After the nice civilised break in El Chalten it was now time to hit the road again, the destination was El Calafate, which we planned on reaching in two days. We were banking on a glorious tail wind to propel us to our first halfway destination, which we had, sort of.
Let me explain. The wind primarily comes from the west, which is true, however when there is a valley to funnel said wind it can change direction a little. This is exactly what happened about 10 miles from El Chalten. Here we started to cycle along side a large lake and we felt the full force of the wind. We weren't cycling into it, we were cycling with it coming in on our right side and it was so strong that at times we had the bikes lent over at nearly 30% to keep pedalling! A couple of tourists in a car, who were coming the opposite direction were so amused by our cycling technique they took a photo, and shouted for us to stop, but not in that wind!
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| Away from the mountains.... |
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| ....and back to the sun.. |
We did stop at one point to put some more layers on and just before this one of my rain covers for my pannier bags blew off, so I quickly dumped my bike and went running after it (wind assisted, I'm sure it gave me a PB for 100m). We carried on for a little while and then turned a corner and the wind was on our backs again and with it came a lot of relief. It was to be short lived!
We covered 90km in 3 hours 23mins, which we were really chuffed with, but with every up there must be a down or with every head there must be a tail and when we turned right at a junction to join ruta 40 again, the down was waiting for us! A constant westerly head wind was blowing, which then kept us company for the next 20km. The 20km was to take 2 hours and even with sharing the load we found it hard to make any head way. My cracks started to appear and on a couple of occasions when I wasn't concentrating the wind took me off the road and onto the not so smooth gravel at the side.
We plodded on and soon saw a sign saying 3km to La Leona and our campsite. It may as well have been 30km as this section seemed to take an age, but eventually we made it! We staggered into the hotel and found it had a nice looking cafe, where we had a welcome hot chocolate, then the owner showed us the camping area which was very sheltered with hot showers. The tent was pitched and food was cooked, we said our prayers that the wind would die down (who ever lives upstairs must be off travelling too, as it was still very windy in the morning)!!
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