3 — Contra vientos glaciares (March 25)
From Cerro Castillo (Chile) we cycled eastwards, crossing again the border to Argentina. We forgot doing the “check-out” at the Chilean border and only noticed 15 km down the road at the Argentinian immigration office. 🤓 So we had to leave our bikes at the Argentinan border control and hitchhike forth & back to Chile to get the bureaucracy done.
The next days we saw mostly one thing: pure pampa & horizon. Lots of guanacos — some sort of llama of the pampa.🦙Here and there rabbits & hunting birds like condors. Pedaling for days in this vast nothingness lets us again feel somewhat great and belittled at the same
Time. However, it feels even greater to know that we would only cycle pampa for some 400-500 km — not 4000 km.🙃 What one could easily do in Argentina.
We had some 2-3 amazing cycling days going east pushed by tail winds; but also pretty bad days going west against head winds. Just there in the pampa we learned: the west winds are simply a thermal circulation. On sunny/summer days the pampa in the east heats up and hot air rises. (Very) cold air from the glaciers flows close to the ground from west to east replacing the risen hot air. High above warm air flows from east to west to cool down and sink onto the ice masses of the glaciers. On sunny/summer days this huge thermic machine starts in the morning and will usually first stop in the late evening after the pampa has cooled down.
The last 90 km to the city of Chaltén we started off at a perfectly asphalted and flat street with an average of 20 km/h at 9 am — during the day our speed dropped to 7-8 km/h because of the head winds. After a day of pedaling we hardly made the last kilometers to Chálten since the wind was stopping us in the flat pampa.
In Calafate we stayed 2 days visiting the Glacier Perito Moreno. It’s huge and very impressive — and just as touristy because of its accessibility and size. It just recently in 2020 started to retreat due to climate crisis. Before it was supposed to be stable. Compared with the glaciers of the Alps it’s again impressive: a sheer endless icy front up to 70 m high. In German I would call it a “Touri-Klatsche” seeing the amount of tourists. The Argentinians know pretty well how to sell the glacier: To visit one usually takes a bus (40€ forth & back) and has to pay the entrance fee of the national park as a foreigner: an additional 40€. Since 160€ each for seeing a glacier were a tiny bit too much for our budget, we decided to hitchhike instead of cycling.
by knOlle92