Veronica's blog: 2nd chapter: Chile and Argentina by bike

There is so much that I could be writing about our trip. However, I realise that pictures say more than 1,000 words and since I am a lazy writer..I'll give you some more pictures to give you a flavour of the journey.
Speaking of flavour..

The Chilean Food!
Many friends had warned us that you don’t travel to Chile because its food. It was sad to see that it was true. Julie, our language teacher, went through a typical Chilean menu during one lesson. “Ensalada a la chilena” she explained was ..tomatoes and onion…it’s delicious! Of course that was it. No other ingredients. A “Pollo a la plancha” together with arroz blanco was just that, grilled chicken and white rice, nothing else..no sauce, no garnish, nothing else to try to make it a bit more interesting. "It’s delicious" Julia commented about every single item in the menu.

After cycling 5-10 hrs every day, you build up a large hunger and going out for a meal (when it was an option) always seemed so disappointing. I have to admit that we had a few epic hamburgers with palta (avocado), but apart from this, the surprises were few.

In a typical village with say 20 houses there would be about 10 supermarcados. All of them had strikingly similar selection of products on offer. We usually picked the one with the most flags (as we are suckers for cheap marketing). Along Carretera Austral the truck with new stock only arrived on Saturdays, so it was very hard to find fresh vegetables, eggs or even onion on the Thursday/Friday.

This picture on the left was taken at the start of our trip in the Los Lagos region. We realised further into our trip that this supermarcado was a very well stocked store. Not a common sight further south.

As a result of the limited selection of food that you could buy, we ate very similar food every day. A typical day we consumed:

Breakfast: Porridge with honey accompanied by tea (+ Coffee for Charlie)

Pre-lunch, lunch and afternoon snack: lots of cookies (usually 3-4 packets per day..enough to have nose crumbs as shown above), white bread and loads of butter and avocado.

Pre-dinner snacks: crackers, chips, anything salty and unhealthy accompanied by Cristal beer or two or three (if available). Cristal is a pretty bog standard lager, but it tastes good when it's 20+ degrees.

Dinner: pasta/instant mashed potatoes/rice and a tomato-based sauce with some random vegetables and salami/bacon or tuna topped with Parmesan cheese. These combos were not consumed every night..but almost. I got severely bored of the cooking.

Eating out was generally pretty dull, with a few exceptions:
(click on the picture to enlarge)

We had our biggest feeding frenzy in Tolhuin (second to last day on the trip) at the famous Panaderia La Union in Tolhuin, Argentina. The owner, Emilio, kindly lets any cyclist to eat as much as they can in his well-stocked bakery and if you want to you can also stay the night for free. He asks for nothing in return as he simply loves cycling himself. It was amazing to rock up at lunch with an empty stomach to the bakery. I think we had 30 empanadas between the two of us followed by sweet delights. We got back on the bikes again three hours later with a slight sick but content feeling.
In sickness and in health:

Unfortunately things didn't always go smoothly. I managed to fall off my bike during my first day in Santiago when I tried to go up on a curb with too much speed. I got a great scab and sprained my left thumb. I couldn’t shift the gear with that hand for over a month (and still can't do it on my mountain bike).

This was still pretty minor compared to Charlie's story. He got food poisoning (we think it was salmonella from an ice cream), which literally wiped him out for two weeks. Luckily, Charlie happened to discover a well-hidden camp ground when he was having a forest visit to powder his nose. We were passing through an area with large distances between villages so we were very thankful to find a place with hot water to pitch the tent. The camp ground actually belonged to the luxury (on the Chilean scale) hotel Lago Yelcho, so when Charlie still was feeling awful the next day, we had to get a room. I never thought that we would be stuck there for almost 2 weeks in the end. This is what Charlie looked like during the first week:

He was either asleep or lying on his stomach to feel a bit more comfortable. He couldn't eat and hardly even drink for 5 days. The nice hotel staff made him "Gloop" - a corn starch mix that looked like glue, which someone's mother always prescribed after stomach sickness. It gave Charlie his nick name at the hotel during the entire stay. "Mr Gloop" eventually had to go to the doctor since it wasn't getting any better. After 1-2 hours drive to Chaiten, we were simply referred to Palena (back where we came from) since Chaiten didn't have any doctor on duty. We had to pay a taxi to drive us 7 hrs return to Palena to find a doctor. A doctor finally examined Charlie but he never gave him any medication since he thought it was virus-caused. Charlie only left with a stash of hydration packets and we were back on the bumpy gravel road for another 2 hrs.

