Author Archives: The Chronicler

Bus Shelter Refugio

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Bus shelters have been the punctuation marks, the way-points on this journey down through Chile. They’re a constant, dependable institution, and just like the Corporation’s orange and green number 57 bus, they always arrive two together. One for each side of the road. Spot a road junction up ahead and, sure enough, there’s the shelters. A large industrial sawmill… another two, a school crossing warning… there they are.

The day starts to warm up, need to shed a layer, there’s bound to be one with a bench in a moment. Ten minutes in the shade… this will do, spitting on to rain… pedal frantically; sure enough here’s one, just in time. They’re regular, dependable, and each region has its own standardised design – some of them quite original. One village has shelters created out of gabion-box, with walls filled with selected water-rounded granite stones. Some have been adopted with a degree of pride, one even has a mosaic mural of ducks and hawks. Only an occasional stance might be termed ‘alfresco pissoir’, and they’re readily passed by… there’s bound to be something better just around the bend.

They might serve as an emergency bivouac, but it would need to be in extremis, always open to front, with a bench too narrow and two arched windows to frame the view. But go south and all that changes.

Approaching the Straits of Magellan and the ferry service over to Tierra del Fuego, the bus stop acquires a new, additional purpose. They become refugios; genuine emergency shelters, double glazed, draught-stoppered, sleeping-benched Crystal Palaces. The municipality asks me to respect and keep tidy the place, so I sweep out the little dust that’s crept in, along with a drift of dead bugs and several desiccated butterflies. I eject one lurid green spider and its web when it tangles in my hair, only to discover the occupant is still living. How all these denizens got in is a mystery, for the feeling inside with the door shut is of being hermetically sealed into a wildlife observation hide. The palpable silence, the enveloping warmth, the Attenborough viewing. Guanaco peacefully graze the verge, two grey foxes trot past, a skunk is gale-tousled as it crabs its way over the road. A passing truck driver calls in to chat and offer a lift, as well as a warning about the pumas that come down from the mountains to feast on new season lamb. As with arctic Canada, everybody looks out for each other, and for bragging rights you need a ‘bear/ puma’ story. We have plenty of the former, I’m in no hurry to collect the latter.

We settle in, and as the international frontier just up the road is closed, it’s an undisturbed night. Unfortunately there isn’t a water supply, otherwise there would have been a real temptation to call a rest day.

I’m not sure if any bus is scheduled to stop at this stance – there’s no posted timetable. None of the long-distance coaches have slowed down to inspect our intentions, although the carabineros have checked as to our safety. So more refuge than bus stop. Which brings us to the other type of official shelter.

These ones come in the Patagonian vernacular of corrugated steel. A tin box which inside has a table, bunk bed and a woodburner stove. Outside is an asado, table and a long-drop toilet, with a PV panel to power an incongruous lamp standard. There’s even a hitching post for your pony. And as the central government has just spent multiple millions of pesos in tax money on a programme of renovation, there’s the obligatory oversized bragging board that dwarfs the shed.

Stealth camping isn’t easy in these windswept pampas.  The occasional bush never grows above waist height, there are few quarries, and even fewer bridges, which makes ‘calls of nature’ awkward and tent camping ‘interesting’.  Which is why these structures start to occupy an inordinate amount of our attention, and, like their brethren further north, we need to inspect.  We might have to retreat, and you never know if a fellow traveler met further down the road won’t be pleased to have our intel report. 

Strange how something as simple as a bus shelter can become a distillation for a Patagonian cycle ride, reduced to craving their presence; the chance to escape, even just for a few moments, the pervasive attention of wind.

The Fascination is in the Minutae

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Or at least it’s in stopping, getting down close to the ground and hunting the detail.

To take at face value the guidebook’s descriptions for the scenic qualities on offer in the southern cone of the Americas continent, is to believe that the Patagonian Pampa will inflict terminal tedium, a boredom resulting in an ennui so severe that it will test your resolve for life.

