Back from Tierra del Fuego

It is time to find my way home.

The riding trip ended yesterday, the 12th, with most of the riders departing for the Punta Arenas airport right after dinner. A change of flight arrival by LANChile (alas, a common problem with them) resulted in the worn-out travelers having to take a 1 am flight this morning for 4 am arrival up in Santiago. That is nothing short of punishment.

Those travelers will talk about all of this someday. There were many times during the trip that we wiped the grit and sweat from our faces and asked ourselves about the Nature of Adventure. I repeated a sentiment I had seen in several sources, including a line from the book by David "Flash" Braun, that adventure is discomfort recounted at leisure. Or perhaps we should also consider the Tim Cahill attributed version:

"An adventure is never an adventure while it's happening. Challenging experiences need time to ferment, and adventure is simply physical and emotional discomfort recollected in tranquility."

In time I will have the chance to think about the trip as an adventure rather than as merely a completed and sometimes stressful and hazardous task. The fotos on the blog don't tell the story adequately. You can't film the terror that sometimes runs through your helmet. You can't take fotos of the almost-crashes, the times the 100km/hr wind nearly launched you from the ball-bearing gravel road into a boulder-filled ditch. You cannot take fotos of the oncoming bus rounding a sharp curve that touches your handlebars as you move to the extreme edge available for your own lane. You cannot take fotos of the car in Bariloche that suddenly darts into traffic in front of you at right angles, and the near-collision that is avoided by mere inches, when your heart momentarily freezes and the core of your body turns cold but only for an instant because you have to keep moving. You cannot record except in blurry mental impressions the hundreds of times each riding day when you probably should have come to grief but didn't.

Some of us - the guides, anyway - have observed that, unlike in years past, these back roads are now full of other riders. Well, maybe not full, but these rides are not the near-solitary adventure or whatever that they used to be. But every generation says that. Hardly a day passed when we didn't come across a dozen or more other bike riders doing trips more challenging than our own. And perhaps an equal number of long-haul bicyclists, all loaded with panniers and whatnot.

But there are lesser-known roads and some being pushed into previously untrammeled areas, and some of us will explore those places and offer special tours, and do our best to ensure that there will always be, well, adventure.

But those on the recently completed ride, we won't forget the accidents and the injuries, the broken parts and the roadside repairs. We won't forget seeing broken bikes and out-of-action riders in the support truck. Some of us won't soon be forgetting how we would like to improve the quality of the adventure.

But I suppose that when compared to the luxury trip to the beach resort, or the habits of the couch potato and their sedentary sloth brethren, that a 3500 km road ride is worthy of recounting later, at leisure.

For now I will stay another day in Punta Arenas and sort out my gear, and pore over the notes covering my many non-fatal errors. I will return the helmet-radio parts and the tank bag, and get the rest of the insidious sand and desert dust out of my eyes. A haircut is not a bad idea, either. And some new laces for the boots while I am in the real city. Then I will take the bus to Natales, and home, to Home Sweet Patagonia. The next tour starts 3 March. The road, it seems, goes ever on.

Out to Harberton

On the way back north from Ushuaia we stopped at estancia Harberton so that the tour guests could visit a penguin rookery at a nearby island. It started to rain on the way back to Ruta 3 and stayed rainy until near Río Grande, where we are staying tonight.

End of the road. Or Ruta 3 anyway

We reached Ushuaia yesterday evening. A decent meal and a good sleep, with a breakfast delayed until 9. Then an easy ride on a cool morning with just a bit of light sprinkling rain, to the Lapataia national park. There is a sign at the end of the road that says it is then end of Argentine national Ruta 3 but most people treat the little turnaround as the end of the road for the hemisphere.

Calafate to Cerro Castillo section

Osorno to Ushuaia

It is about time that I put up a few words about this ride, from Osorno to Ushuaia and then to conclude in Punta Arenas. This is the first time I have guided a Patagonia motorcycle tour for Motoaventura and quite frankly I have been a bit too busy to write much about it. In fact the days since the beginning of this ride on 29 January have become something of a blur. Perhaps in the next few weeks I might have time to better organize this entry and put up some decent fotos and a coherent story, but for the time being I will upload some fotos and let them stand on their own.

Uppermost fotos are most recent; the lower on this entry, the earlier in the ride.