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Published: December 8th 2007
Well, we couldn´t go south forever, the water was too cold. Following our joyous zooming downwind all the way to Ushuaia, we decided to heed the signs, and caught a BUS (32 degrees of stuffiness) back up to Punta Arenas - the end of stage 1 of our cycle tour. A hot shower, a warm friendly dinner TABLE with Emma and Carlos, and a day spent cleaning and fixing errant bike carriers (all those things we should have sorted before leaving chch - details later Aggie!)
We then headed off in a north-west direction, peddling INTO the prevailing winds - starting from Puerto Natales towards the famous Torres del Paine National Park (the Milford of Chile). And yes, los vientos (winds) are as ferocious as legends tell. We now understand why the locals raise their eyebrows so high when we say we´re travelling by bicicletas, (its not cos they´re impressed by the three tough New Zealand lasses, it just confirms that we´re loca! ).
We would have thought that with our outdoors experience, we would have coped better with Patagonian meterological hardships, but blustery gale nor-wests straight off the icecap combined with hub-deep gravel corrugated roads (which will grab
you front wheel and throw you over the handlebars at the first opportunity - Kate with new cleat pedals gets the crash award with 6) was full on; it took us 6.5 hours to travel 20km! In particular we took dislike to the broadside horizontal rain. With Aroha now on compulsory 2 hourly feeding, the world is a rosier place for all. Despite these grim sounding conditions, our characters and skills of selective memory are rapidly developing.
And after three days of biking, we made it to Torres del Paine National Park. Stunningly magnificently beautiful; soaring rock spires (which would bring a silly grin to anyone who enjoys clambering around in the vertical world in slimey, ill fittting shoes), great campsites (with sunsets reflected in mirror lakes on a rare calm evening), glaciers framed by beech forest opening to spectacular vistas. Whiling away an afternoon sharing mate (tea) and sopaipia (deep fried yeast bread) with Pablo and crew (track maintenance workers) was an appreciated time spent with locals. Our new friendships and ability to cart a piece of 4X2 around earned us a chopper ride over the ginormous Glacier Grey. Muchas gracias amigos.
Back to civilisation, with spontaneous
salsa lessons, beautiful singing (no, not US) with guitar, and bbqs (asado) with the locals. As we crashed back into the hostel at 3.30am, our new found Irish friend Ruairi cheekily piped up from deep within sleep in his lovely Irish lilt "I´m going to write to your mothers about this kind of behaviour girls", to which Kate replied " that´s alright, just don´t tell my dad".
Phrase for the day; media naranja. literally translates as ´half orange´ but loosely means ´soul mate´. Its a lovely turn of phrase; one thing that a number of us search for is our other half orange - to think that part of our life is spent searching for our little half oranges!
Non phrase of the day; Penny. Penny is now Penelope. After one month of strange looks during introductions, someone has kindly informed us that Pene translates as penis!!! (Alice!) The upside of the situation is that a well known South American song ´Penelope´ has been several times serenaded, by any South American man with a guitar under his arm.
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Patrick
non-member comment
You do make me laugh
Absolutely loved the Pene comment... hehehehe. Your pictures look excellent.. though I note you've not stopped to take pictures of driving horizontal rain. I shall try to picture that in my mind so that I don't get toooooo jealous of the three chicas ;) p(xxx!)