Much of the ‘scape is flat, impossibly flat and yet it has a surrealist quality, as well as providing a challenge to depict and portray its undoubted beauty. Be that on a day of somber blanket cloud with flat light that wrecks distance perspective, or when the wind-scalped, bristle-stalked, golden tussock is low-lit by a rising sun, or the gutsy wind that’s sending ghost-shadows rippling through the quaking grass. There might be no classical mountain panoramas, no opportunities for those iconic photos that never seem to do justice to their spectacle, nor the colour offering of an indigenous population. That colour has to be found deep down, close to the ground. It’s why cycle touring is so well suited to travelling across this flatscape, it’s so much easier to stop and to look when a sudden possibility happens to occur.

It’s summer, and many of the vergeside plants are into seeding, whilst others are starting to bloom; all are tiny and cushioned close to the ground. Some have strong smells, butterfly attractants, others have some differing quality, maybe a death scent, one that draws flies and ants.

An other reason the bike has a distinct advantage over a car-bound observer is that cyclists spook wildlife. We’ve seen it in the US Everglades, on an Andean altiplano and now the southern Pampas; cars pass and the guanaco won’t even lift its grazing head, whereas an approaching bike sends them into a blind panic. Ñandu will take a flightless race along the fenceline, attempting to barge their way through the expertly strung wires, only to bounce off, give up and carry on striding out in front of us. The steeple-chased guanaco will attempt a fence-jump; some will easily and gracefully succeed, others will entangle themselves in wire, sending convulsive waves singing down the fenceline.

Gauchos on bicycles; herders of wildlife.

Which can be unsettling, bordering on outright dangerous, because a spooked guanaco is oft tempted to cross the carriageway right on front of an approaching car. Hit one of these and there’s a fair chance it’s going to end up inside your car. Each morning the asphalt is daubed with fresh red bloodstains, yet strangely few carcasses are evident. Maybe there are enough carrion eaters to tidy away the deaths or is there a ready market for roadkills; it’s a thought, as the squashed hog-nosed skunk carcass and it’s attendant stink will haunt the verge for weeks to come.

We’ve gathered up a family clutch of ñandu, and they’re striding the fenceline; we’re pedalling hard. They’re barely out of second gear. I’m watching them when I hear the alarm, the hyena-cum-horse call of a guanaco herd. They stampede right across the road to front, right into the path of the ñandu.
Pandaemonium ensues.
Harum-scarum.
A tumbling of ruffled birds.
The camelids effortlessly clearing the fence.
We pedal on by.

Another occasion, we’ve climbed through a fence to inspect an abandoned railway station. Derelict buildings are a favoured cyclist’s camping spot in these exposed, wind-scoured pampas. It’s still too early in the day, so our interest is more in the possibilities than the actualities. There’s a roofless waiting room, a stationmaster’s office and a water closet that with some judicious cleaning would serve for a night. There is also, lost in the grass, iron rails, wood sleepers and the switching gear for the sidings. The redundant water tank still sits rusting on its stone pier, remnants from the steam age that exported mutton and wool to Europe. Yet much of that is invisible from the road.

Whilst the sight sense predominates, others are present.

Dropping down below the road, tucking into a concrete drainage channel, with the wind raging overhead, into a near silent sheltered world after the daylong ear-roar. It’s also a repository for the flotsam of soda cans, tumbleweed, and the territorial skat of fox poop. Even when desiccated to a cinder biscuit, it stinks.

To clean up or move on?

It’s been a long day, another 100 miles, this time much of it side-to- head wind. We clean up and in so doing acquire socks impregnated with the hooked talons of burrweed, an innocent looking seed that is pernicious in its ability to burrow ever deeper into a stocking’s fabric, and then to remain as an invisible irritation for days. And yet, by way of a recompense, we gain a wild camp with a moonless night of infinite starscapes. The wind dying and my ears singing with the silence.

Maybe we have a high threshold for terminal tedium, or.possibly we’re too easily enthralled; that, or it’s a perversity to thwart a guidebook’s prediction. Whichever, I keep finding these vast open spaces sensually fascinating. There’s a deep beauty to be found in the tiny details.

