My Blog
Playing Frozen Footsie With Mount Fitz Roy
'Ummm, Faye. I'm worried I might have gone mental.' 'Huh? Why?' Says Faye absently mindedly from the bed adjacent to mine. 'Well, my toes are itchy. They were itchy last night, and they're itching now.' 'What kind of itchy?' Faye enquires. 'Like a stingy, burny kind...
The real secret to lighting a fire (it's not what Ray Mears would say)
‘It’s going to go out, it’s going to go out, it’s going to… Oh bugger It’s gone out.’ I slouch backwards and sigh. Faye and I are sat outside our tents around our MSR Whisperlite stove willing it not to die on us. Our green soup cups are half-filled with dried mashed...
Me, Robinson Crusoe and the O'Higgins Glacier
Today we went glacier hunting. I am slumped over the railings on the top floor of the ‘Robinson Crusoe’. The boat is rolling from side to side, causing me to brace my legs against the slippery white deck. My stomach feels like a washing machine set to spin mode. Bile...
How to make a 30th birthday 'special' on the road?
It’s 8am on a Friday in northern Patagonia and I am deeply engrossed in this morning’s top secret mission: operation birthday surprise. I am doing my best to keep any noise to a minimum. Faye is still asleep in the tent next door as I delicately unwrap the sponge cake...
Chile's legendary Careterra Austral: When hype doesn't equal reality.
Ah the Careterra Austral. These are two words both Faye and I had never heard until we began cycling in South America. But everywhere we went, and from every cycle tourist we met who learned of our route south, the question was the same: ‘So you’re going to DO the...
With Love, From Germany
We begin to chatting to German couple Anja and Radko on the roadside just outside the Chilean village of Chaitén. I’d first seen them an hour earlier, as we zoomed past a duo taking shelter and eating lunch under a roadside bus stop. It was too wet (and we were too...
A Dog Bite And A Rabies Scare
We’ve been in Puerto Montt now for 3 days and are packing up our things to leave. We’d stopped a little longer than usual in town to wait for some packages to arrive from the UK (one of which contains some new shorts for Faye’s now permanently exposed buttocks). Alas,...
Down But Not Out
Today we had our first crash. We are heading for the Chilean town of Puerto Montt on our fifth day since leaving San Martin de los Andes, and it is wet, wet, wet. As Marti Pellow so beautifully put it: 'I feel it in fingers, I feel it in my toes…’ except, actually I...
The Battle of Bettina
Today was all about Bettina. We’ve just left a lunchtime break on an Argentinian lake shore. Today it isn’t raining, which is an unexpected treat given the hail storm of yesterday. We are gunning it along the road, using the wind and warm air to dry our pants and...
Caught Between A Storm And A Mushroom
We pedal out of the alpine-chic ski bum town of San Martin de Los Andes at 1pm. We exchange a small hi-five in the supermarket carpark on the way out, congratulating ourselves for such an ‘early’ departure. Usually, we aim to leave towns at 10am and roll out at 4pm,...
