‘well i’ve never turned left while leaning right before ‘ says Ben in his Johan Zarco frenchy accent.
It’s true, and I haven’t either.
We’re riding between the frontiers en route back to Chile, the road is loose gravel and all of us are leaning hard to the right while going more or less straight.
This has me wondering at what point the front will tuck. Geez. Sally is understandably freaking out a bit, but at least the wind is consistent (not gusting much), and the road is not terrible so it all goes without issue.
We stop after the Chilean frontier in one of many places plastered with overlanders stickers to take refuge from the wind, and empty a fuel bladder into the tanks.
The forecast is for lower wind speed as the day rolls on, so we decide to do the famous loop through the Torres del Paine NP, 175km of mostly gravel road with some of the most breathtaking scenery I’ve witnessed.
Once up in the mountains though it changed into wind like I’ve never experienced before, gusts out of nowhere, whirly winds taking dust up into the sky with such force you felt they’d take you up too.
At one point I’m following Sally and one of them passes close to her, holy shitballs, I wonder how that would feel if it went through you…
Shortly after that we found out.
I hear a “woooohhhh ahhhhhhhh” through the intercom as I crest a hill and see Sally riding slowly ahead of me.
“oh my god oh my god I need to stop I need to stop” she sounds manic, I’m confused as I didn’t see anything happening and she was still upright on the bike!?
I find somewhere to park and run over to her, grab the bike as she dismounts.
“what’s going on, what happened?”
“I don’t know I don’t know I hit the barrier oh my god”
It’s not making sense yet, but eventually I get it. The wind was coming from the right pretty hard so you lean right to counter it, but in an instant it switched and blew TO the right, and so already leaning that way it shot Sal into the Armco barrier. The crash bars and her MX boots took the hit and she wobbled to a stop, in more than a bit of shock.
I saw the scrape on Sally’s right boot and put it all together. Lucky there was a barrier, there was a steep drop maybe 30m into a freezing lake otherwise.
‘yeah you would have got wet’ says Ben dryly.
Sally is a bit too freaked out to see any positives just yet.
Are you hurt? No I’m fine. Nothing at all? No she says, just as surprised as me.
Bet you’re glad you bought those boots!
