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Chapter 18 Argentinean PatagoniaStart: March
6th, Chile Chico, Chile, Stop: March 29th, Comodoro Rivadavia,
I held out my hand only to feel absolutely no wind pressure. The speedometer showed 120 km/h, which according to my quick calculation meant that we had 120 km/h tail wind. It was incredible. I had never before heard the engine so clear in this speed, and Bente asked over the intercom whether it sounded more noisy than normal. We were on our way east over the Argentinean pampa and had left Lars, Tini and Gerald the same morning in a little village called Perito Moreno, a little east of the Chilean border of Chile Chico. They were going south on Ruta 40, while we took the easy and fast route along the coast. A lunch break introduced us to the Argentinean meat and prices. An incredible
Parilla, a dish that consists of different barbequed meat, proved that
the rumour about high quality meat in this country at least was true up
until now. It was more tender and tasty than any meat we could remember.
A familiar oceanWe reached the coastal Highway, Ruta 3, by way of a sixty kilometer gravel road, at times difficult because of the high heaps of loose gravel separating the wheel tracks combined with strong winds. On each side of the many bridges it was loose across the whole section of the road, and we had a few laughs mixed with high pulse as the bike floated in all directions and we ended up in a different track.
Southbound on the Ruta 3 there was nothing to see, so I opened up the throttle and leaned into the wind. The helmet was twisted to the left, and after a few hours I got tired in my right arm from fighting the gale. Communication was impossible, and given up when a few futile attempts only resulted in a screaming "WHAT DID YOU SAY?". We kept on going though, and even though the 25 degrees we had had over the pampa was reduced to only 12-13 by the time it got dark, we decided to go on for another hour. The moon was almost full, and for a while we had it right behind us, mirroring itself in the slightly wet pavement, thus creating a image of a ships wake. I had a sort of deja vu but couldn't quite put my finger on it at first. I was back on a ship, sailing over the Atlantic or working in the North Sea. Then it struck me. It smelled ocean, but not just any. For the first time in more than nine months we smelled the Atlantic again. I don't know, but it seemed different than the Pacific. It reminded me more of home and work. It smelled good and when we entered the municipal camp ground in San Julian and saw the moon over the Atlantic, I felt good, almost at home. More hickups and bike workAfter an hour's ride out of San Julian I saw oil on my right boot. The engine temperature was higher than normal. "What is it now, Rocinante?", I said and pulled over. Oil was leaking from the cylinder head gasket. Worst case scenarios seems to be the way of thinking these days, so I kicked some stones far into the pampa and let out a few loud and unspeakable words. Bente looked at me instead of the machine and concluded that either I had gone over the edge or Rocinante had finally given in. I believed the head gasket was broken, from my little experience a serious matter for any engine, especially in a place so far from Triumph country as this. We had to continue though, but before we did I tightened three bolts on the cam chain side of the engine, wiped off the oil and smeared dust over the remaining slick layer to easier see if it was still leaking on the next check. We rode into Piedrabuena and settled in outside a Locutorio, a phone center, where I called my dealer in San Diego. Mark's unworried voice in the other end of the line was comforting. After all, he was the one who put this engine together, and when he wasn't worried, I brightened up. I hadn't checked the coolant level in a few weeks, and now I found it to be low, from what reason I couldn't say, but I filled it up again. The oil leakage was stopped by tightening the three screws. All back to normal.
