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Los tres amigos

Two good friends of mine, Jack and Michael, had expressed an interest a while back that they would like to come out and join me for a weeks cycling. We had settled on Santiago as being the best place for them to fly into and I was going to do my best to get as close to Santiago as I could. As their arrival date approached I knew I wasn't going to get as far south as Santiago so we had agreed on a city a bit further north called La Serena. They were going to hire bikes in Santiago, bus up to La Serena and we would spend the week cycling south.

Church in La Serena

When I finally staggered into La Serena I checked my emails to find that the lads were not going to be arriving in on the bus for another hour or so. I went off and sorted out a hostel near the bus station. After eleven o'clock that night Jack and Michael had found their way to the hostel. It was great to finally see them. It was also kinda weird to see my two pals in some random town in Chile complete with the bikes and panniers. As the lads had hardly eaten all day we immediately went out for a bite to eat and a couple of beers to celebrate Jack's birthday which had been a few days previous.
We unfortunately had to spend a full day in La Serena as it materialised that the lads both had problems with their rented bikes which was frustrating as they only had a week in Chile. I wasn't overly complaining however as it gave me a rest day after some big days on the bike getting to La Serena in time. It was entertaining to observe all the bemused looks as we walked around the fancy shopping centre in our beautiful lycra attire to buy food supplies for the next few days.

Between the kilo plus of Reeses peanut butter cups that Michael brought and
the order I had put in with Jack to bring from home I was not going to be running
low on goodies any time soon. The silver up top is a bit of salvaged Christmas cake
....ooh yeah.

Ready for action

Michael's bike issue was still a bit of a concern with the tyre coming very close to the frame but we decided to hit the road hoping and praying that it would survive for the coming days cycling. It was great to finally hit the road and the lads excitement at doing some bike touring was refreshing for me. For the first day or so we were not likely to have much in the line of towns or villages so we had brought plenty of food and water. It didn't take long for the lads to see how much water you go through as the day got progressively hotter. That night we camped at the back of a field behind a shop we had stopped at.

Our first nights camp spot even had the luxury of a table (aka large slab of concrete)

Guaranteed Irish..

The next few days saw some good cycling as the lads got to experience decent hills, headwinds and a few hot afternoons. I'm not sure if they'll ever look at wind-farms the same way again. I wasn't sure what standard of cycling to expect from them but thankfully they were both properly cycling fit and kept me on my toes (or cycling cleats). They quickly got to appreciate the simple joys of a proper shower after a couple of days of cycling and camping. I approached the week with the attitude of just enjoying the ride and hanging out with good company rather than trying to rush too much. With that in mind we were never on the road overly early but still managed to get some decent distances in most days.

Just what you want on your week off.. to camp in a cattle pen.

Ooh la la..!

Good camp spot in a pine forest

Time flew by and it wasn't long before our last day on the bikes which was more of a half days cycling to the picturesque seaside town of Papudo where we had a nice lunch and a swim in the pacific. The lads needed to catch a bus into Santiago later that afternoon to give themselves enough time to drop back the bike rentals and catch their flights the following day. Not wanting to miss a last night out with the three amigos I also threw my bike on the bus to Santiago with the intention of coming back to Papudo to continue the cycle after I had checked out the big city. It was late by the time we made it to our hostel but that obviously didn't stop us going out to enjoy our last night together.

End of the lads cycling as we arrived the pretty seaside town of Papudo

Fine Art museum Santiago

The following day we bid farewell to Jack after a quick lunch and Michael and I headed for a stroll around the city as his flight wasn't until much later that night. That evening we went for a beer with Daniel and Maeva a local Santiago couple who I knew through the cycling website WarmShowers who had kindly agreed to put me up while I was in Santiago. I said goodbye to Michael as he caught his flight to the airport. I was sad to see the lads go as it had been a very enjoyable week. I was thrilled that some friends from home had made it out and could get a little taste for my bike journey and also a taste for the kilo of Reeses peanut butter cup sweets I was getting through since they arrived. Thanks lads, it was great fun.

