WOW

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Strange are the ways you meet people, I went to a workshop to have my bike looked at and there was a Mexican bloke I had previously met in the harbour in Baires and a Swiss guy.

Alejandro and Werner my new traveling companions, we shared a dinner and a room for the night= cheap=good!

The next morning we went off to see the famous Torres de Paine a national park in Chile with some mountains and not anything more, now we sped of towards Puerto Natales were we had some lunch and got some Chilean pesos changed into dollars for the future change into Argie black market pesos, quite favourable.

Had a sandwich with mashed avocado, yummy and then on to the park.

Soon enough we started to see the mountains, a perfect day without a single cloud and the wiew was breath taking and the closer we got the better it got.

Back to ripio roads and big billowing clouds of dust so we'd travel with almost a km between us as to be able to see the road.

33 bucks to enter the park and a whooping 138 of the same for a little room, albeit on a little lake with the best view ever.

They have you by the short and curlies, plastic does come in handy, just smile and hand it over and do your PIN.

The WOW thing is that the views are incredibly beautiful, I'd say that for me it's definitely one of the best natural things I've ever seen, it's up there with Grand Canyon.

Of course there's no way a puny little pics will ever come even close to making it justice, but trust me, Torres de Paine is breath taking.

The colours of the lakes is another thing to make you happy, some are green and other so blue that they look post card fake.

And not to forget, the herds of guanacos, but they do like to run over the road just in case it's safer on the other side.

They blend in well with the landscape and can be hard to spot, so drive carefully, if there's one around there are bound to be more.

The foals ran like little cream coloured streaks of lightning when they heard the bikes.

Sorry to leave the views but then again how long can you watch a mountain and there are more to come, after all I'm in the Andes.

80 km of gravel sees on the border, time for a snack. We go into some cafe and I go to the toilet where I promptly hit the light fitting and break the lamp, time to hit the ladies room.

The Argie border control was as always superbly inefficient one hour to get in, the guy at the customs could barely write, and if you hadn't filled in the form correctly

you had to do it again, a brief respite from the ripio and then another stretch of what the guy called at the petrol station called bad ripio 70 km of "shake your fillings out ripio" we got back on pavement and the on to El Calafate, the only place where to stay.

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