But this incident made us make one more decision. We would go straight to Ushuaia instead of meeting Lars, Tini and Gerald in Calafate. We wanted to be sure we got there and rather see Torres Del Paine and the Perito Moreno Glacier on our way north. In Rio Gallegos we stopped for three days, though, to do a valve clearance check on the engine. In case the valves needed adjustment, I had to order new shims from Costa Rica or San Diego, and rumors in town said that sometimes foreign mail could take forever to get to this far away corner of Argentina. The check revealed that six out of twelve valves needed new shims, so I prepared an order and then we headed for Ushuaia, the ultimate goal of the trip. After a short ride on pavement south of Rio Gallegos, gravel took over. But it was straight and firm and maintaining a speed of almost three digits was no problem. The border control was quick and easy, then we were back in Chile and soon we saw the Magellan Straight. Land of FireSomething was missing though. The sun was shining and there was no wind. When we left on the short ferry ride across the Primero Estrecho, the sea was like a mirror. For months we had feared the Patagonian winds, and now where was it? Dolphins followed the ship and for a while two of them did synchronized swimming, jumping and, it seemed, smiling. I shot picture after picture of them, but as always, none came out good. It is virtually impossible to catch these animals using a slow digital camera. But seeing the black and white bodies jump out of a mirror flat sea in this part of the world will stay in my memory forever. We were off the pavement again. The road from the ferry terminal to the Argentinean border was about 140 km of gravel, most of it good. The winds kept away, and it was like a miracle to see the flat but fascinating Tierra Del Fuego in such good weather. Maybe the Triumph God made good again the small unpleasant moments I had had lately. But it was dusty, and the clouds didn't disappear from the cars ahead of us until the dust had settled, no movement in the air whatsoever. In a small restaurant outside the village or oil base Cullen, the owner agreed that it was a miracle. Only a week earlier they had experienced winds up to 170 km/h.
Tierra Del Fuego is split between Chile and Argentina. On the north-western Chilean side there are almost no people, while the Argentinean side has two main cities, Rio Grande and Ushuaia with a population of around sixty thousand. Both of them are "new" towns. Ushuaia was established more than one hundred years ago, but it wasn't until the Argentinean government made the island a tax free zone and offered financial support to people who started their own business in the area, that the towns started to grow for real. There's not one single pure indigenous left on the island, and more than 80 percent of the people are first or second generation islanders. Actually, most of Argentina descents from recent immigration from Europe, an influence easy traceable in the accent. People from Buenos Aires that we have met speak Spanish with an Italian sound to it, while all the Y and LL-sounds are turned into a SH-sound, distinctly identifying every Argentinean as an Argentinean. The country is the richest in Latin America, and are several steps ahead of even Chile. The prices are of almost Norwegian standards, but in exchange we have found most hotels to be heated, the showers to be excellent, the bread good and most important of all, the espresso coffee abundant and fantastic. This last is quite obvious in a rich country with Italian and Spanish heritage. People here look more like southern Europeans than their mixed blood neighbours in the north and north-west. They are friendly and easy to get in touch with, and remind us not just a little of the people in southern Spain. After another easy border crossing we were back in Argentina and made it to Rio Grande just after dark. A man we met in the street recommended a hostel, a recommendation we would be grateful for. In Hotel Lago Argentino a middle aged woman greeted us with hugs and asked if we wanted to share in on the dinner. For two dollars each we ate a fantastic pasta with day fresh mussles and drank as much wine we could get down. A pleasant evening in the company of very hospitable people was the result of a chance meeting in the streets of this wind-blown oil town. The end of the road
