Heart

0

Comment

0

Link

Log in to comment or reply

I feel really tired this evening. It's the first day back on the bike after a week off, and it's been uphill all the way. The bike has doubled in weight cause I've been shopping and have two weeks worth of dry flood, the usual stuff I eat while on the road. So heavy I can barely lift the bike off the ground. Yet I've had to pedal it all uphill the whole way, all day. I'm tired, so I'm going to lay down. Have an early night and write the rest of this in daylight, when I've had breakfast in the morning.

I slept right away then. Now this morning, I'm writing, trying to put together in my head what happened yesterday. Let's say yesterday morning is clear blue sky with warm radiant sunshine, which it was. Such a difference from the day before. Just the day I've been waiting for to get back on the road.

Inside the tent, what a mess of stuff. It all takes longer to sort out and pack after a long stay in one place. Eventually, I'm taking down the tent at half nine and soon have all loaded on the bike ready to go. Then settle up the bill. Tim let me off with paying 15,000. Which when you think the usual price to camp is 6,000 per night, and I'd been there a week, is almost for nothing.

I roll down the lane to the road and cross over the bridge at the bottom, then up the steep hill the other side of the valley into town. To Umart where I needed to buy two week's worth of spaghetti. That is possibly how far the next big town is, having calculated that it's around 800km to Gobernado Gregores. That according to plan is my next big supermercado.

Outside Umart, I run into more cyclists. A young Korean woman called Jon who speaks better Spanish than English, so we converse in the former. Her husband TV was inside shopping while she guarded the bikes, two maroon Surly Long Haul Truckers. If I were to put a Jeremy Clarkson hat on, I would disrupt cyclists love for this bike as follows: It's a bike that looks like a tank and has as much style as your grand mother. It lacks the swift exceleration and smooth handling of the Dawes Galaxy. In other words it's as slow as a tank, and isn't going anywhere fast.

I met an aging Japanese cyclist, too. A man in the pedestrian street where I'd gone to top up on cash at the ATM, and then have a coffee at Mamma Gauchita. This takes the time up to one o'clock. But as it doesn't get fully dark here in the evenings until half nine, this still leaves enough time to cycle a reasonable distance.

The road out of Coyhaique, a climb, eventually levelling out with impressive cliffs of Cero Simpson on the left, a shear granite rock face about a hundred metres high and maybe a kilometres broad. The road ahead once pass this rocky hillside is more of the same but only smaller scale steep tabular hills with bare rock cliff-sides; between which, the way opens into vivid green pasture land valley with freshly snowed mountains after all the recent precipitation, along the far side and ahead.

It would be a pleasant ride if it weren't for the constant traffic. Mostly pickup trucks driven as though the accelerator pedal is welded to the floor. Neither slowing down, or moving out to the middle while passing, to allow for a margin of error when passing me.

Further on toward the east the countryside becomes wilder. The road traveling along the right side of a pastoral valley, rising up to cliff sided tabular hills on the left. And although there's ribbons of native beech forest left intact, the whole area shows clearly the destructive deforestation of the 1930s onward. The main means being setting of fires. Whole hillsides remain denuded with the remains of stumps and bare tree-trunks.

The road continues toward the border town, Balmaceda. The first settlement in the area; proceeding Coyhaique which was founded in 1929. Then this area would've been the central focus for the future development of the entire region that would eventually be serviced by the Caratera Austral. Many of the villages along which were only founded as late as the 1960s and 70s. The main road access before the Caratera Austral was from Argentina to the east. You can perhaps see why the Chileans desperately needed their own road, so their citizens who'd come to live this far south, could travel back and forth without crossing into Argentina. A cause which became more pressing during the military governments in the area's strained relations over borders in the south. Chile felt it needed to create a substantial defence force to avert possible territorial encroachment by Argentina.