Greetings Everyone

I hope you all had a good Christmas and New Year celebration, down south in Ushuaia it was something of a mixed bag on the weather front, wind, rain, snow, sunshine, cold I swear it was like being back in Melbourne, if you didn’t like the weather just wait 15 minutes for it to change, and believe me it did.

The trip down to Ushuaia had a few moments of excitement. As I mentioned in the previous post, travelling south on Ruta 40 can be exciting due to the strong winds in the area, and the poor condition of the road although that is rapidly changing. Getting to Rio Gallegos I only had about 200km of gravel road the rest was brand new tarmac, but even with those road conditions it can be impossible to travel by motorcycle, I was reading another blog how a couple of weeks earlier the guys had to turn back and wait a couple of days for the winds to calm down.

I was lucky that it wasn’t as strong as that especially as I had a couple of long stretches of gravel road on the way down to El Calafate.

El Calafate is a jumping off point for the nearby National Park and Glacier and walking around the town was like being inside a giant outdoor clothing catalogue. All you can see on the people are the last 5 years clothing designs from North Face, Mountain Hardware, Columbia and the rest. And yes I was no different to the rest of the herd.

Travelling south east from El Calafate to Rio Gallegos was a long but slightly dull trip. After climbing over one small mountain pass the countryside is flat with the road stretching out into distance.

After getting to Rio Gallegos early than I planned I decided to continue on down to Punta Arenas that night which meant crossing back into Chile. This was a bit confusing as I discovered that after waiting for 30 minutes in the line that I was in the wrong building on the wrong side of the border (for reasons I don’t understand they put both sets of immigration and customs offices in the one building on the far side of the border you want to cross) any way hop on bike go 5km and line up again. All sorted this time.

Punta Arenas is the major city down in Southern Chile, from here I needed get a ferry across to Porvenir, Tierra del Fuego and then ride down to Ushuaia. No problem, well just one problem.

My credit card got hacked.

For the first time since I’ve been South America I decided to use my credit card to pay for the (expensive) accommodation I was staying in down here. I was a bit surprised to find out that it was overdrawn as I knew I had nothing on it and then I had a horrible feeling about what I was going to find when I checked the bank records and I was right.

Two days earlier I found out I had bought medical supplies from Italy, stuff from Korea and Tuscon Arizona. When it got hacked I have no idea.

Mierda

What followed was 2 hours of phone calls to the bank in Australia and Mastercard in the USA. They were pretty good about it and cancelled the old card and were going to send a replacement to the Hostel in 6 days (how I laugh when I think about that now, I’m back in Punta Arenas still trying to get the card, they said that they could not deliver it, no one was there, three times! It’s a hotel guys, Knock on the Door, Ring the Bell, Open the bloody door, there are people it the place all day!! Sorry, just having a little rant. I’m supposed to be able to get it, manana. Where have I heard that before?

Trying to sort this out I had two pieces of luck, the first being the internet, the second was having a Skype account allowing me to call phone numbers around the world. Believe me people before you do any more travels around the world get a Skype account and a Skype phone number. If you end up in this situation it will make your life so much easier. Consider yourselves told!

Anyway back to travelling south, on the ferry I met Trevor, Ben and Angie. The ferry trip across to Porvenir is about a two hour crossing after double checking the bikes to make sure they were tied down we went inside.

Trevor had ridden down from Washington while Ben and Angie had started from Canada. The ferry was quite full and we had a brief chat about our travels before settling down, I thought I would grab a quick coffee from the “Merlinka Cafeteria”, it was not quick, it was not slow, it was beyond slow, the pitch drop experiment worked faster than the guy behind the counter and he looked like he was born around the same time as that experiment started and with half the passengers having the same idea as me we waited, and waited…….

Finally after getting a caffeine hit, reading up on where I was going, the ferry was arriving at Porvenir and it was time to mount up and head off.

We were all heading down to Ushuaia after leaving the ferry but we later met up at a King Penguin colony. As penguin colonies go it was not a large one but provided an interesting photo opportunity for us. I have a theory that they are not actually penguins but in fact are really small people in penguin costumes playing up for the tourists. I swear I saw one having a smoke in the background 🙂

After leaving the penguin colony we were heading to yet another border crossing to get back into Argentina, I forgot to mention that the road from Porvenir to the border crossing was another 150km of gravel road but that would be easy after my recent experience.

