Tierra del Fuego - Ushuaia

Sometimes this road is windy

We left Punta Arenas in gorgeous sunshine and had a relatively smooth ferry crossing over to Porvenir wondering where the famous Tierra del Fuegan wind could be. If anything we felt a bit cheated as we headed due east out of Porvenir, into the emptiness, we had read about 80km/hr Westerlies on very flat ripio terrain and had hoped to do some record breaking (or personal bests anyway), but the wind speed couldn't have been more than 20km/hr.

I've never worked out how other cyclists work out wind speeds, but I use a number of highly scientific techniques, all based around trying to cycle at the same speed as it. My favourite is the Flyaway Hair measure, where if you have an irritating wisp of hair in your face then the wind is faster than you are. Pob and I basically guess wind speed by checking the speedo when it feels completely still.

There's not much to see in this part of Tierra del Fuego

The wind picked up a little the following day but only to about 30km/hr. As there is't much else to do in this part of the world we set about record breaking on the way to San Sebastian. We managed our furthest ripio journey (63 miles), and furthest total mileage (64 miles) and longest time on the bikes (6 1/2 hours, plus two very long queues at Argentinian and Chilean immigration, not on the bikes).

The following day the wind was stronger (approx 40km/hr) and the landscape still wasn't terribly interesting, save for the huge expanse of it all, so we went for some other records on the smooth Argentinian tarmacked road on the way to Rio Grande. Our average speed over the 50 mile journey was 14.4mph. Pob was hoping to break his speed record but unfortunately there weren't any steep enough hills...

The weather and scenery significantly improved for our last 100km into Ushuaia and it was wonderful to have some gorgeous views for our final cycle of the trip. We also bumped into an English couple on bikes going the other way who it turned out were Andy, from Thorn, and his wife!  Andy designed our bikes and gave us some advice back in June when we visited the Thorn shop in Bridgewater so it seemed a fitting end to the trip to bump into him near Ushuaia.

So, we've arrived, and it feels great, but strange not to be thinking about the next day's road surface and wind and food and camping conditions; the only remaining challenge is to find some boxes big enough to take our bikes on the plane to Buenos Aires, and from there back home.