chasingsummerp.033
Chasing Summer p.033
Report initially published in the Adventure Rider web site. For more interaction and comments check it out here
March 30th - Chile Chico to El Calafate
I highly recommend checking the interactive maps links provided by Christian (the ones above the maps). With the beautiful satellite images from Google I would have known right away what was expecting us that day...
The red line is yesterday's track while the white vertical one represents the border that we're crossing this morning. It's very visible that the Andes are entirely in the Chilean side as well as all the forests. Rarely crossing a border meant such a dramatic change in the terrain! At least the administrative part of the crossing is not as dramatic, just the usual 30 minutes to be done with it.
Oh, I forgot: we departed from Andy again this morning since he was not feeling well (bad cold) and needed a bit of rest time. Farewell my friend
We're still following the shore of the Lake Carrera General but it looks completely different and not very scenic on this side. Weird.
The road is very good and we rapidly arrive in the town of Perito Moreno, some 60 km further east. Not much in town but a nice surprise: gas is twice cheaper than in Chile! Perito Moreno marks also our arrival on the legendary Ruta 40 that runs for 5,000 km along the Andes through 20 National Parks.
In that section however the road is not exciting. We are at sea level and the terrain is flat and the road paved. There is mostly... nothing
. It’s not a ‘real’ desert (there are some small plants) but it feels like it. We do a couple hundred km without seeing much, just the estancia Telken. Those estancias (ranch) are often small (the housing part) but since there are the only 'things' there, their names figure on the rather empty road maps.
To tell you the truth we're a bit disappointed by the scenery but with the altitude slowly rising to 700 m it becomes better. Plus it's a beautiful day again, the pace is great and it's all good. After a couple of hours the road becomes dirt and I finally see some photo opportunities!
As you can see, this is not a lazy pace and as soon as I stop a short moment for pics, my friends are already far away
Another interesting rock formation. We're pretty close at that point to the 'Cueva de la manos' (hand's cave) a Unesco WH for this site with paintings executed between 13,000 and 9,500 years ago. We don't take the time to stop... maybe next time!
Like in Alaska, things seem bigger here, including the sky...
The Andes are still very far away but we're starting seeing a bit of them now...
Although still mostly straight and flat the road becomes challenging at times. Two reasons for that:
- In some sections the gravel is much deeper and the size of the stones in it bigger too. I don't know if it's Teryk or Dirk who coined the term ' Bowling alleys' to describe the road but it fits very well! The smooth alleys (4 of them) are made by car tires who pushed the gravel away down to a hard pack dirt. In between, gravel berms, sometimes 5-7 inches high.
- So as long as you ride in the alleys, it works fine but there is the wind. Depending on the road orientation or the terrain it blows sometimes really strongly and laterally and it becomes really difficult to stay in the narrow smooth alley. So you end up leaning against the wind, which of course is not constant, and be pushed on the deep gravel berms where the front wheel plows and the whole bike swerves like crazy
.
I took this picture right after the most challenging section
I'm not sure anymore what the fist means but I'll interpret it now as 'we had to fight hard'
. Teryk was happy that he had just changed his tires for new knobbies yesterday. I had not anticipated that terrain and unfortunately didn't change my rear... I will do it tonight! At least I have a steering damper and the 950 is very stable which helps a lot in conditions like that. It just too bad that my 3 tires in the back increase the 'sail effect'.
The rule in Patagonia is to gas up at every opportunity so we stop for gas at the very small pueblo of Bajo Caracoles. The guy starts filling my tank but after a gallon or so it stops. I'm sure that it's only a small issue with the lever or the pump or something but no, the guy tells me that he's out of gas
. Neither really surprised or apologetic, it's just the way it is... Damn!
We check the options with him and there are not many, especially with the small tank of the 650 BMW: we have to do a detour to hit the town of Gobernador Gregores. It's not a huge detour and we should be able to get something to eat there.
One of the reasons I was excited to do the Ruta 40 in this trip is that it's going to disappear, at least as the legendary longest dirt road: the Argentinian government promised that it will be entirely paved in the next couple of years. Yes, it's time that you get on your bikes and ride the world before it's entirely paved
.
But, much to my surprise I end up being happy when seeing one of those short stretches of pavement in a middle of nowhere. Flat and straight gravel roads is not my idea of a fun road and there is too much on that on this part of the Ruta 40. It feels almost surreal: in those paved sections it feels like a freeway on the moon with 2 paved lanes in the middle and a two-lanes dirt road on each side of it. Better not get distracted though as the road work signalization is not great at all and you can end up on this very quickly!
Hey, what's going on here?
We see several times those Guanacos or Vicuñas. Probably the former since the Vicuñas are endangered, because too hunted for their furs of great finesse. In any case they are really beautiful animals in the wild!