Borders

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Chile and Argentina share a border… that’s obvious. What’s less so, is they share a lake, albeit they use differing names. What’s unusual in lake sharing, as opposed to island splitting, which they also do, is that the world’s third longest border follows the continental watershed. A serpentine dash-dotted line that meanders from top to bottom but will cover every point of the compass in its 5150 kilometre journey.

At first I was somewhat intrigued by this incongruity, as the lake drains to the Chilean west. It’s only when sailing over the lake that there’s a possible geographical explanation. Look to the left, the horizon is a crenellation of ice-capped mountains, look the other way and the horizon flattens out into smoke-purple Patagonian Pampa. A distinctive change, one that happens abruptly, right down that international frontier.

Riding east, away from the customs post, the air turns arid, the flora to ashy-green, the scrub shrubs shrink down, retreating into the gritted dust. An evaporation of colour, where hard thorn has replaced soft succulence and the sky-horizon an ever expanding sphere. After six weeks of enclosure by forest trees and valley sides, its a pleasant opening.

A dramatic geographical morphage. What are not so obvious are the social-subtle changes.

Maybe it was the conversation about my carrying a plastic pipe dog-stick with the Gendarme at customs, or the first shop’s noticeboard advertising Tango dancing, or was it Raul’s exuberance as he invites us into his converted water-tank and feeds us a gargantuan dinner? Or was it the the rust-bucket cars that still cruise Avenida San Martin on a Sunday afternoon, or purchasing an ice cream at the heladeria, or navigating siesta closures or the lack of cashcard tapping at the checkout? Whichever, we know we’ve crossed a metaphorical boundary; we now know that were in Argentina.

Land-borders are endlessly fascinating places, for by now we’ve yet to find two Latin American crossings that are similar. From the cerebral angst of negotiating the ever-new variations of officialdom to the anticipation of seeing something new. From the sweepstake of ‘how many franked stamps will I collect just to get my bike into a country’ to ‘how far is it to the first reliable, safe money exchange?’ Or in the instance of a strictly phyto-sanitary Chile, how far will we ride to replace the confiscated food and find replacements that are not based around oats and polenta? Land-crossings are nervous fun.

If it’s monotonous standardisation you crave, try an airport.

Somewhere in the distant realm of a school geography lesson, I have a memory. Neighbouring Argentina and Chile were having another dispute over the ownership of the island of Tierra del Fuego and Great Britain in its inevitable colonial way decided to settle the matter. Queen Victoria is purported to have requested a pencil and ruler, whereupon she drew a straight line down the middle of the eponymous island and declared the dispute solved. I can find no confirmation and suspect that its apocryphal, the imaginative misunderstanding of a pre-teen. Was I confusing it with Belgium?

Yet when I encounter the reality of this piece of displaced Chilean Patagonia, the aberration is palpable. Our cycle distance from border to border will only be 260 kilometres, a mere three or four days, which will be dependant upon the omnipresent wind. Is it worth reinstalling the Chilean ‘phone chip, do we really need to go out of our way to find an ATM, will a room still be unheated and the bed come with a laden stack of four blankets? The reality is; much of the traffic is transiting Argentine, the prices are quoted in Argentine, that and guanacos, rias and skunks still wander over the road. There isn’t even an asphalted shoulder the likes of which we had become accustomed in the Chilean north, it’s really ‘Little Argentina’, only it comes with oil wells, nodding donkeys and an accent that I still find undecipherable.

Tierra del Fuego: split-island, a schizophrenic place where the estancia names are a reflection of Britain’s colonial adventurism. The Chilean estancias still have their English names, reflecting their original British ownership, the Argentine ones were rebranded post the Malvinas/Falkland Islands dispute.

A long shadow of an unamused monarch with her pencil and ruler creating just for us, yet another interesting border.

The De’il and the Wind

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Ask any person who has any association with Patagonia; be it local, visitor or tumble-dryer salesman and one word will inevitably come to the fore…. WIND.

Patagonia is synonymous with wind. Wind is the bête-noir of cyclists, because, irrespective of which direction it is prevailing, it will inevitably be ahead of you. The Irish prayer that extorts: ‘may the wind ever be on your back’, is at variance to that contradictorally bi-directional headwind. As for the white goods sales personnel, they can’t shift tumble-dryers, all you need is treble pegging on a clothes line.

