Well, I spent a rest day there, attempting to grow fat off the produce of a town. 498 inhabitants counts as a town in these parts anyhow, the biggest for the next 237kms at any rate. My splurge was cut somewhat down to size by the growing realisation that I hadn't brought enough money with me for food. The next ATM was about 570km in the future, so I had to be content with a semi-satisfying hit of cake, avacado and wine. The next day was a somewhat more sobering experience, involving the soaking of a kilo of foaming yellow lentils and the boiling of eggs ready for the road.
Buildings in O'Higgins,
The hostel I was staying at was a place called El Mosco, which was, perhaps sadly, not a replica Kremlin, but instead a cosy wooden lodge with a range, bosque-related art on the walls and a camping ground outside. It'd been built a few years ago by a Spanish guy with a plan who studied how to build wooden buildings, came out to Villa O'Higgins, built it from scratch in a year, and now calls it home. There were about eight or ten cyclists staying there, most who had come over on the ferry with me. The whole Carretera Austral is rife with them - us, i guess, although I feel like I've got another few thousand kilometers to go before I really deserve the appelation. Quite a few Chileans down from Santiago or Valpariso, an Austrian couple who'd come all the way from Alaska and were posing in all places with their sponsors T-Shirts, couples on tandems. Matej, a Slovenian chap with an awesome looking vineyard and stone hotel he'd rebuilt near Trieste *touches head in salute in case he's reading*. An Italian fellow with an entire trailer full of photographic equipment, and an incredibly pro-looking blog with a Donations option - don't worry, not getting ideas. He seemed an old hand at this kind of game, and had cycled from Italy to the Himalayas with a blind mate on a tandem.
Cyclists cleaning bikes in the lake,
Steampunk cyclist with a lot cooler shades than me,
The inside of El Mosco. Pretty shaky eh? Probably a minor quake or something.
This is not to say there would be a procession of cyclists passing on the otherside of the road - in the southern section you might only see two or three a day, but then you'd only see ten cars max. First day out of Villa O'Higgins was a bit of a washout; only made it 50kms through a succession of forested lakesides and cascading streams before the torrential rain led me to make an early stop. The rain continued the next day, which led me to call it quits and spend the next day in my tent. Felt pretty weak for this lapse of willpower - a day listening to podcasts on the history of the Roman empire is never a fully wasted day, but when a gung-ho German guy knocked on my tent to check everything was cool, rain pelting off his waterproofs, I felt a pretty strong twinge of shame.
Next day, dusted off my shoes, and got underway. The landscape became more spectacular, water pouring off cliffs faces on both sides, hills looking like lost worlds could nestle in them, a monstrous gorge with walls of trees clinging to the almost vertical sides, a torrential river rushing down to the valley floor below. Then, a few km away from the next settlement (ie five houses), it all changed. The road became flat, the sides of the road were surrounded by lush vegetation, massive bamboo stands, palm fronds and boggy forest, large dragonflies skeeting around, and the sun came out. If my Usborne guide to dinosaurs was telling the truth, the kind of land where you might expect to see a fin-backed dimetrodon lumbering across the road, and the kind of vegetation responsible for most of our coal beds.
Road near the ferry,
Wall of trees,
The rainy Rio Baker river as it approaches the Pacific. The road heads up the valley.
The one road,
Reached the ferry stop, 120km out from Villa O'Higgins. The ferry is very nicely included as part of the Carretera Austral, meaning it is a free service, with a sturdily built, free, brand new wooden refugio with flushing toilets (!) for travellers. However, I needed to get a move on, so crossed that evening, and spent dusk pushing my bike up a monstrous hill, gravel sliding around my feet, rain pouring down, misty rogue clouds wandering around the darkening valley like aimless ghosts.
Beautiful, but by this point I must admit I was having doubts about the whole enterprise. The physical exertion was even greater than I had expected, or at least my body hadn't risen to the challenge with quite the ferocity I had hoped. None of this should really have come as a surprise. I wouldn't describe my 20s as a time of constantly frenzied partying, but I had certainly always been pretty fond of the odd bottle of red or two, and the occasional bouts of exercise clearly hadn't made up for the large periods of torpor and decadence.
Added to this, and more important, as fitness will inevitably improve, is the mental side. Firstly, getting out of bed and onto the road was the main problem. To anyone who knows me well, this will doubtless come as no surprise. When I was picking fruit in Australia years ago I was lucky enough to have a guy named Cowan as my accomplice, and he was forced every morning to brew a family-sized coffee pot at 7am and bring me the contents before I could be prised out of my tent. Sadly, I have no such enforcer on this trip. Plus, the fact you've got to strike camp, check the wheels, carry out a rudimentary cleaning of the chain, cassette, etc., strap tent, sleeping bag and French Connection man-bag to the front rack (yeah, not quite sure what I was thinking with this choice of bag for the road) and secure the panniers and rucksac to the back. Doesn't sound like much, but adds a half hour to the whole getting on the move plan. Plus, a hell of a lot harder to motivate yourself to do this when it's cold and raining. Due to this, I'm snoozing my alarm a hell of a lot, staying in my cocoon, and often getting up at 12pm, occasionally even 2pm. Admittedly some of this is because I'm usually cycling until 10, 10:30pm, then making dinner and reading, but still, I need to adjust to the outdoor rules, of sleeping when it gets dark and rising with the dawn.
