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Published: February 1st 2006
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mmm Foood!
Friendly guy who didn´t understand a word I said and yet still brought good steak! Well as you may know, I tend to get a bit lost sometimes. In a car this is mearly irritating. On a bike a foreign country, it gets to be a tad more worrysome. I currently am nowhere near where I planned on being, but now it is nice. Literally a land of fresh cheese and wine. Yesterday though I didn´t think I would see anything but a hospital. I´ll get to that in a bit, first my leaving Buenos Aires.
As I was packing for the ferry ride the day of the 28th, I thought that since I had time (ferry leaves at midnight) I should change my front tire with one of the new ones just to try it out. That´s when I discovered that my pump apparently is broken. Nothing big it just doesn´t inflate tires. Ok, hmmm. I´ll just pop out and buy a new one. Nope, the shops are closed except for the store that first fixed my chain. So I bought one there for $5US and proceeded back up to the hostel to complete the job. Alas this one didn´t work either for a tire on a rim. Bah! So I tried to find
Pretty Hallucinations
These happy little sunflowers were at the beginning of the ride. just a place to get air. Yep, nothing like walking the streets of BA with a front wheel looking for air (or aire). Finally found a garage with one and filled my tire. so I thought.
I went back and mounted it along with all my gear. Yep the tire is rather low. I pull out my tire gauge, and discover that the tip has gotten jammed and now it doesn´t work. Wonderful. Well there´s enough air maybe I´ll find something on the way to the port. Down the hill I ride. Just as I get to the port I find a station, and ask for air. They point to a machine, but apparently I´m supposed to have my own nozzle for the air hose. Now, it´s just getting hysterical. Or maybe I am. Naw, No worries. I´ll worry about it when I have to- in Uruguay. at 4 am when my boat arrives.
So I line up to embarque onto the ship, oops, I lost my tourist visa. Just smile and not say a thing. My turn rolls up, I hand them my passport, the agent asks a question, I smile like the gorgeous dumb american that
The saving swiss
Even now they provide relief to travelers. I am, and poof she hands me another, I scratch a couple blanks, and then Stamp Stamp Stamp- away I go. Geeze a million dollar grin.
The boat ride is long, and I´m really glad I took the night ferry- no worries about the heat. Yeah, I´m hot. very hot. Normally it´s nice here. Other times, it completely stifles everything. A dripping, drooling heat. Usualy I feel like the Brain but then I feel like Pinkie.
And then it happened. After 15 years of thinking about it, I arrived in Uruguay. It was dark. It was a nice temperature. I could see the stars. The plants smelled quite nice. So I rode. Down the wrong street. No problem I´ll just take a random big road and be back on track. Oh and with the help of the nice soldier at the Mechanized Infantry Base at Colonia del Sacramento, and the random people on the streets at 4:45am.
On I rode.
For 5 Km to the Campo Municipal and an incomprehensible with a half asleep clerk and me being dead tired. Eventually he just waved me away with a ¨mañana¨and I setup my tent and slept.
I could give the tourist overview of Colonia, but just read a tourist guide that´s about what it´s like. Me, on the otherhand, will give a more dramatic represenatation. For I broke somemore stuff!
Yep, while looking for a dinner spot, the nuts and bolts fell off of one side of my front rack- causing my rack to jam into the wheel and bring me to a stop and sent the bits to go flying across the cobblestone streets. The were lost to the gods at that point, but the cool thing was that a waiter or something asked what I was looking for and then tried to help both by looking and then just going and getting some champagne wires to hold everything in place till tomorrow when the stores reopen.
I was about to repay the favor by eating at his place but the prices were way out of my league. So I pedaled, became lost, and just ate a place that popped up in front of me. Pricey but I was starving at this point. I ate the hake (sortof a codlike fish) with some wine. The wine is strong in this heat. I try to drink enough water but nothing stays inside of me. Need time to aclimate myself.
The next day I was able to fix my bike at a hardware store. That´s cool. They sortof understood me. I feel like Mark Twain in ¨Innocents Abroad¨when they are trying to speak french and no one understands. The accents are just so different here than in Mexico. After fixing things I ate at a tiny local restaurant cheaper and very tasty- no sauces needed for the steak. MMMMMMMM. Just oil and vinager on the salad and a little mayo for the fried potatoes. I swear these people need to learn how to make a different style of potatoe.
Oh and keep in mind that everytime I go back and forth from camp to town it´s 5km. Over and over because I keep forgetting things. (grin)
The next day I started out from Colonia del Sacramento at about 7am on the 31st. I started riding. The plan was to go about 50 km and to a town called Rosario. The roads in Uruguay are hilly, up and down constantly- nothing extreme just constant couple hundred meters at a pull. 15-20km in my front luggage rack broke (again), just as I started going down hill- fortunately the baggage held the bolts in place till I stopped.
After removing the gear and then fixing and reassembling the bike and baggage, I was back on the road. Exhausted but still moving. I got an energy spike in the afternoon and decided to bypass Rosario since it was early and make my way to the next town on the map since it was just 10km more- about an hour of riding.
It wasn´t. It just kept going. So I saw a sign for La Paz, with camping and beaches everything. Great so down that road I headed. For a few KM till I came to the town and the beaches were another 12 KM and the town had no hotel and no one knew were the camping sites were located. Back to the main road.
On my way I ran out of water. This is now 4 liters gone, it´s 90 deg. A few splashes of sugar water were left. And then I ran into a nice lady on a moped. She told me, well she told me alot but what I actually understood was, the town I was trying to get to had no hotel and no camping and maybe the nearest place will be the Colonia Suiza. Just keep going straight and you will hit it. Dangerous directions, but I took them out of desperation. On I pedaled. Up. Up. Always Up. Apparently the Swiss had found the only mountain in Uruguay and decided to build on the top. Of course it could just be a hallucination as I also found myself talking to the cows and seeing pretty colors while weaving in the roadways.
My only comforting thought was that there was an amazing amount of traffic for being in the middle of nowhere, and that if I fell over I would probably helped to the nearest hospital by these cute little people.
And then I started seeing vineyards. and cows. and more vineyards and always the cows (sometimes horses).
But I made it! Over 10 hours of riding in the heat and I found this hotel and got a bed. I don´t even think I gave them my name. He just opened the door and dropped my stuff to the floor sat in the shower and then after cooling down a bit fell asleep. For hours. And then I ate and drank. And it was good.
Today I wandered and ended up with a free bottle of wine, but that as they say, is a story for another time.
ciao.
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