Towards the Andes

A southern hemisphere summer fades

I’m writing this from beside a lake somewhere in the southern Andes, a few days from crossing into Chile. As someone who started writing in a time when a travel blog was normal, as someone who obviously now has more politics and reporting in what I write, it feels novel but nice to write something as ordinary as an update on where I am and what I've been doing. I'm also for the first time adding some paid-subscriber content, as a thanks to those who pay for me to keep this blog. The instinctive question of "what will I write?", when I've just cycled across Argentina and am looking up at the mountains, is strange when - realistically - of course the journey of getting here is itself interesting.

At least I hope it is. In truth and that journey across Argentina has - entirely without expectation of as much - been one of the hardest I've ever done by bicycle. The country is enormous and is empty. "Mucha nada", as I said to one truck driver in the middle of the pampa and he replied, clarifying, "mucha nada". Hundreds of kilometres pass with nothing, and it is beautiful but sparse.

Beyond even the distance - which can be prepared for - or the emptiness - which I often love - has been the wind. I have never known such wind, and I have cycled in both storms and steppes before this, so I don't say this lightly. The wind has spent a week crushing me, crushing creative thoughts, crushing any effort at planning logistics. You give it your all not really to move forwards but only to stay upright. 50km days is about what becomes possible. A couple of truckers scooped me off roadsides, a lapse from cycling that troubles my conscience and I find embarrassing, but console myself with the fact it would probably be still more embarrassing to persist in such efforts at futility.