On the 13th of March, the 293rd day of our trip we started our last leg south. The ride was partial pavement and partial gravel, and as we got closer to Ushuaia, it got colder. We had to stop outside a closed restaurant and jump around like idiots for twenty minutes to be able to continue. It was early afternoon when we rode into town. After a quick coffee break - where we discussed our next travel on a motorcycle, maybe around the rest of the world, but more about that another time - we headed 18 km further south-west towards the "End of the road" marker like every motorcyclist and probably everyone else coming here does. At the marker the wind was blowing while we shot picture after picture of ourselves. I was running to and from the camera and sometimes catching the heel of my foot or ending up in an awkward and stupid looking position when the timer ended and the shutter sounded. We had asked eachother how we felt about being here. When we entered Ushuaia we had planned to exclaim our joy about reaching this place with a scream. But in Ushuaia we agreed the feeling would come when we were at the en of the road marker. Now we were here. The truth was none of us felt that this was so special. Don't get us wrong, we felt good, but compared to the feeling I had in mind months ago when Ushuaia was just a name and far far away, this was bleak. OK, we were here, it was cold, the town was nice, the mountains spectacular, but the great feeling of achievement wasn't present. We discussed it for a while and finally agreed on one thing. We hadn't walked barefoot to the South Pole or climbed the Mount Everest. We had just ridden a motorcycle for a while. "Riding a motorcycle around the world is as easy as riding to the closest pub. It just takes longer", someone said once, and it's true, give or take. But either way, it was time for a little statistics. It had taken us more than nine months and 45000km to get to where to road ends, to the southernmost town in the world, from 50 something degrees north to 54 degrees south. We had used almost tree thousand liters of gas, broken engine mounts a couple of times, had an accident that took some time to get out of our heads, met many interesting people and seen fantastic nature and beautiful cities. And we had learned that a trip like this was relatively uncomplicated to see trough. The trip was far from over, but as we got on the bike and turned north towards Ushuaia, it felt right in many ways to know that we were now heading slowly towards home. We found a room for the night, ate a nice celebration dinner and drank two or three cognac too many. On our sinuous way back to the hotel we stopped at a game center and drove model car race for an hour. Bente won every time, since I was too drunk and drove off the track in every turn. It was almost light when we went to bed, unsober and happy.
Rocinante still needed new shims for the valves, and in town I found an excellent high precision tool shop where we filed down the shims to the correct size. It was a lot easier and cheaper than to wait for new shims from the States, or go to another town and follow up the lead I had that Toyota used the same shims.Then we stayed in town long enough to let Lars, Tini and Gerald catch up with us. We also met Bernie, an German American we had met in Nasca, Peru who had driven a Toyota Landcruiser from the States. Quite naturally that meant another wet night, and so we ended up five people driving model cars in the game center, with most of us chasing around to get stranded cars back on track. They also brought news about the Ruta 40, which according to them wasn't so bad after all, and no section was as bad as the last stretch we had done towards Chile Chico. To me it was good news, since I really would like to do this road on our northbound course, if not for anything else so to avoid riding the same stretch of boring coastal road as we did southwards. Shivering coldAfter another couple of days we headed north. The day started reasonably warm, but slowly degraded and it got colder and colder. When we got back on the bike after a lunch break on a YPF service station in Rio Grande, the winds had really picked up and my thermometer showed five degrees celsius. Another 90 kilometers and we were shaking through the border process. Why we decided to go on instead of seeking shelter I don't know, but we did. The sun set and the temperature sank another three degrees. It was blowing hard from the west as I tried my best to keep the bike in the wheel tracks and avoid the loose gravel between them. The cold crept through the layers of clothes and settled in our bones. From time to time I could feel Bente shiver behind me. We aimed for the little restaurant outside Cullen, but had forgotten it was Sunday. It was closed. Bente hammered on the door and shouted that she just had to get in. There was nothing in town and on the gas station the small cubicle only had room for the attendant. We had to go on. Cerro Sombrero was fifty hard kilometers away. Since there's nowhere to hide in this area and since the wind was howling, we drove the last stretch in one go. When we came to the only hostel in town, we were colder than we had ever been on a motorcycle. But inside, the rooms had heating and the showers were simply the best we had had, far better than even the showers in Hotel Radisson in La Paz. I must have stayed under it for forty-five minutes. A bottle of cognac we bought in Ushuaia was quickly reduced to half as we passed the night by the radiator and prayed for better weather.
