May 9th, 2007
Rio Gallegos, Argentian

One thing – remember how Rob lost his bike key last night?  This morning, he lost the key to one of our three motorcycle locks.  Not just fake-lost, like last night, but real-lost, as in now we have a really high quality length of uncuttable steel we can´t use.

What a day.  It started out so nicely – a tiny bit of sunshine to start us off, roads wet but not slick, and no rain.  We were making amazing time out of Rio Grande, but about an hour into our trip we ran into a split (we thought) in the road that included a customs station.  We were exactly at the border between Argetinian provinces, and thought it was some kind of weird inter-provincial checkstop.  

It turned out to be a FORK in the road, and we headed off to Chile about 110 kms earlier than we´d wanted to.

Over half an hour apiece for Argentinian export customs and Chilean import, and we were on our way.  On the worst roads i´ve ever seen.  Potholes, puddles.  Gravel.  No pavement for nearly three hours.

And it started to rain.  Not a heavy rain, but a constant, relentless, soak-you-through-to-your-bones-and-the-other-side kind of malicious rain.  Especially on gravel, pitted roads.

After we acclimatized to the new conditions, we were able to pick up the pace to about 80km/h, which wasn´t bad.  Except every one in a while we´d catch a series of massive potholes and ´bout rattle holes in our teeth.  We were costantly on edge, on the literal edges of our seats to try and keep the bikes up.

An hour and a half or so into this guelling gravel, we passed a grader, spreading new gravel over the road.  Initially, I was pleased – fill up some of these damn potholes.  Instead, it was as though he´d spread jello all over the road.  Our speed dropped immediately from 80 to about 20-30 km/h, and we all nearly bailed several times throughout.  Especially me.  But nobody went down.

We hit the Chilean border at about noon, and we finally made it off the gravel roads at about 3:30pm.  Interestingly, the paved road we finally made it onto was concrete, not asphalt.  We immediately kicked up the speed to try and make up for time we´d lost going into Chile.

Get this – shortly before we hit the ferry to cross over to the mainland, Sean HIT A FRACKIGN LLAMA.

No joke.  I lost Sean and Justin over a hill, and apparently a llama freaking jumped across the road right in front of Sean.  He managed to slow enough to catch the rear end of the animal, and went into one of the worst speed wobbles he says he´s ever had.  He still isn´t sure how he pulled out of it, but he did NOT lay his bike down.

Unlike Ryan, who actually dropped his bike twice at the next border station.  Twice within a block.  In my defense, we had to stop and turn around many times to find the right customs lane.  

Once we hit the real road, we were able to pick up the pace, but we´d lost so much time through that gravel that we were only able to make it to Rio Gallegos tonight.

Unfortuately, there´s nothing at all for services on the roads we travelled, and we all ran out of gas about 25 kms outside Rio Gallegos.  Anticipating a long night trekking back and forth with cans of gas, or hitchhiking, we were most pleasantly surprised when we were able to flag down someone in a gasoline vehicle (out of, say, fifteen vehicles that passed us, only two were gasoline, and the first guys wouldn´t stop).  He was very willing to help us out, in fact, and even had a 1.5-gallon jug of gasoline in his trunk. 

We wanted to buy it, and initially he didn´t want to take any money, but I wanted the jug as well as the gasoline, and offered him $10 USD for it.  He jumped at the chance, and took off right away – to perhaps escape before I came to my senses.  I figuered out, on the way into town, that I´d purchased 5 litres of gasoline for the price of 30 litres.  But hey – it was WAY worth it, dude.

We haven´t had any time to actually eat, so except for small sandwiches last night, we  haven´t eaten since the morning of the eighth, and that was a small continental breakfast.  

We went out tonight to this pizza place.  We ordered:
1)	Large calabrese pizza (thank you Rich for your picky eating habits – without you, i would not have known what this was)
2)	Two hot dogs (we didn´t know what a ´pancho´ was, and ordered one to try out some local cuisine)
3)	A large steak sandwich.  Not a steak with some bread, but some frackin´ beef on a massive bun with all the fixin´s
4)	Two sides of french fries
5)	A large (LARGE) calabrese calzone
6)	Six litres of beer
And still could have had dessert, but decided not to push it.  Total cost of the (awesome) meal?  $28 USD.

An interesting thing about Argentina – there´s really an incredible amount of english music being played, everywhere.  I´m not even kidding, I´ve heard that ´Maggie´ song by Rod Stewart at least three times since I´ve been here.  Haven´t heard any Nickelback, though, so they all either have better taste than Justin, or Nickelback hasn´t broken through here yet.

It´s 11:15 now, though, and I´m rully, rully tired.

G´night,
Ryan Noble
Rio Gellagos, Argentina