“I will cross the Andes on a bicycle,” I said. “It will be fun,” I said.
So I did cross the Andes, and it was (mostly) fun, but I did not in fact do it on a bicycle. I made a solid attempt, but one of the cardinal rules of safety in the outdoors is knowing when enough is enough.
The day started out well. I was at a campground in the charming foothills town of Los Queñes. A friendly dog sat on my feet while I brushed my teeth. A good omen, I figured.
I biked away from Los Queñes full of optimism and excitement. I love mountains – the way they make me feel small and the way they often make humanity bend to the whims of nature instead of the other way around. And obviously they’re just really friggin’ beautiful.
As I followed the dirt road into the Andes, the scenery became more rugged. Leafy green foothills morphed into jagged peaks. Lackadaisical brown creeks assumed a rapid and crystalline nature. The inclines became more aggressive, but still nothing I couldn’t handle.
Mining trucks passed by and the drivers waved at me happily. A few cars and motorcycles with young adventure-seekers gave me supportive beeps on the horn. I was enjoying biking on a road with relatively few vehicles, a sharp contrast to America’s Highway 1 in the summer.
At the intersection where you could turn off to either the mine or the border crossing, I thought to myself “great! Only 11km until immigration. That’s nothing.” I was planning to camp near the Chilean border post that night.
Perhaps it was this overconfidence that did me in, but I suspect my fate was sealed from the moment I chose Paso Vergara as the theoretical best place to enter Argentina. You see, I’d read about it in a book. The book didn’t make it sound too crazy. In fact, the climb up the western side was barely mentioned. All it really talked about was the beauty of biking across the plateau at the top, past glaciers and waterfalls and colourful rock faces.
But the climb… well. The climb.
Biking up a hill is one thing. Biking in gravel is also one thing. Both of these things are very possible and I have done both and I even enjoyed them to some extent. But biking up a series of extremely steep hills in gravel that is actually just mounds of loose dirt with large rocks in it? This is another thing altogether.
After the turnoff to the mine, the road got steeper and steeper. The gravel got looser and looser. I would be biking along (at a snail’s pace due to the incline) when I would hit a section that was nothing but dry, loose dirt with the occasional small boulder. And since I had almost zero momentum, down I would go. Usually I could catch myself by throwing out a foot, but twice I ate dirt. And speaking of dirt, I’m not sure I have ever been so dirty in my life. Like, downright filthy. Just a walking mud cake complete with sweat stains.
The texture of the road also made pushing the bike close to impossible. There was just no way to get a solid footing, so I would be trying to push my incredibly heavy bicycle up a nasty hill, and instead I would be sliding down the hill, regardless of how firmly I dug my feet in. The hike-a-bike express was incapable of leaving the station. There was just no winning.
So it was slow going, but I was still confident I could make it to the immigration outpost. This confidence may have been denial. My only other option was turning back, and at that point turning around seemed like it would be almost as difficult as continuing forward.
I went about 5km in an hour. The immigration outpost was still 6km away. In seven hours, I’d gone less than 50km total. Some police officers came along, asked what I was doing, gave me a long stare, and then told me to be careful. This was the point where I started to wonder if I had made a bad decision.
The universe must have noticed me. I had just fallen off my bike for the second time (into a pile of rocks, very soft landing, real nice). I was considering whether I should A) turn around, B) set up camp for the night on the side of the road, or C) abandon my bicycle and wander off into the Andes to become a nomadic Bigfoot-like creature, when a red truck pulled up.
“¡Hola!” A smiling man said, followed by some Spanish I didn’t understand. With him was a friendly-looking woman in a red polka dot dress, and a two little kids who were practically bouncing off the walls of the truck.
“Yo hablo un poco español,” I answered, because it was the first thing that came to mind, which is how a lot of my Spanish conversations seem to go.
“You speak English? You want a ride? The border closes at 6.”
There was a moment, ever so brief, where my pride tried to get the better of me. I was crossing the Andes on a bicycle! That does not involve a truck!
But I came to my senses almost as quickly as I had departed from them, and I said “yeah. Muchas gracias.”
So we loaded the bike into the back of the truck, and then we loaded me into the cab of the truck, and I properly met my new travel companions – Marcello and his wife Maria-Jose, and their children Clara (7) and Pedro (3). They are possibly the nicest people in the entire world and I think I might be forever in their debt. The kids are also the cutest kids on earth.
We drove up, up, and up to the border post. The Chilean authorities barely batted an eye at this Chilean family with a Canadian cyclist tagging along. We all laughed at the antics of Clara and Pedro, who collected every brochure from the immigration building (most of which were about things like the laws of Chile, what you are and are not allowed to bring into Chile, and other such topics that are naturally appealing to children of all ages).
And then we hopped back in the truck and kept going. I had abandoned my plan of camping at the border crossing, because one thing I knew was that the climb only got harder after that, and if the first part was too much the second half would surely do me in.
The road got steeper and rougher and narrower and twistier, and I thanked my lucky stars for Marcello, his family, and his red truck. I would have been climbing that hill for a week.
We reached the top, and soon come upon the Argentinian immigration building (which was far less well-appointed than the Chilean one). We were greeted by scruffy dogs and two men, one of which was very affable and one of which has possibly never smiled in his life. We were stamped into Argentina, and we set off across the plateau.
The plateau was fairly flat, as plateaus tend to be, but I decided to stay in the truck. It was over a hundred kilometres to the next town, and I was in the mood for a safe option. We bounced along, taking in the scenery, except for Pedro, who was asleep.
My impromptu hitchhiking experience turned out to be a great opportunity to practice my Spanish. We covered topics like bears, dogs, and the timeless animated horse movie, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. I said clever things like “I like goats” and “in Canada, we have mountains.”
Marcello and his family were headed to Brazil, because they wanted to go to the beach. I guess Brazil has much better beaches than Chile, because that is a very long drive. In their twenties, Marcello and Maria-Jose hitchhiked to Ecuador from Chile. Marcello works from home and is trying to learn English. Clara was thrilled that we both like strawberries. They gave me a ham and cheese sandwich because apparently my face looked hungry. Pedro taught me how to do a high-five with sandwiches (you just press your sandwiches together).
It was not the Andean crossing I had imagined, but it was lovely. I had a great time.
The only downside? The scenery was incredible, but I have almost no pictures of it. They were being so nice that I felt bad asking to stop and take photos. I also have no photos of the family. So the trip will mostly live in my memory.
They dropped me off in the teeny tiny town of Los Loicas. Goodbye involved a lot of hugs, and a big confused smile from Pedro, who was probably wondering where this dirty lady who doesn’t know how to talk had come from, and where she was now going.
I thought about camping, but there was an inn right there, and on account of being incredibly dirty, I decided that what I really needed was a shower and I was willing to pay pretty much any amount for it. And if the shower included bed and breakfast, so be it.
And so I spent my first night in Argentina, several days ahead of schedule, in a big bed with an orange duvet, and all the dirt went down the drain. And I did indeed cross the Andes – in a red truck with the nicest people in the world.
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