Divining the hues

Fitz Roy in a glory of sunshine.

March 28, 2014

There’s a scene in Saint Exupery’s The Little Prince where the prince wanders through the desert and meets a flower. Are there any men on this planet? he asks. The flower once saw a caravan passing. I think there are six or seven men in existence, she says. Their life is hard. They are blown around by the wind because they haven’t any roots.

I often think of this scene when making broad statements about a place or a people based on limited experience. Or even based on lots of experience, since so much of what we think of a place or a people is dependent on the random interactions we have with the people we happen to run into. And yet, as my friend Phoebe reminded me once, “Culture is a real thing, Katie!” Which of course is why we stare at our image of a place and try to divine which are the hues imbued by the bright streaks of personality of the individuals we meet and which are the subtler background coloring of culture. But we mess this up all the time. Our brains try to organize the world, even if we have in effect just seen one caravan passing and then judge it for not having the crucial roots that we deem ourselves blessed with.

So all that said, and with apologies to El Calafate for unfairly casting aspersions on its character, El Chalten for me was everything that Calafate was not: generous of spirit,  interesting, open, hospitable, set amidst musclebound mountains that beckon like strangers in cars with candy.

I spent most of yesterday cleaning up, and in the afternoon I climbed part way up Mount Fitz Roy, which, after a morning rainstorm, shined clear as an anthem.

When i got back, the tall Argentine cyclist had decided to roast a lamb on a spit, a process that takes 5 or 6 hours. We were all starving and well boozed by the time it was ready and I was pretty sure it was the most delicious thing I had ever eaten. Some musicians in the group pulled out their guitars and sang Chilean folk songs to us as we drank more.

I awoke at sunrise (at 7:30 am, which strikes me as a civilized hour for sunrise) and packed up as quietly as I could, silently bidding adieu to the sleeping tents with the cyclists in their bellies. I biked north, towards the embattled Laguna del Desierto to catch the first of two ferries involved in this border crossing back into Chile.  My rear rack was broken again — the rack I already had welded once on this trip. It was still serviceable so I just tried to be gentle on it, a harder task than it sounds on 40 km of dirt and gravel road.
I had three hours to wait for the ferry across Desierto so with the help of a nice Chilean man on vacation I jimmied a sorta-fix on the broken rack with the head of a bungee cord. We will see if it lasts.

Me and some other cyclists and hikers took the ferry across the lake, glaciers staring down at us from their precipitous abodes. At the north shore of the lake we found some Argentine police who will stamp our passports adios in the morning. For now we are all camped out under the trees on the side of the lake. I can’t stop staring in wonder at this scenery that looks absolutely, wholly, heart-thumpungly nothing like the pampa.

Today: 37 km
Total: 1141 km

Campet at Laguna del Desierto, admiring the non-pampa-ness.

A tribe of beards

If there had been a tree within 50 km of this sign, it would have depicted it well.

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Today I really, truly cheated, no poll needed.  There is an east-west portion of the route, the last 90 km into El Chalten, where the winds are unerringly and relentlessly due east. People biking east frequently complete the 90 km in less than 2 hours. Those who complete the section going west take 12 or 15 hours. The first person to tell me it would be misery to bike westward was the Japanese guy I met on Day 2 of my trip, nearly two months ago. The opinion has been repeated ad nauseum ever since.

And the opinion wasn’t wrong. If I weren’t worried about the German’s warning about the boat I might have tortured myself longer, but after covering15 km in three hours I was over it. I got off the bike and spent a while trying to hitchhike but the traffic was slow and sedan-y. But even the sedans stopped when they saw me and asked if I needed water or food. One guy even offered too let me hang onto the car and he would slowly pull me. I thanked him but declined.

After a while my patience for standing still in grinding wind gave out and I started biking again. A mile later a truck pulled up next to me. Muerta? He asked out his window. Yes, I am dead tired, I said, and gratefully accepted the ride.

