And so it begins...

December 9, 2012 - We left La Paz and fought traffic for a good twenty five kilometers before we could get into third gear. Our first stop was Oruro, a necessary evil on the way to Uyuni.

We found a dumpy hotel for way too much money, but it served the purpose. In the evening, we went for pizza and stumbled upon a place that only did pizza the right way. There was happiness in Oruro after all.

The next morning we were rolling before sunrise as we feared the road to Uyuni from all reports we had read was a nasty one. To our surprise, we found a brand new perfectly paved road and made it to Uyuni early in the afternoon. For the first time in our so far eight month trip, we ended up in a town where there was no wifi service anywhere, so we were relegated to using Spanish keyboards on faded CRT monitors. Uyuni is a dump of a town, filled with tour operators, white tourists and very grumpy and unfriendly locals. The 2012 Uyuni smile contest produced no winners, only whiners.

The local train graveyard is quite famous and we wandered over to shoot some pictures. There are a boatload more under the "Slideshows" tab.



The tour we booked was a three day jaunt into the Salar de Uyuni, massive salt flats and other unearthly terrain.



Some of the Salar is covered in water this time of year.



We didn't spend three days on a bunch of salt flats but visited a few other sites in the same area. The camera got a workout.



All in all the tour was a grand success and we didn't have to subject our bikes to a bunch of salt water. Instead, we got carted around in a Lexus 450 4x4 which certainly was very comfortable. Given some of the terrain, I have more respect for these things now as I always thought they were wannabe off-road machines. We climbed some hills I would not want to tackle with a Land Rover LT110.

A few hundred kilometers of fantastic off-road riding put me at a very small border crossing a day or two later.



Before I cleared the border, I had to pay a two dollar bribe at the police station before I got my exit stamp. I asked for a receipt first and the only answer I got was that everyone paid it. I am done with Bolivia and its people. On to Chile.

Bummer that you met some unfriendlys....Glad the airhead is treating you well! Thanks for the fantastic report and breathtaking photos!

December 10, 2012 - Farewell to Bolivia, onwards to Chile. The border on the Chilean side was easy, all of five minutes, polite nods and glances, a single piece of paper printed for the bike, a few signatures and I was on my way. On to paved roads, as promised by our Bolivian driver earlier.

Alas, the reality was painfully different. The roads got worse as the day progressed and four hundred kilometers of gravel and broken up pavement later, I arrived in Calama. The sun was weighing on the horizon, but with only a mere hundred kilometers to go to San Pedro de Atacama, I pressed on. Who knew pavement could be so satisfying.

San Pedro de Atacama is a dusty crop of life in the middle of the desert, wise to the tourist dollar. A simple room with shared bathroom was $26, the highest price encountered on this trip. And that was a cheap place. However, the surroundings were worth it. I rode the bike out to Valle de la Luna and waited for the sunset the next day.



I didn't venture much further than Valle de la Luna and took it easy the day after. Aside from the church, there really is nothing of esthetic value in San Pedro.



The next stop was Taltal, a whopping six hundred kilometers further south, but this time all on smooth pavement. The famous hand in the desert needed its picture taken. Sadly it's defaced with all sorts of graffiti these days.



Taltal is an odd little place, half town, half shanty town. Some attempts to spruce it up, such as a decent Plaza de Armas and even a few small sections of malecon, overlooking the water. The hotel I stayed in looked more like a comfortable living room with some quarters surrounding it. It was quite busy and very casual.

A walk around town scared up an odd sight. A German-plated BMW sidecar bastard.







I must admit I don't get sidecars. You're combining all the negatives of motorcycling and automobiles with none of the benefits of either. Beauty in madness I suppose. Tomorrow I'm off to La Serena, where I'll pause for a few days.

You're welcome! Yeah, Bolivia wasn't too friendly. Chile is a lot better. Glad to be off the plateau. Been on or around 12,000 feet for weeks now. Back to sea level.

Why is there a hand in the desert? What are those high pressure hoses attached to in the front of that sidecar?

BTW, I said that once about sidecars & the owner said they have the advantages of both bikes and cars. Change your frame; change the game.

It's called art

Oil cooler

Not this thing... Just look at those tires. It's bastardized.

