Esperanza to El Calafate (hitch hiked) and El Calafate to El Chalten (biked)

Phew. Made it.  Mountains getting closer every day for five.  And now we are here, with cliffs and glaciers surrounding us.  Winds ricocheting off the building.  A relief to be inside.  No tent fly flapping.  No bike to hold steady.  When I laid down for a nap everything in me still wobbled as if I were still riding into those winds.  Wobbled with the effort of leaning into the side wind so as not to get swiped to the other side of the road again.  Wobbled with the effort of keeping the bike moving against headwind gusts nearly halting the bike. 

“Oh good god!”  Say that enough every day between the burrs in our socks or the plants poking us with their spines or the wind or the wind or the wind.  I knew about these winds.  Read people’s accounts of them.  Watched the funny YouTube videos.  And the winds were funny the first day we hit them, riding out of Tolhuin.  “Kinda fun!” I wrote. 

Now?  Now they are humbling in an extreme sort of way.  I don’t know how to explain the fatigue.  Period to be here any day so my emotions are already amplified, but every cell of my body, mind, heart feels wobbled, wobbly.  Stripped bare. 

Nothing to pretend. 

This is exhausting. 

And yet, I can’t think of anything else I’d rather be doing.  Though in some moments I sure wish I could. 

We cry most everyday and laugh a lot too.  One night the wind was so strong it repeatedly blew sand and grit up under the fly and into the tent.  We flipped our sleeping bags around so our faces weren’t the first to be hit and made a sort of “grit catch” with my sleeping bag liner hung up across the inside of the-now-foot-end of the tent.  One river swim (phew), quiet roads, and I’ve started drinking the occasional coffee. Haven’t practiced Spanish much since it’s been five days of just me and Be and pedaling and pokey grasses and lifting our bikes over paddock fences in search of any wind blockade.  

So close to the Carretera Austral now.  Most of the cyclists we’ve talked to, heading south, say the winds aren’t such a thing up there.  Maybe that means things on this trip are about to get a little easier.  10% even, that’d help.  I’d take 10% easier.  

There are more tourists than I expected down here, down here at the southern edge of Patagonia.  And not the friendly, comradery type of tourists like I found in New Zealand.  More like, everyone’s in it for themselves or something.  

Some of my favourite things right now —  Besides this splurge of a place to stay and rest for the next two nights?

• The soft, pale green plants with little yellow flowers and ZERO pokey, spiney parts. 
• Andean Condors and the yet to be identified little brown birds that flit around our paddock camps each night. 
• Fences without barbed wire.  
• The mix of my laughter with Be’s and thank goodness she is such a funny and fun travel companion. 

(Love, Kelsey)