Big ups to you both for riding strong into full on Patagonian Winter!

Most riders turn round by end of March ... so you've beat the odds by a lot going nearly to mid Winter in Tierra Del Fuego! Main thing about the weather there is just how quickly it can change ... and get nasty in just a half hour or so.

I would put the call out here for help about ideas on how and where to ship your bikes from/to. You might try Monte Video if BA turns out to be too complex or expensive. Nice calm little port, but not sure how much traffic goes over to USA, Miami or Eastern Seaboard ports. Maybe worth a look? You could also fly into Galveston, TX. Air freight is costly but much more a sure thing.

Miami and USA Southern states will now be HOT and very humid. Canada will be nice but it's lots further, maybe more expensive to get there?
I just know you guys will do fine. You lead charmed lives for sure!

Congratulations on reaching as far south as you did, through ludicrous conditions
Pictures & reporting brilliant as always, but your own safety must come first.
Time to head for some warmer space & just marvel in what you have achieved on those poor wee posties

__________________
My memory is becoming that good, I should be able to organise my own surprise party soon

Thanks! We sure are lucky to be ale to do this trip. While it would have been great to have made Ushuaia neither of us is disappointed with our effort to have made it to where we did! Tierra Del Fuego!

We have some plans in motion to fly our bikes from Buenos Aires to Toronto Canada. Hopefully we will be there in the next month or so. Hot and humid, oh my, that sounds soooooo lovely!

Haha, thank you kindly! Yes we have to put our own safety first, and really the only reason we turned back was because of our own inability to deal with the snow and ice. How the hell do people drive/ride in the stuff???!!!

So northwards we shall go! Our posties have done so well. We are very happy with them! But the poor things are starting to show the strain now. They really weren't designed with this type of thing in mind!

T - We are beginning our northward journey today and it started with a ferry ride back across from Tierra Del Fuego to mainland Chile.

I must confess to feeling a small sense of sadness at having to turn around when we were so close to our end goal. But the idea of riding back into snow and ice isn't a tempting one. And our guts are screaming at us to not push on.





The ferry ride was pretty uneventful and soon TDF had slipped away into the distance and became just a vague shape on the horizon. Both of us are starting to feel quite excited to get back into 10+ degree days again where we can continue our camping.







We have sent of a few emails to get some shipping quotes and hope to have something solid organised soon. We would like to be in Buenos Aires in 3 weeks and hopefully be riding in Canada in 4. Fingers crossed!

C - We were both getting really excited about flying back to Canada and exploring the east coast of the country. I am completely in love with Latin America and will miss it dearly when we leave, but it will be nice, particularly for Todd, to chat to people in English again - Todd misses out sometimes because it is more difficult for him to communicate in Spanish.

T - We had booked back into a hotel we had stayed at in Punta Arenas previously and after a nice catch up with the owners they delivered to us some bad news. Chilean Customs workers had gone on an indefinite strike nationwide. All the border posts were closed. We couldn't exit Chile until it had been resolved.

This was quite a blow. Both of us sat in our room and I started to feel really stressed. Now the strike could be over in a day or two, but it could also drag on for weeks. One we read about lasted 2.5 months. For me the biggest issue isn't being stuck in pretty Punta Arenas, but being stuck in full blown Patagonian winter on our bikes.

C - This is completely out of our control so there is no point getting worked up about it. But, the challenge is that winter is fast approaching and all that snow and ice will soon start creeping northwards towards the border. After having made the decision to go north, we are both now keen, keen beans to get out of the cold.

T - We don't really know what to do as we are totally at the mercy of Customs. The last ferry of the season back north leaves tomorrow from Puerto Natales 250kms away and we have no way to get tickets and get there in time for that. So we shall stay here tomorrow night too and try to come up with a plan.

T- No photos for today. I forgot all about the camera.

We have sent a heap of emails off to some freight forwarders down this way. We are hoping that we may have the option to fly our bikes from Punta Arenas back into Santiago. While it isn't ideal it's one of the very few options we have to keep moving. We would then likely abandon our plans to ride into Argentina as there is a rather large snow covered mountain range between Chile and Argentina and fly our bikes from Santiago to Canada once the strike was over.