Michael and I having a stroll around Santiago

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Into Chile

The Chilean flag

Gracias por el chocolate y el agua amigos

I cycled into Chile around midday on 20th of February 2014. As usual I was excited to be entering a new country although I was slightly worried that they were going to confiscate what remaining food I had left because Chilean border controls are known for being strict about food. Although they gave my bags the most thorough check that they've had anywhere on the trip thankfully I was able to hold on to the food. My first impressions of Chile were good, everybody seemed very friendly. The first people I got talking to were a lovely young couple who had hitchhiked thousands of kilometres from Southern Chile to go backpacking in Bolivia. They gave me chocolate and water. They knew how to make a good first impression. They didn't even seem to mind that I was filthy from head to toe. Once I passed through customs I was into the small town of Ollague. With the cost of everything being a lot more in Chile than most counties I've passed, especially Bolivia and Peru, it looked like my days of getting a cheap lunch were over. I still needed to eat and paid more for a pork sandwich than I would have paid for a soup, main course and accompanying drink in Bolivia. It the only sandwich I had eaten in months but one of the best sandwiches I have ever eaten in my life. They did not seem to go in for sandwiches in many of the other countries I had passed in South America but they certainly knew how to do a good one in this small border town.

Barren, spectacular wilderness

This crater like dig out made for the perfect shelter, out of sight of the road
and more importantly better protected from the howling wind.

With my waterbottles refilled I got back on the road which reverted to gravel wash board about 2 kilometres out of town. The winds were so strong that evening that I had to find somewhere suitable to erect the tent that was sheltered from the wind.
I may have entered a new country but for the first few days in Chile the landscape was unsurprisingly quite similar to that of Bolivia - stunning, extremely dry and almost completely unpopulated.

The fake tan was probably unnecessary, what with all the sunblock,
sweat, dust, salt and general dirt already clinging to me.

Within two days I had made it to the small minning city of Calama. The nearby mine of Chuquicamata at over four kilometres in length and 3 kilometres wide is the largest open pit copper mine in the world. The fire station at Calama were kind enough to put me up for the night. It was here that I had a long over due shower and probably the best shower I've had in my life. It was almost a week since my last wash in Uyuni and even that had been in a large bucket of cold water as opposed to a proper shower! After the scrub it was over to the supermarket to stock up on supplies. "Eh, where am I?" I thought to myself and probably walked around the isles of the supermarket with my mouth wide open. It was a large, fully stocked supermarket with everything I could think of. It was quite similar to a supermarket from home and it had certainly been a while since I had been anywhere like this. Certainly not for my previous few months in Bolivia and Peru. This was probably amplified by the fact that I had spent a week in isolated desert where you'd struggle to get more than dried goods like a packet of crackers in the few remote villages I passed. I was also mouth agape at the price of things. This was a dangerous place to be as I was starving! My friends at the firestation told me that Calama and much of the north of Chile in general was more expensive than the rest of the country due to all the minning activities. Later that evening a few of us went across the road for a hot dog. A hot dog, hadn't seen one of them in a while, I think I was going to like Chile.

Los Bomberos in Calama just back from a fire

The following evening after being refused by the police and the local church and with the Bomberos (firestation) completely closed up it looked like the mining town of Sierra Gorda was going to be problematic in finding somewhere to stay. That was until I asked a couple who were out in their front of their house if I could pitch my tent in their back garden. Andre and Carmen said that I couldn't pitch the tent because of the large dog in the garden but that I was welcome to sleep in their spare bedroom for the night. Incredible act of kindness to a complete stranger. Wow.

The pretty central square in Antofagasta

I finally made it to the Chilean coast and the city of Antofagasta by the following evening. It was great to finally hit the coast as Panama had been the last place where I had cycled by the Pacific. Even though I was under a fair bit of time pressure I ended up staying two days with the lovely folk of the 8th company fire brigade at Antofagasta. The reason that I was under pressure was that two good friends were flying into Santiago to join me for a week's cycling. At this stage I knew that I wasn't going to make it as far as Santiago so the lads were going to hire bikes in Santiago, bus up to a town called La Serena and we would the following days cycling south in the direction of Santiago.

The first signpost I saw for Santiago had the city 1440 km away so I was much closer
by the time I took this photo.

I stayed a night with the very welcoming Alvarez family in TalTal.
They certainly made sure that I didn't leave hungry! 

This friendly truck driver Rodrigo gifted me his high viz vest so that I could be well seen on the road

The guy on the right was a Brazilian cyclist heading from south to north (he also warned me about
the Patagonian winds!). The guy on the left was a friendly and very generous shop keeper that initially
gifted us a chilled cola each, then he gave us both a tropical fruit, then some grapes
and when we were leaving he gave us two ripe avocados each. Phenomenal.

By this stage I had made it back onto fully paved roads with some of the stretches being on motorway so a nice shoulder for me to cycle in. Obviously with a trip this long covering tens of thousands of kilometres some parts are going to be more interesting than others.
Some of the days between Antofagasta and La Serena I felt a bit like I was eating, cycling, eating, sleeping, up and repeat. Going through the motions to purely get kilometres under my belt. Essentially this was all I was doing as I needed to be in La Serena by the 7th to meet the guys. Thankfully it rarely happens to me that I feel like I am going through the motions despite the length of time I've been on the road. I knew it would be well worth it anyway to see my friends and it's not as if they weren't making a huge effort to make it to Chile and to the town of La Serena.The landscape was baron with little or no vegetation. I had seen enough baron wilderness in northern Chile by this stage.

