By the fourth day, the rain and snow had finally relented, and we departed the town of Ushuaia with one objective in mind: to ride the fifty miles that remained of the most southerly road on earth. We were burning to complete it, to ride until the road and the soil and the grass dried up, to take off our boots and stand on a shore of whole, uncrushed seashells and look out towards whatever lay beyond the limits of this land.
Yet, before we could get there, one matter of great importance still needed to be addressed. While Nathan had installed heated handlebar grips on the bike in anticipation of the cold of Patagonia, the winds were truly merciless and the skin of his knuckles were pummeled flaky and red. And while we had hoped to find mangas, handlebar muffs—or sleeves, as they were locally called)—before our arrival in Ushuaia, we’d had no luck whatsoever. It wouldn’t have been the first time we had rigged something up ourselves. But, perhaps, a cheap foam windshield screen and some duct tape—both of which we’d seen at local grocery stores—would do the trick. We pulled into a parking lot, made our purchases, and got to work.
By the time we left Ushuaia, the muffs were already showing signs of fatigue from constant battering by the wind. But the sun was bright. Our hearts were surging and the end of the road promised to be beautiful. A few lonely farmhouses dotted the road on our right, and brilliant, snow-capped mountains lined the sea to our left. With only twenty-five kilometers to go, we slowly rolled to a stop. Just ahead, a sign hung from a heavy chain was slung across the road. What did it say? Was there a detour?
It was no desviación—the road was closed on the orders of the Argentine military. Had we missed a turn-off somewhere? We consulted iOverlander again, but all the coordinates indicated that this was indeed the end of the road. What? We scrolled through more iOverlander entries and came to a post from two years prior. Two years to the day, in fact—again, the road had been closed by the military. We looked around in disbelief. Now, a work crew of some sort was stepping over the chain.
No entry, please, they called out, in advance of our query. That settled it.
Take a good look around, I thought. This is the furthest south we’re going to get.
We were disappointed, but didn’t want to head back into town to wait for the end of the road to re-open. For, who knew when that, or the next storm-free forecast, would be? More than the Argentine military, the universe seemed to be telling us that the utmost end of the road was not for us to traverse. Indeed, as our traveling friends posted their celebrations on Instagram only a few days later, the end of the road was free and clear.
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The farthest south we were going to get. Photo by Nathan Sharp.
We had learned and re-learned that plans always derailed in our best interest. As the breadth of our experiences and strength of our intuitions grew, our need for experience to confirm or fulfill expectations dwindled. So, we promptly turned around and made our way to the shores of Lago Fagnano. Temperatures dropped down to freezing that night, and our shared pot of spaghetti and broth chilled in the air faster than we could slurp it down.
I barely slept, unable to warm up my feet. While it was still very dark, I awoke with the certainty of some kind of large, four-legged animal sniffling and snorting around our tent. Pine needles shifted crisply under its footsteps in the cold, utter quiet. I didn’t dare breathe or move, and glanced at Nathan, who slept soundly. But by the time I had gathered the courage to silently prop myself up and peer out through the mesh of tent, the creature had gone.
The next morning, the top of the tent was velvety with snow and the cold seared down to our finger bones as we broke down camp. Backing out of the campsite, the bike hit a gnarled root poking up from the duff and toppled to the ground. Nathan untangled himself from the still roaring machine, cursing, and flung his helmet away from him in a rage. It thudded down on the forest floor against a tree trunk. I retreated inward and silently retrieved the expensive, top-of-the-line Schuberth helmet as Nathan scrambled to shut off the petcock. Anger welled up inside me. To throw his helmet, of all things. Why did he always have to make an unpleasant situation worse? I wasn’t going to let it go. Nope, not me. Not that day.
When you crack your helmet, I began coldly, what are going to wear on your stupid head? Sometimes—even now, with only a month to go—we were the same frustrated, impatient kids that we were when we left. Our first morning northward was off to a rocky start.