So thats one option. The other one which we will try tomorrow is to ride 200kms north and just try to cross the border. We will act dumb and plead they let us through due to the approaching winter. There is a hotel just 30kms from the border so it will be easier for us to hole up there.

Our third option is to see if Argentina will allow us to process us and our bikes through even if Chile won't process our bikes out. It would mean we likely wouldn't be able to come back to Chile as we would basically not process our bikes out of Chile which means it would appear that we either abandoned or sold our bikes in Chile which is a big no-no. So not the ideal situation, but we will do what we need to in the end.

Or we end up having to sit in a hotel for who knows how long while we wait. This is very much not the ideal situation at all and I would rather take option 3 over this.

C - The daylight hours are quite short down here and I was uncomfortable doing a run for the border without knowing that there was a closer hotel option. Now we know that a hotel only 30km from the border has a room for us tomorrow night, we will make a border run and see what happens! I have all my fingers and toes crossed Argentina will let us in, even if Chilean customs will not process the exit of our bikes. Fingers crossed people!!

T - So with our options on the table we went for a de-stress walk. We had read of a large mall about 3.5 kms away and went to check it out. It was nice to walk and chat about crap and took our minds off of what was going on.
The mall was huge and served as a Duty Free zone for Punta Arenas. I was eyeballing the nice Mavic Pro Drones in the shop windows....

We treated ourselves to a big hamburger and fries for lunch before walking the 3.5kms back to our room.

So tomorrow we shall try the border and see how it turns out. Wish us luck!

T- Well nothing for it but to try and get out of Chile. We were packed up and ready to go by 10 and the owners of the hotel came out to say goodbye. They weren't too sure that we would be able to cross and told us to come back if we couldn't.

C - It was worth a go, and if we could not cross, then we knew there was a hotel, only 30km back from the border, where we could stay. But we were really hopeful that we could just skip Chilean customs if Argentina would process our documents without proof of the Chilean export.

T - The sky was gorgeous blue and totally devoid of clouds and there was a lovely crispness in the air. My perfect kind of morning! We rode along heading out of town and as I braked for a traffic light Mabel fell away from under me and in less than a nano second I was down on the ground. Bloody hell the road was slick as snot. My front wheel had locked up and just threw the bike straight over.

Luckily there wasn't too much damage, only Mabels nice crash guard covers which were shredded on the road. Bugger.



C - Poor Todd and Mabel. It was less than 2 minutes into the ride and not a great way to start the day. The road was so very, very slippery from all the snow and ice melting after a slightly warmer day yesterday.

Today though, the weather felt so different. It felt like a spring morning, rather than a winter morning and we were both excited to slog out the 200km to the border.



T - The road from Punta Arenas out to the border was a very long one. The kilometers seemingly ticked away so slow. But we pressed on and 200kms later we were being waved into a parking spot by a military guy. We had passed a ton of trucks all headed away from the border and all with Argentinian plates so I was ever hopeful that we would be processed through. There was not a soul in the immigration and customs building when we entered so we went straight to the Argentinian Customs and asked if it was possible to import our bikes into Argentina. He said yes, no problems.







We gave him our import permit from Chile, not sure of what to do with it. He gave it to a very unhappy looking Customs official from Chile and proceeded to get us into Argentina. 40 minutes later and we had passed muster with Customs, immigration, and the military checkpoint outside.

I was shocked. We were in Argentina legally. The man who dealt with our Chilean import permit was very unhappy though. Oh well. Tough luck pumpkin.





C - Oh the relief! We are now both so excited to travel north and into weather that means that we can feel our fingers and toes all day long - imagine how blissful this is going to be!





T - We cruised directly north from there, straight towards the warm sun until we hit the town of Rio Gallegos where we stopped for the night.

We both feel so relieved to have been able to cross as we kept being told that only foot traffic and dangerous goods were being allowed to pass. This is our final South American country and we are now on the count down to Buenos Aires, just 2600kms away!

T - We planned to be up and packed by sunrise today so we could make a good run north. We want to make the most of the short daylight hours down here with the sun not peeking through much before 10am.

And for the first time in a while we actually made it up and out the door on time! It's been much too easy to lay in bed and wait for the outside world to warm up a little these days.