This morning is a breeze of beauty; teasing the poplars, softly sifting through the cedars, tinkling a coke can down the street; this afternoon it will hurtle me halfway across a carriageway and stop me dead in my tracks. It will always be a constant background tinnitus, that will vary in volume, intensity and perversity.

We’re sitting in a converted water tank…(another tale for another day), at a crossroads, contemplating our options. To do the obvious visitor expectancy by rejoining an old acquaintance from our previous visits and ride south on Ruta Cuarenta . To cycle with a constant jacket-rattling sidewind, meeting up again with the pelotons of cycle tourers, the rigs of camper trucks and the cardio-arresting suction of passing lorries. Or to live for the moment and leaving the devil to take the hindmost, to use the monstrous tailwind that even the Patagonians are talking about and head across a continent to the Atlantic coast.

It’s been fourteen years since we last “did the ton”, clocked a century, and in truth I had assumed those days of Full-kit 100 mile rides lay in the past.

Not so.

Slowly I creep into the ‘sweet spot’; the silent bubble when wind roar and forward speed cancel out. The macadam is clean, the road stretches into a vanishing point lost in a floating mirage. It could run all the way to infinity. The computer reads 35kph, when a gust picks me up and pushes hard, now the numbers are effortlessly climbing through 40 heading for 45 and with that the inevitable cerebral debate begins The red-eyed cloven-footed voice urges ‘go for the 50’… whilst the feather-winged halo reminds me that a simple mistake is going to hurt.

…”Go…go…go…its flat, you can see for miles”
….”it’s at least three hours to the nearest hospital”.
…”go..go…go…out to the middle and blast”.
…”do you still want to get to Ushuaia?”
“ Brake”…
“Wimp”.

The road heads determinedly east-south-east, kinking occasionally, a correction that places that monstrous tailwind back squarely on my back. Whole decades of kilometres disappear behind me, even going uphill, a blast of propellant will conveniently trigger a spurt of speed, enough to carry me effortlessly over the top.

.”You know you’ll have to pay for this…. nothing in life is free”….
“bloody wee Puritan, away back to your presbytery”….
“there’ll be reckoning tomorrow”….
“we’ll worry about tomorrow when tomorrow comes”.

Tomorrow does come and we could have repeated that score, only we get waylaid by some classic Argentine hospitality; (yet another tale).

So the account sits heavily in the Red. There’s a distinct reek of sanctimonious guilt to counter the deodorant of ego, for we’ll be able to dine-out on that score come that Argentine hospitality. The debt-guilt comes from the cheating.

The plethora of quality weather apps keeps increasing, as does their subset: the ‘wind-app’, and with each passing cyclist we’re introduced to yet another one. All are works of beauty, strands of flowing arrows like weed in a river, appreciative art if you’re not intending to swim against the current. So they are also prognosticators for when to call a rest day, a day that might have been squandered on alleviating those accrued deficits. Tomorrow’s forecast shows a magenta southerly, we and the road go that way: for there are no other options left. Thereafter, the wind turns northerly.
No brainier.
Rest-day declared.

We’re time-rich, we an afford the stigmatic opprobrium from the fluttering halo as she silently mutters: “a debtor never be…”

In a Chilean Forest

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“He who does not know the Chilean forest, does not know the planet’  …..Reiterated; because now it might be true.

The tree line

What had gone before had been an arboriculture, no different from agriculture; pines in place of wheat, log piles in place of wrapped hay; cereals to the salmon feed silo, wood chip to the cellulose factory. It was interesting but it didn’t stir the soul.

Then riding the Carretera Austral south we lose that monotonous monoculture and find Neruda’s forest. 

