San Carlos de Bariloche

Stacy was right and I probably should have waited to say exactly what bike trip we would do until after talking to the bike shop. Also, and unfortunately, maybe, our bus into the area from Chile, drove most of the route we were considering doing. Don’t get me wrong, it’s quite beautiful, but now we have done a lot of it.

Yes I know, true cyclists throughout the world are screaming, but it’s not the same:). Well… Also, there is no bike lane, only gravel alongside the road. Many cyclists ride on the road, but it is one lane of traffic each direction with lots of buses and a real narrow gap between you and the cars. To Stacy and I this is a bit nerve wracking and opted for option B.

We decided to still do an overnighter but wound up cutting our trip by a third with the plan being to camp out and then bike back the next day. Easy right 😂😂 Well, if anyone knows Stacy and I, havoc always reigns supreme.

First off, we thought this would be a relatively easy ride, only 20km to our campsite, all the while, riding along pristine lakes with less traffic than what we had been considering doing. Everything started out fine, riding along the coast to start making our way out of the city of San Carlos de Bariloche.

The main route still entailed those gravel roads that parallel all the streets and highways and is much slower and harder cycling than using the pavement, but neither of us felt terribly safe riding in the road. We still felt like we had plenty of time, evening stopping and taking a break for ice cream, obviously:).

Once we truly got out of the city, we hit some gravel roads, which were fine but were also an ungraded gravel road, oftentimes making me feel less like I was cycling and more like I was operating a jackhammer. Hills and hills and hills. This ride wound up being much hillier than either of us expected.

I felt as if we were doing a never ending Flagstaff Mtn in Boulder, over and over again. We didn’t leave on this trip until lunch time and started to get our first glimpses of the lakes maybe around 3-4pm. The lakes region is spectacularly gorgeous. After a brief break on one of the beaches, we started to realize that this ride was going to be much longer than 20 kilometers.

We started to hit so many hills and am not too prideful to say that there was definitely some walking involved. Around 6pm we finally got to the area of our camp. Thank god. Until we quickly realized that the campground depicted on the map didn’t exist (or we couldn’t find it).

At this point we had been riding hills for six hours. Finding out this news, I wanted to cry. We were exhausted, spent and I was ready to have someone put a fork in me. We looked so disheveled and lost, that a local tried to tell us where we could camp, but it wasn’t realistic and for the second time, we were out of water .

As we sat on the ground contemplating options, continuing to look as haphazardly as possible, the local who was trying to help us earlier brought over a giant purple Powerade, 2 chocolate milks, water and chocolate cookies! I cannot even count the number of times that I have blown away by the kindness of the people on our trip. There’s just a general kindness amongst the people here. This act of generosity, saved our little heinies.

After chugging the chocolate milk so fast that if a recorder had been present I might’ve gotten my mug shot into an Irish book of records, Stacy saw that there was a town another 4-5 kilometers away. Being left with no other options, we saddled back up and naturally started up an incredibly large hill.

I started eyeing little trails darting off the main road and was thinking one of those side trails might just be where we end up for the night. Completely out of energy, we walked a good portion of this hill, but reached the town of LLOA LLOA around 7:30pm.

We had now been biking for about 7 and a half hours. We asked a local who quickly said that there was no camping anywhere in this area. Flabbergasted and dejected, we asked what was the next closest option, they said that there is a campsite called Cirse, which is 10 kilometers ahead. She mind as well of just kicked me in the nuts because it felt about the same.

The sun sets in one hour, and without a lick of energy left, we very slowly made our way down the road. After more walking of the bikes for the unrelenting hills, we noticed a car pulled off the side of the road about a kilometer down the road. They waved us down and said that they had overheard our conversation in LLOA LLOA and calculated that we would not make it to the camp. Stacy and I had already made this same calculation 😂

They had a small pickup truck and offered to take us to campsite CIRSE. I probably said yes before they had even finished their sentence, and just like that we were hitchhiking again in the bed of a pickup truck. We never would have made it, and this incredibly kind couple from Guatemala were our second guardian angels of the day.

We got to camp and it turned to be a swanky camp, with food trucks and music. We probably biked with panniers somewhere between 45-50 kilometers of hills as far as the eye can see. Just an easy 20 kilometer ride today, ha. We each got a beer and just had to laugh.Read more