The weather at El Chalten eventually broke, so we went for a bit of a walk on one of the trailheads that isn’t controlled for tickets (avoiding the $70 hiking fee!), nice walk but it was still foggy up higher so we just did part of it and spared my knee the full descent.
From there we were unsure of how to get out of dodge and further north out of the wind.
There was a 4 hour period very early in the day, 2 days out, where there might not be wind on the famous ’73 malditos’ route (google it), or alternatively there’s another road, twice as long that avoids the malditos but is still gravel and totally unknown.
We decided to do a short day (140km) out of El Chalten and stay in a tiny town on the Ruta 40 called Tres Lagos, (that’s right at the start of the Malditos), so we arrived pretty early and set about some intense Tacna time for the rest of the day.
There was a Hilux with a couple of bikes on the back passing thru town and we got taking to them about the road options, turns out the couple run bike tours and were going to do the alternate longer route that day just to see how it was for future clients to use. Great! We swapped phone numbers and waited to hear back from them with a road report.
Our window with low wind was from 5am till around 9am, so it was an early night! Sometime during the night my watch buzzed with the message from the Hilux guys…
The pic didn’t look bad at all, but anyway I went back to sleep content with that news. If I had to choose 73km of gravel I’ve already ridden, or 145km that I don’t know, and I have only 4 hours in the next few days to do it, I’d take the 73 every time.
So back the dreaded malditos it was. The wind forecast ended up being a little off so there was more than expected, but we got through ok, breathed a sigh of relief, reinflated our tyres to highway pressure and buckled up for a long day to get up north and hopefully cross the andes back into Chile where the wind is less crazy.
As the day wore on the wind picked up, and aware that by 6pm things would get dicey we barely stopped from 5am till 4pm, eventually arriving at the fuel stop before the border and then pausing a moment to work out what to do next.
Just over the border we had two options, either get on a ferry the next morning (if it wasn’t cancelled due to wind) to a small port in Chile and ride north from there on the best part of the Carreterra Austral, or skip the ferry and ride down the mountain pass to the Carreterra Austral and do half a day in the worst part of it to eventually get to the same good bit.
Sally looked at the ferry booking site to see if there were seats for the next morning available, but surprisingly found seats for an extra ferry that had been scheduled to catch up after all the cancellations due to the wind. Fuck yes.
We had 3 hours to rode 80km, cross the frontier and find the ferry terminal. Hit it.
Lucky for us there was no lineup at the border posts, so we made it with time to spare, and were soon on a boat counting our blessings.
On the boat Sally even managed to get a call out to the Clarks/Dougans for Violetta’s birthday before the Internet dropped out 🙂
As it was to be a lateish arrival we WhatsApp’d a local guest house to book a room, and crashed pretty hard after dinner.
Next day on the carreterra was a stunning mountain ride, with rivers, lakes, snow capped mountains and almost perfect asphalt road for the whole day. Really nice to get to do that part twice, I could have turned around at the end of the day and done it all again!
That brings me to yesterday… Our first day in proper cold dreary rain, wet squelchy boots, wet hands, cold, and happy to eventually arrive at Futalefu, a small town 10km from the Argentinian border again, but maybe 500km north from where we excited Argentina just the day before last.
So why all this criss crossing the border, do we love hanging out in customs lineups? No. We just needed to get north of the wind on the other side of the Andes.
In Futalefu we’ve reunited with BenSnacks for a few days till we head north to Mendoza after Christmas, and he catches up with some other guys to go off-road riding.
Not much more to report, tomorrow we’re going back to the Argentine side but staying close to the Andes where the wind is manageable.
We hope.
xxoo