El Chalten To Lagos Pousadas

Given our want to get a big travel day out of the way to get north on the boring 40 up to Lagos Pousadas we “took the money and ran” so to speak with the promise of light winds from the weatherman .

On our exit we came across the Unimog again, he was pumping his tires up but we stopped just to make sure all was good.

P1240461 by twomotokiwis, on Flickr

Further up the road w pull in for fuel at Tres Lagos (yes they had some) and they drove past in mog again so we were playing leapfrog adventure style ...well they had style .

Nearing lunchtime we pull up behind them, thinking of food they also pull over to a nice flat area so we did to, a joke was had about who was stalking who but I guess we pulled in behind them

This time on a quick inspection while airing down we discovered the left hand taillight assembly had lost its nuts and was hanging so we fixed that.

Grateful it was an easy fix cos we prolly couldn't tow him

P1240463 by twomotokiwis, on Flickr

In an uneventful day we managed to belt out 550 km in a virtually still day, a huge reward after the punishing winds we had gone through previously and very welcomed on a day we wanted to make some ground.

A funny worthy of a mention, we saw a F800 at El Chalten filling up with gas, they blazed past us going north and waved, we waved back.

Further up the road we took a shortcut and popped back out onto the main road cruising along again quietly and they came up behind us again, he looked, waved then realized it was us again …. in front of him , he could not work it out how we managed to pass him without passing him ... some funny shit.....take that bloody F8 off the main drag bro!!! 8-)

Our shortcut, we were going to wait for the traffic to clear but we didn't have a coupla days to wait till someone came along

P1240465 by twomotokiwis, on Flickr

Getting to Lago Pousadas the steering was heavy and we had a front flat tyre, the MT21 strong enough to stand up nearly by itself, mighta been cos it was bloody cold too.

Looks like a nail had gone through the top and gone out again ….sneaky , thankfully with the 4 mm HD tubes it just made a hole and did no other damage and luckily the tube did not pop cos that could have changed the day.

The front tyre was due for a rotation as the hard Patagonia winds had really shaved the tyre off quickly due to essentially ploughing along on the road so I took the opportunity to multi task.

The changing (multi) task was made hard by dropping temperatures making a stiff tyre even stiffer and our repair kit which made itself extremely stealth when we needed it which didn’t help so I swung in our (new) spare tube and we will fix the old tube in the Coyhaique and put it back in when we put on our final front tire of this trip.

Patagonia photo of appreciation ....just ta show ya how tuff we are ....thankfully it was a calm day

IMG_7403 by twomotokiwis, on Flickr