Thursday, 20th Oct.
I was up once in the night and stepped outside into the forest. Straight out of a horror film the spindly trees shrank back into the darkness. It was a completely clear night and the southern stars were out in full, a shooting star sailed past as I looked up. I went back to sleep in the cosy shelter where I had set my bed on a bench.
The sky was still clear in the morning which made for a chilly descent from the lagoon. I headed off early, scarf up around my face and not yet warmed up from pedalling, the wind blew any remnants of sleep from my body. As I came round the corner with a steep hillside on my left and a riverbank on my right I spotted three huemul, an endangered species of deer native to the southern andes. Two females and a male were grazing by side of the road and took little notice of me as I got closer. They were completely unafraid and hopped over the barrier ten metres in front of me and carried on up the hillside. I read later that there were only 1500 of them left in the wild.
The rest of the morning felt like 30 kilometres of very slight uphill, not strenuous but enough to prevent me gaining any speed, plus the wind had shifted around into a strong headwind. Spring had not quite made it up to the pass yet. The leafless deciduous trees gave the mountainsides a dark brown almost purple hue, bleeding into bare grey and brown rock patchy with snow. Even with streams of meltwater dripping by the forest felt dry, the sun and wind dispersing any humidity, a different world to the coastal rainforests I’d come through a few days before.
At the end of the pass was a steep drop into Villa Cerro Castillo, a small town at the foot of the towered fortress mountain from which it got its name. Continuing into the frosty headwind I wound down a section of switch-backs that overlooked the valley where sunshine beamed down between white clouds. At the bottom, numb from the wind, I took shelter in an old bus that had been converted into a cafe and thawed myself out by the gas heater. Over the next hour a range of travellers trickled in, amongst them a motorcyclist on his way down from Canada and hitchhikers from Israel and Spain.
The next town I wanted to spend some time in was Puerto Rio Tranquilo, still 120km away. I’d set my mind on getting some distance done today, despite the slow feel of the morning, so I aimed for a roadside camp that was marked on an wild-camping app, a further 57km ahead. It turned out to be more strenuous than I thought, especially once the paving stopped for good, marked by a sign, and the gravel road slowed my progress. The road climbed out of Villa Cerro Castillo and then down into a marshland where cows grazed knee-deep in the mud. Cars and buses threw up dust as they passed and the headwind continued to blow.
It then became a personal challenge to reach my decided camp, a determination that I questioned a few times as I passed potential campsites, but I carried on. The sun got lower and the light became golden, long shadows were cast towards me by every piece of gravel on the road. One final climb drained the last of my energy and I drifted slowly beside a small river. I got to a broken down shack which I knew marked the site and had to unpack the bike to get everything around a fence next to a stream. I set up my tent further into the forest to be hidden from the road and lay down exhausted, too tired to cook, and fell into a deep sleep, the only sounds the running of the stream and the occasional car beeping for luck as they passed the nearby shrine.
Austral Spring 