospitable and friendly.
We stop for lunch later on at a husky sledding centre, thankfully the huskies are tied up as I´m not sure we could outpace them on bikes just yet. Its a great feeling eating soup and sandwiches while sitting on a wooden bridge on the valley floor with a clear mountain steam flowing below you.
When we get to the start of the pass we see it´s not all that bad. It´s a steady gradient, very doable and we definitely don´t mind that we can´t see the end of the corkscrew. We grind up the pass in our bottom gears, watching for the lorries who seem to take the racing line down the pass. The road is plenty wide with two gravel run off areas but even small cars use the gravel to get a better line through the corners. The truckers are friendly though and most will give a wave. We wave back which is an acquired skill when you have panniers on your front wheel.

After a few false summits and about 10km of climbing we reach the top of the pass and see the other side of the mountain. The photos are here Below us we can see the old road, I think it´s in one of the photos but it looks lethal, gravel surface and no crash barriers so we´re glad to see the new road stretching down the far side of the valley at the side of lake fagnano.
We coast down the road hitting speeds of 45Km / hr and having to hold the bikes back from doing more. Some well earned free wheeling at last. Cycling with a loaded bike is a different kettle of fish and I joke that we´ll be qualified for our artic licences when we get home.

On the way down the pass we see a sign for a hostel but decide to push on. Bit of a rookie error as we are short water and later on the road is surrounded by swampy marshes with dead trees and no running streams. We needed water but knew the lake ran close to the road from our maps eventually so pushed on.
When we saw the sign for lago fagnano we followed the dirt track to what turned out to be a naval base. The C.O. let us camp on the lawn and use their hot water and jacks while their two massive alsatians made friends with us and watched us cooking up our stew. Very disciplined dogs as even though they are drooling they behave themselves till I throw them some bread.
A good end to the first day on the road with 70 kms and one mountain pass in the bag.

25-10-08
We wake, eat porridge and break camp. It takes us 2 hours from waking till we hit the road but I´m sure that will improve later. We hit the road to the next town, Tolhuin, its in a logging area and we get lunch and 2 days supply of bread to get us to rio grande.
We cycle on paved roads through miles of swampy half dead forest till it´s late in the evening and we pass an estancia. We go in and ask can we camp and some gauchos let us stay on their ranch. These fellas were proper tough gauchos; riding round bareback rounding up horses, rough houses with the radiators pegged outside, pups eating what looked like a horses head out the back and we had a job trying to figure out which one of them was in charge. Turns out the toughest loooking buck among them living out of the roughest house with the worst set of teeth I´ve seen in my life was in charge of the operation. Later we saw them corral horses on bareback with lassoos, very impressive and they seemed to enjoy what they were at.
We camp up the back of the farm beside the water shed and go to sleep to the sounds of bats night flying round us. 60kms today.
Sun 26-10
As we cycle along the road in the middle of the day we see lots cars pulled over to the side of the road. There´s smoke rising from the the trees opposite most of the cars. Turns out its a big tradition to head or the country with the family for an asado or BBQ. Good thing we´ve got enough food or the smell of the BBQ might be too much for hungry cyclists.
We have lunch at the side of the road not far from where a minibus full of family are having a BBQ. The sun is out and we´re sheltered from the wind which has been picking up and we both crash out and sleep. Later the younger people from the group wander over to look at our bikes and say hello. I think they´re not too impressed with our packet soup and ham sandwiches lunch so they return later, first with a steak and then with a big hunk of patagonian lamb. In the distance I hear the men in the group joking "ask them if they want red wine with that"
We´ve just ate lunch but the food tastes fantastic and later we chat with all the group as they are moving on.

Later when we hit the road the wind is strong. Normally on the flat paved roads we can easily do 15km 7 hr all day long but now we´re grinding out the miles at 10. Late in the evening when we see an estancia I call in to see if we can get some water I get chatting to Adrian the ranch owner who generously offers us a place to camp for free. His Son in Law Thomas even introduces us to the farm cook who throws our names in the pot with the farm hands. Thomas shows us to an old farm cottage where we bunk up for the night on old slatted beds. Estancia Viamonte has quite a history to it and Thomas who is originally from Buenos Aires seems to really like the place. Turns out he was educated by the Irish christian brothers in BA.
At dinner in the workers dining room The farm workers Adolfo, Pancho and Alfonso are a good laugh and they invite us back to their quarters to drink a mate. We chat for an hour in spanish and manage to pull off a decent conversation.
A great day for Argentine hospitality, we´re stuffed to the gills, have eaten two massive feeds of lamb and have a roof over our heads for free. Such friendly people.

