Bright Lights, Big City!

Coyhaique is all of that minus the bright and big! But after a month in the wild anything with paved roads, cell phone coverage and a supermarket stocked with bread, milk, fresh fruits and vegetables galore is a big walking, big talking city! We rolled in after a two day ride from Villa Cerro Castillo where cockadoodledooing cocks reign the dust-blown, gravel streets where dogs lazily sleep the day away waiting for the occasional chase that´s inspired by any passing vehicle and a supermarket is anything but super.

A friendly Aussie, Chris, who joined us on the road for a while.

Even the road to big-town Coyhaique was paved and after endless kilometers of various grades of gravel which I have no doubt that booting the urban myth of eskimos having more than 20 words to define the different types of snow encountered in the north, that the various grades of gravel on the Carretera Austral will for certain be coined by cyclists. There´s a slate gravel resembling broken up blackboards that slide under the tires, cobblestone gravel, dust a/o mud producing gravel, sandpit gravel in which your tires sink as if you hit quicksand or got an instant flat, deep rolling gravel that´s impossible to pedal and the notorious washboard gravel which the Germans cleverly coined, it is exactly what it sounds like and after a few hours of riding the washboard you forearms have taken so much shaking and tenderizing that they resemble cooked meat that´s ready to fall right off the bone, no knife needed! This washboard will shake the sense out of you, I´ve caught myself various times dropping my jaw and letting out a big AHHHHHH, so I can hear each bump where it breaks the monotony of my humming voice. Yeah, fun and deep is the life of a cyclist! The other day, shook silly by gravel and suffering water deprivation about 15 km short of rolling into Villa Cerro Castillo I had a desert mirage optical (and wishful) illusion that the gravel ahead was actually a silken paved road and that the

bumpy shaking would come to an end! Nope!

Entering Villa Cerro Castillo

Then finally it did!

Villa Cerro Castillo was a meat fest. It was my first hard ride since being sick and I arrived 2, my hunger and I. We feasted on giant hamburgers and steaks. We combed the fields searching for a gaucho (beany wearing cowboy) to slaughter us a lamb, we were looking for 1/2 a lamb or a leg would do. We found our man. He was a quintessential Chilean gaucho, handsome in his own right, we saw him from a few fields away and he started towards us on horseback, mountains in the background, his clan of proud, bandana wearing dogs at his heals. We tried to negotiate 1/2 a lamb, as there was no way to throw a whole lamb carcus to the backs of our bikes, but with no such luck. He didn´t want to get stuck with 1/2 for himself, reasonable. The beauty of it was this soft spoken, toothless, smiling gaucho actually would have slaughtered us a lamb if we would have give him 30 minutes and been prepared to take the whole thing.

My partners in crime on the lamb-leg search

We went back into town hopeful, our mission had not yet been forfeited. We scored a lamb leg in the local meat shop, picked it up the following morning and Ryan bungeed the leg of lamb onto the back of his bike to be taken over a switchback pass.

Lamb-leg bungeed onto Ryan´s bike

That night at the top of the mountain in our peaceful campsite we grilled the lamb leg over a bonfire and celebrated with wine and burnt veggies, Ryan, Chris and I descended on our fiest like savages.

Like that we arrived to the big city of Coyhaique, sweat covered and bloody handed. We rode good and hard into the northernly winds pushing forward nearly 70km in one day, we earned the two nights we had in a bed and the one small stretch of Route 7 pavement that brought us into the big city.