El Fin del Mundo

It began almost 50 years ago.

There was never really a plan, just a vague idea – Dave and I would get a couple of motorcycles and head south. We’d stop when we ran out of road. I had no idea how we would do this, just old National Geographic images in my head of  rugged gauchos with their herds on the vast expanse of Patagonia and Inca ruins perched on the slopes of the soaring Andes mountains.

Then life happened.

But the idea never went away. Like a flower that grows, against all odds, in a crack in the urban concrete, it survived. But what I thought was the concrete of my life, turned out to be something much more malleable. And that flower never lost its beauty and allure.

Things changed as the trip evolved from idea to an actual plan, and changed again after we arrived, as I’ve written in previous blogs. But the idea of riding to Ushuaia, the southern tip of South America, literally the end of the road, remained an important goal for me.

Ushuaia is 3,163 km (about 2,000 miles) from our house in Mendoza, over some good, and some not-so-good roads. It would take me from the Andes Mountains, through the Pampas, the fertile breadbasket of Argentina, and past a few resort towns on the South Atlantic coast. But most of it was crossing the wild, lonely, wind-swept expanse of Patagonia.

Most of the photos I took are of the strange and interesting things along the way, like the roadside dinosaur in Trelew – life-size model of Argentinosaurus, one of the largest land animals that ever lived.

But Patagonia itself? How do you capture the essence of a place like that in a picture? The magnificent, empty immensity of it all. Our human scale of reference fails us in places like this. The changes in landscape are subtle and happen over hundreds of kilometers. On the other hand a tuft of grass is an entire microcosm to it’s tiny inhabitants.

Traveling across Patagonia is as much an inward journey as it is an outward one. I think people who run marathons feel the same way. It’s not really about the race.

There’s time to think.

About everything.

From the meaning of life, to what I want for supper.

Or let your mind go clear and think about nothing at all.

A typical day goes like this: get up around 7, have coffee and something to eat. Check my email while I still have wifi. Then put on my riding gear and load the bike. Turn on the tunes and hit the road around 8.

I have a blue tooth sound system in my helmet that connects with my phone. There’s no cell coverage in Patagonia, but it allows me to have music while I ride. Sometimes it’s a classic rock, or old blues. Sometimes I sing along, sometimes not. Often I just put it on random and see what comes up. I kind like it when Schubert plays back to back with The Clash.

My maximum range on the Ténéré is 400 km (250 miles). But in remote places like Patagonia, where gas stations are few and far between, I never like to get below half a tank. It’s also good to stop and stretch the legs for a few minutes every couple of hours. There are often other motorcyclists filling up, having a coffee, grabbing a bite to eat and stretching. The trip to and from Ushuaia is a popular pilgrimage amongst the motorcycle faithful. Most were from South America, but there were quite a few Europeans, and a smattering of North Americans. In broken English and mangled Spanish, we swapped stories about our travels, places we’ve been or want to go. The Ténéré roused a lot of interest, since they’re not available yet in South America. Mostly we talked about the road conditions and weather ahead depending on which direction you were traveling.

And the wind. The camera is mounted straight in this picture. It’s tilted because the wind is so strong, you have lean over just to go straight.

Patagonia is the kingdom of the wind. Sailors call the area below 40° south latitude, “the roaring forties”. That’s because, aside from South America, there is nothing except the island of Tasmania and a bit of New Zealand to interrupt the winds that whirl around the southern ocean. The wind averages 40 kph west to east, and the roads run north-south, so it’s a constant crosswind. I had one day where it was 70, gusting to 90!

(The “roaring forties” were legendary in the days of sail. The winds are even worse in the “furious fifties”. There’s an old sailor’s saying, “Below 40° there is no law – Below 50° there is no God”).

Fill the tank, hit the bathroom, have a drink of water, then back on the road. Rinse and repeat. I’d usually start looking for a place to stay about 5 o’clock.

After 6 days of riding 8 hours a day, I was almost there. The most amazing thing happened when I was a hour away from Ushuaia – a rainbow appeared in front of me. It faded, then brightened, faded, then brightened, all the way into Ushuaia. I felt like Moses following the pillar of fire. I’m not naïve (or vain) enough to think it was something special, just for me. It rains a lot in Ushuaia and rainbows are common. But it felt special. Of course, rainbows are notoriously hard to photograph and the picture doesn’t do it justice, but you get the idea.

The end of the road is actually about 20 km past Ushuaia. Ruta 3 ends at Bahia la Pataia, in Tierra del Fuego National Park, 54.86° south latitude. It’s as far south as you can drive anywhere in the world. The end of the Pan American Hwy, 17,848 km from Dead Horse, Alaska. A 50 year dream come true.

Then I turned around and headed back the way I had come.

At it’s most prosaic, it was simply one more stop along the road. But there is something more to it than that. I don’t want to overburden it with hyperbole, but there is something to setting a challenge and then, despite the difficulties, meeting it.

It’s banal and misleading to say that anything is possible if you really want it. I know how lucky I am to have been able to make this journey. A lot of people don’t have the time or money, and lot more wouldn’t want to, even if they could. But if it signifies anything beyond another check mark on the bucket list, it’s that a lot, not all, but a lot of the limits we feel in our lives are ones we place upon ourselves.

Here are a few more pictures from my ride to “El Fin del Mundo”.