| Location: | El Calafate |
The wind! It is the first time I have sat on the back of the bike, with the bike being at 45 degrees and we are still going in a straight line. One way to get rid of chicken lines without cornering! The myths of Patagonian winds are not myths! It is incessant, sweeping off the Andes and rushing with great force at the bike. Hard to handle in any situation, almost impossible on some of the roads we´ve been riding.
There are so many dirt roads here that are short cuts to places, that you can´t and don´t want to avoid them. Well, you can avoid them by riding two sides of a triangle on sealed roads, but that wouldn´t be cricket! Besides, these dirt roads are some of the most remote and really put you in the middle of the wilderness and give you a challenging ride at the same time.
The same road goes from perfect hard smooth dirt, to the tiniest strip of hard rocks, edged high with great piles of pebbles, so that one inch of wobble and it could be all over. That´s where the wind comes back into play. . . . our only consolation was it was dry. It is hard for Kev to take charge when he carries so much weight (me!) on the bike. The front is so light that the wind plays with it like a feather in the wind and more than once we are pushed to the brink, the bike dances into huge ridges of dirt, wanging it left, right, left, but coming out of it upright and still moving forward.
How we come through some of these rides without yet hitting the deck is a bit of a myth in itself. In both of world record rides, not once has Kevin let the bike hit the deck. I try not to think too much about this statistic, because given the amount of miles we have ridden, in the type of countries we have ridden, on the types of roads we have ridden, in the weather conditions we have ridden, we must be on borrowed time or else Kevin was a cat in his last life . . . .
Suffice to say that we survive the rides to pleasure at gawping at the massifs of Torres del Paine for a second time, still as wondrous as the first, and stand speechless at the Perito Moreno Glacier as thunderous groans echo from its great insides and huge jagged chunks of flouresent blue ice slide into the lake below.
Riding here is truly a once in a lifetime experience and yet we are here for a second time and, when our motorcycle tours start to Patagonia, we will be back again. . . . .
