Rest and Recovery

I crawl into back into my tent, which isn’t hard to do since the zipper doesn’t hold the door closed. Pre-dawn light creeps over the horizon, but I’m looking forward to a few more hours in my sleeping bag. This was the seventh trip behind the tree tonight, and I’m clueless as to what else could possibly be exiting my body with such urgency.

I realized we had forgotten to talk about some of our everyday experiences traveling from Villa O’Higgins to Cochrane, our first stretch of the Carretera Austral, or the road that stretches north to south through Chilean Patagonia. Built in the 1980’s by Pinochet, it’s one of the most challenging, and beautiful roads in the world. Here are a few notes from the road:

“Super enfermo“, we’ve learned, means super sick; which is what Mike and I were when a break in the weather prompted the team and I to head out of Tortel, and make for the town of Cochrane a couple hundred kilometers away. It’s no fun being super sick, but through it we witnessed some genuine acts of kindness by total strangers. For example, while Mike and I waited at our campground/public pavilion that morning in Tortel, we managed to look so pathetic that a couple of tourists passing by gave us food (two cans of peaches) and another couple even gave us money! I didn’t think we looked so pathetic as to warrant these gifts, though. At the time I was fixing some parts on my bike, coughing and fending off an over-curious puppy; and Mike was passed out on the deck “starfish-style”, soaking up the precious rays of sunshine. We apparently looked worse off than I thought! It is also worth noting that at this time Mike was dealing with an intestinal parasitic infection which wreaked havoc on his digestive system for the next week.