Secondly, the willpower to keep on going when progress is slow can be hard. Obvious point is obvious. When you're zooming along at 25km/hr on a paved road, you're getting somewhere. When all you have to show for the previous hour is 9km up a steep, twisting hill climb, wheels slipping and crunching on the rocks, with the prospect of a treacherous downhill, then another hard slog uphill, it gets hard. I feel like a bit of a dick for complaining, when I could be working for a living, but there it is.
I also live in constant fear of my bike or panniers breaking on the ripio - some parts are smoothish, and fine cycling for a few hundred metres, but then you hit the potholes, the corrugated sections, and the sections that are little more than a collection of large stones and small boulders. You spend the whole time scanning the road twenty or thirty metres ahead, picking the good sections and steering through them, although often there is no good section to pick out.
My bike has actually held up a hell of a lot better than I feared it might - the wheels and hubs, which were my main concern, have been great, and everything else is in good working order. Apart from the saddle that is - probably too much dragging the bike up embankments holding it, but the front has ripped off - okay at the moment, but any more and this will get seriously unconfortable! The panniers haven't been quite so good - the weight is supported on a thick metal bar, which I assumed was steel, but judging on how easily it has bent must be aluminum. This means they can now easily slip out of their moulded moorings, so the panniers were basically falling off when I hit a pothole. Partly my own fault I guess, I could well be carrying more than the recommended weight, but a real pain. I've managed to fix for now by rebending and forcing the bars in so the bend is forcing the bars into the moorings rather than out , so...fingers crossed. My only other equipment problem, and I raged about this in the wet, inconsequential as it must seem, is the so-called 'waterproof' North Face jacket I own appears pretty far from waterproof. It's not the totally top of the range Summit series, but rather the more lightweight Flight series, but still almost £200 worth of jacket, Goretex coated, all that jazz. You get wet at the seams and zips, and the pockets with their special waterproof zips actually act as minuture resevoirs. I'd put my mp3 player in one, and after cycling for 4 hours in steady, but by no means torrential rain, there was a good 2 inches of water in my pockets. Luckily it was just a generic £40 model, but still pretty damn annoying. Don't get me wrong, the coat looks cool as hell (or at least as much as a waterproof can), and is really pretty good at keeping wind out and heat in, but still, it's a waterproof. And yet....not.
My kit, a few days earlier.
Anyway, tedious and over-long bitching aside, I started looking deep into myself on the ride the next day (dum, dum, DUM!) and realising that I couldn't get frustrated by slow progress, couldn't spent my time checking out km markers on the road side, and needed to take a slightly more zen approach to this. Obviously I'd realised this shit before, but I was in a good frame mind to really accept it that day, for whatever reason, and appreciate the beauty of the road, sing songs on the easy streches, and grind it out on the slogs. Concentrate on the small triumphs and pleasures and let the destination come to you, as surely it will. Yeah......man.
So anyway, after an inperceptible divide the vegetation changed to lengas, and....other trees. Pines and coniferous looking beasties, and the rain more or less stopped as I closed in on Cochrane. By this time I was running low on food, or at least easily eatable food - I had, as always, dried spaghetti and porridge oats, but spaghetti needs cooking, and I was pretty much out of gas. Obviously I can use a fire to heat the water, and I did, but this requires time to build, and can be pretty tricky in the wet to someone of my somewhat sub-Mears skills. So, it was with incredible happiness that I honed in on Cochrane. The land of milk and honey. The fabled town of Ambrosia. The town with a supermercado that accepted Visa. I arrived at 10pm to find the store open and thriving, pastry and baking section open. I don't want to bore with with what I ate, there and then, on a a bench in the town square (3 empenadas, a chicken wing , 4 donuts, a tube of crisps, packet of biscuits, chocolate, juice), but afterwards, re-energised, I retraced my wheel grooves 9kms to Lago Esmerelda, a beautiful still lake with a few parts of flat shoreline with stands of conifers, pitched my tent, got myself a beaker of wine, and started writing this entry, ready for the next day.
Lakeside at Esmerelda,
Note - as I pointed out at the top of this entry, I am now 334km north of Cochrane, so this all happened several days in the past. I will write another entry tomorrow about the next leg. Betcha can't wait.
Secondary note - the songs I was mostly singing on the easy sections were 'She lives in a time of her own - 13th Floor Elevators (although I was going more with the Judybats version), 'Blonde on Blonde by Nada Surf', Higher than the Sun and Kowalski by Primal Scream, and Eric B and Rakim's Paid in Full - the Coldcut remix - this in particular would have sounded insane to any sharp eared interloper. Don't worry though, I haven't quite lost it....yet!
Third note. Have a few photos from Mt Fitzroy and the pass over to Chile that I think I'll post, as my internet connection wasn't good enough last time.
Perito Merino glacier,
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In front of Fitzroy and his attendant peaks,
Mt Fitzroy at dawn,
The road north to the 'on-foot only' border post. Raining at late in the evening, had a pretty mystical aspect to it,
Confused and bewildered. I expect a bird attack was imminent.
A mental and physical battle was always imminent. Keep on keeping on. That picture of the red Mt Fitzroy at dawn is staggering.
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