Hi everybody,

I am in Buenos Aires and am planning to buy a cheap secondhand scooter there to tour Argentina. Offcourse I´d rather ride a bike but I do not yet have my motorcycle driving license! (I´m getting one in July in Holland)

My general route will be to go south along the coast, cross the country to Bariloche, cross the Andes to Chile, ride north to Santiago, cross the Andes again, to Mendoza, and then via Cordoba back to Buenos Aires. Offcourse these are a lot of miles to be covered and I do not know if I will make it but it would be really cool.

I think i will be needing a tent, mat and sleeping bag, raingear and some heavy clothing because it gets quite cold there now. And also some simple tools and maybe a spare tyre, and a scooter offcourse. Does anybody know a cheap way to get these things, maybe some seconhand stuff I could buy somewhere?

In most countries you can drive a scooter up to a certain amount of cc`s or speed with just a car driving license right. Who knows what you can drive in Argentine? I asked a guy in a store yesterday and he said that in Buenos Aires you can drive up to 50cc, but outside B-A nobody cares about a licence. But legally I think I need to insure my bike, could i insure a bike without actually having a licence...?
If I can`t drive a motorized bike at all I might consider getting a license, but would this be expensive and hard to get? The same guy also told me that they are not really expensive but you do have to answer 30 questions in spanish..

Oh yeah and I don`t know how to fix a scooter flat tyre, I`m quite good with normal bicycles so I think I can learn, but is there a site somewhere which explains these kind of things? Or a good book available in shops in B-A?

O and can a 50cc scooter cross the Andes, or does it get troubles with the fuel becouse of the different pressure and oxigen availability...?
Or maybe it can`t go uphill..

Thanks!

Greetings,
Broos

Haaaah well I bougth one anyway...50cc little old bike for about 250 US and I'm riding to Tierra del Fuego!
VROEM

Buena Suerte! You'll need it bro'...

Keep us posted.

__________________
How much does a man live, after all?
Does he live a thousand days, or one only?
For a week, or several centuries?
How long does a man spend dying?
What does it mean to say “forever”? - Pablo Neruda

See, you didn't really need to ask all those questions - you knew what you were going to do.
If you are still interested in some answers, there are 1000s of threads in here which answer about 99% of them - not many of those answers will be in "route planning" though.

Good luck with the travels,

__________________
Dave

Yeah, you would have had better chance of replies if you had posted in the "Which Bike" section. If I had been a better moderator I would have shifted it for you! Good luck, and keep us posted. I would love to hear how it goes.

Cheers,

Nigel in NZ

--"Ride Tall, Ride Small"--

__________________
The mouth of a perfectly contented man is filled with . -- 2200 BC Egyptian inscription

Hey all! thanks for the replies, I´ll give an update:

After about 160 km, near the little town Magdalena, the bike almost completely broke down, as I kind of expected.. All the dents of the ´primero´ were ripped off and the suspension was broken. But the good part was that two brothers came to help me to fix the thing, and they offered me a place to sleep in their shed. I ended up sleeping there for over two weeks! In that time I sold that old thing after fixing it up a bit, and bought a real Honda! An Econopower with a 90cc fourstroke engine, the front actually looks like this: ! The two argentinian guys, an old russian lad and me fixed it up a lot, changed the chain, the ´corona´ and ´pignot´ and the air filter and some tubing and a lot of the electrick wiring and the front tire and cleaned up the interior of the carburator and cylinder, it was a lot of fun and the russian guy had a supply of vodka offcourse.

Three days ago I finally left Magdalena and am now on the road. The weather has been good and the roads nearly empty because it´s low season, it´s getting pretty cold though. I really like travelling like this but I´m constantly worrying that the bike is going to break down, every hundred kilometres or so it starts making other noises, and at the end of the first day the chain snapped in two!! Turned out that I didn´t put the screws on the corona tight enough and it got stuck.

I have to go now but I will update again soon!

you could have bought a new Honda Hero for about $1000.