C - Venturing outside into the dark at 0830 is such a weird sensation for me. I always feel like its 0530, not 0830! We decided to pack up the bikes, then warm up whilst we ate breakfast, so we could start the day warm. As I opened the door to the carpark, the icy cold wind slapped me in the face. Ouch, it's gonna be a cold morning. The girls were completely frosted over with ice and Rosie looked miserable. She then sounded miserable whilst we both spent the next 20 minutes trying to kick her over to get her to warm up. Like me, the cold is her favourite way to start the day!



Finally, we got smokey joe going and managed to fill up the carpark with her smelly, oily grey smoke. Quite a beautiful sight in the orange glow of the carpark lights...

T - As we rode out of the hotels parking lot we were greeted with wet roads and grey skies and a ton of frost. Except, it wasn't wet roads at all. It was a thin veneer of bloody ice.

Now just recently Mabels rear brake has taken to locking on and not releasing itself. So the first time I went to brake it locked on and Mabel slid sideways down the road. Crap. We decided we would ride at 30kms/hr and take it nice and easy until we got out of town.

However the roads had a different idea and on the approach to the next set of lights Mabel and I were suddenly down hard onto the road and slid up to the lights in style. None of the drivers around us even blinked. They probably see this all the time.

C - Poor Todd - two days in a row. Rosie had a sideways skip as I started to slow, but thankfully I was going slow enough that I could put my feet down and slide to a stop next to a now sleeping Mabel.

T - Picking Mabel up was quite the challenge as I slid and skated around the road after her until eventually she slid into the kerb and I could lever her up. Now the other crash bar cover was shredded and I had a screaming pain on my right side. Sigh.

C - Of course, at this time, I got distracted from the GPS, concentrating on not falling over, and missed our turn. We ended up having to backtrack along the foreshore - what a delightful misturn! It was simply stunning, with the sun just beginning to show its first light over the ocean whilst white, wispy mist drifted upwards. It was really beautiful.

T - We made it out of town very, very slowly and I started to feel stupidly anxious about falling again. I have fallen off tons of times before and it's never bothered me. But now I felt wobbly and rode with my feet down skimming along the road.

The ice stayed with us on the main highway for the next 60kms. It was so slippery. I gave up riding on the road with my heart in my mouth and instead rode on the gravel shoulder.



C - It was nice to see that the other traffic on the highway was taking it very easily as well. The cars and trucks were all moving at a much slower pace and you could see everyone was maneuvering slowly.

As we made our way up the highway, I was already cold. The pastures on either side of the highway were white with ice - it looked like snow until you got close. Within no time, my hands and feet were burning with cold and then shortly after, they were completely numb.





We stopped regularly to perform our traffic entertainment on the side of the road - this includes jumping jacks, running on the spot and generally dancing around like weirdos as we try to get feeling back in our hands and feet.

It starts as some very odd crippled people stiffly climb off of their motorbikes, barely able to straighten their knees or manage an upright position, given the lack of sensation in their feet. We must look like such a sight as we slowly come to life and then start jumping and dancing around!







I really struggled to mentally deal with the cold today. We ended up stopping every 45 minutes so I could try to warm up. By the time we neared stopping, I was shivering all over. It was the coldest I have been so far.

T - We slogged along the Ruta 3. The scenery was pretty flat and featureless and I really liked it. We don't want anymore mountains for just now. By 230pm we had reached our planned stop for the night and decided to push on and knock out another 120kms for the day.





C - As the time neared 2pm, we had left the icy roadsides behind and the weather began to feel just a touch warmer.

We stopped at the gas station in Comandante Luis Piedrabuena and sat in their warm restaurant whilst we enjoyed a nice big hot chocolate.

Feeling much refreshed, we jumped back on the bikes, much warmer than before. In fact, I stayed much warmer for the rest of the ride and that last 120km was much, much easier.

T - By the time we pulled into the town of Puerto San Julian, 360kms from where we started, it was just getting dark and cold and we had ridden for near on 8 hours. Rosie had a horrid sound coming from her engine and it turned out her exhaust gasket has let go. That poor bike is falling apart. Im starting to struggle to keep up her maintenance as her engine is falling apart faster than I can fix it! Not far Rosie and then you can have a new motor!