When approaching Puerto Natales the next night, we were almost as cold though, but again we found a hostel with heating. After a fantastic salmon dinner made by the owner and a good night's sleep we prepared for the leg up to Torres Del Paine. Bente met a guy with a motorcycle jacket in the reception and asked him if he was travelling on two wheels. He looked at her and replied, "Is your name Bente?". He was Chris Bright, an English motorcyclist who after doing Africa on his BMW 100GS had started from New York at about the same time as us. We had been following each other down the continent, sometimes him leading and sometimes us. Lars, Tini and Gerald had all travelled with him for a while, but we hadn't met before. His bike, according to him a troublesome one, was parked somewhere up on the Ruta 40 while he was waiting for a friend to come over from England with a new rear shock absorber. We talked for an hour, exchanged e-mail addresses, and then he had to run to catch the bus to Punta Arenas, where they would meet up the next day. From Puerto Natales the road turned to gravel again. It was firm and the going was good. After only a few kilometers a fully dressed dual sport bike came towards us, and we pulled over. An American in his fifties greeted us. He was on his way back from an attempt to ride the Ruta 40. An accident had resulted in a badly twisted left foot, so he backed off and decided to take the boat from Puerto Natales to Puerto Montt instead of taking his chances on the deserted Ruta 40 and later the Carretera Austral. His bike was a BMW F650, and the luggage was bigger than ours. A flag pole in the back was used for different purposes. He had made one flag that stated his start end end points of the trip - he was on his second leg of a trip from somewhere up in Alaska to Ushuaia, and one flag that said "No Choques", meaning "No Collisions", written in bright red letters and used in big city traffic to draw attention to himself. I bet it worked. We wished him all the best and a quick recovery for his foot, then sped it towards Torres Del Paine.
Glacier countryThe park was marvellous with white peaks in every direction, guanacos grassing everywhere and the towers themselves visible from the road. The road through the park was excellent; firm gravel and twisty. Glacier water lakes surrounded us, flamingoes waded in a small lake, the weather was nice and sunny, and it was simply one of these fantastic days. We spent the night in the cheapest hosteria in the park, but almost regretted it when paying 35 dollars for a lousy room in a very cold house. We cooked on the floor in our room, and burned up as much wood we could fit into the fire place in the reception, played cards and quickly escaped the next morning. It was another fantastic day, and after enjoying more of the views in the park, we left for Argentina again. Our last border crossing between the two countries was just as easy and fast as all of them had been. We entered the Ruta 40 and turned north towards El Calafate. The road was good and after a little over a hundred kilometers we were back on pavement and rode into town in the setting sun. We quickly found the hostel we had been recommended and unpacked everything on the bike. The next morning we mounted a light weight Rocinante and headed towards the Perito Moreno glacier. The eighty kilometers road was not only gravel, but very bumpy gravel, and for more than an hour we shook and vibrated our way towards the park. A few kilometers before the glacier, Rocinante started running poorly. Both recognized the behaviour from the incident in Chile, and both swore and begged the stubborn horse to make it out there before shutting down. She did, and when we entered the parking lot black exhaust smoke disturbed the peaceful national park. Rocinante was left to regret the wrongdoings while we walked down to take this vast mass of ice in closer view.
Perito Moreno is an arm stretching from the great Campo de Hielo Sur into the Lago Argentino. It advances two meters a day and calfs continuously into the lake. The amazing thing is not the glacier itself, but the fact that it pushes towards a penisula in the lake, but never quite makes it over. Sometimes it blocks the flow over water between the two sides, but this only lasts until enough water pressure has built up to burst through the ice dam. The result is that people can stand on the edge of the peninsula and watch a calfing clacier a hundred or so meters away. From the upper view point we could see the glacier stretch for fourteen kilometers before it split and integrated with the main mass of ice. Neither of us had ever seen a glacier this close, and we stayed for several hours and saw plenty of small and medium size calfings. It was undoubtedly one of the most spectacular views we had seen. Before we left the glacier we took off the tank and checked cables and connections for damages. I didn't really think this could be the cause of the stuttering, but without proper tools, it was all we could do. Finally we started up, prayed to the Triumph God and headed towards the hotel. It was eighty nerve cracking kilometers. Not only did Rocinante threathen to stop all the time, it also consumed gas in a very high tempo, adding to the doubt we had about making it back. But we did. The next day I checked all the answers we got from people on the Triumph Tiger mailing list and from our mechanical advisers at Rocket MC in San Diego. Then we cleaned and oiled the air filter, replaced the spark plugs and started up again. After an initial period of stuttering, the bike ran fine again. We quite naturally shared a beer and a cognac while I drew my conlusions. Two times this had happened, and both times it was fixed by cleaning an air filter that didn't look too dirty. The answer was simply to clean it more often from now on. The infamous La QuarentaRuta 40, or La