Myrtle – of some kind

A dense obscura of Myrtles, many just starting to flower. An inflorescence that requires close inspection to see the intricate detail, only then to find their delicate nectar perfume. Turn another corner and the woods change to beech. The southern beech, and like their northern unrelated namesakes, stand in open woodland, grand specimens that when they die, remain upstanding, bleached sentinels  protruding through the living canopy. Maybe its a change of height, soil or aspect, for we now have cedar stands. On the flat valley floors whole woods of these have been felled to create open pasture land for beef cattle and grazing sheep. Small parcels of green studded with Islands of branch brash and logged trunks; discarded battlefield casualties, bleeding crumbling heartwood, are littered across the floor. Slovenly housekeeping that will be an oasis of bacteria, invertebrates and wood lice.

All of these trees cloak the valley sides rising to a tideline, a contouring tree line, above which the sparse grasses soon give way to rock and ice, through which glacier carved mountains suddenly erupt. Turn another bend, drop down another hillside, cross one more granite bouldered raging torrent and another new snow capped mountain is framed by yet another specimen tree. 

Whilst the trees dominate the green texture, its the verdant verges that add the colours. Plants that I know from a formal northern border grow in profusion in their own endemic garden. Gunnera: that giant spike-stalked impersonator of rhubarb with its umbrellific spreading leaf, creates a barrier and a foil for the choke of fuchsia behind, whilst carpets of yellow Daisy alternate with purple Lupin and magenta Bugloss right beside the road. Find a way through this tangle, find a way into those woods and suddenly you’re in another place.

Chilean Daisy – Mutisia app.

Sun shafts filter down, highlighting the lichen-bearded trunks and warming the mulch of crumbled leaf litter, a humus that coats the soil-crud of volcanic grit. Then step from the trail, stoop to inspect the under-storey and I start to find many the staples for a Scottish commercial landscaping project or the progenitors for the berry fields of Blair. Pernettya and Achillea, gooseberries and currants. Flora for whose country of provenance I’ve never thought to query, questions I’ve never thought to ask. Despite the obvious fact that centuries-old Scottish plant collector’s surnames predominate in these plant’s bi-nominal names.

I now wonder if that is the question that Neruda was posing. Chilean forests pose more questions than answers…. and for that I’m eternally grateful, because I’m in no hurry to have completed a knowledge of the planet.

Another Chilean Daisy – Mutisia spp

In the Beginning

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The roadside kilometre posts  suggest that its a mere 1,020 km to the capital, only the bike computer has a score of 1,600 km. 

What these bald scores don’t tell are the circuitous deviations that riding the Chilean coastline entail as opposed to the Central Valley’s autopista. One is a collection of map navigations and rolling hills the other entails keeping to the right and heading interminably south. One is peaceful, if you can ignore the lactated muscles and the ear blood pounding, the other has goods traffic and their attendant effluvias. One has curiosities and interests, the other has a linear direction and speed. One has fishing caletas where the boats are hauled out by oxen and surfers bob in offshore, the other an easy way to the ‘muy hermoso’…. ‘the beautiful south’.

There’s attractions to both. You make your choice.

The last time that we visited Valparaíso, we headed north, so it would seem logical that we would start this tour in the capital’s sea port and head south. A chronological succession, a linear progression, that with time will lead to a completion. It was also a chance to revisit a town with some of the best street art in Latin America. Many of the murals have been painted over, new material confirming the mantra of wall art’s transience.  However, one of my favourite pieces still sits on a steep street corner, the simple message, advice for our lives…”use the bike”. Wishful thoughts in a city of multitudinous hills, where ascensores connect barrios and steps connect streets, lifts that clamber cliffs, staircases that count in hundreds, an easy place to wander aimlessly, to explore serendipitously. 

Which is how we get gassed.

The university students are revolting. Black bilious reek is roiling out from between two buildings, a squad of riot shielded carabineros loiter on the corner, a  militarised  canon hoses water into the side street, a rattle of popping noises, spent cartridges litter the carriageway.   

Your street sense takes its cues from the behaviour of the locals around you. Nobody seems unduly perturbed; sure, the traffic is snarled up on the diverted street, but it is rush hour.  People are wandering past, chatting with friends, taking photos’, interrogating  ‘phones. Then one of my eyes starts to water… teargas…. probably time to turnaround and find another street. 