He was a hotelier with lodges all over Patagonia but he spent most of his time in El Chalten, at least in the summers. In the winters he travels around the world. This winter he is going to Thailand and maybe Indonesia. Chalten is a new town, he explained, just 29 years old, and he’s been there for 19 of them. The town was built with two express goals: to create Argentina’s capital of trekking, and to piss on the proverbial fire hydrant so that Chile would have less of a claim on the territory. There was a conflict over where precisely the border between the countries ran in the 1960s and 1970s, when both Chile and Argentina claimed the long tongue of Laguna del Desierto as part of their country. This conflict became heated enough that a Chilean was actually killed during a scuffle with Argentine soldiers near the border in 1967. “There was a big conflict over Desierto, and we won,” said the Argentine hotelier. I hadn’t heard any Chileans describe it that way, but  didn’t argue.

He dropped me off at the Casa de Ciclistas, the two-room home of a lady named Flor and her two sons. Flor invites cyclists to set up their tents in her backyard as they pass through Chalten and cyclists take her up on that offer by the scores. Flor greeted me enthusiastically and walked me to the backyard. There were a dozen tents set up and bicycles tucked into every cranny, although the cyclists themselves were all out trekking or internetting. I found a corner to install my own tent, and then went in search of information about the boat. Eventually I learned that Saturday’s wouldn’t be the last boat–there will be one more one week later. But if I don’t want to wait around el Chalten for a week, I have to leave latest by Friday morning.

When I returned to Flor’s it was nearly dark and the cyclists were back, drinking beer and insulting each other jovially. A tall Argentine who was nursing the grill to life told me they’d already counted me in for the barbeque. Two blond Alaskans with beards as long as Methuselah’s said they’d been on the road for a year and 9 months, and had biked from their hometown of Juneau. A long-legged French Canadian had biked from her hometown as well. More cyclists showed up, maybe 15 in all. They were all heading south, on the last leg of a journey they started a long time ago, in the arc of a velo affair…

We stayed up late and ate till our bellies could accept no more, and talked cycling. I mentioned to a couple of them that I was thinking of backwards-biking the 75 km I had missed, and they looked at me like I had suggested I was going to allow a mosquito to bite me to make up for the one I had avoided. You have so much cycling ahead, the tall Argentine said. Take tomorrow off. It was sound advice.

After a few beers I couldn’t keep my eyes open,. I fell asleep to the sound of drunk cyclists talking shop around me, and I was filled with a feeling of home.

Today: 46 km
Total: 1104

Adventures in abandoned house exploration

Abandoned house, less creepy but still kinda creepy by daylight

March 25, 2014

Given my superpower for procrastination, and that the once-meaty days have shed much of their weight while the night has packed it on, I was bound to wind up night-biking one of these days. That turned out to be tonight, under a moonless sky on an unlit road in search of an abandoned house.

The German is to blame. I don’t remember his name or even where he started his trip, somewhere far away like Bolivia or Brazil. I just remember that he had skin as leathery as his baggage and sported the telltale tightly curved posture of a hard core cyclist. We met in the late afternoon 40 km out of Calafate; he had started the day in El Chalten, 180 km away. The trip I aimed to complete in three days, he was about to finish in one.

We exchanged the usual wind report greeting and were about to part ways when he said, Do keep in mind, the last boat to O’Higgins is Saturday. My eyebrows turned into exclamation marks.

OK, a quick geography lesson. I am in Argentina because there is a 400 km segment of Chile that has no roads: The entire width of the country is an icefield that drops its dozens of toes into the Pacific Ocean, and west of that is a wild archipelago of uninhabited islands. The only way to get from one end of the section to the other  without leaving Chile is by air or by sea. If you want to go overland you must jog east into Argentina for several hundred kilometers. And the cyclist’s path is this: bike into Argentina, cycle through a couple hundred miles through empty pampa. Bike to Calafate, perhaps breaking your rear axle on the way, then break your dad’s camera. Bike to El Chalten, heroically battling ferocious winds. Then cross back to Chile through the craziest border crossing of your life, which entails biking up to the embattled Laguna del Desierto, crossing it in a ferry, carrying your bike through miles of muddy single-track trails, then taking a long and expensive ferry across  lake to O’Higgins. Clearly a flight would be easier, but here we are.

