Puente del Inca to Uspallata (with link to photos)
26.5.09
Saturday (Sabado) 16/5/9 was meant to be a very cruisy run from 2720m down to 2020m through a most beautiful valley out of the Andes.
And it was... for the first 30km. We even got past the Nacional Gendarmeria without too many hiccups. They seemed satisfied with our receipt from the hostel for two nights which is why although we came into Argentina on the 14th we only arrived at Puente del Vacas on the 16th. Sometimes limited Spanish has its benefits.
We started rolling down a relatively gentle gradient (950m over the first 15km). There was a nice tail wind too so we couldn’t even really feel the speed – I could hear Stuart Bragg’s voice again in my mind and used my brakes more often than would be usual.
Really if the first 30km had been the day I probably wouldn’t have set a blog aside for it. But in reality the day’s adversity was created from about 30km to 65km. As we descended the wind accelerated to a point where I would guess the gusts were over 100km/h. At some points it was actually terrifying and we had to stop the bikes and walk them for fear of being blown over or crashing over the edge into the abyss of a canyon/valley below.
It seemed such a cruel joke that we had such a beautiful descent but that we had to walk parts of it due to the wind or at least white knuckles from braking down to less than 10km/hr! Indeed there were two occasions where we had to go through fairly short tunnels that focussed the wind so strongly that you could hardly stand up against the wind. The tunnels were like being in a stretched slingshot and forcing yourself to gently, ever so gently release the slingshot as if you just let go the ‘rock’ would fly out the other end of the tunnel and never stop...
And then as we descended further and the valley opened up we were hit by numerous dust and gravel storms. I put my goretex jacket on just to give myself more protection from the gravel pelting me like hail in the back! I asked Anita if she regretted sending on her swimming googles that were in the post from Santiago to Mendoza.
At the 40km mark, to top it off, I got a flat tyre. And the pump wouldn’t work! Fortunately I had a spare in the BOB bag so we unpacked the BOB to get it out. It would appear that although the tyres are essentially bullet proof from the outside with special foam protectors AND tyre liners the rim tape was substandard. It was very disappointing to find this out in the middle of the wind. And then this very nice fellow stopped his car to tell us how dangerous it was for us to be stopped where we were due to the falling rocks. We said thank you to him as he drove away in his pick up truck and left us to chew the dirt while we continued to fix the flat... ;^). I was well aware of our dangerous and precarious position as Anita was fairly narrowly missed by a big rock (two fists I guess) that bounced behind her about 5 km previous.
All in all it was a monumental day. The scenery was enormous and despite the fact that we descended some 1000 m and actually ascended nearly 300m (so the altimeter says anyway) we really expended no physical energy. We are both however exhausted from focussing so hard all day to ensure we didn’t have any nasty accidents.
Despite all the dangers and harrowing adventures of the day, our diary still shows many more positives than negatives.
↑Excellent sunrise in Puente del Inca
↑Beautiful scenery
↑Excellent pizza and beer in Uspallata
↑Seeing a Condor in the desert as we left the Andes
↑74 km of nearly all down hill at a gradient that nearly meant no braking (if no tail wind)
↑Getting past the Gendarme with no hassles
↑Having a shower and getting into our sleeping bags in a safe campground for 10 pesos ($3.60 AUD) each per night
↑ Playing Futbol with the kids in the campground
↑ Eating our first Parillada. A carne (meat) fest!!! No one does it better than the Argentinians.
↓Mental exhaustion
↓The dust storm
↓The flat tyre in the peak of the dust storm
↓The wind tunnel (although I found this experience curious rather than scary)
↓ The loss of our photos from this leg (if you can advise on where to download some software to recover photos from microSD cards that would be appreciated)
Stuart and Anita
Posted byStuart Kane at 4:35 PM
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Hi Stu - looks like the trip is going fantastically.
On the microSD problem. Try a utility called Photorec from http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Photorec
It ignores the file system and goes for the underlying data, recognising 180 formats to recover. I came across a story of a Nikon that went feral on a flash card, losing a bunch of photos that were eventually recovered with this.