25/10/2013 Stage 48 Bush camp routa 40 - El sosneado

2013-10-25 more photo's

25/10/2013 Stage 48 Bush camp Route 48 – El Sosneado
Untitled by malcandmarjetpatterson at Garmin Connect - Details

Waking up was difficult despite 11 hrs in our sleeping bags and both of us had stiff legs. The ripio soon shook our muscles back into shape again as we climbed for about 200m on a very gentle slope. Once again there was a lot of sand so a lot of slow and high speed skidding but thankfully only one section that Marjet had to push. As yesterday the rare passer-by in a car would often stop and ask if we needed any help or wanted anything. The scenery remained beautiful with the snow capped mountains to our right and vast areas of nothingness in front and to our left.

After 40 kms we hit the tarmac road leading to El Sosneado which gently undulated heading West. We stopped for lunch and slowed the pace as progress was much more rapid now we were on lovely smooth tarmac. Until.

Riding down a slight incline led us into a headwind which initially we thought to be a strong thermal induced gust, but it persisted and got stronger , and stronger and then it picked up strength again to the point that the speed dropped from 16 to 3 mph and the danger was from constantly being blown off course and into the middle of the road. The last 20 kms were hard going and when we finally entered the city of El Sosneado we discovered it had one petrol station which sold sandwiches to toast and ,thank God, cold beer. Anyway we eventually found a comfortable cabin and began the usual beer drinking calorie stuffing routine. Suffering does have it rewards!

Ja knikker in Dutch  Don't know the English for this