The students’ grievances are centred on tuition fees. Governments of various colours have been fiscally prudent and managed successfully two sovereign wealth funds, primarily based on copper returns. The students are of the opinion that some of that prudence should be redistributed to them. Presently, the government disagrees. Not my dispute, but I can’t help but wonder if similar senes would be re-enacted at an Oxbridge college. 

A thousand flat kilometres against considerably more hilly ones, probably explains why we have met only one other cycle traveler. On the few occasions that we’ve graced the wide shoulder of the autopista, we’ve seen several other cycle tourers. Seen…. but not met. There’s a double height – double width crash barrier protecting a deep concrete moat that separates four lanes of grumbling traffic between us and them. It makes for a noisy, busy, but lonely journey. The autopista’s shoulder does, however? return your faith in your own ability to cycle travel, to the feeling that some form of southerly progress is being achieved. Good therapy for two days and then its time to go and find some more exquisite southern volcanoes and reflective lakes. 

Time to wander serendipitously again.

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In the Woods

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“He who doesn’t know a Chilean forest does not know the planet”.    Pablo Neruda

Another town, another room, another shape of pine. Ripples and knots repeat across the walls, where the door melts into the repeating theme. A reiteration of exaggerated growth rings and modernist fractals.

South central Chile is timber country, where whole days are ridden through blanket Pinus radiata, seas of deep-shade green, their high crowns swaying in the incessant southwesterlies, their roots in a silent gloom. Waves over the rolling hills they flow, only to suddenly cease for an evisceration of clear-fell or the skeletal agonies of forest fire. The latter being the result of direct action by radical Mapuche protestors. These plantation pines are given some relief by groves of gums, long tall single stem eucalyptus, regimented by rank and file. A sad modern monoculture so at variance with Neruda’s much quoted stanza. He wrote over half a century ago, so as an historical marker, it is poignantly significant, for I’ve found it hard to find the extensive afforestation that he envisioned. Remnants remain in protected corners, in national parks and private reserves and now in a university’s  arboretum. A place to answer some of our botanical questions and confirm some of our suppositions. It’s always nice to find that were correct, after all. Still, despite the tranquility, this place is but a zoo for trees, single specimens, a solitary illustration taken out of context. That context being the woodland forest.

Now I know that there are forty-three varieties of Nothofagus, the southern beech, over five thousand in the myrtle family and that the fern that adorns river banks and damp cliffs in such vast profusion is called locally: Helechos. I have had a thought that it would complement my expanding fernery at home, so I checked out UK supplier’s prices. At those rates Chile could wipe its national debt. Still, I’m not about to attempt some bio-transference, tempting as that might be, neither am I about to turn nerdish on the plethora of southern beech varieties, just happy to have a generic single name.

There are many examples from the southern cone’s temperate rain forest, but only one specimen of the nation’s national tree. The Araucaria auracana,  or Monkey Puzzle tree, and even that one has been attributed as deriving from Brazil. Any specimens that we’ve seen in plazas and gardens have been wizened, withering sticks, all near death. They were severely logged on the costal ranges until harvesting was banned in 1990. Put simply, they don’t thrive in pollution, in particular the particulates of diesel from the rumbling lumber trucks hauling pines and eucs to the ever present sawmill or the cellulose factory. 

It’s those mills that have produced the cladding for our log cabin. Unfortunately it’s not in the woods, but on the top floor of a concrete high rise.

Prescription Beginning

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‘What are you doing in the country?”

“Didn’t recognise you… didn’t expect to see you this time of year”

“Still around… when do you leave, then?”

Three different days, three different bus trips, three different people. There would appear to be some sort of expectation, like the roll of the seasons; the geese fly in and we fly out.

An ennui of ‘laissez faire’ has permeated much of this trip.  Even down to deciding it’s destination and timing.  A regard for careful planning has been severely lacking.

A dark damp November evening at home, we’re challenging ourselves: “Are we going to go away this year?  Everybody seems to expect it”.  Ten minutes later the decision would appear to have been concluded by hitting ‘send’ and an account being the lighter for the cost of two tickets to Chile. 

Sometimes I wonder if we both have an alternate shadow, an amalgam entity that seems obligated to interfere.  The same imp who has sent us over high Andean passes, insisted we sleep in Pampas drainage culverts and claims that forward planning is for others.