We also see several rheas, birds from the ostrich family but a bit smaller (adult rheas are about 5 ft tall and weigh 60 to 100 pounds). They ran too fast however for me to be able to snap a picture.
We stop at Gobernador Gregores around 3:30 pm and gas up. It's however impossible to find an open restaurant at this hour and we end up at the only small shop open eating the worst wrapped ham & cheese sandwiches we ever had in our entire life.
The road to leave Gobernador Gregores is nice though; a smaller dirt road with turns that we really enjoy after the Ruta 40.
The huge sky has become the main attraction for the eyes...
It's strange to see a huge lake (this is the Lago Cardiel) in the middle of this desert but it's of course fed not by local rains but by the snow melting on the Andes.
We stop a moment to look at horses...
Yes, were really happy, this is a good day, with a good group at a good pace in the immensity of Patagonia...
April 1st - El Calafate - Glacier Perito Moreno
El Calafate is a town at the base of cliffs on the south shore of beautiful Lago Argentino, one of Argentina's largest lakes. The town has grown a lot those past years counting more than 8,000 h now. The reason of this success is that it's the gateway to many spectacular sites, especially the Parque Nacional los Glaciares and the Glaciar Perito Moreno. The price to pay for that expansion is that the town looks very touristy (even if we are at the very end of the season) and very pricey too. The crowd is a mix of 'outdoorsy' gringos and classy tourists from Buenos Aires.
And there is chocolate everywhere! I lost count of how many shops but for what ever reason it's made locally.
But our goal for the day is not to stuff ourselves on chocolate but to visit the Glacier, about 80 km West of the town. The first sight we have of the glacier is already stunning, even if it's difficult to comprehend the scale
Getting closer we start to realize how tall those 'ice cliff' are
The boats taking the tourists closer to the glacier help us to visualize that the glacier is about 50-55 m high (160-180 ft)!
But the color is also what makes it so beautiful. The color on the pictures are real, not emphasized in any way. If you look for the reason, here it is: "This is because of how the sunlight passes through the ice and what happens to the sunlight. The light is really made up of all the colors of the rainbow. Each of the sun's colors have different amounts of energy in them. When the sunlight tries to go through the solid glacier ice crystals the sun gets broken up into lots of colors. Red and yellow have very little energy and the thick ice soaks up the red light more than it soaks up the blue light. The blue light has enough extra energy to get away from the solid ice crystals without getting absorbed or soaked up. The blue light has enough energy to escape the ice so that you can see it and that is why glacial ice is often a deep blue color."
This glacier is one of the only ones still progressing and that movement creates an enormous number of crevasses, with sounds like thunder that are really impressive.
You can also see sometimes huge icebergs collapsing in the water! We were lucky to see one piece falling and even if the block was only a third of the height, the sound and the wave were spectacular. The picture came a tad too late though...
While waiting the next departure for the boat visit we walk on the several km of walkways that took us so close to the glacier that we didn't feel like taking the boat after all.
We had a hard time leaving the place though since it was so extraordinary, from the immensity of it...
... to the infinite richness of the details.
In just a few days we've seen the most fantastic lake and glacier we've ever seen!
The Adventure’s Gods
Oh I forgot to mention a ‘detail’ so let me backtrack a little, to March 30st...
We are on the Ruta 40 a bit before 6 PM, at 40km from Tres Lagos, our planned destination for the evening. As you read on my post for that day we were in great spirit and the day had been great so far.
I had pick up speed a little to pass a car who nicely stepped to the ‘bad lane’, the one without ‘bowling alleys’ to let me pass. In such a case you don’t want to dust (or throw gravel at) the car for too long.
After a turn (one of the very few) the road is straight again with a slight downhill. I’m still in the ‘good lane’ (the left one) but I notice that the alleys are not that clean anymore in the distance so I slow down a bit. Seconds later, my front wheel starts to get on the gravel berm on the left. Hardly the first time on this Ruta 40 so I just increase my focus, keeping the pressure on the handlebars light but the bike doesn’t ‘stabilize’ this time: the rear continues to be sideway (on the right side) and I can’t stop the violent swerving.
Suddenly I’m in the air, high and fast
. It goes so fast that there is no ‘thinking’ involved, no decision to make; it’s pure reflex. I put my left hand to protect my head and initiate a rolling. I land hard on the rear right side of my helmet and on my back. My Camelback helps absorbing the impact even if the tip is ejected out. I roll one more time and end up sliding on my belly and right shoulder to the gravel ditch on the left side of the road. Now if the word ‘sliding’ evokes anything smooth to you it was quite the opposite this time on this pack hard dirt and big stones
.
