Villa Cerro Castillo to Bahia Murta (2/26 Fri)

Stats:
- 61 miles (all dirt...okay, Arn insists there was 2/10 of a mile of pavement)
- 3500 feet of climbing
- time...including breaks, but remember the flies...8 hours 45 minutes!

After a breakast of instant coffee and toast, we headed south. The plan was this --- ride until we had enough and find wild camping.  "Wild" means there are no sactioned camp spots. Or let me put it differently --- you are SO damn remote that no one even wants to attempt to make a few bucks by charging for camping on their homestead. The trick to wild camping is finding a place with water, a place to put your tent (not in a mud flat, a dry wash, etc), and place where you won't get caught. 

So while we didn't know where the day would end, I knew toast was hollow fuel for this suffer-fest. Things started out pretty well. Our awesome views from yesterday continued and the ripio wasn't too bad. We saw only a few cars and people were reasonable. We knew a climb was coming as we would have to get up and out of this valley. So, the climbing commenced. While not terrible, the legs were not feeling completely fresh. Evenually, the road dropped down into the next valley. The mountains were more rounded. The bottom of the valley was totally flat --- like a table top. Down the center, a small turquoise river braided through gravel. Then, it turned into a giant bog. There were pools of water, reed like plants, and I could feel the humidity increase. The temps were warm and I was already down to my tank top. From reading the blog of a guy we met many weeks ago, we knew there was bad ripio coming. In fact, this guy cursed this stretch of road. And before the day would end, there would be two more people cursing this road with him. 

Okay, we first picked up a massive head wind. Looking down valley, it was clear we were going to navigate the edge of this bog for a while. Note "navigating edge of bog" does NOT equal flat. It means gaining and losing the same shitty 100 feet for a few hours. We couldn't hear each other scream, we rode in silence. Well, the wind howled, but we were silent  Then, the surface got ugly. It was the new "worst ever" surface of the trip and the first time that tempers (namely mine) flared.  You might remember the stretch of road I called "riding golf balls in the swimming pool", well, this made that look like a paved sidewalk. This crappy excuse for a road was sandy and loose and full of huge rocks that slid around. Riding in the flats was awful. The cars had set up huge washboards and massive pot holes that were filled with sand and more loose rocks. This kind of stuff chews off your legs in a big hurry. Riding uphill is frustrating as you can't get a bite in the surface. You push the pedals and the back tire, despite the massive weight of gear on the back off the bike, just spins --- the back wheel can't get traction. It is like driving your car in snow and the wheels spin and you go nowhere. Unfortunately, on a bike you can't do this for long before you are off the bike with no traction. This happened and this sucks. The only thing harder than pedaling this crap is trying to push your bike in this kind of crap. Now, I am not the strongest rider around. However, I can hang with a bad surface on the uphill for a while. Twice, I was dumped off and had to push the bike about 20 feet to find a patch of ripio that offered a better chance for the rear wheel to get traction. At one point, Arn asked, "Are you okay?". I bit his head off and ate it as my second breakfast. 16 miles into 75 miles of road to be covered in two days --- this was NOT going well and was defintely NOT the follow up to yesterday that I was dreaming about.  Now, if the uphill was frustrating in this stuff, the downhill was terrifying. If you are a skier, think of spring skiing in the slush.  Think about the sound your skies make going through really heavy, wet slush --- it is a swooosh, swooosh. Now, think about that sound riding downhill with NO traction on a fully loaded bike in the middle of a place so remote there are no services and no camping options. I don't know --- if we got lucky, maybe we could find a hospital in 24 hours if someone helped quickly. I laid myself out in ripio early on in this trip and it was not a confidence booster for today.  So, it went like this for hours. 

