The 2 months since leaving Santiago have been even more filled than normal. Never have i touched so many of my personal limits in such a short amount of time, nor been through so many new experiences. As a result, even though i say this with (boring) frequency, i´m quite happy to say it again: i´ve never felt so alive!
After exactly 4 weeks relaxing (read: being a complete bum) in santiago, catching up with old friends, and making new ones (amongst whom my first danish friends), it was with surpising relief that i left and could cycle daily again. I think the reason why i like travelling on my bike so much is that i´ve never been a very sporty person. I don´t come from a sporty family, i really *really* sucked at sports at school, and until a few years ago, if i did anything remotely physical, it was because i knew it was good for my health rather than genuinely enjoying it. But there´s something different about cycle-touring: when the sun´s shining, there´s little wind, and i´m surrounded by amazing scenery, the kilometres and hours fly by without my even realising it. When i think about the pitifully slow first few days in uruguay, i can´t help but smile at the effort it took to cover a few millimetres on my map. Now, i can look at the same map and actually see the progress i´ve made between towns (even despite the sections where i hitched or took a train)... – and all this with the simple repetition of pushing one pedal after the other! Amazing! Some days have been so perfect that i dare admit tearing up with happiness (but no tears were actually shed of course; i´m not that much of a pansy ;) ..
But i digress with the sentamentalism: i was talking about new experiences. I paraglided for the first time near Córdoba (the geographic heart of argentina), where the sierras are a dream for hangliders and paragliders alike. Talking to a few of them was an introduction to a completely unknown community to me until then. they´re all passionate about flying, and to see them anxiously watching the wind indicators before catching the perfect gust to take off, then watching as they spiralled around and played with the winds, was a real delight. One guy (retired) loves it so much that he now lives in a campervan at the take-off site, so that as soon as the winds are right, he can just fly off. And when the winds are right, they´re right: it´s apparently no big deal to be gliding in the air for several hours on end, and still be able to land at the same take-off site (ie, not losing altitude and landing at a site much further away, and having to walk back to his home). Although i prefer the intense adrenaline rush of other activities (such as bungee jumping, or hopefully one day, skydiving or parachuting), there´s definitely a certain peace in gliding that i can appreciate. When i took off (tandem), my instructor manoeuvred us so that we were playing with birds flying nearby, and in that moment, the expression ´free as a bird´ really summed it up!
Heading further north with the intention of spending more time in bolivia, i climbed to the highest point that i´ve reached on my bike – 3780masl. (Not that high compared to many cyclists whom i´ve met, but like i said, i´m not a sportsperson...) The thing that surprised me was how much i had to push my lungs. I´ve never been too badly affected by altitude, - perhaps a bit of shortness of breath when in bolivia last year, accompanied by lethargy (but i like bumming around so much anyway that i can´t really blame the laziness on altitude), - but there were a few short spans (uphill, dirt road, strong headwind,) when the thinness of the air really made itself felt. I can´t begin to explain how strange it was for me to be sucking as much air into my lungs as i could, and still feel as if i were suffocating... the only comparison i can draw (and i´m sure we´ve all had this) is the pining feeling you have when you desperately want someone´s affection, but they don´t feel the same way. The desperation and the sheer need for oxygen is almost too much: your diaphragm is crying out ´i´m trying as hard as i can!´, you feel like you´re dying, and you can´t do anything about it. After that first extreme bout of exertion, i made sure i took it easy, but even with care, i could feel my lungs straining the higher up i got.
And if that wasn´t enough for my body, there was my dramatic adventure as i crossed the andes again to the town of San Pedro de Atacama (where i am now), in Chile. The highest part of the pass commonly used is at roughly 4800masl, and boy, is it cold up there. especially when you´re hitching across and you get caught in a freak snowstorm, are consequently forced to turn back, and of course, since the truckdriver who picked you up is carrying a wide load, the truck almost turns over as he struggles for almost half an hour to do a u-turn, and then you get stuck in a snowdrift, unable to move... yeah, that´s when you realise that it really is cold up there. we were stuck for 3 days and 2 nights, with no cars passing by to at least alert the authorities since, we were later to find out, a paraguayan truck had crashed further up the road and the pass was closed. The 2nd night, the thermometer showed minus 22 degrees. Even though there were our 2 human bodies radiating heat in the small truck cabin, all the water we had we had froze during the night. and the next day, even though the snow had subsided enough for us to theoretically be able to come down off the pass, we woke to find the petrol tank completely frozen through. we spent more than 5 hours heating near-frozen water and pouring the result on the petrol tank, with very little effect. jogging my physics memory, i`m quite sure that with every 1000m rise in altitude, the boiling temperature of water decreases by 10 degrees, so admittedly the boiling water was not that hot at less than 60 degrees. (Until then, this had only been a mild pain in the arse (just an itchy bottom actually) when i´d been trying to cook onions up high – i think you could boil them for half an hour, and they´d still be crunchy.) we were close to running out of food the first day, but that wasn´t too drastic. then we ran out of water, and that was a little more serious, so i had to run about a kilometre to a nearby mountain stream to fill up. with the cold strong winds that day (easily surpassing 70kph), the water would freeze as it was being poured into the bottles, and even though i was easily buffeted towards the stream, it was a real struggle fighting against the current back towards the truck. Obviously, i felt the cold. But what really surprised me was what happened to my hands over the next few weeks (the only exposed part of me apart from my face): they turned completely black. During the first few days after we eventually got down from the mountain, i thought my skin was cracking and bleeding due to the aridity – the atacama desert is the driest in the world. But when the skin started to harden and turn black, I realised that the intensity of the cold was enough for the skin to be ´burnt´ off the back of my hands. However, since i was only exposed for a short time, the ´trauma´ was superficial enough, in the moment, for me not to experience traditional frostbite (where you lose sensation, and sometimes the digits or limbs themselves), for which i´m very grateful!
But getting back to our stuck-up-in-the-middle-of-nowhere ordeal: we then ran out of petrol for my stove, so we could no longer heat water to pour on the petrol tank. Relying on a lot of swearing and not a small amount of luck that the sun kept shining, enough of the petrol melted to be able to head back down the mountain late that afternoon. The argentine border police were nice enough to give us a hot shower (ahhhhh) and a hot meal (ohhhh), and the pass was clear enough the next day for us to finally cross over to chile. For the first time in my passport, there´s a period of 4 days where i´m in no man´s land – officially leaving argentine soil on the 11th of june, and only arriving in chile on the 15th of june.
So after such a full couple of months of new experiences and exciting adventure, i was ready to chill out for a while. ´for a while´ initially meant a few days, while i checked out the main hotspots around here. but i fell instantly in love with the scenery and setting of the town. Words like ´stunning´, ´spectacular´, and ´amazing´ don´t mean anything, and the photos that i´ll soon put up don´t do the area justice. Combine this with the amount of signs i saw up for work opportunities, and the thought that i would be heading north to countries where i would feel uncomfortable taking jobs from the locals (such as bolivia), ´for a while´ has now turned to at least a few months, and very possibly until march of next year. ...but that´s for another entry...
(more photos in ´period of firsts´ gallery)
