Patagonia Revisited

Behind me is my Commencal Meta 4, along with Angie’s Trek Ex 8 and of course Angie herself. She’s wedged in between the bikes and the balding spare tyre in the back of a beaten up, rattling Renault express van while I peer out through a spider’s web of cracks that decorate the car’s windscreen as we rumble along at 40 MPH only ten feet behind the bus in front. It might not be the safest shuttle, but it’s only $7 and it’s a ride up to the mountain and that’s what matters. We get to save our energy for the trail ahead: a meandering singletrack that cuts across the mountainside before dropping 2500 feet towards town.



It’s been more than a decade since we were last explored Patagonia with bikes, but this trip - a six week foray into the wild and windy expanse that covers Southern Argentina and Chile - couldn’t be more distinct from the previous. Big mountains and Southern hemisphere springtime are our lure, along with the idea that hidden among those mountains would be some incredible riding. Our previous ideals of a self-supported bike tour have been replaced by a "plane, trains and automobiles" approach of getting from A to B and the expedition bikes complete with 1.9" Continental Top Touring tyres and front and rear panniers that were "so-today’s way" of riding through an exotic country in ‘96 are swapped for a pair of full suspension, dedicated trail machines that I ‘m sure don’t share a single rack mount braze-on between them. Baggy shorts and shock pumps now accompany our progress through Patagonia all the way to Tierra del Fuego.


The van drops us at the Cerro Catedral ski station 15 miles outside San Carlos de Bariloche and we start re-assembling our bikes. Less than a decade ago I would have insisted on riding my hardtail every mile of this less-than-interesting, asphalted approach to the trail, but today the convenience of shuttling has replaced the painful hum of knobblies on tarmac to get to the start a ride. While in the purist form I still welcome the bike as a viable and essential means of transport, our programme of trail searching in Patagonia just doesn’t have space for the concept of bike as vehicle, not this time.



During the descent my rear brake starts to fade, again, and I’m conscious of the thick gloop of dust that’s adhering to my fork stanchions, signalling leaking seals. Halfway down the descent I pull up, less to let the bike recover from the exertion I am putting on it and more to take in the scenery that’s surrounding us. As if on cue, a condor soars into view above us reminding me that we are indeed back in Patagonia. Suddenly the mechanical issues I have with my bike seem less important.


In a region like this the bike is truly seen as a form of transport, not a plaything; they have squeaking, rusty chains and wobbly wheels and are the kind of thing you can throw in, under or on top of a vehicle without worry about damage to high tech, hard to find components. It comes as a relief when we arrive at each location with bikes unscathed and start employing local taxi services that can shuttle us and our bikes with care.


Our plans to ride are sometimes scuppered by the lack of information on trails. We head to several places that we tasted previously, sure that they would have trails to ride - San Martin, El Calafate, Bariloche - and at each our initial enquiries about mountain biking are fielded by well meaning but naieve tourist information types with details of mundane dirt road loops. It’s understandable of course. Trails exist, but they are rarely waymarked and outside of the main trekking centres there are no maps. Simply put, people in Patagonia generally just do not head off in to the hills to enjoy a day out, let alone ride bikes among them, and should you stumble across anyone on a trail it's more likely to be a Patagonian gaucho (or cowboy) with a herd of cattle in tow.


We resort to the tried and tested way of getting the sermon on local trails by finding bike shops and heading straight to the mechanic’s pulpit. In San Martin de los Andes, a place that is gaining almost Mecca status among locals for its secret singletrack, we dive into Adventure, a bike shop on the main street that has a Kona Stinky hanging above a sea of 661 pads in the window - a promising sign indeed - and within minutes of entering I find myself invited along on the lunchtime loop. Like the staff rides that I remember from my own time served spannering at the back of a bike shop years ago, the loop is ridden at a do-or-die pace. The three guys whose rear wheels I am trying to keep in sight are spinning along on full sussers too, a rarity in Argentina apparently. Here the XC race scene is healthy and hardtails popular, but as my host Martin explains, there are few people in a country that is repeatedly devaluing its currency who will drop the type of cash needed for an imported full suspension rig. They haul me to the top of the climb and without so much as a pause launch headlong in to the descent, leaving me to soon realise why they are riding so clumped together. In seconds the trail is a fog of raised dust that has me choking and squinting in to the void ahead of me, making me glad that I have a machine that can soak up the bumps that I am blindly thumping through. If I’d tried this on my old Cindercone I’d be lying by the trailside waiting for a passing Condor to finish me off by now. I dip my riser bars one way and then the other, aware that I am experiencing drift in both wheels but worshipping the control my bars afford me. I smile at the thought of the straight, 20" bars that steered me round Patagonia last time I was here.




Having had a taste of San Martin’s glorious singletrack, we start the next day by paying a local taxi to shuttle us to the Chapelco ski station, ready for a 12 mile, 1900 ft drop singletrack descent. It’s a pedal-free descent through rain-eroded, play-inspiring gullies that are perfect for slingshotting along and we’re back in town eating cake by 11 am. Addicted to the dusty charms of San Martin and in need of another fix, I team up with Jan, the mechanic from Adventure, for an afternoon loop. He leads me on an hour and a half of jeep track climbing that delivers us back at the same spot that a $10 taxi ride had done so that very morning. To my surprise, Chapelco resort has yet to see mountain biking as a source of summer income and so there is no public transport to the base of the ski station. Local riders like Jan are used to riding the climb up, using it to work on their fitness. The pace he sets though is stretching my comfort zone beneath a hot mid-afternoon sun and it’s only as we pause beside a dormant ski lift that my riding partner, a veritable muscly giant clad in lycra race kit, confesses that he’s actually had several top five finishes in the Argentinian elite XC series. We finish the 4000 ft climb forty minutes later among moss-strewn Lenga forest. I am very, very glad that it’s all down from here. As we stand admiring the forest, I realise that we look a decade apart. Earthy colours, full finger gloves and full suspension contrast with race-strip lycra, peak-less helmet and a racelight hardtail. But despite his appearance as hill climber extraordinaire, Jan is also a master of the descent as he shows by leading me down a barrelling trail that soon has me glad that I have dropped my seat. The trail we ride is just one of the “illegal” trails that Jan and his friends have up their sleeves and it being early spring, they have not yet had time to head up and clear it of winter’s debris. We flick the bikes around a series of berms and hop fallen branches during a forty-minute, dusty play session of railing bends and pumping bumps. A true local, Jan knows every unmarked junction of our 3500 ft descent by heart and we flow like spilt mercury down the Patagonian hillside, leaving only a cloud of dust and whoops as a record of our ride.