At baggage reclaim: our panniers come off first and our bikes come out last; nothing is obviously rattling, nothing is spewing clothes, nothing is of use to use as displacement activity… it’s time to make a decision, time to do some planning. 

The more important the piece of paper, the flimsier it is

Three minutes later and we’re in possession of two bus tickets to Valparaíso, add a further five minutes to buy a phone chip with which to book a room l, and a realisation that that wee gremlin is still running this trip.  At some point we’re going to have to have words. 

3.5 GB for 15 days…

Thirty-three hours from cycling away from our frosted front door to hauling our kit up a Chilean hospededaje’s creaking, polished and steep wooden stairs, there to store our bikes in the kitchen.  Then to realise that the market is just across the road and the local Chifa is just around the corner, to wondering when, or where, all this ‘largesse of ease’ will be redeemed. 

Shadow, gremlin, imp?…. no, it just our Guardian Angel.  Seems that she’s decided to come along on our next South American journey.

Turning the Corner

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For those in the know: Paso Canoás (Costa Rica – Panama) border > Carretera Interamerica (aka PanAm Highway) > all the way to Panama City.  Zero navigation!

Friday 17th November we turned a corner, turned out from one of North America’s great retail institutions: the worker’s cooperative outdoor equipment emporium and onto Copley Drive, San Diego.

Resetting the compass out of perpetual west and turning southeast in San Diego.

And that’s been the story for the subsequent three and a half months, a macro-navigation that each morning entails cycling into the sunrise.  Into an opal light that soft-focuses our world, squinting for hazards, and wondering, “can the vehicle approaching from behind see us through the glare?”.  A nascent sun that in a more northern clime, and around the solstice, rose obliquely, a slow arousal, with lingering shadows, but now the equinox is imminent, blasts up out of an horizon, away from the night, with momentary twilights and shrinking shadows, fleeting apparitions that need to be savoured.

Then we arrive in David, Panama’s second city, with a desire to escape the smothering humidity.  To put it crudely, I think my sweat pores have been sufficiently flushed, and the cotton shirts in their various incarnations are in danger of rotting away.  So we turn to the mountains.

Turning due North.

Which is why I’m now sporting sunburnt elbows. A new angle of exposure, new flesh that hasn’t been radiated recently, a back that hasn’t had a comforting warmth, for a quarter of a year. It’s quite noticeable that the Navigator’s bra-strap tan lines, even through clothing, have not been topped up, as they would by a south facing tour.  It’s a debate that’s seldom raised when considering which direction for a long linear tour?  Prevailing winds will inevitably top that calculation, followed possibly by which side of the carriageway gives the best view of the ocean, but “sun in your face”?  Not sure I’ve ever seen that mentioned.  It should be, it’s significant.

The road rises gently, which, given our recent experiences, is a novelty, passing a gentrification of tidy gardens and private schools, gated communities and swimming pool sales, all etched bright, clean, sharp by the change of direction.  To front is Panama’s highest point, the dominating mass of Volcán Barú, its summit, bristling with comms towers, being occasionally obscured by clouds.  A volcanic cauldron cooking up boiling masses of thunderheads that detach and roll south. Just like they did yesterday, dropping their cargo in a sudden warm, drenching downpour on the PanAmericana highway into town.

Yet another storm-caster mountain.

Still the road rises, laser straight, a constant agreeable gradient, the mountain ever growing, when the punctuation of a thirty metre candy-stick lighthouse in the middle of a mall, in the middle of a continent, slowly realises.  Not so much a fish out of water as a ‘faro’ far from water.  Such incongruities have been a rarity on this journey, an edifice more in keeping six countries farther north, but might be a reflection of the increasing number of US nationals moving into the area.  Still we’re climbing, happily mimicking hill-slugs, only to be passed, effortlessly, by yet another training peloton and their attendant rescue wagon.

Then the wind commences.

At first it’s welcome, for it blows away the heavy humidity; however, it keeps strengthening.  Yet again we’re among volcanic mountains, yet again we’ve found a katabatic wind.  Gusts come careering down-slope, down the gravel streets whipping up dust, rattling palm fronds and crashing onto tin roofs that clatter all through the night.

