For the first 2 days I felt great - rested and keen to "attack" the hills, I found the gusting winds fun, adding a new element to the daily battle of negotiating the roads. By day three, the novelty of being blown all over the place, sliding around on the gravel, and jolting over the ruts had worn a bit thin though... My whole body hurt, and in places the road was unspeakably bad. There are no words really adequate to describe it, you have to ride on it with loaded panniers and no suspension for several days to really appreciate the full glory. I dreamt of reaching the tarmac just one day away...
At one point, after a particularly bad patch of road that is painful just to recall, we reached a beautiful stretch. A smooth, hard-packed mud road winding through the trees and I found myself grinning from ear to ear. The sheer joy of being able to ride effortlessly was so intense, it was quite remarkable, and rather thought-provoking. I will remember the feeling forever, but was it really such a good thing that something so simple as a few minutes of easy cycling could give me so much pleasure? Being as we were in the middle of nowhere, life had been reduced to nothing much more than sleeping, eating and cycling. I think it´s great to get away from the regular bustle of everyday life at home (and things like blogs...), and to appreciate the small things, but if something so minor was so wonderful, didn´t that mean that the rest of the time was just too hard?! It`s something I´m still pondering...
The views though were just great, and the sun often shone - we saw a heumal, a rare local deer, just metres away, and of course lakes, rivers and mountains...
Despite the condition of the roads and the wind, we made good progress, and after four days, reached the long dreamt-for tarmac. And started climbing immediately. Which was fine - 
we knew that we had to go over a high pass, and it was rewarding to reach the top - great views and nothing but 80kms of flat roads between us and our destination, the town of Coyhaique. But then we rounded the corner and found... WIND. Parallelling this road north through Chile, there is the infamous Ruta 40 through Argentina - miles of dirt road through the flat and windy pampas. The Chilean road is much wetter and hillier, but there is more to see, and the whole point is, it isn´t windy. That´s the deal - the risk of rain, endless hills, but no wind. Or so I´d thought as I battled ahead at 4-8 kms an hour. I´m sure that in the UK, less strong winds blow rooves off houses... The others laughed at my frustration (having cycled across tierra del fuego, they´d dealt with days on end of much stronger winds, and were more than entitled to tease me!). It took me a while to come to terms with the fact that there was nothing I could do but continue to grind ahead in my lowest gear with the wind whistling in my ears and I found it soul-destroyingly horrible. There was nothing enjoyable about it in the slightest, and there wasn´t even anything interesting to look at! Not that you could really look anywhere but a metre ahead without risking being blown off the road...Coyhaique itself is the biggest town on the carretera austral, and a pretty chilled-out place to spend a few days of wind-recovery therapy (which involves eating lots of chocoate cake...). As I´m running out of time to get back to Buenos Aires in time for my flight home, unfortunately I´m going to have to say goodbye to the winds and take a bus for the next section though... And then its back on my bike to cycle across the border and back into Argentina. More hills and bad roads, but fingers crossed, since I´m heading East, I might even have a tailwind... I can always hope!
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