So when the German told me the last boat to O’Higgins is Saturday rday, I asked when I’d have to make it to Chalten in order to catch the boat by Saturday. He thought. Tomorrow night, he said decisively.

Hence the night biking. I had left town around 2pm after several hours of screwing around and had initially aimed for 65 km. At km 75, the world already soaked in gloaming, I stopped at the house of a road worker to beg some water. He said there was an abandoned house in 20 more kilometers where cyclists can sleep.

The road worker hadn’t mentioned that the abandoned house was surrounded by barbed wire fence but with a headlamp and the Magellanic clouds lighting my way through, I found a way over. I crept into the abandoned house, each step creaking harshly on the holey wood floor, shining my flashlight through busted doors and windows into grafittied rooms with corners filled with trash. I was about to turn around and find someplace less creepy to pitch my tent when I saw, through the broken door of a back room, the flash of a pedal reflector.

There was somebody in this house, I realized. And it’s a cyclist.

I paused and listened, but heard nothing. Hello? I asked the darkness. Hello? I asked again, more bravely. Hello hello?

Hola! I heard at last from a side room. A man was sitting up in his sleeping bag, fumbling for his headlamp. You’re late! he said. I apologized excessively for waking him up. Another cyclist appeared from another room. The two of them put their jackets on and helped me get my bike and luggage over the fence. One was German and the other Spanish, and they were jolly and kind despite having been roused from sleep.

They returned to bed and I picked a corner to install myself. The house has lost its creepiness and transformed into some kind of homely hominess now that I know its occupants.

Today: 95 km
Total: 1058 km

Gear eruption

The German, in the morning.

On being an annoying tourist.

 

Broken axle, whole axle.

March 24, 2014

I am about to offend 25,000 residents and most of a nation, but I don’t really like the town of El Calafate, Argentina.

That’s mainly because it doesn’t really like me either. It’s one of those towns that exists to serve tourists, and is kind of bitter about it. They have dealt with one too many ugly American, one too many condescending European or clueless Israeli kid fresh out of military service. No, forget one too many, they have dealt with 20,000 too many, and that’s this year alone. And now you’re the 20,001st obnoxiously demanding person they have had to deal with and they are fucking over it. They are over you. They just want you to go away so their charming little village will have a little bit less obnoxious in it.

People come to El Calafate for one reason, and it is this:

perito moreno!

OK, that is a crappy picture taken by my tablet, but just go Google Perito Moreno Glacier and you will see why people come here. Better yet, YouTube it and watch skyskraper-sized chunks of ice and rock splat into Argentina’s biggest and milky-teal-est lake. The glacier is stunning, tremendous, action-packed. It is worth being an annoying tourist for for a couple of days in El Calafate just to see it.

But I wound up staying here for many days, first because my bike broke, and then because my camera broke. For those who keep score, this is actually the second camera that I have broken on this trip, and it is not even mine—my dad lent me his, and I broke it. I ran out the door, a little late as always, and I hadn’t closed my backpack all the way, and it dropped onto the sidewalk and wouldn’t take any more pictures after that. It flashed “lens error” endlessly, which I took to be the blue screen of death for cameras.

As though to rub salt into the wound, I was on my way to go see that glacier, the most photogenic natural phenomenon of my trip.I wandered around for hours staring at it and feeling a profound sadness about my seemingly incurable carelessness, a carelessness that I have actually been trying hard to reign in on this trip, to no avail. That carelessness is the characteristic about myself I most abhor and feel most powerless to change.  It is a source of tremendous frustration and grief to me, not to mention the people around me.

