Puerto Natales to El Chaltén - Fighting against the wind...

As we wanted to leave Puerto Natales the 17th of March, we figured that again I had play in my headset... So together with an English cyclist we met in the hostel, we took the whole headset apart to figure out how exactly my system is supposed to work. It took us a long time, but it seems that we finally understood how it's supposed to work and how to fix it, at least it seems to work since then! ;-) When we finally left Puerto Natales, there was only little wind, but for the first time we had tailwind!! :-) On our way to the Argentinian border we made a small detour to visit the Cuevas del Milodón, some pretty impressive caves in the middle of nowhere. 



The impressive Cueva del Milodón

View from the Cueva del Milodón towards the Andes :-)

On the road through the pampa again, but now with
beautiful mountains in the background :-)

After leaving Chile (we couldn't even use the toilet at the customs, as there was no water in the whole town...) we continued our way up the pass to Argentina on ripio... Once we got to Argentina I was already pretty tired, but we tried to reach the intersection to get to the paved Ruta 40 again, as we expected to find an estancia there where we hoped to be allowed to camp... However, our map as well as the GPS were wrong, and we figured that we passed the estancia we were looking for just after entering Argentina... So we cycled back quite a bit to ask there if we could pass the night on their property and we were immediately offered a bed and food!! It's just amazing how hospitable and friendly these people are! The next day we were lucky as there was hardly any wind and therefore managed to make it all the way to El Cerrito, a road worker's place where we were allowed to pass the night in an empty house.

On the way to El Cerrito...

The day after we hoped to cycle our 1000th km and reach El Calafate, however the wind didn't agree. It soon grew so strong that there was no point in continuing to fight the wind anymore and even though the weather was gorgeous we spent almost 3 hours freezing next to the street trying to get a pick-up to take us to El Calafate. We finally were picked up by a guy owning a hostel in El Calafate and well, we therefore stayed at his hostel once we got to El Calafate...
The only reason we made the detour to El Calafate in the first place was to stock up on provisions and to do another very touristy thing: visiting the Perito Moreno glacier...
So on the 20th of March we took a bus to the Los Glaciares National Park, where we first made a boat tour to the south face of the glacier (it's absolutely amazing how big it is!!), and then spent some time walking around the place. We got really lucky, as we could witness how several pieces of ice fell off the glacier, showing you in a very impressive manner that the glacier is constantly moving (this glacier grows up to 2m per day in its middle part!).

The impressive south wall of the Perito Moreno Glacier: It´s huge!!

The Perito Moreno Glacier from above...

The next day we were ready to bike again, and after being controlled by the police as we left the city we followed the southern shore of Lago Argentino towards the intersection of Ruta 40 and soon reached km 1000! :-) Once on Ruta 40 again, we had slight headwind, but we soon figured that our goal, an abandoned pink house next to the street, should be about 15 km closer than we expected it to be, so that increased our motivation to cycle against the wind. Once we reached the pink house, we were just a amazed by its location! Next to the river, surrounded by lots of trees and with a fire pit we decided to use for cooking that night. Like this we spent an awesome evening at the banks of the river, observing the sunset and later on the stars!

A really luxurious place for cooking dinner, and an incredibly beautiful one as well!

And the sunset was just spectacular! :-)

The next day there was quite a bit of wind again, and this already in the morning... So we started with head/side wind towards Lago Viedma where we stopped at the hotel La Leona for a coffee. Afterwards the street turned so that for a while we had side wind, but soon we had strong headwind again... Once the street left the Lago Viedma we had pretty strong tailwind for about 20 km, so that for once we didn't even have to pedal anymore in order to advance! However, after these 20 km we got to the intersection to El Chaltén and it was immediately clear that there was no point in continuing, as we'd have strong headwind for the next 90 km... So as there was a sign telling us that 2 km ahead there should be a road workers place, we continued, but unfortunately there was nothing. But we knew from other cyclists that there had to be some shelter close to the intersection, so I went back (walking, the wind grew so strong that you couldn't even think of cycling anymore!) to look for it. I found a small shelter and it took us over an hour to push our bikes the about 2 km against the wind to get to the shelter...

Our shelter for the night: the hut protected us from the wind and the tent from the rain... :P

So the only thing left to do was cooking, cleaning some stuff, going to bed early, and hoping for less wind the next day. The next morning it was still pretty windy, but not nearly as bad as the day before and we had a beautiful view onto Mount Fitz Roy and Cerro Torre, and this at sunrise!

Beautiful view on the Argentinian mountains just after sunrise

So we started with quite a bit of headwind, but unfortunately it soon grew stronger and after only about 10 km it was definitely too strong for me, as I was blown off the street every few meters. And as the next estancia we could probably have hidden from the wind was still about 10 km away, we decided to hitchhike again. It didn't take long until we were picked up by an Argentinian couple and so we got to El Chaltén quite early, where we stayed at Flor's casa de ciclista (a casa the ciclista is a house of someone who lets cyclists stay or camp on his/her property for free).
The 24th of March we went hiking once again, this time our goal was to reach the Lago de los Tres, a beautiful Laguna at the foot of Mount Fitz Roy. We hiked together with two French girls we met at Flor's place, and on our way to the top we also passed the beautiful Laguna de Capri from where we had an awesome view onto Mount Fitz Roy! We also had some spectacular views into the valley leading to the Lago del Desierto, which we'll cycle once we leave El Chaltén...



The view of Mount Fitz Roy from the Laguna Capri



Laguna de los Tres:
The closest you can get to Mount Fitz Roy on normal hiking trails...



When we got back in the evening, a lot more cyclists coming from the north arrived, so we had lots of company and it was good to be around so many cyclists for once and to exchange the most important info's! Once up to date we knew what will expect us on our way to the Chilean Carretera Austral and we planned enough time in order to reach the last boat to cross over to the southernmost point of the famous Carretera Austral, Villa O'Higgins.