KANE: My colleagues JP and Barry have gone on holiday, so it's just me this week sitting in for JP.

There's been much said about history on these programs. I explain this through my curiousity as a bicycle-traveller, to know how the road I'm on evolved. I'm forever looking for traces of an older road that preceded the modern road, usually a narrow earthen track to the side. I want to know about the people that were around when these primitive roads where made and why they used this route.

In the last program I was in the southern Patagonia province of Santa Cruz, Argentina. Since then I crossed back into Chile, riding north on the Carretera Austral, you remember I spoke about the "Carretera Austral" two programs ago. However, my route took me back into Argentina, into the next province to the north of Santa Cruz, largely settled and developed by Welsh immigrants: the province of Chubut.

The Welsh disillusioned with their lot in a Wales under English rule, decided to upsticks and find a place in the world where they could be free to speak their own language and practice their religion unfettered by English law. They came to Patagonia and settled a river valley, the river called Chapat by the native Tehuelche nomadic people that inhabited most of Patagonia when they first arrived in 1865. In time the word "Chapat" was corupted to the present "Chubut" the Rio Chubut. The river "Rio Chubut" would give it's name to a province. Chubut: a large area of central Patagonia that the river and it's many tributaries drain.

The Welsh it's a wonder they survived at all in this windy arid wilderness. They were the first Europeans in any numbers to try to settle in Patagonia when they come in the 1860s. They were townspeople, miners and tradesmen unused to living of the land. They endured famine and deprivation in the early years, and if it weren't for the help of native Tehuelche that showed them how to hunt, the colony may not have succeded. Eventually though they learned how to irrigate and farm the land.

By the 1880s the Chubut valley Welsh colony began to prosper. Meanwhile the Tehuelche were being persecuted by the Argentine military (The Campagn of the Desert) and thereby Patagonia was annexed to Argentina. Thereafter a new Chubut province needed mapping and to be settled.

An early pioneer was John Daniel Evans, only 18 years old in November 1883 when he and three Welsh companions set off on horseback up the Chubut Valley to find a route to the Andes, where they believed there were rich pasturelands for settling. Not much is documented on how far they got, though it's believed they'd ran out of provisions and had to turn round. On their return east to the inhabited Chubut valley, they encountered hostile Tehuelche angered by their threatment by the Argentine military. Evans' group were pursuited by the Tehuelche horsemen until cornered on the edge of a sheer precipest, were Evans urged his horse out over the edge and made a jump for it. Fortunately his horse that he called "Malacara" landed upright on the slope below unharmed, so Evans escapes a brutal death that awaited his three companions above at the hands of their pursuers. He made a hungry but successful march home leading a moriband Malacara. There now stands a monument at the site of the tragity, and the area is called "The Valley Of The Martires". Many years later when Evans' horse died, he repectively burried his horse in the garden of his farmhouse and erected a stone with an inscription "Here lies my horse Malacara, who saved my life when I was pursued by indians on the __th Mar 1884"

Evans was chosen as a scout for a large expedition that set off west up the valley in November a few years later. They would find a route to the fertile valleys of the Andes and settle. In the succeding years they'd be followed by wagon-trains, that would establish a wagon-wheel track. Progress was slow; ten miles a day as each wagon would take a day at the front to clear the path of stones and bushes; and, they'd have to stop and make camp in the afternoon somewhere by the river to pasture and water their horses and cattle.

In time the wagon tracks would be replaced by a road, and a network of alternative roads would be established for motorcars that didn't need pasture, so could go away from the river valley across the dryer pampa where it was easier to clear a ripio road.

Eventually small service settlements would be established. I was particularily interested in one: Arroya Pescado: a trading post were, on the 29th of December 1908, an unsuccesful armed robbery took place. The robbers were after cash they mistakenly thought to be on the premises for payment to farmers for the yearly wool sheep-clip. At gunpoint they ordered the patron to hand over the cash. When the patron pleaded there was no cash, they shot him dead, ramshackled the shop, and finding nothing escaped empty handed. Many believe Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were the robbers

My cycling route took me out east on provincial roads, one stretch nothing more than a farmtrack where I never saw a car all day. I found not much remaining of the trading post at Arroya Pescado, so continued to my main objective, the imposing rock formation called "Piedra Parada" (standing rock) on the bank of Rio Chubut. It looks like a large highrise block standing alone amidt the valley dwarfing the hills around. It was a place with special significants for the Tehuelche, where tribes would meet and camp.

I returned west on the same kind of traffic free provincial roads, rattling along over ripio until reaching tarmac and traffic again before the town of El Maiten. The adventure was over. That is for another 70km to El Bolson, a town that grew as a hippy colony in the late 1960s and 70s, and now is famous for microbrewed beer that I enjoyed on a couple of rest-days there before the start of a new adventure: the Lago Puelo hiking trail to Chile. A mix of mountainbiking, pushing the bike and portaging through the forested hills above a lake and river system that flows west to the Pacific and my journey's end.

Summing up I covered a wide variety of terrain and roads on this wide swing east away from the more usual cycle-touring route. I do wish though I'd fatter tyres than the limited tyre-clearance my bike allows, that would allow me to push on faster without worrying about puncturing on loose abrupt edged stones that litter the unsealed roads.

In the final days as I reached tarmac and traffic again in Chile, I reflected back on the past two weeks as the perfect swansong to four months on the road. It does seem an awful long time since September, when I set off from Salta, north west Argentina. And now as I write in Puerto Varas, having finally finished, I've taken onboard what emprovements I'll make for future cycle-tour outings. I definitely want to get away from the tarmac roads more in future. And I'm spissed off with these spissy narrow tyres on my Dawes Galaxy. Furthermore, why am I carrying four half-full panniers. You never know I might go the bikepacking way. Certainly I'll be going lighter so the bike will be more pickup-able.

So what next?

Well I've also had time to think about the immediate future. I have a plan with an end gold, but as alway we'll have to wait and see.

Anyway, thanks for reading and, I hope you come back to read the daily journal instatements.