Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25241
modern-enough operation planted a long 25 miles inside the Argentine border. It's as good a place as any for a customs house-there's nowhere else to turn between here and Argentina. Traveling this route by bike is all the more satisfying as we stand by eating ice cream and watching packs of international travelers stumble tiredly off of their buses, laboriously cramming luggage onto an X-ray machine. The climb is exhausting and is made more brutal by a curious expression of Chilean diligence. Highway planners have apparently not noticed that this entire stretch is a single, unflagging uphill climb and have planted yellow signs featuring a truck at a 60-degree angle every couple of kilometers to alert us of the rise. "No kidding!" I scream from behind the Bolivian as we inch our way around a curve and catch a glance of yet another road-sign slap in the face. "We've been climbing all morning!" EI Boliviano, with supreme cool, pulls over and plucks some wild blackberries from a roadside bush. Making things worse, some sadistic Chilean roadways' employee apparently thought it helpful to mark this international highway with distance markings in painstakingly minute increments. In the middle of the road, numbers read 19.985 km and, only a few feet away appears the next: 20.000 km. It's perhaps a straggling incarnation of the attention to detail that one finds in a country which was operated by the trains-run-on-time strongman, Augusto Pinochet, until only 12 years ago. The perfect yellow, hand-painted numbers batter us, insuring that we will fail to take our minds off the matter of the burning in our legs. Nonetheless, it is a beautiful stretch through Chile's Puyehue National Park, an area which draws visitors to its thermal springs and to hike around the Puyehue Volcano. But we crawl past the attractions, pining instead for Argentina's famed parril/as (steakhouses). The summit is marked with an understated sign reading "Bienvenidos a 10 Republica de Argentina" and with our first taste of pure, unchecked Patagonian wind. The region is notorious for its howling and relentless winds but thus far, we've been operating in the protective trough of the Andes. The road crumbles into a mess of dirt and gravel as we begin the descent into Argentina, where road crews are actively working to make the entry into what Argentines consider to be the more sophisticated of the Southern Cone countries a bit smoother. The road flattens as we enter Argentine customs. The handsome blond blockhead at Argentine customs reports uneasily to his boss that "we have no code for 'bicycle.'" "Put them down as walkers," shoots back the old man. Our route will wind us through three celebrated ski towns: Villa la Angostura, Bariloche and Esquel. While Chile is moderately expensive by Latin American standards, the Argentine economy - now in full crisis - makes things downright costoso. This morning in Villa la Angostura, a cozy, upscale ski town, EI Boliviano broke camp early and led me into town for a full-blown breakfast of eggs, waffles and $3 cafe con leche. Twenty-five dollars later we were finally on our way east to Bariloche. Lush forests and blue lakes of Argentina's Nahuel Huapi National Park border Argentine highway 231 east of Angostura but as we approach Bariloche, they gradually give way to a savage, red emptiness. Here, the vast horizon offers a taste of what it must be to traverse the Argentine Pampa, the broad swath of earth between the Andes and the Atlantic coast. Like reports we have heard about the Pampa, here too, the brutal winds are trained directly upon our faces. We battle the fierce winds, drafting one another like geese. Faced with the longest segment of our trip 75 miles from Bariloche to EI Bols6n, we lazily killed the morning in Bariloche, lying to ourselves about how long the trip south would take. Now, nearing dusk and still 40 miles north of EI Bols6n, I test the idea on EI Boliviano of hitching a ride in a truck. "There's not a single street lamp on these roads and there's no shoulder," I plead. "We're sitting ducks." "Are you kidding?" he insists. "You want to pass up the chance to ride 40 miles under the stars." He's right. Night smothers the mountaintops, and then us, and soon we're biking, wearing camping headlamps, in the pitch-black of night under the stately Southern Cross in the Lite-Brite sky. The pure silence of the night is tricked only by the swoosh of our knobby tires on the pavement and the very rare passing car. EI Bols6n, a town of 10,000 is known as a hippy refuge, and any reputation at all is probably a boon for a place situated so squarely in the middle of nowhere. The average Argentine knows this part of his country about as well as a typical American knows Kansas. This is not to say that EI Bols6n is unworthy of a visit, merely that it is a damn long way from Buenos Aires. It is a beautiful little town nestled between two mountain ranges. It is also the only place that could be called a town for the 175 miles between Bariloche and Esquel. Visitors remember it for its open-air "Hippy Market," complete with noisy open-mic political exhortations and an inexplicably large quantity of carved wooden forks and spoons. EI Bols6n is Gatlinburg, Tennessee, with an end-of-the-world feel. Argentina and Chile have been, for the most part, peaceful neighbors for the past couple of centuries. But, in tiny Trevelin, Argentina, the tensest moment between the two nations still seems fresh. The town, an inconsequential outpost nearly 2,000 kilometers from Buenos Aires, is geographically cozy with Chile-a stone's throw from the border. Yet culturally, Trevelin is securely Argentine. Local nice guy Andres Fernandez invites us into his living room to drink mate, a bitter Argentine tea steeped from wild herbs originally collected on the open plains by Argentine gauchos. Now, mate is integrated into modern Argentine culture. Sucked through a common straw, the drink is passed around a circle of friends and serves as a rite of friendship. As his wife pours the next and the next and the next cup, Andres remembers all too clearly when Argentina and Chile staged a militarized frontier standoff in 1978. At stake: ownership of three small islands at the end of the world, just off the coast ofTierra del Fuego, in the Beagle 32