Ephemerica

First of all, we finally arrived in Ushuaia yesterday! Woohoo!!! Now for how we got here…

We spent a couple of days in Punta Arenas resting and waiting for Cindy’s bike to be repaired. Punta Arenas has a nice downtown area, with a couple of museums, the best of which was the former mansion of a sheep rancher, which is now open to the public. The museum featured the original furnishings of the house, as well as exhibits on the history of Southern Patagonia. We also visited the famous large cemetery in town, which has everything from small graves (think high-rise projects for dead people) to large mausoleums. Finally, we picked up Cindy’s bike and then early the next day, loaded up the bikes and rode out to the ferry terminal.

We had nice weather for crossing the Strait of Magellan, although by the end of the 2.5 hr ride, we were both wishing that we had taken some anti-seasick meds. Since the boat didn’t arrive until after 12 pm, we decided rather than hit the road right away, we would spend the night in the town of Porvenir. Porvenir is supposed to be a cute, sleepy town—and it is, but on Sundays, it’s a little too sleepy. We couldn’t find much to eat other than a few empanadas, bread and cheese we bought from a panaderia. The next day we headed west toward the Argentine half of Tierra del Fuego. Although we were traveling on ripio, the road was quite good. And of course, we had GREAT tailwinds the whole way. On top of it all, we were spurred on by the knowledge that we only had two more days of riding on ripio, and the rest of the road to Ushuaia was paved. Our first day out of Porvenir, we were treated to beautiful views along the shore of Bahia Inutil (Useless Bay). Luckily, when it came time for us to camp, we found a small empty shelter along the side of the road where we could get some protection from the wind. The next day was a short day, crossing over into Argentina and then staying the night in San Sebastian.

From San Sebastian, we rode to Rio Grande, which is the largest town on the Argentinian part of the island. Although we were no longer traveling directly with the wind, we still had pretty good winds for most of the day. We were lucky enough to have a place to stay in Rio Grande—our Couchsurfing friend Mariana that we met in Costa Rica grew up in Rio Grande, and her father Oscar still lives here. Oscar and his family took us in, and we had a big asado (always a sign that you are back in Argentina). We had lots of interesting conversations, and learned a lot about life here on the island, which revolves mostly around four things: oil, electronics, sheep, and trout. Oscar took us on a tour of the electronics factory where he has worked for the last 20-some years supervising the construction of televisions for the rest of the country. After taking a rest day (and eating very well), we decided it was time to push on.

The next place we planned to stop in was the town of Tolhuin. We started out fighting the wind as we headed west to the point where we crossed the Rio Grande. After that, we continued to have good wind until about 40 km outside of Tolhuin, when it turned in our faces. It was right about there that we really noticed a sudden change in scenery, with flat grassy plains giving way to heavily forested hills. At around noon, we were riding down the road when we heard somebody yell our names from the side of the road. It was our biker friend Hiro, whom we had lost touch with after Puerto Natales. He was staying in an estancia (sheep ranch) near the highway with Luis, a Peruvian biker he had met on the road. We told them the story we had heard about a famous panaderia in Tolhuin, La Union, where the owner would sometimes house traveling cyclists (Veronika and Roger, and the 3 American women had stayed in the bakery), and decided to meet there later in the day. Well, it seemed as though the owner wasn’t around, so we didn’t get the free place to stay. But we did end up renting a cabaña together for the night.

The next day, we all left separately, not sure whether or not we would make it the 110 km to Ushuaia in one or two days. We knew there was a lot of climbing (over 1000 m elevation gain), and that we would be heading west, into the direction of the prevailing winds, so the difficulty factor was a bit unknown. The ride ended up not being as hard as we had thought—the climbs were not particularly long or steep (with the exception of the 10 km up to Garibaldi Pass), and the trees/mountains protected us from the winds most of the day. But the ride was made more exciting by the fact that about an hour into the day, I discovered that the rim of MY back tire had cracked, in the same way that both of Cindy’s had before. I was really hoping that my wheel wouldn’t explode when we decended from the pass at 50 km/hr! Most of the day was overcast and dry, but we nevertheless had beautiful scenery, surrounded by snow-covered mountains and forests turning fall colors, with amazing shades of red, yellow and orange. However, as we got about 20 km outside of Ushuaia, we got caught in the rain one last time. We arrived in town about an hour before sundown, and ran into the first warm hostel we could find

We are going to stay here a few more days, and do some of the touristy things there are to do here, like a boat tour of the Beagle Canal. Our friend Mariana has a cousin that lives in Ushuaia, so we are going to see about spending some time with her while we are here as well. Then we’ll begin the LONG bus ride up to Buenos Aires.

Posted by Matthew on April 20th, 2008 | Filed under: Argentina, Chile