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| outside our hotel room |
OK – enough of the ripio
already!! As we left the estancia for El
Chalten this morning, I thought of the ripio as my friend. 150 km later, I’m cursing it. The majority of it was quite ho-hum with
occasional sightings of cattle, horses, and as we get further south, the ever
present guanaco. (kind of like a
llama) The gravel road wasn’t really
much of a problem, but as they continue to pave these roads, they make detours
off to the side. These detours are made
of sand, gravel, mud, sticks – and boulders.
The big rocks are packed down really well, but they stick up to the
point of making motorcycle travel more like motocross travel. It would have been fun had it not been for
the detours – of which there were plenty.
We all continue to have fun stopping and taking pictures of each other
as we go zooming by, but my back is screaming “no mas”, and I’m glad that we
have a day off tomorrow, and the next destination is all paved highway.
As we headed into El Chalten
on Ruta 40 & 23, the ever present Patagonian winds seemed to double their
effort. I’ve been in winds before, but
it was usually gusts from one side and then the other. This was continual winds in what most of us
guessed to be in the 40mph range for the better part of 150km. I’ve never had to lean into a wind to keep
going straight for such a long period of time.
I tried getting video of it with my helmet cam while Bjorn was riding
ahead of me, but you have to be really close to anything to pick up details, so
it just looks like a guy on a bike going down the road. It’s a good thing the roads were dry. If we had a big rain storm, I would have been
scared to death to try and negotiate these roads. As I sit typing this, we are having almost
blizzard conditions! And when you have
snow with this kind of wind – well, I’m just glad we have tomorrow off. The closer we got to town, the bigger the
Fitzroy mountain range became. This is a
photographers dream, and if the snow ever goes away, I hope to capture some of
it. We hope to take a short hike up to
the mountains tomorrow, or maybe the Patagonian ice fields that rest behind
them. I hope the helmet cam videos show
better on a TV. While I’m sure a montage
of clips will be satisfying, none of it is what I would call spectacular. I am however; very pleased with most of the
thousands of pictures Weez and I have taken.
More tomorrow – maybe.
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