I had assumed that I was at fault for breaking the bicycle as well, since I am generally to blame when things break or disappear or otherwise malfunction around me, but it turns out my bike came with a crappy axle/hub system that is kind of famous for breaking under pressure. I immediately went to the town’s sole bike shop, but they did not want to help me, and got increasingly annoyed that I kept asking them to. They said they didn’t have the part, they couldn’t say when it would come in, if ever. No, there was no way to tell when it would come in, or to special order it. They wouldn’t sell me another wheel, although they had one, because they don’t sell wheels. They had no advice for me other than to wait around town for a few weeks and see if the part showed up.

This led to three days of frenzied calls to other bike shops in other cities trying to find someone who would send me a spare axle, a logistical nightmare. Also, asking every single person I met in El Calafate if they knew anybody who knew anything about bikes in Calafate other than the useless bikeshop assholes. In the end, I found someone who knew someone who was a bike hobbiest and might be able to help me, but he was on vacation. They pointed out his house though, and I took to walking by it several times a day, staring at it woefully, sometimes replacing the urgent note I’d left on his doorstep with a new and more urgent one.

Miraculously, this strategy worked. I walked by his house for the seventeenth time and noticed the note was gone. I literally ran up to the door and pounded on it. Can you fix my bike? I demanded of the young man who came to the door. He looked at me kindly. Come back at three, he said.

I did. It turned out that the young man was actually the bike hobbiest’s son, Cesar. He had come by the house to check on it while his dad was on vacation. His dad had taught him a lot about bikes, so Cesar thought he might be able to help me. He walked me back to his garage, which was like some kind of tool-lovers panacea, everything carefully organized and labeled in shelves and drawers, wheels hanging from the ceiling and a glass case protecting some special parts. He looked in a bag on a shelf near the floor and pulled out a spare axle.

I coulda cried.

Cesar was one of those quietly competent people that you meet and immediately wish they populated the world’s legislatures, because if they did, we wouldn’t be as screwed as we currently are.  He was raised in Calafate and loves it here. He works in a government office that manages social welfare. I watched him treat my bike with great care and respect, slowly coaxing it back to health and functionality. He took about an hour to replace the axle and grease my break cables, chatting with me calmly and kindly as he did so.

He charged me $7 total. I tried to pay him more, but he was quietly insistent. No, that’s quite enough. Don’t worry. Have a good trip.

I rode back to my hostel with so much gratitude and gladness in my heart that it threatened to float away.

That was right before the camera broke, and my heart deflated again. Later, I learned that the lens error is common with this camera, caused by a manufacturing defect, and that Canon will fix it for free. But that didn’t really make me feel better. I still dropped it, and I was still reckless with something that’s not even mine, and I am still without a camera, and I am still a despicably careless person. For a while, I thought delusionaly that I might be able to get it fixed here in town, but it was pretty much like the bike story: There are two photography stores in town but both told me that they do absolutely no camera servicing, and there’s no one within 500 miles who does. I am pretty sure there is some Cesar of cameras somewhere in this town, and I just need to find him or her, but I cannot stomach being an annoyance to these people any longer than I already have been, so I am biking out in the  morning. I bought a disposable camera.

Goodbye, Calafate. I hope one day you let Cesar run things for you.

Cesar, fixing my bike.

 

Glaciers are cool.

Me, actively trying not to look sad.

 

I have discovered what my spirit animal is and I am offended.

Snow outside my tent.

March 20, 2014

I woke up to patches of snow on my tent and on the ground, and large amouts of it splayed across the mountains to the west as though Patagonia hadn’t heard it was still technically summer for one more day. I was cold. My feet were numb. I hadn’t slept much.

I made oatmeal for me and my police friends, which they said they’d never tried before. Ricardo liked it. Victor took one bite which he took five minutes to swallow, and then spent the next 10 minutes moving the rest around his plate. I pretended not to notice.

They asked me what Americans think of Obama, a question I get a lot and don’t ever know quite how to answer. Today I went with, Well, most people think he’s better than his predecessor! which invariably elicits an enthusiastic response, since Bush wasn’t well loved by South Americans. I asked how they like their own presidenta and got a thumbs down from Ricardo. She’s ruining everything, he said bitterly.

