We said goodbye to our travel buddy Ben Snacks (Pop Pop Pop) last night, and also to Alex from Germany who we’ve bumped into a few times along the road, and with loose plans to reconvene for Christmas, we rode to Porto Natales this morning on our lonesomes again.
It was a tough ride for the first 100km (wind of course), then the road turned west and into the wind and it got a bit less hectic.
I’d woken at 6am, and immediately went for my phone and the now reverred windy app… balls. The wind was up a bit over the forecast, and coming up more as the day wore on.
‘We better get going Sal’
The forecast was for 45kmh winds, gusting to 65, blowing directly across our trajectory. In all honesty I had no idea whether that was a lot, or totally manageable, but it was the lowest it’d been in a while, or would-be for a while.
Turns out that 45 gusting to 65 is quite a lot, somewhere near the limit I’d guess.
With wind from the left pushing us right, and ordinarily riding on the right (this being South America and all) there isn’t far to get pushed before you run out of road and end up in the scrub.
Which would be bad.
Lucky for us it’s Sunday! So the roads were completely deserted, and we did what any normal Australian would do and rode on the left side of the highway instead. Actually on the left side, of the left side!
This gave us two whole lanes to get blown across before leaving the road. Of course there was the odd oncoming car, truck and bus to contend with, but that extra margin for 98% of the ride was a blessing.
It did have me wondering how the conversation might play out with the Carabinieros though…
‘but officer, I’m from Australia, i didn’t know!’
Tomorow we have another window early afternoon until about 10pm to reach El Chalten, that’s 515km with a border crossing thrown in.
The last 320 of which is without any services, and will be all cross wind (less than today though!) so will be battling that and carrying extra fuel too.
It’s going to be a long day.
You know it was a hard day when Sally is asleep at 4pm!