Just as Chile boasts of San Rafael, Argentina has the Perito Moreno glacier to skite about. And it’s a beauty alright, slightly easier to access than via a 5 hour each way boat ride. In fact we rode the bikes from El Calafate to the face, or at least to where it faces off against […]
Or Chile’s Ruta 7 as this 1200 km road from Puerto Monte to Villa O’Higgins is otherwise known took 10 years and cost 11 lives to build. It only serves 100,000 people and the country it runs through must have been hell to build a road through. But the General Pinochet regime – and the […]
Time to head out of Argentina for a bit – to Santiago for some bike servicing and to sort out whether we can ride south on the west side of the Andes to Osorno, Chile’s lake district. With the aftermath of the quake being public disorder in the southern towns, stories of it taking 48 […]
What a beauty! here we were in this rather understated hotel in Villa Union, Argentina last night and earlier over a few cervazas been talking about robustness of the structure, typical of many it looked like the Big Bad Wolf could blow it down without much effort – when at 3.30 am the whole place […]
The day always arrives on these trips when the brief sojourn of having wives and families along comes to an end, they return to NZ and the real expedition ride resumes. No vans to follow us around any more, no local guides to point out the best routes (although too often they’re completely wrong on […]
From Nazca we decided to take a short cut to get up to the Andes and Cusco. We’ve heard there may be helicopter rides going into Machu Picchu & while the direct road from Nazca is cut, there is an alternative to going too far south to Arequipa and up, and that is to go […]
Down the coast to Nazca, home of the Nazcans who settled here 1,000 years before the Incas did their stuff. A desert tribe they were engineering whizzkids, building subterranean aquaducts to bring water down from the Andes out on to the dry pampas where they did their cool ceramics, artisan skills that survive to this […]
After 2 days waiting around, signing another form every couple of hours, the Peruvian authorities released our bikes. What a circus – but totally expected. In 2002 when we came into Peru on motorcycles from Chile we were held up at the border for 30 hours. Eight years has seen little progress with the make-work […]
The bikes are locked and loaded, as much of South American bureacracy and red tape that we can clear from here has been done, we are itching to go. Just have to stay for our chrissie presents and then the countdown really starts. Jabs and documentation all done, GPS’s loaded, carnets sorted, bike spares and […]
Our trip to the Arctic via North Europe. ‘Poles Apart II – Northern Lights’ … in photos! Browse through the galleries below.
