Muddled in the dust of chalky gravel, one lone road curling ahead like a frayed whip across the border. Scavenging empty haciendas for a battered wall to camp behind, away from the clutches of 60 mph [100 kmh] headwinds.
A weathered face, a familiar wilderness, pockmarked with fishing huts and scraggy tundra. I’d forgotten all these colors, the same figgy sapphires and sage mosses from my highest mountain passes in Peru, or those first few weeks across the Arctic Circle, as if biking back to where I’d started.
The final days, one last climb. I rode through sunsets and slept on the ground wherever possible: on a towering cliff face above the Strait of Magellan or inside a plywood refugio, the only wind shelter for at least one hundred miles; outside a police station where officers warmed my soul with steaming gourds of yerba mate, an Argentine staple; and then in the back room of a famous bakery whose owner kept a few free beds for tired bikepackers.
At the end I was expecting tears, some kind of quiet introspection, but instead found quite the opposite. I shouted and rallied, “One more hill, let’s go, faster, faster,” like a boxer jabbing at the air as they enter the ring. This wasn’t much like me, but sometimes we reveal the most of ourselves when we are least like ourselves. It felt good to be something else, 20,000 miles later. It felt good to be done.
One of my oldest friends flew in to meet me at the finish line with a bottle of champagne. We took a victory lap through every taproom in Ushuaia and found a local Argentine barbecue joint so good that we went back twice. We took a boat along the Beagle Channel to watch Magellanic penguins chase each other across the islands. I tried to make soup with my leftover bikepacking rations and it turned out hilariously terrible.
“All souls come here to rub the sharp edges off each other. This isn’t suffering. It’s erosion.” – Chuck Palahniuk
by donivanberube