The lovely Tonsic family very generously invited me to lunch

Since the first hour of entering Chile I have been bowled over by the generosity of complete strangers. One encounter after the next, it has been very touching.
On the 7th of March at 9pm in the dark of night I cycled into La Serena. I had made it in time to meet the lads, now all I had to do was find them.

A fishing village that I passed not far from La Serena

Southern Bolivia

  

I finally escaped the clutches of the Casa and was back into the cycling with a bang with the 12 kilometre climb from downtown La Paz up out of the bowl to El Alto and back onto the Altiplano. I was cycling at a snails pace up out of the city attempting to get used to this cycling jazz again. Even though there were plenty of towns and civilisation for the first few hundred kilometres I had loaded up on food and supplies in anticipation of the isolated stretches that awaited further south in Bolivia. I wasn't even able to pack all the food I had initially planned on taking, all of my bags were bulging with food and different unessential items I had picked up over the previous few weeks and months. I think it was the heaviest the bike has ever been which was quite the achievement.

Some fascinating rock formations to be seen

A camp spot inside an old abandoned house that I was told to use.

Flamingos in a lake I passed

The city of Oruro was the biggest dump I've been in to date.
This is not a dump simply rubbish dumped by the side
of the road.

Thankfully after the initial climb out of La Paz the terrain was relatively flat for the next few days with varrying road conditions and traffic volumes. They are in the process of building a two lane highway in each direction between La Paz and the city of Oruro which lies a bit over two hundred kilometres south which had me criss crossing between the old road, heavy traffic road works with no shoulder, new two lane road with a lovely shoulder and even the occasional opportunity the cycle on the freshly paved road that had yet to be opened to traffic which was great. It felt like cycling on a run way with the three lanes to myself. I knew this was not going to last. The paved roads stopped two days after Ururo and it was onto the mostly sandy dust with plenty of "ripio" as they call it around here which is bumpy wash bord. It helps to make for a nice sore ass if you haven't been doing much cycling, which I hadn't after my time off in La Paz!

Ripio aka washboard

Not the first river that I've had to cross but the first time I've had to make a quick
retreat due to quick sand in one spot

I was surrounded on three sides by a gigantic mud flat, it was an incredible view.

Anything to avoid the ripio 

Before leaving La Paz and for the few days cycling south I had being weighing up whether or not I would cycle across Salar de Uyuni which is the biggest salt flat in the world. It is one of the "must sees" on most cycle tourists itineraries and during the dry season most cyclists cross it. But it's the wet season and during this time most cyclists don't cross it as it's mostly flooded not to mention that salt water is a sure fire way to destroy your bike prematurely! I arrived in the late afternoon at Colchani which is the closest village to one of the main entry points to the salt flats. I cycled straight through the village and down the 5 km road which is almost like a spit for the last part stretching out into the salt flats.
I was in my bare feet not too far from the road taking a few photos when another passing cyclist stopped to ask me in Spanish where I was from. It did not take long to notice neither of us were native Spanish speakers and it turned out that Chris was a fellow Irish man from Galway. Chris was a few months into his South American cycle and was eventually heading for Colombia. A short while later we bumped into Ted, a French cyclist from Lyon heading north. After the photo session it was back to Colchani in the dark where we stayed in the same hostel. I had decided that I wasn't going to cross the Salar. It was physically possible but it would have added time on between the detour and then needing probably the best part of another day to take the time to thoroughly clean the bike. I didn't have any time to play with as two good friends were flying into Santigo de Chile in early March giving me only a few weeks to make it the few thousand kilometres further south.

A map of the famous Salar de Uyuni

It felt a bit like a zoo with the hordes of tourists driven out to
the edge of the Salar for sunset then loaded back into the vans shortly
after. It was strange to compare this to the vast open expanses with equally
beautiful sunsets with nobody in sight for miles around that I experienced over the
following days.

Pretty impressive sunset all the same

Chris and Ted

The Dakar rally had passed through the Salar
a week or  so previous

As always we exchanged stories and tips, me singing the virtues of the Casa de Ciclista that they could look forward to in La Paz with both Chris and Ted separately warning of the crazy winds that I could look forward to in Patagonia. Not the first time I'd been told about that. Ted also told me that he had bumped into Simon and Olivia only a day or so riding ahead of me. We had all come from different directions and the following morning we all set out in our different directions. I was heading south, Ted north and where else would a Galway man be headed but out west... into the flooded salt flats with a cracked rim.