I've added the Garmin Mapsource files for each country. Most are tracks as ridden, some have waypoints of hotels and repair shops. For the US, some exist as routes and tracks. By default, the end of each track is a hotel where I stayed the night. Enjoy. http://www.nohorizons.net/2012/countries.html

Put on meditation music and read your thread for a second time.
A modest request, more portraiture please.

Long ago in England three wheels were road taxed as motorcycles this encouraged sidecars and three wheeled cars like Morgan.
One of the better outfits is offered by the Dutch, EML Sidecars.
Back in the day the provider would commute via motorbike and only use the chair for family outings.

December 23, 2012 - From Taltal, I rode to La Serena and paused for a few days. It was a comfortable and warm stop. Interesting conversations with pair of New Zealand lawyers, just starting on their careers, lasted well into the night a few times.

La Serena is a beach town, so I made the obligatory pilgrimage to the beach to observe sand and water, personally unmoved by the combination that makes people flock to such destinations.



A walk around town resulted in a meager collection of pictures, although the local museum had a few worthy items.



From La Serena, the road continued south to Santiago. The main road in Chile is quite nice and doesn't differ in quality from anything you would find in North America or Europe.



Gas is about as expensive and a diet pop at the local Shell Select convenience store sets you back about $1.5, similar prices to back home. The only thing vastly more expensive are the hotels. Travel is certainly not getting cheaper.

Santiago was the next stop. An earlier inquiry led to a decent hostal where I parked the bike for a few days. One of the pursuits was a new tire. After twenty one thousand kilometers, it was time to retire the Shinko rear tire. It had another few thousand kilometers of life left on it, but finding a decent replacement further south might be less convenient.

Santiago disappointed a bit in that I had a more romanticized view of it somehow. It's just a big city with a few decent buildings and a nice fine art museum.



In Santiago I met up again with Jan who was temporarily distracted by a woman he'd encountered in Columbia and we rode on further south, direction Chillan and Villarrica.

Great pics!

Is that a shrunken head? :huh

Thanks!

It is indeed. There are a few of them sprinkled around museums in Ecuador, Colombia and now here. Pretty spooky stuff.

December 29, 2012 - A few days of rain in Santiago set the scene for the next week. An uneventful ride to Chillan and Villarrica over perfectly straight roads ended in rain.

In Chillan, the only mildly amusing event was a dinner at the local fire station. The place operates as a restaurant and serves quite decent meals for mere peanuts, at least by Chilean standards. Our next stop was Villarrica, where we arrived at the start of a rainy afternoon. Despite inquiring here and there, we failed to find accommodation that wasn't stratospherically priced, although the town itself was dead, not a tourist to be seen. So we pressed on to Pucon, a tourist town twenty five kilometers further.

In Pucon, we found a place just as the heavens opened up. And the rain continued for three full days. Not just a wee bit of rain, but volumes sufficient to drench you in a few steps. Although there were some gaps, the rain didn't let up much. On day three, we managed to go for a walk during a break in the weather. We walked past a unguarded gated community and ended up in a nice enclave. It could have been West Vancouver, with huge houses tucked away in the greenery, out of sight from the main road.



From Pucon, we rode on to Puerto Varas, which is beautifully located on a lake with a volcano towering in the background.



When you are traveling, you sometimes doubt the sanity of it all. Talking to others, mostly non-travelers back home, does not help this feeling. But just in case you get the idea that riding a motorcycle around the world, without a single hotel booking, map or guidebook strikes you as foolish, rest assured there are always people out there crazier than you.



The car above is an '80s or so Polish copy of a Fiat 500. It's propped up on the curb because the driver just changed a wheel bearing. A few feet further we found a 1957 Jawa, all of 250 cc, single cylinder.



Also present were two Trabants.





Note the ingenious fuel lines coming from the tanks strapped to the roof. Did I mention all this stuff was two-stroke?

From Quellon, we took the night ferry to Chaiten to start on the Carretera Austral. We ran into a few more overlanders and I ended up chatting with Kobus (from liferemotely.com) and his wife Jessica. Jessica's write-up was the one we used to help us with the convoluted process of shipping the bikes from Panama to Colombia. It was good to be able to thank her in person.

And if you think riding a motorcycle across the world is expensive, try this on for size. A full-size truck with all the trappings.



