Arriving in San Rafael!

The last pictures of the bike trip are here!

All of a sudden we are at the end of a lot of kilometers pedaling (click here to see our final statistics). We still are a little bit surprised by it, after three days in the house of Kat's aunt in San Rafael. We have been looking forward to arriving here for a while, but felt like “what now??” when we were finally here.
I guess the end of such a long trip always comes a bit as a shock, a surprise. The sudden change of daily habits, of our travel routine: of buying the daily food supplies in a small village, filling all water bottles an hour before the day's end of cycling; of looking for a camp-spot in the afternoons, setting up the tent, cooking on our little camping stove, crawling in the sleeping bags by 8-9pm; of getting up with sunrise, packing the 6 bags each again, and pedaling pedaling pedaling...; of cleaning bikes, fixing punctures, consulting maps for the next day's planning, reading route descriptions of other bike travelers, calculating distances.

And now... no more of all this for a while: we have a bed, a room, a roof, a house, a shower, a fridge full of good food, a TV, and all the other usual commodities of everyday life. We were warmly welcomed into this – for us – “new” life by Kat's family – her 2 aunts and cousins living here whom Kat herself hadn't seen for 8 long years. So now the bikes sit in the storage room for the moment, waiting for their last big deep-clean. We will get them out again soon and strap them to the car when we begin our road trip south in a few weeks.

We left you off in the last post in Salta, a nice town in northern Argentina where we had rested for a few days. We left in the afternoon, after spending a last couple of hours in a coffee-shop with WiFi on the main plaza to email to friends and family.
Now northern Argentina has a lot of desert, long stretches of flat, sandy and rocky plains full of thorn bushes, with the occasional sand dunes, rock formations and little villages appearing out of the otherwise monotonous scenery. It looks a lot like the southwest US. We got hit with a lot of strong winds, mostly coming straight from up front slowing us down to seemingly crouching speed, making the anyway never-changing landscapes appear even more endless and unforgiving.

It was no wonder we spent the last 2 weeks in the habit of cycling some stretches, hitchhiking for half a day to get a bit further, cycling again a day and a half or so, hitchhiking again a part etc. But there were some highlights on the way worth mentioning: around Cafayate, a small touristic oasis a few days from Salta, astounding rock formations and outcrops in all shades of red-orange-purple-rose appear in the desert, giving rise to a spectacular scenery of martian beauty. A bit further south the many vineyards in the dry warm valleys with the backdrop of the mighty Andes behind were a pleasure to cycle through. Another highlight was Kat throwing up after going crazy and eating a few platefuls of meat at one of the famous Argentine grill restaurants, eating meat for the first time in years! (But it tasted so good!)

And finally Mendoza, which we reached in a 600km overnight bus ride when we had enough of monotonous deserts once more, was a very pleasant town to celebrate our near-arrival at the end with lots of local red wine (80% of Argentina's wine is produced in this region), good food, a jazzy concert in the chic Teatro Independencia and long strolls through its parks, plazas and gardens.

Kat's mom spent most of her childhood here, she emailed a small list of places we needed to visit – the parks, the hills she used to run up with her sister, the old neighborhood where we chatted with the elderly shop owner on the corner who still fondly remembers the Gabrielidis family, telling us of things distant relatives used to do. It was an extremely interesting and happy time for Kat to learn more about where her mother grew up and imagine what it must have been like for her 50 years ago. We also were able to surprisingly meet up with 8 other cyclists, who by some strange coincidence were all in Mendoza at the same time, 7 of whom we had meet and cycled with before in Chile, Bolivia, Peru and even Mexico so long ago! It was a nice reunion, we went out for wine and pizza, discussed routes and cycling experiences since our last rides together, and future plans. For the moment, it appears we are the only ones getting off the bikes: some go to New Zealand or Asia, some continue south towards Ushuaia. Maybe we'll see some again someday in Europe... who knows, the cyclo-touring world isn't too big!

We were ready to leave Mendoza after a few days – it seems like now we have a habit of quick, intense visits, we'll have to wait and see how we handle this new pause! – but not quite so ready to finish our bike trip that abruptly, having another 10 days anyway until Kat's mom would arrive. So we decided to make a small side trip on the final stretch south to San Rafael: to have a last big mountain pass on a dirt road, see the snow of the Andes once more on bikes, and maybe even get a glimpse of the highest peak of the Americas, Mt. Aconcagua on the Argentine-Chilean border.

Instead of south we headed off north to the town of Villavicencio, once more going for 50km through the well-known thorn bush desert. From there we cut across a range of the pre-Andes, climbing a last time on a dirt road from 1700 to 3200m (5,100ft to 9,600ft) altitude in 27kms (~18 miles). We camped half way up the endless switchbacks in a loop of the road, the only spot for many km/miles with a few trees and a flat spot – and great views. It was a windy night, and the next morning turned out even windier still, so that the next ~20kms to the top were quite a hard ride and push against the gusting winds. It took us forever to get to the top and turned out to be one of the slowest average speeds we had all year (26km in 4 hours). Once there we had to eat our lunch sheltered by a small crypt, and riding down on the other side required strong pedaling to get down the hill against the wind – it was nearly impossible to stand still holding the bikes, we got nearly pushed over several times. And of course it was still headwind regardless of all the twists and turns in the road (Murphy's law for cyclists)!

Finally we made it down into a huge broad desert valley, the snow-covered peaks of the central Andes in view, to the small town of Uspallata, passing through the region where the movie “Seven Years In Tibet” was filmed (so, it was not filmed in Tibet … we wonder now how many other movies we may have seen thinking it shows the landscapes of this or that place the movie is about, while it actually was filmed on some other continent ... do movies make us stupid and ignorant in this way too??).

In Uspallata we splurged for a rather upper-class hotel with WiFi, towels, shampoo and conditioner in the showers, and an all-you-can-eat (and we can eat a lot..) breakfast buffet. So we started off rather late due to the buffet, heading finally south towards San Rafael – but had to stop cycling after 10km. The winds were even stronger than yesterday, and it was just impossible to keep riding. We got blown off the road onto the side a few times just by the wind, and again each time a semi truck passed. It was nearly impossible to stay on the bike and road. Yesterday we were on a lonely dirt road which was bad enough but today we were on the major highway in between Chile and Argentina, and quickly realized how dangerous the trucks could be if we tried to continue. So we reluctantly caught a ride with a friendly baker. We were really disappointed; it was a shame we had to stop because of this wind – we were going through a gorgeous canyon in the car, wishing we could have pedaled all the way in these last biking days.
But 80km further the winds subsided finally, so we could get out of the car and continued south on our own power. We made it all the way to a small village called Paraditos, with a now light back wind we were going fast and reaching our best average ever, doing over 100km (>60miles) in just under 4 hours. It was our last night of camping, our last night of a long trip, a last night with the bikes attached to a tree next to the tent in a public garden full of barbecues and little tables.... the end. sniff, sniff...

A few more hours of pedaling against winds through thorn bush deserts brought us the next day quickly to San Rafael, to the house of Aunt Neni. Showers, a few washing machine loads of dirty clothes and a lot of relaxing being fed home-made gnocchi and pasta while catching up on family goings-on with Neni, Aunt Silvia, cousins Tuti and Gregorio, meeting new cousin-niece Renata. And here we are, impatient for Kat's mom to arrive in 2 days. We aren't totally sure when we will begin our trip south, we're taking it day by day and will try not to get sucked back into the luxuries of bed, couch, and kitchen!