The road turned from pavement to gravel and mud.I saw many flocks of ñandu, the South American ostrich, all neck and legs and beak. And probably a dozen condors riding the wind, their white feathery fingers at the end of their boxy wings  stret0ched wide like a child’s drawing of a hand.

My friends Tamara and Bruce have a game they play where they determine everyone’s spirit animal, a game that frequently ends satisfyingly with  annoying editors or reviled politicians being likened the scummiest members of the animal kingdom. To my recollection Tamara and Bruce have never actually assigned me a spirit animal,  and now I know why: because they didn’t want to hurt my feelings with the ugly truth. My spirit animal is the cow.

This occurred to me because I have an irrational fear of cow grates. Even though I know logically they pose no real danger to me or my bicycle, I still basically hyperventilate every time I have to ride over one.  But now that I think of it, it’s obvious. I like to chew things over. I am a skilled grazer. I am pretty placid, by many measures a little too placid. I am pro-social. My farts have probably contributed to global warming.

I was super annoyed at this insight– I’d much rather have a spirit animal of a swallow or an octopus or something cool like that. But then I remembered this amazing story about a cow that my friend Laurel told me, which proves that cows can be both cunning and valiant, and I felt a bit better.

I stopped to talk to a couple of Canadian cyclists in the middle of the blusteriest valley of the day; the wind hit us both laterally as I biked north and they south. I looked back after saying goodbye and watched a gust push the woman over. I stopped to turn around but she waved me off  from her pile on the ground with a thumbs up.

I biked to the next police station in hopes of some coffee, or at least some water, but there was nobody there but an overly friendly cat, whom I dubbed Fondles the Police Cat. Here is his picture.

I was about 15 km shy of my destination for the day when catastrophe struck in the form of a strange noise coming from my back wheel. The strange noise turned into a stranger noise, and then into a tormented noise combined with a sudden lack of forward movement.

I stopped to look at it, and although my knowledge of bike mechanics leaves something to be desired, I figured the problem was grave when the axle fell out of my rear tire.

I sat down in the wind and waited. No cars went by for an hour and a half. I don’t have the patience for boring that my hitchhiking Belgian friend does so I finally got up and walked, pushing my bike. That ended a while later when I rolled my bad ankle to excruciating effect. I was still standing there on one leg, wondering if it was safe to put my foot down, when a silver truck appeared, heading my direction. I wildly waved both arms at them, like I was redirecting a landing plane. They had no choice but to stop. The truck was full of Brazilians, two men who are brothers who had married two women who are first cousins 40 years ago. Now all are retired and they spend their time road tripping together around the Americas.

They agreed to take me and my bike to El Calafate, 100km away, and proceeded to do the shoddiest tie-down job I have ever witnessed. For the next hour and a half, I peered out the back window waiting for my bike to fly away. It did not.

Today: 55 km
Total: 963

The brothers who married the cousins.

Whole and broken

Clouds that I liked.

If ñandu and sheep can get along, why can’t the rest of us?

Snow on the mountains to the west.

 

terrorizing squiggles

Me and my bus shelter campsite. I took more selfies this morning than I have ever taken in my entire life put together, as part of my procrastination campaign waiting for the wind to die down. Selfies are no defense against wind, it turns out.

March 19

Sometime in the middle of last night the world around my busstop campsite went from tranquilo to Patagonia, and by Patagonia I mean hollering winds and flashing cold rain. I laid around all morning to see if tranquilo would make another appearance but it declined. At noon I abandoned my delusions and left.

A few hours later I hit the Argentine border. I like borders. They are dry and warm and have electrical outlets. Plus, the immigration guys are usually bored and will look up the weather for you. I ate peanutbutter on crackers and befriended a Belgian kid who has been hitchhiking around South America since September. He told me that the good part of hitching is you don’t pay for transportation, so you can keep traveling even if you’re broke. The bad part is there is lots of boring. Sometimes the next ride won’t come for hours or days.