C - Tomorrow, we keep heading north on Ruta 3. We will aim for around 350km again and hopefully be back in weather suitable for camping within a day or two!

C - Oh, what a treat!! We ventured outside at around 9am to pack the bikes to discover....not a scrap of ice or snow anywhere! The first time since we left Puerto Montt. WOOHOOOOOOO!!! The morning was still crispy and chilly, but nowhere near as bad as it has been.

T - It was positively warm this morning! I reckon it must have been at least 5 degrees! So toasty.

C - We were surprised to see the first light come in a bit earlier too. At 9am, there was some hint of the dawn grey, so we hit the road at 10am, back to the Ruta 3.



I was a bit of a dare devil this morning and decided to forego my balaclava and wet weather jacket. Well, within 50km that had all changed and we were making our first stop to warm up. It definitely wasn't as cold as yesterday, but the wind still had an unpleasant chill to it.

On went the balaclava and the wet weather jacket and we were back on the road for the next 50km. Which turned out to be a very straight 50km. I really do not think we took a single turn in this 50km!





T - We had heard about how boring this Ruta 3 section of Patagonia is, but I must say I have been really enjoying it. It is absolutely gorgeous! Sure its flat but that is the beauty of it. The road flies as straight as arrow for tens of kilometers then it dips into a random canyon, blasts up the other side and resumes its flat straightness for the next 50kms. Loving it.





C - And so on the day went. Stopping every 50km to run and jump around to warm up. We saw gazillions of Guanco (a native type of llama) today and envied their warm, fluffy coats.







T - They are such a daft looking animal, they seem much taller than the llamas that we have seen in Peru and they tend to freak out when the bikes get close. Trucks blasting by and they dont even blink, but see a postie bike on the horizon and its panic stations. They fly in all directions, abandoning their young and leap over fences in their haste to get away. Mabel and Rosie sure are threatening looking and sounding...I guess...Silly bloody animals.

C - We pushed on through 270km to reach the first real town of the day, Fitz Roy. We stopped here for a hot coffee and some biscuits and definitely picked the wrong truck stop! We picked the one without any hot food and with only one small heater in the corner which the owner hogged. I had been dreaming about a steaming, hot empanada to warm up my insides. Never mind!





The last 80km went just as the rest, but it seemed to be a little warmer and we pushed on without stopping. We reached Caleta Olivia and were greeted with an unimaginable amount of plastic rubbish everywhere. This was the worst we had seen since Peru. It was horrifying to see how much plastic, mainly plastic bags, were littering everything - stuck in bushes, fences, against cars.

T - The plastic bags snagged in every bush and fence as we came into town was absolutely staggering. The area is called Trash Hill by other overlanders and its a damn shame to see it like that. What a mess. Every little shrub had 3 or 4 bags stuck to it. Such a pity. But on the plus side, our hotel room has two toilet in it. One for number ones and one for number twos. But the flushing on one of them is weird, it sprays up and hits me in the face every time I use it. It must be broken.



C - It really feels as though we are powering north now and hopefully we will awake to a bit warmer morning again tomorrow!

T - We faced a big day today. Our ride was going to be 450kms long and we wouldn't make it to our destination much before dark. Nothing for it but to get up early and get cracking!

C - The reason for the big day is that there is not a single town after Comodoro Rivadavia, only 80kms from our starting point. Nothing for it but to push for the whole 9 yards!

T - And what a perfect start to the day! It wasn't cold, traffic wasn't too bad and the sky was a beautiful clear blue! Nice! We hooned out of town and cruised along the coast while the sun hovered just above the horizon and warmed us up.





C - It was such a stunning morning. We were still fully clothed in everything we own, but we could feel that the temps were slowly increasing. It was to be our first, full balaclava free day!

T - From there on nothing much changed. We rode through the city of Comodoro Rivadavia and then there was nothing for the next 200 odd kms. No towns, nada, nil, nuttin'. I could put up a picture from yesterday and it would look the same as today. Flat and featureless as far as we could see. Really lovely!



C - One thing we were not expecting was a rise in elevation. So it came as a bit of a shock to see signs suggesting that we were about to enter a "chain up" area. Slowly, we rose up to 660mtrs in elevation. Which really is not much, but boy did it change the temperature. What started out as a mild day soon turned into a cold day again. The beautiful blue sky disappeared and once again we were riding the Ruta 3 under a moody, grey windswept sky. Sigh.