Turns out, it was nothing a little warmth and caffeinated cheer from the nearest panadería couldn’t cure. We had smoothed things over by the time we were pulling up to the curb in front of the famed Panadería La Union, and were giggling over my choice of insult. Portraits of wader-wearing men cradling their prize bass catches from Lago Fagnano plastered the walls inside the bakery, and once we were sufficiently thawed, we began planning our route northwards.
We knew that the only Chilean road that we could ride northward was accessible from Puerto Montt, which lay a little more than 2,400 km north of us. By land, our only option was to turn around and retrace our steps up Argentina’s Ruta 40. But what Argentina possessed in a single highway through arid, monotonous steppes and desert, peppered with guanacos, armadillos, and ñandú, Chile possessed in milky, sea glass-colored fjords discarded by glaciers. It possessed channels rippling with dolphins and mist-stitched forests. Northwards, via four days of port-hopping out of Chile’s Puerto Natales, it would be.
The wind snatched at our faces and parted our eyelashes as we wolfed down the salami, cheese, and tomato sandwiches that we had purchased at La Union before joining the usual song and dance of Customs procedures. To be honest, the Chilean agents probably wouldn't have made a fuss about the cured meat or bread—it was the sliced tomatoes, the frutas, that would have gotten us in a pickle.
Looking like Hell on Wheels in Punta Arenas. Photo by Diana Juárez.
We arrived at the Chilean town of Porvenir, where Puerto Natales was located, with minutes to spare before the ferry ticket office closed for the day. Nathan’s DIY handlebar muffs flapped in the wind that billowed down the rain-slicked main street like the wings of an exploded gargoyle and was held intact by only a few strands of the duct tape. But we would make it to our first scheduled stop, Punta Arenas, that night after all.
The ferry was packed to bursting with work crews and families vacationing with small children, and we were just able to snag two seats together. We were numb to the ruckus of conversation and laughter after our day in the wind and our previous night in the cold. We stared blankly out over cups of the most expensive instant hot chocolates we had yet encountered, in a private bubble of silence.
Nathan fashions muffs out of a foam sleeping pad. Photo by Diana Juárez.
When we arrived in the city of Punta Arenas, it was already dark and we had two options for accommodation in mind that suited our budget. Although $20 a night for the two of us would have been hideously expensive in other countries, it was a steal for Chile—even when it meant sleeping in a tent in a hostel’s back garden. However, upon ringing the doorbell of one family home-cum-hostel, it became apparent that this place was not, in fact, where we would rest our weary bones that night. The garden grounds were already covered with high-tech, abstractly-shaped tents, and when the door was finally answered by one of the guests—the hosts were nowhere to be found—I could see that every available corner, chair, bunk, and countertop had been claimed by a body. It was the same story at the second hostel. And the third. When we eventually found a place with available beds, it was close to midnight. The establishment itself was a hastily cobbled-together affair. The women’s restroom, for example, was clean, but its multiple toilets lined the wall, prison-style, without privacy stalls. I eyed the clear shower curtain and the door that had no lock, which stood slightly ajar behind me, after I’d shut it. The whole place evidently operated without any record-keeping or logbook—we’d simply handed cash over to the caretaker of the place and were told to keep the kitchen clean. After breakfast, Nathan discovered that his phone had disappeared, after accidentally leaving it unattended in the men’s restroom. Fortunately, after a few minutes of searching, he heard it buzzing from within an unlocked bathroom cupboard, hidden under a pile of clothes. Absolutely, it was a careless mistake to have left it lying around. But the hostility of the host’s reprimand, upon realizing that Nathan had retrieved the phone from the cupboard, seemed highly suspect. Nathan and I were the only guests, after all. We weren’t interested in making accusations or leaving negative reviews online, however. We just wanted out of Punta Arenas.
