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South America » Argentina » Santa Cruz » El Calafate
January 10th 2009
Published: January 10th 2009
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El Chalten was a great reintroduction to vibrant Argentina after the sparsly populated southern section of the Carretera Austral. A magnet for climbers and other adventuous travellers, there are few cars on the streets, but tents and backpacks abound. We enjoyed chatting with climbers at the free campground and other cyclists, including the American couple who had a trailer like mine, carrying much more important cargo. They had been cycling for 3 months already, with their now 5 month old daughter fast asleep in the BOB. I (Phil) also ran into a motorcyclist called Doug, a character I met when I was working in Brisbane. Funny really because I only worked there for 5 days.

After a couple of days exploring and admiring the many epic peaks, we blew out of town, the wind propelling us in the Argentinian Steppe. We loved being able to start cycling after 5pm, nail 80kms, and still have a couple of hours of spare daylight. This is big sky country that Graeme Sydney would love. Nothing grows bigger than knee-high here in the desert-like soil, and the wind is relentless. Why it isn´t dotted with wind turbines I don´t know. Dry and barren, yet strangely alluring in the silent calm of the early morning, the best time to be cycling.

Compared with laidback el Chalten, el Calafate had very limited appeal for us. Attracting a different type of tourist, this busy and noisy town boasted hundreds of ways to empty your pockets, including a casino. We wanted no part of it, so we made arrangements to leave the next day rather than wait two days for our reserved flights.

Travelling through the monochrome landscape towards rio Gallegos we didn´t see any options for good camping. For hundreds of km´s there is nothing but 5-10 m´s of barely vegetated gravelly verge, between the straight road and the fenced-off estancias. We couldn´t see the point of the fence, there being almost no stock on the barran land, only the occaaional graceful guanaco (llama like camel like creature). Luckily we were seeing all this through the window of a bus. Now, purists would say we were breaking the rules of cycletouring, but we are glad to be anarchists so the rules don´t apply to us. This four hour bus ride was just a warm up for the 50 hour trip north (50 hours! WTF!), to Salta, just a few hundred km´s south of Bolivia. We have one enormous pannier filled with food to fuel the eating machines we have become.


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