Stranger Things

We are currently a bit stuck in Cochrane. A medium size town with 5000 inhabitants where there is not much going on. Initially we just wanted to spend one night here and go on east to enter Argentina again, but for two weeks now my left wrist is hurting and it does not get any better. So I took the opportunity of Cochrane having a hospital and went to see a doctor. Apparently I have an inflammation and now I shall take some Diclofenaco and not move my wrist for some days.

The next part of the journey being hundreds of km of gravel and sand roads we decided to spent more time here because it is not a good idea riding such a route one-handed.

So I take the opportunity to write down some of the things we encountered in the last six weeks traveling through Chile and Argentina that felt odd to us.

Taking a warm shower

The more we move to the south, the more often we see this. Hot water is being generated in a gas boiler that activates itself, when hot water is demanded. The strange thing is, that when the temperature of the water starts rising and you adapt your demand to mixing it with cold water, at a certain point the boiler decides that its services are no longer required and stops completely. Even if you slowly start turning the shower faucet more and more back to “warm”, the water temperature only knows one direction. The only way to not end up with ice cold water is to stop everything and start with only hot water from scratch.

I don’t want to know how many liters of water I wasted just trying to get something bearable between close to boiling or close to ice water temperature.

Traffic rules

This applies to Argentina only. When we entered Argentina we were confused regarding the right of way rules. In most cases there are neither signs nor traffic lights so one would imagine at a crossroad the ones coming from the right may go first. Well it is not that simple. We drove in a very defensive way and observed how the locals were driving. To me it made absolutely no sense until I asked a local.

It has nothing to do with if you enter the crossroad from the right or left side. It is organized differently. Pedestrians always go first. Then all two wheel vehicles and after that cars. How trucks are dealt with is not so easy and depends on the behavior of the truck driver (in doubt he will always win). This explained perfectly why everyone was going so slowly and why we didn’t got it in the first place.

UPDATE: Meanwhile we are in El Calafate and here the rules seem to be different. Cars always first, they don’t even want to stop on a zebra crossing for pedestrians when you are already crossing it :-(

Online form just available on working days

In Chile we bought a local SIM card to be able to use google maps and the internet in general independently from any WiFi hotspots. We were advised that this would only work for a couple of weeks with my mobile phone that I bought in Germany. If I wanted to use it longer than the usual tourist stay, I’d had to register it so it won’t get blocked.

I had to upload various details of my device, the SIM card, a foto of my passport and the entrance stamps in my passport on an online form. So far so understandable.

What really surprised me was that the online form to fill out the data and upload the fotos had “opening hours”. It was just not possible to transfer the requested details online at night or in the afternoon at the weekend. Still no idea why.

Why??

Doors do not open

This we have seen on both sides of the border in Patagonia. A lot of doors are installed in a way that it is not possible to open them completely. The first 45º in most cases work seamlessly, but then the door suddenly gets stuck on the ground and just stops. In some cases, if you push hard enough you can open the door properly leaving scratches on the ground. But often you have just reached at the end. If you are lucky you end up squeezing yourself and all the bulky luggage you have through a half closed door, if you are less lucky, you look like an idiot and run into a door you thought you had just opened..

In this case the floor already lost the battle..

Patagonia and Mate

I knew that “Mate” is a thing here in Patagonia, but it is truly astonishing how may people are walking around carrying a thermos jug with hot water, the small cup and the special straw around to have their sip of Mate wherever they go (e.g., supermarket).

I had a chat with the mechanic that helped me to fix my broken panniers and he told me on a usual day he drinks about 70 of these tiny portions of Mate.

Kettle with a specific Mate temperature setting

Free animals

Passing through Patagonia we where able to see a lot of free animals. There are rabbits, foxes, a lot of guanacos (like deer), and some ñandus (similar to ostrich) in rural areas next to and sometimes on the highway, but there are also horses, cows, sheep and other domestic animals just strolling around very close to inhabited areas. One night I woke up due to a loud noise from outside. Something trampling over the wooden stairs and the terrace next to our window. The next day the owner of the house confirmed that it was one of these “wild cows” that JUMPED over the hip high fence to look for food in the vegetable garden. The owner was angry because this seem to happen frequently and due to their weight the cows often cause damage.

A little fox that was specifically interested in our empanadas

Great hospital service

Today I went to see a doctor due to pain in my wrist. Like usually my timing was bad, so after days in very remote sights we just reached the next town with more than a couple of hundreds inhabitants on a Saturday night. So on Sunday I just walked into the emergency entrance of the hospital and explained the situation. After zero waiting time a nurse checked some basics like blood pressure, oxygen saturation and directly after that I was able to see a doctor.

After 30 minutes in total I was out again, had the diagnosis in my email inbox and the prescribed drugs in my hands. They gave out the medicine directly at the hospital, no need to find a pharmacy. And I only had to pay about 25€ !

Wow!

No natural yoghurt

Even in big supermarkets, there is no “pure” yogurt. They always either contain added sugar and a bunch of flavoring to mimic a certain taste or they add gelatin to otherwise natural joghurt. Same for apple juice. Even the “purest” apple juice we found contained additional sugar, lemon acid, green tea, colorants and a whole list of E…s

Kuchenes

There are absolutely delicious pies in Patagonia! And they keep the names of the origins of the recipes. So it is quite common to find all these three kind of cakes written like this on the same menu:

- Torta (spanish word for cake with a lot of cream)

- Pie de Limón (lemon pie)

- Kuchen or in plural Kuchenes (German word for cake, used here for cakes with fruits like Apfelkuchen)

Maintenance of roads

In Patagonia there are a lot of unpaved roads and a lot of them are about to get paved. But the asphalting works in a strange way. Instead of starting at the beginning of a unpaved road and continuously working until the end, they seem to randomly asphalt a short part somewhere in the middle, then they leave some hundreds of meters untouched and continue paving another part. So we often had parts that were 2 km paved, followed by 1 km unpaved, than 500 m paved again, then 2km gravel and so on.

“Dangerous roads”

Also they seem to overestimate the dangers on their roads. There are literally millions of “peligro” signs warning about everything (and often nothing). At the beginning I was slowing down, but often there is just no reason to do so, so I kind of got used to ignore them.

Same to the speed limit. Sometimes after kilometers just straight there comes a very big curve with a slight angle of maybe 15-20º, perfect asphalt conditions, you are in the desert and you can see kilometers in all directions and the speed limit is 40 ?? The locals drive these curves with 100-120 km/h which seams reasonable to me.

Signs

There are a lot of signs being used at shops. But one thing I noticed is, that it is far from certain if their indication is correct. Long story short, these things happened various times already:

- “Open”: door is locked and no one is inside

- “Hoy hay pan” (today bread is available): same as above.

- “Closed”: Because there were people inside, we asked if we may enter. So did everyone that entered after us. We were served. So were the others..

Conclusion: Do not rely on opening hours or sign indications.