On our way out of Dodge, we stopped briefly at an outdoor outfitter’s shop and emerged with a cheap foam sleeping mat. Handlebar muffs v. 2.0 were forthcoming. And at a small auto shop, where the interior walls sported just two unframed, A4 posters of shyly topless ladies, we bought a new tire to carry us to Santiago. The tread of the tire we had bought in Mendoza, only a month or so earlier, was somehow already scrubbed thin. And while the comfortable gas stations and economical municipal campgrounds of Argentina’s Patagonia had disappeared entirely on the Chilean side, we didn’t despair—we had stocked up on sandwich fixings for a few easy, fuel-free meals, and Nathan had downloaded a movie or two while we had wifi access in Ushuaia.
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Approaching Torres del Paine. Photo by Nathan Sharp.
The interior of Tierra del Fuego, the Land of Fire, was gray, slate, light black, cement-colored, and monotonous. All we needed for this night was a buffer against the wind and the freedom to rest when we grew tired. We spotted a gravel pit that lay just off a dirt road that snaked between several rain-darkened mounds of pebbles. We picked a reasonably level place to lay out the moldy, several-times-patched, dutiful carcass of our tent.
Our here, now of the moment wasn’t gorgeous. Our here, now wasn’t a tourist destination. But none of that mattered. While I took my last pee for the evening behind the largest mound of pebbles, I looked around. The vast, seemingly empty setting that gave definition to our array of misshapen and precious belongings, and to our own bodies in their present conditions, carried a charge that made me look over my shoulder, made me scan the horizon and the clouds for its origin. It didn’t matter that we weren’t in a place of obvious majesty; still, the feeling arose. Throughout our journey, whenever that particular feeling wound itself around my chest like some kind of muscular, flickering tail, I would quicken my steps. Indeed, I did still.
Feeling less alone in the lonely places. Photo by Nathan Sharp.
In the loneliest places, I no longer felt alone. Rather, I had become aware of a distinct sort of atmosphere whose creation we’d played no part in. Surely, if someone had told me then, in the gray of Tierra del Fuego, that what I was feeling was only the Fullness of Being, I would have laughed at the glibness of it. But the feeling had become a more constant and more insistent companion. Not a congenial one, exactly, but it exerted certainly as much force upon my psyche as Nathan did.
The loneliest places, whether grand, forgotten, or simply unexploited, all contained a sort of presence greater than the sum of their uncountable parts—their sprinklings of plucked feathers, their fields of low-growing brush dotted with berries, their billions of pebbles. It was a presence, quality, or atmosphere that evoked as much emotion from me as any person who might stand before me, judge me, love me, and compel me. The land wasn’t judging me or loving me, as a human being might. Of course not. But it was the Fullness of Being that I felt, and my own being made more full, and the pathways within my memory for arriving at the places—far from the noise of advertising and social obligation and self-consciousness—growing more numerous and intertwined than before. But a body can only contain so much. I was still learning. I hurried back to my orange abode before darkness could scatter my way back. In our froggtogg rain gear zipped up over our long underwear, we enjoyed a film and then lay down to wait for sleep.
By the time we left the next morning, we’d discovered signs that we had chosen an abandoned natural gas, not gravel, quarry for our bed. As Puerto Natales, our next stop, was only an hour’s ride away, and we skipped camp breakfast and planned to find coffee in town. It was Sunday, however, and upon arriving into the charming town full of cabins with wood smoke swirling from the chimneys, we stopped at the only eatery in operation that day—the bus station. Parque Nacional Torres del Paine, the jewel of Patagonia, lay in wait within our imaginations, and we rode toward it.
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Nathan riding out of Torres del Paine. Photo by Diana Juárez.