We stayed in Chaiten for a day to relax, do laundry and repair an electrical problem. A walk around Chaiten puzzled us at first, as there were so many abandoned houses. A little inquiring and some web research filled in the blanks as to what happened here. In 2008, a volcano eruption wiped away half the town, with the balance of the residents being resettled for a year elsewhere.

The signs of destruction are still visible everywhere, with houses buried in runoff from the volcano.



And then we hopped onto the Carretera Austral.

Are those guys in the Trabants sponsored? Or are stickers just what they do for kicks?

Is it these guys?!?!
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Sponsored, for some of it.

Yup

January 5, 2013 - The Carretera Austral started off nice enough. Beautiful pavement and great vistas. Fifty kilometers from Chaiten, the road as we knew it ended and gravel started. It was the start of a long and sometimes painful experience.

The unending battering we and the bikes endured came with lots of spectacular highlights and the next six days proved to be very much worth the effort. Our first decent stop was Puyuhuapi. The weather was ok, the vistas not too spectacular and the lady who ran the hostal was muttering at every turn. In some ways the surroundings looked very much like British Columbia in spring or fall.



The road varied - a lot. This is the butter-smooth six lane highway variety of the Carretera Austral.



On day two, the weather cleared up quite a bit.



The pictures below give you a good idea of what the general vistas are like while riding the Carretera Austral.





One of our stops was Puerto Tranquilo, where we visited the Catedral De Marmol, a marble structure in the middle of the lake, surrounded by lots of caves.





After six days, we were ready for a change - and paved roads, so we escaped via Cochrane and Chile Chico to Argentina.

Was there much traffic on that gravel road?

10-20 cars per hour I guess

January 8, 2013 - We left Chile with the idea of arriving in a grand country, once the fourth or fifth richest in the world. What we found was a hollowed-out shell of its former self.

Our first stop in Argentina was the town of Perito Moreno, a dusty outcrop on the intersection to Routa 40, the infamous road to the southern most areas of the continent. Looking around for a place to stay, we were shocked at the prices quoted for accommodation. We ended up in the smallest room on our trip so far for the princely sum of US$64.

A trip to the supermarket was reminiscent of my time in Yugoslavia, months before the war broke out a few decades ago. From the doom and gloom on people's faces, the near-empty produce and bakery shelves, it was clear this country had been brought to its knees. We fled the next day, south along Routa 40 towards El Chalten, at the foot of Los Glaciares National Park.



Although some of Routa 40 is paved, long stretches, hundreds of kilometers on end, are very badly worn gravel roads. It made for a back-breaking day. We covered five hundred and ninety kilometers to El Chalten and arrived exhausted. There, it took us a few tries to find a place that had room.

The Argentinean time-warp continued, with cars from my youth dotting the streets among the fancier tourist-funded vehicles.



El Chalten is a place of contrasts. You can either pay $7 for coffee and eat decent steak at a fancy restaurant, or you can go to the local supermarket and get candies in lieu of change. Credit card usage is discouraged due to inflation.



Here again we found empty store shelves most of the time. I lucked out once and arrived when supplies arrived, with people mobbing the store and virtually emptying it out in a matter of hours. One guy bought all the yogurt that came in, about fifty liters of it. It took him and two buddies to carry it all out.

Argentina has all sorts of esoteric exchange controls which make life complicated and expensive. Locals can't use a bank card outside the country without incurring significant penalties. The official exchange rate at the time we were there was 4.8 pesos for US$1. The black market rates in civilized settings like restaurants was 5.6 pesos and on the street around 6.8. And then there were the lineups to buy gas.

Economic insanity aside, the natural surroundings are spectacular.



Our first hike was to Laguna Torre. The weather was debatable with intermittent rain and cloudy views. I took a few pictures but none survived a critical look later on. The next day was rained out and we stayed inside, using the meager bandwidth in our hostal to browse the web.

Day three was a success, as the weather cleared up and we hiked for about six hours to Lago de Los Tres and back.



In the evening, I wandered around town a bit and bumped into this.



I had inadvertently found Nacho, the VW Van owned by Brad and Sheena, a couple I'd emailed with a number of times months ago.

The next morning we met up with them before heading out.



The evening before, I'd asked where they were heading next, and it turns out they were shipping the van to Asia around the same time we were planning to fly our bikes to Australia. In mere minutes we'd changed tack and decided to share a container with them. After enjoying a cup of coffee with them, we rode on to El Calafate.