Punta Arenas and on....

The hostel is totally empty (just me) and I can tell that the guy wants me to leave. Everyone probably normally leaves on the early bus, but I´ve put a spanner in those works by travelling independently and having a lie in. My bike is unwilling to start after 7 days in the garden, but it does, just. The weather on leaving Puerto Natales is sublime ! Sunshine and zero wind, probably the best of the whole trip. Puerto Natales is beautiful, wild and remote, now I can actually see the mountains properly.

It´s 250km to Punta Arenas, mostly more barren pampas. The last 50km and the weather breaks and it starts to rain, but there is not much wind, which is lucky, Punta Arenas is famous for it´s wind, 140kmh is not uncommon in Springtime.  I find a cheap and homely hostel right in town, bike parking at the back, run by a very friendly guy (Backpackers Paradise). There is an English girl staying and I am fortunate to receive a properly cooked Carbonara for dinner ! cool ! Punta Arenas is a working town, not really a tourist town, it´s fairly scruffy, but interesting never the less.

I ride South down the coast (of the Straights of Magellan) the next day, looking for shipwrecks, and find a few, but it´s gets very cold and I have to turn around and go back. I´m surprised to find people living in tin shacks on the coast, there seem to be some very poor people in Chile.

The guy who runs the hostel announces that he wants to do the "W" trek, rather surprisingly. So he is planning to leave me alone in the hostel the next day. This is an attractive prospect, to get to live in a largish house, completely to myself, for a few days !  He shows me how to work the boiler and heaters, great !! Unfortunately the hostel owner completely vetoes this idea, so I get turfed out the early the next morning. I find another hostel round the corner, but it´s horrible, no heating, no blankets !! This makes my mind up for me, I will leave Punta Arenas and head to Tierra del Fuego soonest.

There is only one ferry a day, it leaves at 9am and crosses the straights to Porvenir, taking 2 and a half hours. It´s often rough, but today it´s very flat. Arriving in Porvenir, it really does start to feel like the "end of the road". It´s a very rural place with the buildings you always tend to see in high latitude places. I should have stayed longer but I wanted to get away in reasonable time. I´ll be camping tonight so I wanted a decent lunch, I headed for a cafe and order something quick, cheeseburger and chips (my first burger since January) an hour later I receive an enormous T-bone sized steak and chips, hmmmm, something got lost in translation..... still, it was very good...  When I asked for directions later, they still did not understand me at all, no matter how I put it, must have a regional accent here...(or island folk....).

There is a long stretch of unavoidable ripio at this point, no matter how you do it, Tierra del Fuego is not completely paved. It´s 150km of ripio all the way to the Argentine border at San Sebastian, a long stretch. It´s a beautiful ride, good weather and snow covered mountains in all directions, it runs alongside "Inutil bay" (useless bay !) so called by the crew of the Beagle, cos they could not land there. I stop and talk to 2 American cyclists coming the other way (if you´ve both seen no-one for hours, this tends to happen). All their stuff is new and shiney, they are 3 days out of Ushuaia heading for Columbia ! How strange, I´m nearly finished, they´ve got it all to come....

The last 30km of ripio is fairly rough, it´s late evening by the time I get to the border, the town of San Sebastian turns out to be one coffee shop, so camping it has to be (no energy left to cross the border). I once again pull off the road to one side, where the fence is wide, and camp. Truck drivers hoot until they can no longer see me, this is now way past 10pm ! I hope the wind stays down, there is no shelter in this place.

In the morning I cross the border. The Chile side was fine, but on this border the Argentinian side was rude, truculent and very slow. I was asking a question, in Spanish, the guy suddenly shouts at me "Speak in Spanish !", and I was ! I know my accent is poor but he just was not listening at all, Totally Insulted !! Then he gets up and makes himself a Mate and ignores me for a full 10 minutes, with my passport perched on his keyboard.

Thankfully the road is now apshalto, all the way, 100km to Rio Grande. I ride into a "wall" of seafog at one point, coming from the east, it gets very cold for a while. I was going to stop in Rio Grande but after a horrible coffee in a grotty YPF station I decide to push on, as the weather is good.  It´s another scenic 100km to Tolhuin, a lakeside town that looks as if it was built the week before ! It´s a beautiful evening and I´m very tempted to push on the remaining 105km to Ushuaia and complete this trip, but I´d be getting in, in the late dusk, so stay.

I´m the only one in a very rustic lakeside campsite. There is a metal water cylinder over a wood burner outside the baños, the guy says, light the fire and you´ll get hot water in one hour ! There seems to be unlimited wood !  So I do, and there is !! lots of it, I have a good long shower. There is a large common area with a huge wood burner and the same applies. On the walls people have left messages. It turns out that nearly all the (mainly) cyclist´s blogs I´ve been reading for information, over the past 2 months, have passed right through this very place and left a message. My perfect campsite !!