Southwards Bound

We have now reached El Calafate, a small town by the famous Perito Moreno glacier, after a drive of more than 1’500 kilometres south, part of it on gravelled roads. We are really south now, I have never been that south in my life. Summer officially starts tomorrow here, it does not feel like it though. We are freeeezing, days and nights.

Patagonia is a deserted area, swept by gusts of wind, with a few cows and sheep here and there. The scenery is beautiful but vaguely hostile. Towns are 400 kilometres apart, and these are really small towns, a few streets that’s all. It is telling that even isolated houses are shown on the maps…There is very few traffic, a vehicle every ten minutes or so…

And this is where we had another of these irritating mechanical issues. We again broke something in the suspensions. I am starting to believe in guardian angels: it happened just 200 meters from the campsite we were going to, at the entrance of El Esquel. All of a sudden, we heard a horrible hissing sound with some white smoke. I thought we had burst a tyre. We got off the car and saw that the right front wheel was skewed. The vehicle would not move, the back still on the road and in a curve. We waved at an approaching truck who stopped immediately behind us. The driver knew immediately what it was, called a mechanic in town and took me there while Xenia was staying by the camper, still in the middle of the road; we had put our two triangles and some rocks to warn incoming vehicles. The mechanic secured the wheel with a chain and we could move the vehicle to his workshop, at snail pace. He welded the broken part the next day: spare parts are difficult to get in Argentina. We could resume our journey south the next day. I hope the part will hold. It is amazing how easy it was to have this fixed. And fortunately, it did not happen in the middle of nowhere. Do guardian angels exist?

Besides this, our coffee pot is dead for good, cracked by the vibrations on gravelled roads.

Yesterday, we took two young French who have been hitchhiking their way all the way from Mexico. They use the website “Couchsurfing” to find free accommodation or pitch their tent. They have been travelling for one year already and plan to continue over Asia next year. This is a smart way to travel, but not easy every day: we left them at a crossroad in the middle of nowhere with relentless gusts of wind as sole company. I hope they found another vehicle to take them to their destination. 

We meet all kind of people on the road: people travelling on campers like us, or on bike, motorbike, on foot. I reckon it is very courageous to travel on bike or motorbike in this part of the world: the wind is so strong it closes the doors of our camper and constantly pushes it laterally. For some reasons, it never blows from behind, always on the sides. I cannot  (and do not want to) imagine what it must be like on a bike.