Which makes for a differing dark-time soundtrack; no labouring air conditioner nor rattling fan stirring up stale moist air to drown out the passing heavy goods traffic, barking dogs or squealing cicadas.  Just the question: “is this normal and will we have a roof in the morning?”

Intriguingly, the next overtaking cyclo-peloton is now ‘drafting’ in the wake of their ‘sag-wagon’… are they cheats or is it jealousy? At least they’re not hanging on the tailgate as we’ve seen before.

Our sojourn to the high ground with its cool, fresh evenings, will be short lived. To reach that airport departure gate we need to keep moving, to drop back into the humidities.  Still, between here and there, there’s the ‘pay-back’; a forty kilometres free-wheel, followed by a 200km bend to the nor’easter and the isthmus of the Panama Canal.

Gifts from the Road

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Medicine-ball Watermelon; plastic bags of ice cold water, cannon-ball Cantaloupe, mango ‘pipas frias’, giant mandarinas, granadillas, face towels, windfall Zapotes, one un-identified fruit and two promotional mugs for the incongruously named ‘Wilson Hotel’.

And that’s just the haul of physical goodies gifted to us whilst on the Costa Rican road.

Naturally, each has a story.

New county, new terms and conditions. Trader stands are arranged along the verge of the four-lane PanAm highway and, as is customary, all will be selling exactly the same range of five fruits; you can tell because there will always be a hand-scribed list of offerings a short distance previously. I can recognise all the names with the exception of one: ‘pipas frias’… something cold and probably associated with the un-powered ice chest that is prominently placed on every stand.

An articulated lorry seems to be having some mechanical problem. It’s stopped up ahead close to one of those stands, it pulls away before we pull up behind, then stops again , this time in the middle of that dual carriageway. We come up to it and the driver and his wife jump out and hold up two plastic bags of frozen mango slush.  Nectar.  He’s a weekend cycling road warrior and now we know what a ‘pipa fria’ is.

Thankfully, the gargantuan watermelon that would easily destabilise my bike if it wasn’t for the counterbalancing cantaloupe, materialised at the end of the day and we were able to reduce its weight somewhat before having to haul it over a mountain. Fortunately, this one’s seedless, but it’s also a diuretic.  No scatter-gun spitting, just a mildly disturbed night.  A balanced sum; fortunately we have a cabin room with private facilities.  This largesse was a gift from a neighbour who keeps a fruit stall, a retired fruit-seller who once flew a crop-duster plane in the ‘el Norto’.

Another day, another apposite story.  The weekly 21km Sunday road run.  We pass them, we stop to slurp coffee, they pass us.  So it goes on; we’re all heading the same way.  A long hill climb, they all pass us so effortlessly and then stop at the top…. to present us with bags of ice cold water, when it’s they that need it more.  What I find interesting, and it’s symptomatic of Costa Rica; not just the generosity, but that it’s a simple plastic bag and not a single use plastic bottle to be discarded further along the route.  Secondly, the waste is collected up and packed away. Country wide, verge litter is a rare sighting.

As for the delicately flavoured grenadilla, it is but a maraca filled with frog spawn, which gives the the nickname: globby fruit.  And that leaves the anonymous tropical specimen.  We were reassured that it was normal for our lips to be affected, that the effect would wear off, which, in truth, isn’t all that reassuring.  Again it’s a subtle soft taste, not unpleasant, and there is an ‘effect’.  A coating of light latex that, subconsciously has you using your teeth to scrape at your lips. It does wear off through time, but I would suggest sharing only one at a sitting, unlike the giant pineapple which was way too easy to gorge on.

It’s these memories rather than the more marketable ‘#VisitCosta Rica’ images gleaned from every brochure, that linger.  True, the nature spotting is abundant, even if the really close encounters were more likely to be roadkills.  The humidades werean exuberance of enthusiastic flora and the coastline a cliché for a palm fringed paradise.

As for the face towels, those we stowed, but the mugs regretfully were left behind.