I was pumped for the next section of road because on the map it appeared to slice east into Argentina, which meant riding WITH the wind for once, without even cheating. But turns out the mapmakers forgot to add all the squiggles the road builders had added for no apparent reason. At one point the road actually curved all the way back west, and I was going face-first into the wind. I got irrationally angry, as though the universe’s mapmakers and road builders had conspired specifically to fuck with me.

But then a straight eastward road appeared at last, and my bike sprouted jetpacks and my mood did too. At the start of the day I had aimed to get to a crossroads called Tapi Aike, but after my late start and long lunch last the border and the terrorizing squiggles I had given up on that goal. That’s why you should never ever give up, kids. Because all of a sudden you might find yourself in Tapi Aike after all.

As I approached I saw a green-hatted figure in distance — my Belgian friend. He was despondent: he’d found a ride shortly after I left him at the border, but they could only take him to Tapi Aike, and he’d been trying to hitch for three boring hours with no luck.

I walked my bike to the police station, which is the only thing at Tapi Aike other than a petrol station that has been out of petrol for weeks. The two officers on duty this week are Victor and Ricardo. Their primary missions are to control the transport of sheep, and to help troubled motorists. They let me set up my tent in the sideyard and then invited me and the Belgian into their military-tidy station for tea. Ricardo, the older guy, retires in September. After that, he says, he’s going to travel. He wants to see every corner of his continent.

I’m going to sleep now to the mew of another generator, which Victor says will go off at midnight, an hour and 15 minutes from now. It has begun to rain again.

Today: 83 km
Total: 908 km

Ricardo and Victor, policing the middle of nowhere.

The trip’s first flat. Fortunately not mine.

Puerto Natales.

March 18

Ohman, it felt so good to get back on the bike today.

I took the bus to Natales, which is where Magda and I started biking south, but this time I biked north. (I also put the wheel in the right direction, for those keeping score.) It was after 5pm when I hit the road, but the wind was low and the sun was out and my legs were happy to be pedaling.

One side effect of my dog adventure seems to be that I now reflexively come to a full stop every time a dog comes in sight. In a country with more street dogs than street signs, this is pretty inconvenient. I am hoping it is a temporary affliction.

After a while a guy rode up behind me. He was in his late thirties and had a charming boyish smile. His name is Ricardo. He was on a training ride after work, biking to the Cave of the Miladon. He trains 500 km a week, he says, an hour after work each day and 5 to 8 hours on the weekends. He has biked around nearly every volcano in Chile.

What about in the winter? I ask. Winter is no problem, he says, me and my friends bike in the snow. The only hard part is training yourself not to use your brakes, because brakes are trouble when it’s below freezing. I told him that was a whole new level of crazy, like those guys who train themselves not to have a breathing reflex so they can free dive longer.

We were a km away from the turnoff to the cave when his bicycle began whining loudly. A few seconds later, his front tire was flat. He was unperturbed. It’s OK, my friend will pick me up. I’ll be fine, he said, shooing me on.

Tonight I put my tent up on the cement floor of a bus stop on the crest of a small wooded hill. The moon is nearly full. It’s a lot colder than my comfy bed at Magdalena and Fabian’s house, but it has its charms.

Today: 30 km
Total: 825 km

Clouds and mountains.

Horsey looking picturesque enough that I stopped.

My busstop campsite.

The rabid farándula

On Sunday I was biking home fat and boozy and happy after lunch at my friend Mario’s house, excited that after a month of mostly slobbing about in Punta Arenas I would finally be getting on the road the next day.

Then a pack of street dogs attacked me.

The dogs had been idly harassing a few kids who were punting a soccer ball around the street when I rode by and they decided to harass me instead. All of a sudden I was at the center of a swarm of five or six dogs so I started trying to bike away. I know, I know, if you are pursued by a pack of dogs you’re supposed to come to a stop in order to calm their hunting instinct, but it turns out it is hard to calm your fleeing instinct long enough to remember to do so. They chased me down and the biggest, a muscled, scar-faced blond with a short snout and a tommy lee jones bark, put his teeth in my leg.