En route to Ushuaia we retrace our steps to the Torres del Paine National Park in Chile. As we enter the park through the eastern gate we recognise the spot where a decade earlier we were defeated by the wind, having taken an hour to granny-ring a measly 3 kilometres. Our bus though cuts through the gusting wind effortlessly and an hour later we are set up in a comfy cabin. TDP’s howling winds and rapidly changing weather make it perhaps one of the most unsuitable place to try to ride a bike, but the park’s 130 miles of hiking trails have lured us back. We load our bikes onto the back of a beaten up pick-up truck for a lift to the start of one trail that looks promising on the map. The trail we set out on is perfect, winding across open moorland and around hills that started their lives as glacial moraine, but it does head straight into the strong, gusting westerly that forms the basis for every visitor’s love-hate relationship with the weather here. The 12 mile trail takes us 3 hours to ride and at the far end we pause for a while to absorb the grandeur before spinning round for the return leg. This of course will be a different ride altogether and we drop our seats a few inches in anticipation and to maximise the ‘throwability’ of our bikes.


With a gusting tail wind behind us we set off down the trail once more, gently descending alongside the Grey river with its occasional mini-bergs of glacial ice floating by. It’s an almost pedal free hour of riding down a narrow ribbon of trail whose rollercoaster coarse seems to lend itself to playful riding style. It’s a way of handling a bike that I wouldn’t have envisaged me displaying 11 years ago, at home or in Patagonia. I think back to how I rode and what I was riding a decade ago, the last time I rode in the shadow of these peaks, and realise that a lot has changed since then.



The bikes: then and now
In 1996 I left my Canondale M800 at home, preferring to attack Patagonia on the then-steel frame of a Kona Cindercone (it’s an aluminum frame now). Spec’d with straight Project II forks, cantilever brakes and loose-bearing hubs and kitted with lifetime-guaranteed Blackburn racks, the Cindercones were seen as lightweight work-horse mountain bikes: comfortable, reliable, serviceable. Ideal for ripping up the dirt roads. They kept us rolling for a full year around Argentina and Chile with only a tyre sidewall ripping and a rack weld snapping as mechanical problems we encountered (and fixed with dental floss and metal matrix putty, respectively).

Our focus on trail riding favoured a new, factory-spec Trek Ex 8 and a Commencal Meta 4 VIP built up with a la carte Mavic ST wheels, Crank Bros chainset and pedals and USE kit. Oversized, shaped alu tubing, disc brakes, 27 speed shifting, riserbars, 2.2 Schwalbe Racing Ralph tyres, along with 4 and 5 inches of plush travel, made for a totally different Patagonia experience. Yet for all the modern technologies on hand I experienced more mechanical issues with my bike than on the previous trip. A leaky caliper (my fault due to malpractice when servicing) meant having to refill the reservoir on my XT rear brake a couple of times, and although faultless for nearly a year prior, the seals on my Fox 100’s suddenly and inexplicably developed leaky seals in transit to Argentina. Today’s bikes, while seeming to thrash through everything in their path, are also a little more fragile than you might initially expect.

Getting a bus driver to understand that, despite our bikes’ rugged good looks, they don’t respond well to having suitcases stacked on top of them tested my stamina and conversational Spanish alike. Damage to brake discs, wheels and fork stanchions was a constant concern when loading our bikes into the luggage holds of long distance buses, so we carried spare discs and spokes and transported the bikes in Dhb (www.wiggle.com) bike bags.


Travel info:
Fly to either Santiago, Chile or Buenos Aires, Argentina. Internal flights from either capital city to Patagonian destinations cost from $200 return. You can bus it from Buenos Aires to many destinations in Argentine Patagonia (from $40). Long distance buses (24 hours) are comfortable with airline style reclining seats. Locally, use a “remise” (taxi-van) to shuttle you and your bikes about or rent a car (from $35 per day).

The towns with decent riding are San Martin de los Andes and Bariloche, where there are plenty of decent trails to keep you happy for days. Ask the locals how to find them. Hiking maps of both areas are available locally. In Chile the renowned trekking mecca of Torres del Paine National Park has some rideable trails amidst breathtaking scenery. You will be the only people here on bikes, guaranteed! Avoid heading to El Calafate and Ushuaia; we found little riding there.

A strong wind blows incessantly in Springtime (Oct- Dec) and to a lesser extent in Summer (Dec-Feb). The closer you get to Chile the more changeable the weather too, so take and carry waterproofs. Bike shops and supplies are only found in the resort towns of Bariloche and San Martin so take spares - discs, brake pads, brake fluid - with you to be safe. Relatively, Patagonia is a cheap place to live, Argentina more so than Chile. Rooms cost from $10 pppn and a taxi up to the mountain 12 miles away will set you back $7. Tap water is potable.


All photography by Dan Milner. You can see more of Dan's incredible work on his website.

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