Incredible! fellow travelers would say, the whites of their eyes gleaming and their arms outstretched, swooping. In Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile, they had gaped up at giant birds swooping over canyons and circling unimaginable peaks. Unlike anything else, they would say. Condors, the largest flying birds. Nathan and I had seen so much incredible wildlife on this trip for which we were earnestly grateful. We had learned to earnestly trust Mother Nature to present us with what she wished us to see. For the most part, we had made our peace with the shadowy places in our imaginations where it seemed that certain exotic creatures would stay, lumbering, slinking, and coiling and uncoiling, just out of sight. Just as I had gone without the dark, shaggy anteater; just as Nathan had gone without the python, except in a dream, we had traversed Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina without seeing a single, distant condor through a gap in the clouds. But our hearts felt chewed on, a bit. Thus far, the soaring silhouette that figured so prominently in so many of South America’s mythologies, folk art, pop culture, and psyche had not been presented to us.
A Condor at Lago Grey. Color photo by Nathan Sharp.
We wandered along the pebbly shore of Lago Grey, further acquainting ourselves with the nearly-black Andes of Patagonia’s Southern Ice Field and with the slate grey sky. Snow shimmered in the mountain crags, like angular limbs of electricity in black-and-white films that enliven experiments of mad science and like real bolts of lightening that strike in the countryside. We could just see a sliver of Glaciar Grey glowing in the shadowy light. It was still late summer.
The clear water of Lago Grey reflected the sky and lapped at the edge of land. We sat before the rolling waves, still a little petty and sore over the $40 we had spent that morning on eggs, coffee, and toast. The air was quiet. And full of something. Suddenly, our senses stood at attention.
Sunset over Lago de los Glaciares, Argentina. Photo by Diana Juárez.
A far-away, dark shape, like a child’s heavy-handed rendering of a bird, came swooping out from behind the peaks. It careened towards our spot on the pebbles and ducked in and out of sight, carving an invisible scrollwork in the thick clouds, as if it knew we sat watching, awestruck. It was enormous, more mythic beast than bird, which commanded the airspace. We could just make out its cartoonish, fluffy white collar and the white stripes on the backs of its wings. We could clearly see the spindly feathers of its wingtips, splayed as if to comb each cloud for whatever might present itself for the taking. The words vulture and scavenger, applied to the creature surveying the fortress of iron and ice rising from Lago Grey, didn’t seem to do it justice. How could we have dreamed of sighting one in any other place than here?
A moment of levity while cooking spaghetti. Photo by Nathan Sharp.
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Perhaps we were meeting our limits. We had previously expressed distaste for the type of beg-packer whose enjoyment of a place centered wholly on how low one could haggle down the cost of a meal, accommodations, or a tour or trinket. We, in our moral superiority, strove for balance. We were happy to pay the modest fees charged for the preservation of wilderness areas. But we hadn’t done our research on Chilean Patagonia. Had we done so, we wouldn’t have found ourselves bitterly complaining, whinging, and whining about the $11 bag of spaghetti and small $5 cup of instant Nescafe for sale at the only bodega within several hours of the park. We claimed personal offense at having to reserve a tent site three months in advance at $20 per person, all horribly exposed to the wind and clustered close together, on top of the $30 entry permit. (Lodges within the park could be reserved at upwards of $300 a night). We simply didn’t have the budget for the show-stopping sights that have inspired trekkers, adventures, and entrepreneurs the world over. We felt distinctly unrewarded and unrecognized for our intepid and resourceful natures.
I didn’t sleep a wink all night. My sleeping bag and liner were not warm enough, and we had camped on a barren plain on the outskirts of the park. The wind slam-dunked the walls of our tent upon my head all night long. I was reminded of a game called Boffing, popular among the Magik the Gathering kids on my college campus. Players, wearing vaguely-medieval attire, stood evenly-spaced apart and rooted to one spot on one of the campus’s many grassy knolls. And then they wailed on one another with foam pool noodles—as far as I could tell, that was the extent of the game. And there I was, nearly ten years later, with neither shield nor sword nor faux fox-tail, being boffed through the night until morning dew began to fall.