Chris preparing his bike for the Salar crossing

As Chris said himself, it's an Irish thing. Proudly attaching his Tayto crisps pen to the bike!

Showing off the Galway colours

A roundabout sculpture in Uyuni

Once I passed the town of Uyuni, which is the main tourist spot for organised jeep trips out into the Salar things started to get a lot more isolated and I needed to make sure I had plenty of water with about 100 km between towns and these towns of Rio Grande and San Juan did not have too much in them. After that then it was around a hundred kilometres to the Chilean border. Which wouldn't be that long on a normal road. The days I spent in between Uyuni and the Chilean border were one of the highlights of the trip. I shall remember this particular stretch for a number of factors, first and foremost the incredible natural beauty that I found myself in, the isolation and also that some of it was extremely difficult. I would have been confident when I finally left  Peru that a few of the hours when I found myself "cycling", crawling and pushing the last few hundred metres up the rocky paths to mountain passes in the Cordillera Blanca that this would not be topped in terms of how slow I was travelling or how challenging it was.
My last full day in Bolivia however topped this, a record that I hadn't particularly been looking to break!

Three wild donkies

Muck getting clogged between my tyre and mud guard

Not much traction with the salt sticking to the wheels like snow

The roads or tracks are a bit more vague in this stunning part of the world. I might be standing smack bang in the middle of the road according to the improved map app on my phone or I might be 500 metres to the side or a kilometre or so off it. It didn't really mater, there was zero traffic and most of the time they were simply different tyre tracks from jeeps that had passed and sometimes there wasn't tyre tracks at all. Between my phone and a target point I would have on the horizon I had a rough idea of where I was going. Rough in every sense of the word.

The tracks had deteriorated after the last town I passed of San Juan. I had headed off down one track for nearly an hour at one stage only to notice on my phone that it was headed in the completely wrong direction. The tracks were pretty random and obviously there were no signs. There was however a train track so I started to use this for bearings and I decided to follow a small path that was running alongside the train tracks. I knew that the train was headed for the border town in Chile that I wanted to get to. The path got less worn and harder to make out but I still had the train tracks. Then the terrain closet to the tracks became too difficult and the path seemed to split off in different directions away from the train tracks. This essentially meant that the drivers of the various jeep tracks I had been following had no longer been able to drive along by the train tracks and had gone off in different directions.

Getting deeper into the sand, mud and salt mix. 

More hot, bubbly mushy bananas..
yum yum. Taste great when you are running
low on food ... kind of

As the afternoon progressed things got gradually tougher and I found myself in the middle of a massive semi dry cross between salt and mud flat. It seemed to extend for miles around me. I wasn't worried as I had picked a point on the horizon near to where the train tracks seemed to head and where there the hills seemed to drop. The issue was the speed with which I was travelling. By this stage I was off the bike pushing it as my wheels were sinking between two and four inches into the sand-muck-salt making it impossible to cycle in. As the afternoon progressed the wind picked up so I was eventually out in the middle of this massive expanse of sand and salt pushing my loaded bike. On some of the tougher days I'd usually get out the music but there was absolutely no point in that because I wouldn't hear a thing with the howling wind. I was literally stopping every ten metres to catch my breath. Some of the time I was furious, shouting expletives at the top of my voice, other times I could only chuckle to myself thinking "If only the lads could see me now, they'd have some laugh" but most of the time I was just focused on trying to make the next few metres. Even though the spot I was aiming for on the horizon was probably only a few kilometres away I finally figured out that there was no way that I was going to make it before dark and that it would possibly still take me half the following day. I didn't fancy pitching the tent in the middle of this sand flat because however difficult it was at the moment it would have become far more difficult to get out of if it rained that night. It wasn't in the direction that I wanted to eventually end up but over to my right were some hills where I might be able to camp and most importantly it seemed to be the "quickest" exit off the flats. I was pretty relieved to eventually make it out and put my tent up in the dark that night but I had spotted a series of tyre tracks for the following day. As I packed up in the morning I could see for miles around me yet I couldn't hear a sound. No more wind. It was almost a complete silence bar an occasional bird fluttering by. It was another one of those stand back in awe moments.

Add expletives as required. 

Junction

By midday of the following day I had made it to the Bolivia Chile border crossing. Thank God as I was pretty low on food and didn't have any water left. The border guard exiting Bolivia tried to con me into paying for exiting the country but I knew I didn't need to. I didn't pay.

This surface was actually better for cycling on than the bumpy wash board road near by

Dragging my ass south one metre at a time..

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