Next morning we hit the road early to avoid the wind which picks up around 10 and peaks mid afternoon. I´m a bit sorry not to have stayed around to see the workings of the farm and chat to Thomas who is a real gent but we need to push on so we leave a thank you note and hit the road at 7 am to avoid the wind. The last stretch into Rio grande is tough as my porridge only seems to last the first hour and a half so I´m running on empty by the time I hit town and hour later.
Town is a windswept and unimpressive sprawl with a fair few derelict buildings. The camping we were headed for is closed. I´m very cold so I change into dry layers to warm up. and we manage to find hostel argenino. The owner is lovely and she makes us hot coffee with liquor and biscuits to warm us up.
We rest up for the remainder of the day and stay the next day as we´ve planned a rest day.
A good start to our travels so we do some planning for the next leg.

Next Stop Rio Grande

Tomorrow we hit the road through the mountains to Rio Grande.
I´ts about 4 days away so we´ll be packing some load of food to keep us going.
Next update might not be till Punta Arenas..

Ushuaia at last

I´d say both Paul and I would admit that both of us aren´t really all that gone on cities and by the end of the second week in Buenos Aires we were really looking forward to the flight south and getting on the roads on our bikes in the wild.

Patagonia was what interested us and it was only on the flight down that we really felt that the trip had begun proper. Our flight took a stop off in El Calafate where we would later be hiking on glaciers and we could see glacial ice floating on the lake while the plane was on the runway. On the way in to ushuaia the views of the mountain ranges were unbelievable, these were serious hills with a decent layer of snow on all of them.

Ushuaia itself was set with a ring of snow covered mountains sheltering it and the beagle channel coming right up to the port at the edge of town. It was like landing on another planet.

When we checked into hostel freestyle the guy on reception was surprised to see "more cyclists"
The last thing we expected was to be rooming with a guy doing a similar trip. Julien Montoya from Santiago was cycling from Ushuaia to Alaska but the poor fellas knee had given up 50 kms out of town. He was pretty down and it was rough on him to have the two of us getting ready for the road ahead while he was arranging to fly home for keyhole surgery on his knee. He reckoned the road ahead was tough, with a 10km hill over a mountain pass that was still above the snowline.
A failed cyclist and tales of woe from the road ahead is not exactly what you want to hear at the start of and expedition. I guess no map can really do justice to local conditions so we had no real idea what it would be like on the road. Despite having checked the temperatures we knew we were arriving in early spring and werent sure if the weather was going to be baltic cold or not? Would the famed patagonian wind that could rip the door off a car grind us to a halt? Would there be enough towns between big cities so we could at least buy food on the way?

No point dwelling too much on the road ahead, so we just get stuck into the prep.
We settled into the hostel and got stuck into putting our bikes together as we´d not opened the boxes since packing them in Ireland and had no idea if they were damaged in the flight or not.
We assembled the bikes out at the bbq area of the hostel and they seemed ok. Mighty, one thing going right at least.

Two Irish fellas arrive in the southernmost city in the world, on a cycling trip north and what´s the first thing they do? Cycle south. At least if we were going for a cycle the wrong way it was on purpose, we wanted to see the national park and hike to a viewpoint overlooking the mountain ranges. We hit the road which soon turned to gravel with our rucksacks and cycled the 25km out of town to see the amazing views of the national park. Well worth the effort and after a 2 hour hike up a mountain through deciduous forest the view at the top was spectacular. Paul took some photos on the way and even though his camera battery died at the top we didnt mind, the views were like nothing Id ever seen.

To see the famed penguins we took a boat trip the next day on the beagle channel with one of the girls from the hostel Sonia, a story best told by Pauls photos on the right. Some of the wildlife we saw like steamboat ducks, a sea lion colony, gannets and albatrosses were well worth seeing up close.

