09/12/2013 Stage 75 Wild camp - San Sebastian (Arg)

Untitled by malcandmarjetpatterson at Garmin Connect - Details
09/12/2013 Stage 75 Wild camp - San Sebastian (Argentina)

Nice to see the Atlantic again

During the night we heard the rain against the tent and by morning the wind had got up again. We are in Patagonia after all, more specifically in Tiera del Fuego ( Vuur eiland as I remember from geography lessons as a child) We could see the The Magallanes straits whilst sipping our coffee. The straits made Punto Arena into an important port before the Panama Canal opened. Sadly no sun today and we were well and truly back to pampa. Just tufts of grass and not much else. The odd guanuco (a kind of deer) would come into view. The land is always well fenced but we are not sure what the fences are for because the guanuco's always leap right over them and we rarely see other life stock. We made good progress and soon arrived at the border where we had the usual rigmarole. Returning into Argentina is a little easier then going into Chile because Chile is very fussy about what you can take in (no fruit,veg, dairy produce or meat unless vacuum sealed ) we bought 4 chocolate bars with the last of our 4000 Chileno's. It is not too surprising that everybody uses a calculator when you deal in such big numbers. The 15 km between the Chilean and Argentinian border proved to be ripio of the worst kind and I had my first mechanical issue on the whole trip. The chain has stretched so much and I haven't bothered to do anything about it, it actually fell off. Not a big deal to be fair and it did not take me long to be on the move again. It should not pose a problem on the asphalt roads and there is only one more long section of ripio to come. We decided to stop in San Sebastian because we have plenty of time to get to Ushuaia and are pleased to be able to see the Atlantic Ocean from our room. We haven't seen that one in a while.