Wrong.

About 30km from the border the steering felt funny and I knew that I wasn’t going to be laughing. A flat tyre.

Mierda.

Not a problem I have a 100% success rate fixing flat tyres on Kitty (you guessed it, only one flat) I got out the repair kit and mini air compressor and started to work on it. Soon Ben and Angie pulled up and started to help me which was very fortunate because my repair kit was bugger all effective. The tyre had split and my kit would not fix that. While we were working on fixing the flat when Tim from the UK stopped as well to help and take a few photos for posterity.

Luckily Ben had a different type of repair kit and we managed to get enough air into the tyre to get me to the border.

After sorting out the Chilean bureaucracy another check on the tyre showed that the plug was not holding so a second attempt was made to fix the tyre that was more successful so we headed off to Rio Grade to find a warm hotel. I should mention that as we went further south the colder it got and I do mean cold.

The next day we all parted company and I rode at a more sedate pace down to Ushuaia. The ride to Ushuaia was on good tarmac so didn’t stress the tyre, I was wondering how I was going to nurse it for the 3000km run up to Buenos Aries but that was a problem for another day.

The final run into Ushuaia takes you over a low mountain pass with snow covering the peaks. I had heard that only a couple of weeks earlier that ice and snow on the road itself made crossing through the pass a nightmare for bikes so I was looking at the air temp thermometer I have on Kitty to see how cold it was. I was happy(?) to see it was a balmy 6 deg C.

On the outskirts of Ushuaia I met Trevor, he knew of a hostel in town and so I followed him and we both ended up staying at Hostel La Posta. This was fortunate in more ways than one as I had been expecting to have to camp in Ushuaia and with the rain and low temps I wasn’t looking forward to that idea .

Also as it turns out the Lolo, the owner of the Hostel was a bike rider and was very helpful. Later that afternoon he took me around to a friends motor bike shop and there in the tyre rack was a miracle.

A brand new tyre that fitted Kitty! There was much rejoicing.

The next day I spent a fun filled two hours fitting the tyre, you can see from the photo that I’m rugged up against the cold, but I can tell you that while I was wrestling with that tyre I was sweating underneath those layers, but any exposed bits were freezing. The temps dropped to less than 5 deg C and when it started to snow I thought it was getting beyond a joke.

In Douglas Adams Hitch Hiker books one of the characters (unknown to him) is a rain god. I was beginning to wonder if I had been adopted by the local bad weather god as every time I went near Kitty (packing, unpacking, fixing, riding) the temp would drop and it would start to rain or snow.

The next few day I paid for my outside adventure with a sore throat that developed into a cold.

On Christmas day we were joined by Con and Valerie who Trevor had met elsewhere in South America we had some excellent roast lamb and vegetables afterwards I wussed out and collapsed back into bed.

On Boxing day I had one of the most important tasks of the trip to do. As I said Ushuaia is the end of the road for most people doing the Alaska to Argentina run and would have been for us if we had kept going back in 2008. It’s not the end for me but a milestone in the journey.

Heading west from the town you enter the national park (for a fee, a very large fee) and ride about another 10km until the road ends and you are at “The Sign”

This marks the end of the road (RN 3) and here is where the obligatory photo of bike and sign are taken. I didn’t break the rule.

I had one other task here as well. Leading on from the end of the road is a walking path down to the shoreline of the Beagle Channel. This channel leads out to the Southern Ocean and Antarctica.

In our trip back in 2007 we got to Prudoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean and for reasons that still elude me I thought it would be a good idea to go for a swim. Carolyn missed out on the swim due to some bad planning (on my part) and only managed to get her feet wet in the water. It was something she always regretted missing out on (I’m not sure why, it was damn cold but then again she did enjoy her swimming).

At the end of the path was a quiet bay with a rock ledge that jutted out into the water. Around the bay are the snow covered peaks of mountains in the national park, it’s an incredibly beautiful part of the world. I took some her ashes that I’ve taken on the trip with me and put them into the water, it’s the nearest I can do to make up for the Arctic swim. I think she would have liked it.

