January 24, 2016
Windchill: Refuse hut to Rio Grande.
The wind has picked up during the night, blowing a gale. To step out from the sheltered east facing side of this refuse hut means getting an unpleasant icy blast of wind. Thankfully it will be tailwind. I can just imagine how cyclists riding the other way feel this morning.
I pack up my camp which takes almost as long as if I had pitched the tent and am moving by half eight. Cycling without pedalling, the wind pushes me along. It is a pity the road surface isn't better, being a mix of corrugated and small potholes, slow and bumpy with constant use of brakes to ease around the worse of it.
About midmorning having been approaching the same range of hills to the right for quite a while, I cross a small crest and the numerous box like houses of San Sebastian at long last come into view along the bottom of said hill.
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Though still a good many kilometres off it is comforting to be this far. Then as the boxes enlarge to houses on drawing nearer, I pass a sign "Control frontiereza 1km.
I get my exit stamp and after a filling hamburger, am on my way. The road surface improves somewhat on the way on with that earlier mentioned hill immediately on the right. Then, the road crosses a cattle grid with a "Benvenido a Argentina" sign to the side. Although still ripio the road surface improves dramatically from here on. Now I have a wheel track clear of loose stones I can follow without much braking as there's no corrugation or holes.
I don't have to be constantly looking down at the road and looking to the left, there's something moving rapidly across to the fore of a shattered herd of cattle on a wide open grassy plain on that side. A quadbike, it turns sharp round and moves in on the cattle sending them into a bit of a stampede. Then a faster slimmer machine closes in on them round the right side. A trialsbike, it does the job of a dog. Both cattle and bikes are quite a bit off and the engine noise is muffled by strong wind.
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I am not long covering the fifteen kilometres to the Argentine border complex. I wheel the bike through the arched drive-through building and on the far side, lift the bike up over the curb into the sheltered lea of the building where I can open my handle-bar bag to get my passport out without the danger of pieces of paper blowing away. But before I can extract my passport, a young olive green uniformed gendarme officer is over, instructing me that I need to get my passport stamped before I come through to this side. Couldn't he see this is the only shelter from the wind.
With an enter stamp I cycle across to the ACA hosteria (guesthouse and cafe) over the road where outside the door there's a mountain bike loaded for touring. I enter. Inside there are three cyclists stranded by the wind: a German man whose bike it is outside and a young couple from Oregon who have been here since yesterday and will be staying another night, both with knee problems they say from battling against the wind. They are travelling with a dog which isn't present in the café. I relay information on the way I come, their route ahead when they eventually get a calm day to move, showing them on my map places to camp as he records it on a map on a tablet.
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I set off again now on tarmac with tailwind, though from here on the road having swung south-east, its no longer directly from behind; its slightly to my right and where the road swings right, it is crosswind. It would be like this all the way south, a hairy stressful ride as a moment's lack of concentration together with a sudden gust of wind could sent me across the road into the path of an oncoming vehicle.
I pass a team putting up fencing and see an old gaucho warmly rapped up unable to move his horse forward, the horse digging in it's heals unwilling to budge.
The wind is so icy cold it penetrates to the bone. Even though I'm wearing a down-jacket underneath my wind-jacket I'm still shivering. Younger riders, those in their early twenties seem immune to the cold. The three young Germans I met on Saturday having taken off their sodden gloves after the heavy shower revealing cold reddened hands. Another thing the cold wind does, it dehumanises you, as after a couple of hours of it this morning, I couldn't make sense when being asked questions at the Chilean border control. What I was trying to say was like baby talk to the amusement of the officer behind the desk.
I reach Rio Grande shortly after six with a sorehead from the cold, hoping to soon escape indoors out of the wind, but find the worse scenario. Club Nautical, which previously put cyclists and motorcyclists up in there large building on the waterfront, no longer operate such a service. I ask the man running the place does he know of a hostel in town. He replies that he doesn't, but gives me directions to a hospedaje on Avenida San Martin, the main waterfront street.
As I cycle that direction I don't really want to pay the three hundred pesos or whatever cost a room in a hospedaje will be. Anyway, I must've missed the hospedaje as I don't see it and I ride on to the YPF service station at the end, where the street turns in from the beach. In the warmth of the café there I use the wifi. It seems pointless trying to find a hostel on Hostelworld in an obscure place like Rio Grande, as it isn't recognized when I write it in their search box.
It seems the best coarse is to ride out of town and find some sheltered spot to pitch the tent, but, I have to wait a little more before I can face that cold wind again.
Just coming up on nine when I'm about to get up and leave, come a backpacker through the door. Surely he'll know somewhere to stay. I make eye contact and we smile mutually to one another. An Asiatic man, he come over and puts down his pack by the table and introduces himself, Eidog from Kazakhstan.
When I tell him I'm about to ride out of town to camp, he replies "Why go so far. I camp just over there" he points toward a the beach beyond a Volvo car showroom. Oh, I ask is there any shelter? He replies there's a fence, which I take to mean a solid fence.
I stress that I would like to soon set up camp as I've been to the supermarket and need to cook, to which he says "Relax. We spend some time here. This place doesn't close until midnight." Really. So I'm going to be cooking at midnight.
The truth is he is a hitchhiker and has been sitting in a warm car all day not having used much energy. I on the other hand have been exposed to the wind since eight in the morning and need to get up and cycle tomorrow morning. I tell him this and say we should soon go.
I lend him my computer so he can upload his photos to his blog which takes some time, toward the end of which, he says he cannot find some photo file due to a virus. Now he tells me. Supposedly the computer will now be infected with the same virus.
It is half ten when he's finished and we get out of there and start moving toward the prospective campsite. The wind still hasn't let up. He said the place he camped before had a solid fence for shelter, but when we get there, it is a rubbish strewn piece of urban waistland open to the wind.
"You cannot camp here!" I retort. "Why?" he replies. "Why! The wind, that's why." He then says there is another option. Well this place better be sheltered.
This second option proves idea. It is an old beached ship tidied up and painted and paved around as a monument to the town's seagoing heritage, in the lea of which is perfectly sheltered and the ground level. His tent isn't much more than a bivouac, so that explains why he didn't need much wind protection. Then as I'm trying to get the tent up as quick as possible and get inside out of the wind, he keeps telling me to look at the wakes lapping in on the nearby beach. His constant chatter was getting a bit irritating.
I eventually close the zip on a very cold day and start cooking dinner of steak and potatoes in the outer tent at quarter past eleven.
Today's ride: 112 km (70 miles)
Total: 4,471 km (2,776 miles)
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