T - We rode along and got knocked about by the blasts of wind from hundreds of trucks. We plodded along and had our bikes working hard at 70km/hr all day, and it showed. By the time we had done 260 km's both bikes were wearing new oil leaks and Rosie had a pinhole in one of her oil cooler lines. Poor bikes. On the plus side, Chantelles right hand boot was getting a nice dose of oil which should make it a little more water repellent! Luckily I have a section of oil line and tomorrow I will replace the split bit of hose and we will have to fix her other leaks.

C - We plugged on until 2.30pm when we reached a fuel stop. We grabbed a coffee to warm up and then we were straight back onto the highway for the final slog.

T - By the time we reached the town of Trelew we were both exhausted and the bikes needed a rest. So we grabbed a bottle of and chilled out in our room while the bikes sat ticking and cooling and dribbling oil on the ground in a covered in carpark.



We are now 1450kms from Buenos Aires and plan to be there in about a week. Chantelles birthday is coming up and we will take a day off the bikes to celebrate it.

So tomorrow we give the girls a service, fix some leaks and push on northwards.

T - We had planned another 400+ km day today. So we wanted to get away at a decent hour and make tracks. But first I had to try to fix Rosies leaky oil cooler hose. Luckily we carried a spare piece and it wasn't long before we had a new one fitted up and off we went.

C - It was great to get one of Rosie's oil leaks sorted! Although, the split in the oil line hose was making my right boot nice and shiny and more waterproof!

T - And that was about as exciting as it got! We just rode and rode. The first 100 kms ticked by so slowly. But we kept at it, breaking our day into 100km hops. We noticed that the trucks seemed to be a little crazy in their driving today and we would get a line of them passing us within a meter as they flew by at possibly double our speed! A few of them would tailgate us so closely that we could feel the heat coming from their radiator grills. Just stupid driving really. Still this is the life of riding a slow bike on a highway.





We really did just slog it out today, and the last part of our day was spent discussing the next part of our Americas trip. We are both stunned at the cost to ship our bikes from Buenos Aires to Canada. It's going to cost us the equivalent of 6 months travel budget, which is really quite hard to take.





C - Shipping from Australia to the Americas was so cheap that this really did come as a shock - more than twice the price! It is hard to spend such a big chunk of cash one on event like this, when we know that money would do us another six months of travelling.

T - We have been umming and ahhing about what we should do. The shipping is a lot, then we would need to ship back home from the US still. Or we could ship home from Buenos Aires, maybe ride a little around Australia and find a place we like with a job each and start planning the next part of our adventure.

We both feel quite down about this as we really didn't expect this shipping to be so high for such little bikes.



Tomorrow we continue on and being as its Chantelles birthday on the 3rd we plan on having that day off of the bikes before making the final push into Buenos Aires.

T - "One more long day of riding and you can have a day off" I promised Mabel.

But she just scoffed "Covfefe" in my direction as she belted down the highway.

It was her special day today and all I could do was flog the crap out of her again.

We had packed up earlyish this morning as we were keen to make the city of Bahia Blanca at a reasonable hour and begin our break off of the bikes. I had to fix a very nasty oil leak on Rosie first though. We had been trying to ignore it and worry about it in Buenos Aires, but now Rosies rear tyre was quite wet with oil and I was worried that with a bit of rain she and Chantelle would be slipping on their bottoms down the road.

Unfortunately when I took of Rosies pegs to get at the side engine cover the whole peg assembly just fell apart in my hands. All the mounting bolts had stripped and rattled to bits. That's going to need to be fixed!



Oil leak fixed and pegs tied back on with a length of rope and we were out of there.





C - Poor Rosie! Soon Rosie, you will repaired! Only three days of riding till we reach Buenos Aires!



T - Just 100 kms up the road and Mabel turned the big one. 000000. Brand new again! I bought her way back when she only had 28 000 kms on her. Only two years ago! Good job Mabes, now let's get back to the next lot of noughts.



C - It was really exciting when Mabel turned back around the clock to 000000! We had a jump around on the side of the highway and loudly sang Happy Birthday to her.