To prep for the off we went on a mission to the local supermarket. Paul had plan of cooking stew in the hostel so wed have some solid dinner grub for two days before having to go the pasta and sauce route. We estimated it would take 4 to 5 days to reach Rio Grande, the next big town and were not sure of how much food you could get along the way so wed need quite a bit of food just in case. I eat a lot so having enough food was going to be a big issue.

We took an extra day to pack, well worth it in the end as our bikes were looking like overloaded donkeys even with ditching some stuff. Cold was weighing on our minds so wed packed extra warm layers. All we had to do now was cycle..

Last week in Buenos Aires

This week we´ve been taking spanish lessons with a local Argentine girl Cecelia Martinez.
She runs the classes from her apartment and thankfully has endless patience when Paul and I end up using french words instead of spanish. Thankfully her apartment is two blocks away and she doesn´t mind when wére late for class after the night before. By the end of the week she could tell when the spanish wasn´t going to flow so easy and would produce a mate gourd and kick things off with a bit of caffeine.

By sheer coincidence she had met 3 english guys who were doing a similar bike trip to us while on holidays in Mendoza and put us in touch with them. Some of their advie on routes and distances between towns has been invaluable as sometimes a marked place on a map down here just means the crossroads with tumbleweed blowing though it has a name and not that there is a shop or anything like a village.
Spanish classes were great craic, with Cecelia teaching us everything from the words for each part of our bike to how to ask permission to camp in a farmers field. Not the standard spanish lessons by any stretch of the imagination. By the end of the week we´d made great progress and were well able to get by.

We´ve had a few great nights out thanks to meeting some Paddies abroad, Patrick "el architecto" and the genial Eoghan were great craic to meet for a few pints and showed us some good spots in town. On our last saturday night in town we were determined to stick the pace of a Buenos Aires night out, clubs don´t open till 3 and close at 6 so we had some adjusting to do to our Irish drinking schedule, but thanks to the lads we had a mighty night.
When we met Paddy and Eoghan at the bar their friend seemed a bit familiar. Looked like someone I knew from rowing at home a few years back. Couldn´t be I thought but it was indeed Anthony, a well travelled frenchman. I should have know it was him as he was chatting up the ladies from the hostel straight off! He´s lived in a fair few cities, Madrid, Dublin, Paris, the list goes on, but seems to really like Buenos Aires so there´s definitely something there. Good to meet an old rowing buddy and next time the tequilas are on me.
Our friends from the hostel Tamara, Katy and John were out with us too and had a great night as well. We moved to a hostel in a better area after the first week and meet some really sound people there and have had a few great nights out with them.
One night we went to see the obligatory tango show. Normally I´m averse to being dressed up as a tourist and roasted on a spit to see the local equvalent of dancing midgets, but I have to say I was well impressed by the show we went to. Cecelia was advising us on good things in the locality and definitely hit the nail on the head with the show. There was a live band with a double bass, baby grand and violin and the band leader on accordion. The accordiaon player had the facial expression of a gravedigger but was giving the old squeeze box welly. At one stage he´d expanded it so far I though he´d do damage. Singing and dancing were alternated and along with the obligatory tango, which is a bit serious but very skilled, the dancers did some traditional local dances as well. At the end of the show some of the audience were invited to dance with the dancers and I ended up dancing with one of the tango ladies. The odd bit of swing dancing I´d done in Galway kicked in and while it was far from a tango, thankfully I didn´t ruin the girl´s career with my size 14´s.

First Week in Buenos Aires

After a long flight over, thankfully having had our bikes flown in their boxes for free thanks for Aerlingus and British Ariways, we landed at Buenos Aires Airport and took a taxi van to the hostel we´d booked while on the stop over in heathrow.
Our hostel was slap bang in the city centre, which turned out to be one of the seedier areas of the city. Not the best spot to be a gringo standing on the street with two big cardboard boxes and a load of panniers trying to find a hostel. It looked like a jumble sale.

First week we´ve mostly been doing touristy things, we saw the cemetery of the rich in Ricoleta, where Eva Peron is buried. All of the tombs are over the top, we were walking through all the marble tombs and granite mauseloems half the size of houses when we spotted the 20 foot celtic cross of Father Fahey a missionary priest originally from Loughrea. There were lots of irish names; aparently the Duggan´s are one of Buenos Aires richest Families and the most famous irish man is definitely Admiral Brown, a Mayo Man from Foxford who is celebrated as the father of the Argentine navy. He was pivotal in their war for independance.