The next day I had one more task to do. South East of Ushuaia is a road that runs along the coast for a few km that ends at a lighthouse. This was as far south as we would go. Kitty was parked at the marker and the Beloved and I had a chat and shared a coke (those of you who knew Carolyn will remember how much she loved that evil drink 🙂 ) and now we start the journey north.

Just to update this post, I forgot to mention that back in Prudoe Bay I pick up a few stones that were lying on the beach and I’ve carried them with me all through both Americas trips.

I wanted to take them down here to Ushuaia and leave them here on the beach below. There is nothing unusual or unique about these stones, they’re ordinary quartz or sedimentary rocks worn smooth by the ocean waves but I do have a dream that sometime in the next 1000 years or so, one of them will catch the eye of a geologist walking down this beach and he will pick it up, realise where it has come from and propose an entirely new theory about the prehistory of the continents.

Yes I know its a million to one chance but as a famous author has remarked on more than one occasion sometimes a million to to one chance crops up nine times out of ten.

Before leaving Ushuaia I wanted to try the local King Crab (thanks for the suggestion Leanne) I met up with Ben and Angie who were also also keen to do this as well and after some quick web research we headed down to the main shopping area.

Ushuaia like El Calafate is a tourist town but in this case it’s for the Antarctic cruises that leave from here as well as the National Park. The main shopping area is full of outdoor shops and the obligatory tourist shops with many souvenirs of the Malvinas.

One important tip for you in this part of the world especially for the British readers out there, is what ever you do don’t mention the war, I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it. 🙂 The locals have not forgotten the events of 1982 and as far as they are concerned it’s Malvinas Siempre

Meanwhile back in the restaurant we’ve ordered our victim and soon we were outfitted with implements of destruction ready for the guest of honour.

It was good. Very, very good. Not a lot more I can say really.

The next day it was time to leave and head north, as always going near the bike it started to snow. I was thinking what it was going to be like on the pass if we had snow this low altitude.

As it turned out it was ok, the temperature did drop but didn’t get to freezing and it was sunny’ish as I headed north. That was the only good news, the rest of the day the temp stayed in single digits and the wind was biting cold, whenever I hit a rain storm it would drop down a couple of degrees just to make it a bit cooler.

I decided to do a big run across the border (570km) and get back to Porvenir to catch the next mornings ferry to Punta Arenas. Good idea, well executed, didn’t work.

The ferry was cancelled.

Back to the Hostel in Porvenir and wait for the afternoon ferry and hope it wasn’t cancelled as well.

As it turned out all was good that afternoon. I met Mark and Sanne at the ferry, they have been travelling around the world on a pair of Suzuki DRZ400’s for several years and we were all heading to Punta Arenas that night.

We decided to meet up on New Years Eve where we would find a place to get something to eat and then head off to find a bar or pub to see in the New Year. Punta Arenas is a major city and we had a simple plan.

Fail.

At 8pm we were wandering around for a place to eat, any place that was open but there were damn few. Eventually we ended up in a Chilean Chinese restaurant, yes the mind does boggle slightly but the food was good. At 11pm they kicked us out into the night and we went searching for those mythical bars.

The place was deader than the proverbial welsh village on a wet Sunday afternoon, even more quiet than Northborne Ave in Canberra at night (sorry, there goes the Canberra readers) Eventually we found a local (believe me there were not many around) who suggested the casino bar. We were not enthused but trudged down the road and found a huge casino on the shoreline. The bar turned out to be on the top floor and it was ok, it had a view over the city, and we realised how big the city was. Where were all the people? Probably sensibly tucked up warm at home not aimlessly walking the streets like a bunch of lost tourists.

So that was New Year in Punta Arenas, tomorrow I allegedly(?) get a new credit card and will leave for Buenos Aries via the Torres del Paine National Park.

It will be time for some routine (and not so routine) maintenance on Kitty when I get to BA. One thing I haven’t told you is how the starter motor has decided to become intermittent (only a couple of times but that’s enough) I can fix it by using some percussive maintenance techniques (i.e hit it vigorously with a piece of wood) but I really want it to sort it out, kick starting Kitty is a non event.

On that note I leave you until next time and wish you all the best for the New Year

Ian J