T - We slogged along the now very busy highway and got pushed, shoved and blown all over the road by trucks and cars. Then we ran through a big patch of thorns and Mabel got a flat tyre. Luckily I needed to pull her rear wheel off tomorrow to make her rear brake work again anyway, so we spent the next hour changing the tube out, pulling all the thorns from my very bald tyre, and unjamming her brake mechanism. All the salt, sea water, mud and grit from the past few months must have all helped to ensure that it was all tightly rusted up never to move again. Until I hit it with my axe. Then it all fell apart and after a nice clean up and some lube with our chain spray we were off again, with a working rear brake! Yay!









We soon blasted into Bahia Blanca and headed to our home for the next two nights. We had found an apartment for rent where we would have a kitchen and all right in the centre of town. We plan on cooking a nice meal of Surf and Turf tomorrow night with a helping of hand cut chippies all slathered in creamy garlic sauce. DROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL.

Tomorrow is Chantelles birthday so I will also buy her a big cake. Probably I will try to find my favourite, I mean her favourite...

T - Happy birthday Channy!

We had been planning to have Chantelles birthday as a down day for some time now so it was nice to not have to pack up the bikes, or even look at the bikes. As much as we do love them.

Instead we spent the day having a short walk to the grocery store and then back to our apartment for a chill out day.

C - We found ourselves a small apartment to stay in that had a kitchen, so we could cook up a comfort meal for dinner! I had a great day doing essentially nothing and then cooking! Perfecto!







T - We bought a nice cake and cooked up an amazing dinner of steak, garlic prawns and chips. It was bloody lovely! All washed down with some red wine while we watched netflix.

C - I definitely ate too much of everything, especially the cake. What else to do on your birthday!





T - All in all a very relaxing day. Tomorrow we continue our ride towards Buenos Aires, but things have come up and our plans are again having to change. So we shall see what happens over the next few weeks.

T - We were planning another 350km ride today, and to be honest neither of us are feeling it these days. It's been quite the slog for us since we left Punta Arenas and we are looking forward to stopping and smelling the oil leaks a little more.

The first 100 kms dragged by with agonising slowness. Ugh. Sometimes these trips play these mental games and the roads end seemingly gets further away the closer you get to it. It was just one of those days.





C - Today was definitely one of those days. Doing this kind of riding is not our thing - slog all day on the highway, pull into the first hotel in town destination, eat, sleep, repeat. It gets quite exhausting. I think our first 100km of the day took 600km and 23 hours.

T - It was all summed up by the spot we chose for lunch. It was by pure chance that we pulled off the highway and into a rubbish dump. Neither of us had the energy to go any further and so we sat there amongst the rotting sheep carcasses and old chemical drums and ate our sandwiches.

C - We half heartedly toyed with the idea of finding another lunch spot but it was obvious we were both happy to just be oblivious to our surroundings and enjoy our leftover sandwiches of birthday steak, chips and creamy garlic sauce!





T - With just 250 kms to go we trudged on and on eventually rejoining the Ruta 3 which had now become a toll road.









Finally we rolled into town a good 8 hours after we started. Both of us physically and mentally exhausted. We booked into a small run down hotel where we could store the bikes in a garage and walked into town for supplies before crashing into bed.



Tomorrow the plan is to head the last 350 kms into Buenos Aires where we may just stop for a while.

T - When we got up today we both decided to just stay another night. Neither of us was particularly excited to go into the city of Buenos Aires and just wanted to spend a day doing nothing.

So we started to research flights and sent some more emails off before having a wander into the town center. I managed to scoff a 250ml cup of Dulce de Leche and Chocolate Blanco icecream and immediately my day brightened up. It was possibly the best ice cream I have had since Mexico! Ahh Mexico, how we miss you and your topes.





Then it was back to the hotel where we caught up on some computer work and spent the afternoon watching tv shows.





C - But we did manage to make one decision - we decided to put off making the hard decision about where to from here and go and check our Argentina's north eastern neighbour. That's called adulting!

T - We have decided to duck into Uruguay for a bit and have a look while we have some spare time. It is so close and we do have time to waste so why not! So tomorrow's plan is to just have a short day's ride and stop more often.