We´ve ate well here, the steaks are as good as everyone says, for 12 euro you can get a big lump of sirloin steak, spuds and a beer. I think the main reason they´re so good is the way they´re cooked, all of the places use charcoal grills.

Eating here is a bit odd, as we get hungry for dinner round 6. Actually I get hungry about 5 times a day, but the restaraunts don´t open till 7:30 pm and the locals seem to go out to eat round 10.30 pm and only have desert round 12pm, on a week night. Yet when we talked to a few it seems they keep normal office hours. we were wrecked from eating steak that late for the first few days and definitely had a few dodgy dreams brought on by steak processing. All the late night steak and beers are building a good layer of insulation for the antartic winds down south!

For the laugh we went to the Zoo to see what sort of dangerous animals might try join us in the tent out in the sticks. Most of the bad guys like snakes seem to live in the jungles up north, thankfully, though a few will cross our paths, I know I´ll be checking my boots after seeing the scorpions cage. We did spot a few things that might make a decent snack for some hungry cyclists if worst came to worst.

Walking round the City there is a big divide between rich and poor. In posh areas like ricoletta there are designer shops like Hermes with no prices, where as in the other end of town you see people eating leftovers out of mc donalds bins or sorting rubbish to make a few quid at night. In an area like the Boca where to Boca Juniors stadium is, Maradona´s home club, we saw an excellent tango show but two blocks away were sure to let a local dude know we knew he was following us. One of the girls from our hostel that was with us was robbed the day before down there.

That said any of the Argentines we´ve met are very friendly. We´ve been having a few beers and introduced to a few good pubs and drinks with a few of the local lads. Shop keepers will count out your change for you so you know you´re getting the correct change and we´ve never been short changed.
Nobody minds giving a few directions to two gringos with no mucho espagnol and even the guy on the street hawking measuring tapes was willing to walk us over to a hardware shop so we could buy a spanner and allen keys for our bikes to replace the stuff that was taken from our carry on luggage in dublin by security.

Next week we start spanish lessons, badly wanting at this stage.

Backdated from september

At this stage we're getting pretty sorted for our trip to south america.Plan is to fly over to buenos aires on the 7th of October. We're going to go to a language school and generally hang out, see the city and eat as much steak as we can to fatten up before the inevitable lean times we'll have cycling up the mountain passes in the Andes.

After two weeks we fly on to ushuia, the southernmost city in the world, to begin the journey proper. A lot of what we are interested in is in Patagonia, we'll be doing a lot of hiking in the national parks there, just google torres del paine or mount fitzroy to see what I'm on about. By hikes I mean 5-7 day circuits of the national parks, crossing glacier fields, nothing crazy, we'll have a guide for the glacier fields as a guy from mayo was lost on them a while back, but it will be one hell of an adventure. We'll be cycling and camping a lot. We'll camp to cut down on costs, as we all weill be doing this on less than a shoestring. Plus there are some amazing spots for free camping.
I guess what I'm driving at is that we'll be carrying all our gear on the bikes, clothes, wet gear, tent cooking stuff, a few days food and water. So at the moment I'm building my bike for the trip, it's coming together, had an old school leather saddle with springs, has no wheels or gears yet but I have my panniers, some 85 litres of storage space so far, with about 30 more to go. Being pretty careful about what I use to build it up with. Most people who go touring end up naming their bike they spend that much time on them and end up relying on them so much. Shoot me if I do!

As far a planning the total Trip we've only got as far as Xmas, which will bring us to Santiago, Chile. My Girlfriend Rosie is travelling over to meet me there, turns out my sister and her boyfriend will be in south America at the same time (copycats) so they're aiming to meet us there too, should be a blast.

Beyond that there the Inca trails, Ecuador and the small problem of not being able to cross Colombia without being kidnapped. About the only thing I've done for that so far is get my vaccinations. My doc wants to know for how long and in what country ill be so she can sort out the malaria meds for me, but I'm not getting any closer to that by a long shot. Will have to do some serious reading up in the next few days.