My friend Mario is crazy, alcoholic, overbearing, entertaining, generous, obsessed with justice, and deeply knowledgeable about local history and marine biology. He was on his bike 50 meters behind me when the dogs attacked, and he pulled over and picked up some rocks and started chucking them at the dogs, who scattered. Then he puffed out his chest and started screaming at the kids, who had abandoned their futbol in favor of the farándula* with me and the dogs. WHOSE DOG IS THAT?! He hollered. Not mine, not mine, they all said. It’s just always around. Always been like that too, biting people. I’M GONNA KILL THAT DOG! IMA KILL IT! WHERE’D IT GO!? Mario screamed. The blond scarfaced dog had wisely skedaddled. Mario, undeterred, picked up more rocks and began throwing them at the rest of the dogs, who had presumed their innocence would protect them and had stuck around to watch the farándula also, but now yelped and ran away.

I looked at the blood rolling down my leg and biked away, listening to Mario screaming MATO ESE PERRO behind me.

Mario caught up to me several blocks later, after I stopped to Google “rabies Chile” on my phone. He was still obsessing over how he was gonna kill the dog. I told him to shut up about the dog and take me to the nearest hospital.

So OK, here is the deal with rabies in Chile. Chile has been rabies free since the 1970s, except for one case that appeared five years ago after a bat bit somebody in some city several thousand kilometers from here. Nonetheless the naval hospital gave me the first of five rabies shots and told me to come back in 3 days for the next, and then in 7 then in 14 then in 28. “For prevention,” they said.

I completely agree that rabies is something you hella want to prevent. I mean, it has a 100 percent mortality rate, so even if there’s just a 0.01 percent chance of infection, you gotta get the shots, right?

But (excuse me while I take a cue from Mario and get hysterical) OH MY GOD, did this really have to happen the DAY before I was planning to leave?! Like, REALLY planning to leave, after staying for way, way longer than anticipated. Like, I had been sedentary for so long that I was starting to feel my muscles and bones and fat and blood congealing into a sludgy mess akin to that last bit of Thanksgiving turkey I put in the back of my fridge each year with the intention of making stock but instead discover sometime the following year in putrid horror. And now I had to stay in Punta Arenas for more days or weeks for a series of stupid shots that might save me from death but probably wouldn’t do anything but waste my time? Are you kidding me?

And so I kept trying to get doctors and nurses and everybody else to clarify — was there actually any risk of me getting rabies? No, no, there’s no rabies in Chile, but just in case, you know. Just in case what, exactly? Well, it is really just our policy, it’s what we recommend anybody who gets bit by a dog. OK, it’s your policy, but there’s actually no rabies, right, so there’s no risk? No, there hasn’t been any dog-transmitted rabies in Chile since the 1970s. So would I be OK if I skip the shots? You should be OK, but it’s up to how you feel about it and what you feel is right for you. OMG, how I feel should have nothing to do with it! I just want to know, is it a 0 percent chance or a 0.01 percent chance? I don’t know what to tell you, you just have to do what makes you most comfortable.

In the end, what made me most comfortable was getting on my bike and going. This comfort was somewhat bolstered because my friend’s dad was the rabies expert for the UN’s health arm in Latin America, and he gave me the thumbs up to leave, which was all I needed.

So far I’m not drooling or frightened of water. But just in case I become a case for the record books, tell Mario to go ahead and kill that dog.

* Farándula is a great word that means anything stupid and overly theatrical, gossip or drama involving people you don’t know. Basically anything that would be breathlessly reported on TMZ.

back to crankin it

Dog bite! Also, lack of tan. Photo credit: Mario Santana

I am on my way again! About to get on a bus back to Natales, where I will actually start my journey northward in earnest. Enough of this bike for a few days, laze around for two weeks crap. The biking’s about to get real.