Quarenta, was waiting for us. Bente had agreed to take this road after all, since the wind had been fairly low lately. I had argued that this was a man's thing. Everybody we had met had mentioned Ruta 40 with some kind of awe or at least letting out a little air at the end. I never insisted on taking it, I just looked into the horizon with dreaming eyes and tasted the name. We men are like kids. We never grow up and have to continue the who's-the-strongest game we played in the schoolyard into adolescense. Different name, same game. I would have felt a little bad about not taking the infamous stretch of road, but now I got my will and we were on our way. A few kilometers outside El Calafate the road left the pavement. The quality varied but for the most part that day it was easy. The exception was the last thirty kilometers before Tres Lagos, where the gravel rider's enemy number one had passed over the day before, the road worker. On this road the loose gravel piles up in heaps between the tracks, sometimes more than thirty centimeters high, leaving the track narrow but firm. This is why the road had a bad name, because combined with strong winds it's very hard to keep the bike in the track. But when the road worker decides to fix it, he spreads the gravel and pulls up the firm layer beneath. Then he leaves it to the traffic to make it firm again. Because traffic is scarse and we arrived the day after they had destroyed the road, we were riding on a ten centimeter loose layer of gravel and dirt. It was slow going and Bente sat stiff as a pole behind me, from time to time releasing a sound exclaiming her fear. She admitted she still had an exaggerated fear of falling, exaggerated because the speed was so low that had we fallen, no damage would happen.
When we turned north again from Tres Lagos, we entered the longest stretch of uninhabitaded land we had passed through. The wind was moderate, and after one hundred kilometers we came to Lago Cardiel where an estancia - a cattle farm - offered accommodation. This was late in the season and most places were about to shut down for the winter. We hadn't met a single vehicle since Tres Lagos, and on the estancia we were the only guests. We quickly declined the offer for a room because of the high price and chose to camp outside. When the owner, a middle age man with a french beret and a silk scarf around his neck, turned off the generator silence took over and a million stars looked down upon us and Rocinante. After a late start we were back on the road. The surface changed around every turn. It reminded me of cross country skiing. The tracks were deep and sometimes the only places we could switch to the track next to us was at cattle guards or in turns. In every turn the tracks vanished and was replaced by a semi soft layer that we traversed slowly and carefully. Sometimes the tracks were wide and we could keep a high speed, but other times it was narrow and required first gear riding. The Cordillera - the Andes Mountains - was always looming to the west of us, while the barren pampa dominated the east. For hours we rode alone. Not a single human being or a house disturbed the peaceful landscape. Sometimes guanacos crossed the road, eagles were looking for pray and once we saw a condor high above our heads. I loved it. Bente accepted it. When she shouted, "I love this" on a completely different subject, I was quick to steel the expression out of the context and thank her for enjoying the ride as much as myself. She started to protest but I turned off the intercom. After three hundred kilometers that day - we met five cars - we had passed Bajo Caracoles with it's one hundred inhabitants and stopped at the Estancia Casa de Piedra. They offered camping and rooms, according to our guidebook. The place seemed deserted, but after a little while a gaucho - the Argentinean cowboy - walked over. Luis was about fifty years old, bow-legged and wore the standard beret and scarf. He told us the house had closed down for the winter but that we could camp if we wanted to. An open shelter had a fireplace and was available for cooking. When the owner of the estancia came a little while later we arranged for a horse back ride the next day to the Cueva de las Manos. A seven hour ride awaited us, and I couldn't help worrying if our bodies would handle it. Norwegian cowboys - and girlsWe sat by the fireplace in the morning, trying to build up some heat from the cold night we had spent in the tent. By the time we mounted the horses and rode into the pampa, the sun was out, the wind gone and the warmth crept slowly into our bones. It was my forth ride ever, and although Bente had worked with horses in her youth, she was more or less as unaccustomed as me. Our last ride in the States had been slightly boring because of the restrictions. All we were allowed to do was to walk slowly on paths. This was totally different. Luis let us do whatever we wanted to, and it didn't take many minutes before I kicked my overeager stallion into full gallop. I was thrown up and slammed down, up and down, until I slowly tipped sideways towards the point of no return. When I pulled the bridle the horse slowed down to a fast trot, which only made it worse. Finally it came to a halt so I could straghten up again. Puh, this would be a long day. After following a canyon for a kilometer or so we climbed up onto the open pampa. As far as we could see in every direction we were alone. No roads, houses or power lines disturbed the fantastic rolling hills coloured yellow and golden from the sunshine. Bente had started rather slow because her horse just didn't have the energy or was too tired to do anything, but after an hour it woke up and both of us were galloping from time to time. I was getting the hang of it I thought, which probably only meant that if you had seen me you would have laughed out loud but not died from it.
