Day 69

43,303 – 43,476  173 Miles today (20,776 Miles Overall)

El Calafate, Argentina – Puerto Natales, Chile

I left Calafate today to go down to Natales to meet Sameera. She’s finally flying in to meet me! I got on the road around 9am and god damn was it cold. I was on a nice paved road heading into the mountains and it slowly turned into a big windy desert. The view was sort of nice though, it wasn’t too boring.

The paved road suddenly turned into dirt for me. I could have taken a 50 minute longer paved road to not take the dirt road but I wanted to get there. I ended up riding this pretty bad gravel road for about 40 miles with a ton of big rocks and my suspension was taking a beating for sure. I had a rock bounce up off my front wheel which then hit my foot and would have definitely shattered my foot if I wasn’t wearing my Moto boots. I had to pull over and check my foot because it felt like it was broken. It hurt like hell. I eventually made it off the dirt road which I passed a few people riding bicycles on. I stopped for fuel at this gas station I’ve seen pictures of with thousands of stickers on it.

Off I went towards the border of Chile. The border crossing was quite simple and took a few minutes on each side. It was cake. I stopped to check out a nice lake on the way into Puerto Natales and eventually made it to the hostel. I walked around town for some food and went to a bunch of shops to try to get us a Torre Del Paine tour. Sameera had been wanting to do this for a long long time and we didn’t book anything mostly because everything was booked out months in advance. I didn’t really have any luck other than getting a campsite for a night on the western side of the park but was told they weren’t all booked up at all so i’ll come back to do that another day.

Sameera rolled into town around 7 and we went out for some food. The sun was setting here at 10pm and was still light out until 11:15 which was insane for her to see.