For what it’s worth, this last week of lazing around was unintentional, and was predicated by a gnarly sore throat, a dog bite, and a bunch of other stuff I don’t have the time to write about right now. So instead of writing more, I leave you with a bunch of pictures taken by the beautiful and talented Magdalena.

Hasta pronto!

PS I nearly forgot! Two of my Patagonia-inspired stories came out in Scientific American online last week. You should read them because they are both super interesting. One is about beavers, twenty of which were imported from Canada to Tierra del Fuego by the Peron administration in the 1940s. Once they arrived, they found thesmselves themselves in some kind of happy beavery paradise of abundant wetlands and a total lack of predators and they began destroying shit and making babies. Now nobody even knows how many there are, but something like 100,000. Maybe 200,000, who knows. And they are waddling northward, gnawing millions of trees as they go. The other story is about this robin-sized bird that migrates from the top of one American continent to the bottom of the other. It is beautiful and changes color twice a year (how did I not know that birds could do that?!) Now they are maybe going extinct because of activities on the Jersey Shore, among other things.

Oh humans. We are such a pain in the ass to everything else on this planet.

Rare shot of Katie not doing her annoying reflexive peace sign. Photo credit: Magdalena

Sometimes I like looking at the map more than I like biking. Photo credit: Magdalena

That time I put the bike tire on backwards at the bus station in Natales. Photo credit: Magdalena

Clouds and sunglasses selfie. Photo credit: Magdalena

Me and Magda and the amazing generous Blanca! This is after she gave usa warm and wonderful place to sleep and mountains of food and a bucketful of booze. Photo credit: Magdalena

Wind monument, because apparently wind is kind of a thing in Patagonia. Photo credit: Magdalena

Magic skull protecting rainbow beanie! Worked like a charm. Photo credit: Magdalena

Ciao! Photo credit: Magdalena

The universe’s pom-poms

March 7, 2014

Sometime after Magda hitched onward yesterday I spent a few kilometers looking for a place to pee – trickier than it sounds in the wide-open pampa. I finally gave up and decided to risk it: There had been no traffic either direction for more than ten minutes, so I squatted behind a power poll that was wholly inadequate at multitasking as a bathroom door, wagering I might be able to get away with the 30 second operation without anybody noticing.

If in the history of humanity, 560 million women have talked themselves into dropping their trousers to pee because no traffic has gone by for more than 10 minutes, resulting in 560 million instances in which a car has immediately then appeared out of nowhere. Yesterday of course was no exception: Four cars passed in those 30 seconds. The first three kindly averted their eyes and pretended not to see me. The fourth was a truck full of police officers, and the carabinero dude in the passenger seat pressed his face against the window and grinned at me superwide, following me with his eyes as they passed. I scowled at him nonstop as he stared at me. Fucker.

I probably would have never thought about this again, relegating it to the file of life’s little indignities, if I hadn’t walked into the police station in Villa Tehuelche this morning to get some tapwater and been faced with that exact same grinning face.

His grin grew wider. My scowl grew narrower.

Magdalena and Artur and I had been sung out of bed early by the yodeling generator. We caught a beautiful sunrise, drinking our coffee as a grey fox idly chased a couple of black-faced ibis across the lawn; beyond that a shepherd and his dogs romanced a flock of lazy sheep down the road. We were actually pedaling by 9 a.m. – my earliest start ever – scared straight by a forecast that the wind would be relatively light until noon and then return to yesterday’s ferocity.

Aided by stroller-breeze and the call of beer, Magda and I covered 105 km in 5.5 hours. The ride was easy and beautiful, and as we approached the Straight of Magellan it spread wide in front of us like an embrace. We rode into town feeling like superheroes. As we approached home the wind finally picked up and a little rain began to fall, but even that felt friendly, like the universe had turned out a cheersquad for us and the breeze was its chant and the raindrops were its pom-poms.

Today: 105 km
Total:795 km

Sunrise.

Magda is ready before anybody else, as always.

a sheep that refused to be romanced. tied at the feet for the shepherd to come back and pick up later with a truck.

We biked straight to the market and got ourselves some beer and some fish.