Luis seemed to belong in his saddle, and he told us he had worked as a gaucho his whole life. In the winter he was the only one living on the farm, caring for the cattle and the horses and maintaining the property. He was living alone and enjoyed it, he said. When he stood next to the horse and rolled a cigarette from tobacco he fished out from a leather pouch, his beret at an angle and his knees far from each other, the image of the gaucho was fullfilled. After two hours we entered the canyon that would lead us up to the caves. We had been warned that the descent was so steep we had to dismount and walk the horses down. But we felt in control by now, and Luis just shook his shoulders and told us to ride down if we wanted to. It was a fun ride. The horses were sliding a little, but with four legs they are more stable than one can imagine. If I let the horse decide his own route and avoided the temptation to lean toward the canyon wall, he was in total control. Bente smiled after a while as well, and soon we were by a river. We crossed the river numerous times and then arrived at the cave. The Cueva de las Manos is a cave full of hand prints. The oldest prints have been dated ten thousand years back, and they look like someone has put his hand on the rocky wall and used a spray can over it. The spray can of those days was the mouth and a straw. The hundreds or thousands of hand prints were probably a homeage to the gods. Every visitor left his print on what the experts believe was a sacred place. Also guanacos and other animals were painted on the walls. We stayed an hour before starting the return trip. This time we galloped a lot more, and as we got closer it felt like my intestines would come out my mouth. Bente's back was on it's way up through her neck, while Luis looked like he was in his armchair watching his favorite tv-show. It wasn't the galloping that tired me out, but the trotting. I tried to listen to Bente's advise and ride "english", ie sit down in every second trot, but never found the rythm of the beast. But when we galloped I could stand up and enjoy. It was fantastic to race across the pampa in the low sun, feeling in control of this incredible animal. Bente was one big smile. We arrived in the late afternoon, thanked Luis and pretended to be only slightly tired. The picture of the cowboy came to mind when I looked down and saw the distance between my hurting knees. I was turning bow-legged. While sitting by the fire and enjoying a well deserved beer we saw the owner outside with a freshly slaughtered sheep, and soon he had made us a few steaks we barbequed over the fire. He fished up a bottle of wine to go with it. I felt like the last cave man as I tore off pieces of meat with my teeth, eating dry bread at the side. When we went to bed the temperature had sunken drastically, and soon it was below zero outside. We slept with all our clothes on but froze even so. Minus three degrees was way lower than we were equipped for, but by the time we left the next day the sun was back and had warmed us up again. We did the last seventy kilometer to the village of Perito Moreno and then turned east. This was the road we took when we entered Argentina and after a few hours we were back at the Atlantic coast. We said goodbye to Patagonia and headed north. Now we're in Comodoro Rivadavia, an oil town on the Atlantic coast. We will head towards the Valdez Peninsula tomorrow to search out penguins and whales, then slowly and randomly continue north. We might go to Iguazu Falls and maybe even the southern corner of Brazil and Uruguay before we cross the ocean towards home. Europe and Norway isn't too far away now, but not quite yet, please.
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