If you have been watching our Spot Messenger, you will have noticed that we have not moved for a while.  We would like to dedicate this period of idleness to Wells Fargo Bank who managed to deactivate all my debit/credit cards leaving us without access to our communal funds.  They have “rush” shipped a new card and apologized for accidentally deleting access to 3 of my cards.

What does RTS do when not on our bikes.  A fair amount of nothing, usually, but we were lucky enough to meet another epic bike tourist named El Turco, taking a hiatus in his hometown here in San Juan and his friend Niko living at the Casa Loca.  El Turco is a bike tourist/climber/human extroardinaire, and when he saw our Xtracycles he knew his lifestyle required one…and so he and Goat rounded up some scrap metal and welded one together.   If you get the time, you gotta check out his blog, currently featuring a great climbing video he put together:

Here a few of the pictures of the birth of an Argentine Xtracycle:

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               Arriving like a rogue wave, a giant dust storm enveloped our campsite during the middle of the night en route to San Juan – a 160 kilometer stretch of desert in a region somehow described without irony as “the fertile valley.â€?  True, mountains rise up on both sides making it a valley, but exactly what is considered fertile in this windswept scrub covered region has been lost on us.  

               Disaster seemed to blow in with the dust, knocking all three bikes to the ground and scattering our stuff across the desert.  Everything coated with a fine layer of sand to be dusted off before a daylong struggle against the headwind.

Morale seems to take the brunt of the wind, which seems to offer very little in favor of the bike tourist.  At the end of a long hour against the wind, there is no vista, other than the dusty, almost apocalyptic horizon, that you have seen throughout the day.  Time slows, and kilometers grow longer.

               Though we have largely passed the most brutal aspects (high elevation, and epic 4,000m ascents) of the Andes, our path brings us new challenges we have not had to consider for years.  Since southern Mexico, we have had very few nights where we could sleep out under the stars without expecting a rain shower.   Somewhere in Bolivia, I remember looking up the night sky, strange and unfamiliar, no big dipper, no orion´s belt. Though I had been in the southern hemisphere for months, it seems that not until we reached the arid altiplano, did the cloud cover vanish and the sky opened up.

               Bolivia was a lonely country, outside the few big cities.  Every town we passed through seemed like a ghost town, doors of vacant houses in their town squares flapping in the wind.  If a tienda existed, we almost certainly had to track down the owner so we could buy what little provisions they could offer, from canned peaches to llama jerky.   (more…)