To make matters worse, we started to see more cars, trucks and buses. Last night, a man warned us about the crazy traffic on this stretch of road. We thought, 'hmm, dude we haven't seen anything like that since we rolled onto the Carretera Austral". I am sorry to say, but he was right. The drivers were NUTS!  They were driving way too fast for the conditions. If you measured the full width of the road, then I would say, "yes, the width is two lanes wide".  HOWEVER, the road is high in the middle and slopes downward on both sides. The amount of road usable by cars is about 1 1/2 lanes. In other words, they need to work together to pass each other and they SHOULD be concerned about oncoming traffic. Now, for a cyclist, the slopes on the edges of the road are suicidal. They start off as deep sand and end in a trench of rocks about the size of cantalopes. So, for those on two wheels, the section of road that is rideable is about the width of 1 car lane and it runs -- you guessed it -- right down the center of the road.  Add a few more ingredients to the mix: a) every driver believes there will be NO oncoming traffic or bikes, b) every driver thinks their stopping distance is the same as driving on pavement, c) every driver assumes a speed appropriate for pavement and d) every driver is sure a cyclist can ride the trench on the edge of the road (read: ride cantalopes).  Where in the hell did these rules and these people come from???  We have not seen this anywhere on the Carretera and it was terrifying. We didn't have a lot of traffic, but 90% of what we had felt life threatening.  If you know Arn, then you know about his own private language when he gets ticked off. At the point in the ride, the fuck speak commenced. 

As a self preservation strategy, we adopted a new riding technique. You might say we played a game of "chicken" with the cars. We would spot a car (from either direction).  We would let them see us. Then, we would ride in the center of the road next to each other. We watched their approach. Once they slowed down enough, we would slide over to our maximum point and ride single file. It was an aggressive and stressful way to ride. The scariest thing was watching cars barreling down us head on and never slowing up. Like I said, it was a game of chicken. 

Finally, the road surfaced improved. This of course came with a long climb up and out of this valley. We reached a sign marking the pass and the road still climbed. I am not sure how they determined "pass".  The scenery was beautiful and the winds continued. Again, we tried to pick a windy spot for our PBJ sandwiches and again, we were chased back onto the bikes by the horseflies. The motorists we met conintued to be assholes, however, the better surface gave us more road width to work with. 

Eventually, we finished our slog uphill and had views to the next valley. Here was my only thought -- "shit, this looks exactly like where we just came from and we are going back to that same lousy ass surface".  There was no satisfaction in being proven right about this. It was during this section of ripio that I wanted to kill a few Chileans. We had a car approaching from the front. Then, a car appeared from the back.  We took the center of the road in attempt to slow everyone down. Then, it became clear --- neither car was going to slow down and they were setting up to pass each other and us at the same freaking time! We pulled out single file. Still, they didn't slow up. We had no where to go if we were to stay on the bikes. We looked backed and this guy was still coming full speed. We both headed into the ditch of cantalope rocks and tried to hold on. I landed on my feet and heard the wheels lock up on the pickup truck behind us. I looked back to see Arn's rear wheel lined up with the right side of the truck. The truck lunged once and again. It was about six feet off his wheel. I thought for sure I watching Arn get hit. The truck lunged once more and stopped about three feet short of his wheel. At this point, the oncoming truck passed and never stopped. I started screaming in Arn's private language. Let me tell you, you did NOT need to speak English to know exactly how I felt. Arn then started screaming. These two assholes never rolled the window down, never got out of the truck, never said, "Lo siento" (I'm sorry).  They drove off!!!!

This and 90% of the motorists we saw today made this the worst day of the trip. Our next pass was by a couple in a white van. They slowed way down and inched past us. The woman hung out the window and gave us a huge thumbs up. We needed more like her today. 

Now, we were supposed to be looking for wild camping. To this I said, we can either stop and deal with the horseflies or we can continue to ride. Arn would see camping options and ask, "How are you doing?". My reply was the same, "Let's ride".  Eventually, it became clear we could gut out another 14 miles and find a place to sleep indoors out of the flies. Shortly after we made the decision to ride to Bahia Murta, we passed our first cyclists in many days --- a couple from Switzerland with a dog they said that has been following them for three days. They offered the dog and we said, "no thanks".  So, we finally called it day --- cold beers, hot showers, boring dinner.  The only good thing about this ride is that it is over.