Damn, it hurts so much! I try to catch my breath, worry about the pain in my belly and the bit of liquid I feel on my face. I see my bike, high on the berm on the other side of the ditch. My first thought is anger against myself: “How could I mess up like that!?!” I already know that my trip is over now. For good
.
While I try to sit down my friends arrive and immediately remove my Camelback and force me to lie down on my back to assess the situation. After a minute of listening to my body I say “I think I’m fine everywhere but for my left arm/wrist that is broken”. They remove my helmet and I’m relieved to know that the liquid was nothing but water from the Camelback and a bit of blood from a cut on the lip. We cannot take the rest of the clothes off since the pain is too sharp but it seems that there is no bleeding/open fracture anyway so I should be fine.
The car that I’ve passed a minute ago arrives too and it’s a couple of young French people. They’re really awesome and immediately propose to take me and all my luggage to the next town. This is a great chance for me and they even offer a couple of strong pain killer. Despite the pain, I wanted to take a picture of the scene:
The next ‘town’, Tres Lagos is only one street and a few houses but they have a medical dispensary. It’s closed but there is the name of the person in passive guard. The village is quite desert but we finally found someone who tell us which house the nurse lives. At the dispensary she confirms the wrist fracture with large displacement
. What are the odds? Only one fracture in 25 years of riding and then 2 in just a few weeks! Me think the Adventure's Gods didn't want me to see the 'end of the world' just yet...
She cuts my glove and clothes and immobilizes my wrist with some bandage and then an inflatable sleeve. She hurts me like crazy trying to immobilize the fracture but she at least gives a very good news: they have an ambulance here that will take me to the Hospital at El Calafate.
The 3 hours (about half of it on a dirt road) to get there were probably the most painful of my life. But all things considered I felt lucky to be in an ambulance and that there was an hospital in El Calafate a town of not even 10,0000. I'm pretty sure that the next hospital is hundred miles further. But my biggest chance was to have a very good trauma surgeon taking care of me. When he saw the radio his prognosis was that the fracture was really, really bad and that I would probably never recover totally my wrist. He spend a good amount of time with me explaining what was broken, and in my half-delirium what I saw looked like a puzzle with pieces of bones quite away from where they should be
The scaphoid and (I think) the Ulna were broken as well as several ligaments. He didn't do a surgery since I preferred having one in the US but he took me to the block for a general anesthesia and a reduction of the fracture. From several specialists who have seen the radios he has done an excellent job and one clear sign for me was that the pain was decreased by a factor 10
.
I stayed in the hospital 24 hours in observation and the good news is that besides my broken wrist and some hematoma the rest of my body was fine. They took radios of the vertebra and all but it looks like the 'sacrifice' of my wrist saved my neck of, if I judge by my helmet' what could have been a very serious injury.
Teryk and Dirk came to visit after spending the night at Tres Lagos. They went on the morning to pick up the bike with the sheriff and it's now secured at the police station.
It felt so nice since the accident to have them 'in charge' of everything logistic wise. They were also awesome for comforting me
. It made a big difference compared to my first injury. They also helped me understand the question I kept asking myself "What the heck happened?!?" Besides beating myself for 'enjoying the ride' instead of focusing on 'finishing it', I still couldn't pinpoint a specific mistake I would have made.
I mean, I'm not a novice rider and the road was straight and relatively flat. We were not going slow but neither too fast for such circumstances. Just our regular pace. Based on their observations, here why I think the accident happened:
- They found the front tire to be flat. I had no idea, but there is little chance that it happened during the crash so it must have happened just before it. That same day I stopped a couple of times to check my front tire that felt flat on that strange gravel, bit it was fine. This time it must have been the reverse, or a very big puncture. That would not be surprising since Dirk alone got 6 or 7 punctures on the week it took him to get to Ushuaia!
- Of course a front flat tire will 'plow' in the gravel while the rear, rolling more freely, will want to go ahead of the front.
- Dirk and Teryk spent time looking at my tire tracks right after I was gone in the Jeep. They explained that, looking under the gravel they found that what was usually a flat 'bowling alley' was here a rut (probably created by a truck at the wet season) with square 'walls' a few inches high and as hard as concrete. So, when the rear tire skidded it touched at some point the 2 walls on each side of the rut which blocked the wheel and created a high side. That rut existed only for a mile or two and was impossible to see under the gravel, while riding.
Anyway, no matter how it happened, it did happen and that sucks. However that was 3 weeks ago now so I'm over it. No need for 'comforting' messages from you, I've already re-read the ones from after my first injury
.
Oh, BTW, those pictures from the glacier are indeed part of the RR even though I was riding bitch at the time on Dirk's bike the day after leaving the hospital.
I'll visit Ushuaia some day but for now I will be looking for a job. A million thanks to the ones who tagged along with me for so long, offering me such great comments and 'company'