We would get the most out of our three day permits, we were determined, even if we hadn’t shelled out on guided trek packages. We parked Horace on a dirt trail and began the short walk up to the Mirador de los Condores. Half-way to the top, we were bowed at the waist in the turbulence of the wind, holding tightly onto our hats with one hand and holding onto the sides of the rocks to maintain our hard-won ground. It was like walking through honey and tears streamed from the outer corners of our eyes. At the summit, we squinted and knelt down on both knees to take in the view of the horned and towering mountains, in reverence born of necessity rather than of any habit of righteousness. But the view was like the brilliant, burning bush and like the voice of mind-ending volume. It was not was like being gathered into the eternally-laundered robes of a modern, beneficent god, and who but the condors wouldn’t sink into genuflection? On the way down, while we were still high enough to look out over the parking area, we could see a dark, hulking mass lain in the dirt. It was Horace, all 600-plus pounds of him, bowled over by the wind.
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Pastel de batata, cafe americano, and a slumbering dog at the gas pump outside of the town of Tres Lagos. Photo by Diana Juárez.
Unfortunately, the ferry to Puerto Montt from Puerto Natales was completely full. Our only option to move northward from here was to retrace our route up Argentina's Ruta 40—the very option we’d ridden for days to avoid. Once again, we turnstile'd through Immigration and Customs, and once again we arrived in Calafate, where we indulged in our last exquisite, ample bochas of Argentino ice cream. From a vista point along the highway, outside of town, we spied a family of five foxes. Two of the kits were tirelessly engaged in bringing a newfound treasure to their mother—a ribbon of toilet paper, at least seven squares long, which the wind kept spiriting away.
At the fuel station outside of the single-street hamlet of Tres Lagos, where we had slapped a Two If By Land sticker on the already sticker-embalmed single pump, we relished expertly pulled espresso americanos and homemade pasteles de batata, fried, flaky pastries filled with candied sweet potato and bathed in honey. With these comforts, we steeled ourselves to repeat the most difficult section of R40, with its deep, loose gravel overlaying deeply rutted road. Once again, we would be blessed with miraculously still, hot air.
The sold out fuel station at Bajo Caracoles. Photo by Nathan Sharp.
We also found ourselves back in the tiny settlement of Bajo Caracoles. Their fuel station was out of nafta and wouldn’t be replenished for a week. Though we would be okay, if only just barely, we lingered, slowly sputtering down the dirt road toward the edge of the village and scanning for Pablo. Pablo was the groundskeeper who had offered us a lean-to shelter and circuitous conversation the last time we had passed through. It had only been ten days since we had seen his face, but we found ourselves craving meaningful hellos and farewells. He wasn’t around.
We said our goodbyes to Argentina with one last night on the pampa. The guanaco were plentiful and unbothered by our presence, and we chose a place in the shadow of a ridge, next to a thorn bush with two inch spines. I recalled the roofing nail that popped our first tire while we were still in Mexico. Here, the only indicators of civilization were the wire fences on either side of the R40, seemingly without beginning or end, which were systematically pulled down every so often to allow the guanaco to roam freely without becoming caught and left to cure in the desert air. The fences went on and on and a cluster of skinny, Spanish poplars inclined vertically in the distance. A small, brown rabbit, also unimpressed by the racket of our arrival, chubbily pondered life on the other side of the fence, as if it couldn’t easily slip under the bottom wire of it.
I wanted to stay here, with the stiff, yellow, coiron grass with shallow roots and with the frosty gray santolina shrubs. But, Goodbye, yellow wildflowers pursed shut to our fantastically long-legged shadows. Goodbye, half-buried, antique wagon wheels and hills made iconic by their surroundings, which appear to be negative space until given closer examination. Goodbye, beetles. Goodbye, exquisitely painted sky. Goodbye, goodbye, for now and quite possibly for good. We had been sad to leave most of the previous twelve countries. But this last evening felt especially tender.
As I unfurled and fluffed our sleeping bags within the tent, I heard Nathan pause his maneuvers with the billowing nylon of the motorcycle cover. He seemed to be considering his words.
I think I just saw a puma, he said slowly.
The guanaco are plentiful, I observed again, aloud.