After another six days, Charlie was still not recovering. He was slowly vanishing as he had lost 5 kg in a week. I was slowly gaining weight at the same time since the hotel chef was very skilled and I was also very bored after been watching TV for a week. With little progress Charlie had to see another doctor. Luckily we were able to accompany a couple of other hotel guests to Futalefu (close to the Argentinian border). After a drip to combat his dehydration and antibiotics, Charlie was finally recovering.

Futalefu is famous for its white water rafting. While Charlie was feeling crook I was having itchy feet. The weather was gorgeous and I was ready to hit some world famous rapids. I bumped into a German cyclist who we had met in Santiago upon our arrival in December. Juergen was also keen for some action-packed rafting and we joined forces with Jon, an American guy who was cycling around with his family.
This photo is taken just before we are about to get thrown out of the raft after hitting a Grade 4+ rapid. Jiiihaaa!!! I have to admit that I got scared...but it was FUN!!
The weather:
December and January were hot and sunny! We had 30 degrees days on end and camping seemed amazingly easy. Unfortunately the flies, mosquitos and sandflies loved the heat as well. We had some epic battles to brush off the horse flies whilst cycling.

Meeting other travellers:
Even before leaving NZ, we realized that a large part of the planned route was relatively well travelled by other cycle tourers. After many hours of biking, Charlie came up with a theory of meeting three different types of tourers:
1. Bike-lovers / cycle tourers – Always foreigners. Trip length 1 - 6 months. Count us in this one. We love travelling by bike! The journey is part of the fun and we are on holiday to go biking for the sake of biking.
2. World travelers – Always foreigners. Trip length 6 months to 3 years+. These travelers are out travelling for years on end and they are using the bicycle as a vehicle. They may not necessarily know much about bikes or really like biking, but they love the travel experience.
3. Chilean tourers – different gear altogether. No Ortlieb panniers for starters and then downhill from there. Start with a cheap old mountain bike and then load it with about 100kg of ‘stuff’. Usually always loaded only on a flimsy rear rack. Charlie kindly offered bike maintenance 101 classes on a regular basis to many Chilean tourers.

Not everyone likes bikes and we of course met lots of other kinds of travellers as well. Chile was FULL of hitchhikers (usually from Israel in large groups). We often felt sorry for them after we saw them sitting by the road side for an entire day in the rain (or in the dust clouds) without any luck. It honestly looked like the worst way of travelling. On a bike, you are in control of your own destiny.

We also met plenty of motor cyclists and camper van people, some on short trips and others on year-long journeys.

Flora and Fauna:
Enough about people..onto the animals and the plants! I don't think you would go to Chile for the wild life. It felt pretty sparse and we often went many days without really seeing many at all. Here are at least some of them.

The king penguins were a definite highlight. This little group of pingles (18 in total) had made a home amongst the sand dunes of Tierra del Fuego. It is the only colony that lives away from the sub-antarctic islands (Falklands, South Georgia). They grow up to 95 cm and can live to 20 years of age. The colony can be viewed by paying a small fortune to a Chilean guy who sits around in a plastic igloo all day long. Not a lot of people pass this remote gravel road so we pushed hard to get in for half price. After lots of negotiating using our best Spanish we won! I was really fascinated by them. One was sitting on an egg and you could clearly see the skin flap covering the egg to keep it warm.

More flora and fauna:

The monkey puzzle trees were a definite favourite:

OK, this blog post is turning into the world's longest one. As you can understand the trip was amazing and I would love to do it again and see even more!

I'll leave you with some last memories: