September 2: Week 9 wrapup
I've changed the route quite a bit: I'm planning a long section through Chile.
The route I posted originally was the default route from Ushuaia to Lima, with some tweaks to the start and end because they’re tricky areas, with only a few towns. The problem was when I went back and started looking at the middle part. It's a straight line up through Argentina, and it turned out that instead of being a nice simple flat run with regular towns, it was going to be a lot of long and careful steps from small town to small town. Also tricky.
Fortunately, there's two amazingly awesome options which I totally didn't know about until I went Googling: Ruta 40 and Carretera Austral.
Ruta 40 is a 5200km road running almost the full length of Argentina. It starts at the southeast corner of the mainland, but immediately zips west over to the Andes and skirts them all the way up to border with Bolivia in the far north. The road is mostly asphalt, with some loooong gravel sections. It's got a reputation for epic vistas, lots of gravel ... and few people. Not a lot of towns, but a bit of an improvement over the original route. And the views are definitely better.
The Carretera Austral isn't exactly an alternative but it’s got a reputation as one of the most spectacular scenic routes in the world so it's on. It runs vaguely parallel to the Ruta 40, through Chile for 1500km on the other side of the Andes. So the plan is 1) get on the Carretera Austral as soon as possible, 2) take it as far as possible, 3) when that plan stops working swap back to Ruta 40, which is probably a bit north of Santiago, where Chile turns into a desert.
The new route!
The southern end of the road is in a town called Villa O'Higgins. (On the map it’s slightly above the “g” of the Patagonian Ice Field.) The usual way to get there is by ferry, but that doesn't run until November, when the summer season starts. There's a few other options to get there, like a light plane service and a dubious back-country track, but it's all a bit unreliable in spring. Even in summer the ferry only runs in good weather, and I've seen stories about people stranded there for over a week waiting for the weather to clear. I don’t have any spare weeks.
So the safe option is to join the road a bit further north. That will mean a few days of riding, because there’s only a few roads over the Andes and since it’s a border there’s guards and paperwork and delays. Sounds like I should have my bike serial number printed out, plus some other papers; it's decidedly medieval in comparison with the EU where I only stopped for selfies.
It also sounds faintly corrupt. I’ve read about people being stranded at the border because their car wasn't registered in the right country - a reason that isn't mentioned in the statute, and things only got resolved when they brought out the actual text of the law. Which is a deeply understated description: for the situation to risen to that level there must have been an ugly little altercation. Presumably a border guard blocked their crossing, dealing a serious blow to their travel plans ... leaving the nameless traveller so fired up they went digging through Argentinian immigration legislation to find the relevant passage. Going back with that is like bringing out a knife, it escalates things dangerously. But the border crew have all the power and can definitely take it further than you: it's likely they knew the law too, and denied the crossing just to set things up for a bribe. So bringing out the legislation is a high-stakes gamble, if the guards are motivated they might find you're actually breaking the law somehow, and having that immigration legislation isn't going to matter any more...
Things like this probably won't happen to me, because I'm travelling on a visibly old bike and smell like a hobo. So I probably don't look ripe for a shakedown. Nevertheless, I'd prefer to cross the border somewhere where getting denied won't leave me stranded ...
There's a few options. But there's a tradeoff: it looks like the southern crossings lead into an area where all the accommodation is extortionately expensive. Google Maps shows a scattering of options, but when you click through to the website there's photos good enough to be magazine covers, immaculate typography, prices that only appear if you try to book - and are then revealed to be upwards of US$1000 per night.
So I'm going to have to cross the border and join the Carretera Austral even further north at Ingeniero Pallavecini. It looks spectacular: high mountains everywhere. That does mean equally spectacular climbs but I'm here for it. And from there on things are a bit simpler; there's regular towns and reasonable prices - and the climate should steadily improve all the way to Santiago. There's a couple of ferries, there's a town with a reputation for dessert. And at least two volcanoes.
So definitely an improvement over the previous route. Looking forward to it!
There was also a 5hr training ride in the weekend, I only took one photo and this is it.
