I would never cycle in the rain for fun, luckily once in Argentina I feel the sun working as a super Prozac on my system. Six weeks cycling in the rain did me no good. But now, all is dandy again and cycling on the hardened mud track, not so long ago a mud pool, I feel life circulating through my veins.
You may call me stubborn, but I have learned that when people tell me something is impossible, complicated, or difficult, it often isn’t. Now, when people tell me there is a meter of snow, I don’t believe it. Even though these people are the firemen to whom drivers ask about the situation on the road. So, when those people tell me to stay until the snow disappears, I continue on.
The rain, for me at this moment, is a sound of elegant yet forceful fingers tapping on a tight drum, stretched cloth above my head; my tent, my home.
Patagonia towards winter means the start of serious wind. I am heading to a hostile place on earth, this not being part of my plan, I let my happiness guide me. For now, the wind is in my back. Blowing across the vastness as a large cloud, like a passenger in a big haste.
Anxious I was about the climb towards the Cristo Redentor pass. I counted 18 perfect symmetric curves. It turned out to be 30, and I took them in only 1,5 hour. Hail to Cindy indeed!
I really don’t know what to do: route 40 with the highest pass in Argentina? Or route 51 which runs parallel but is lower, asphalted and has traffic. I don’t even want to throw a coin because what if it tells me to take route 40? I simply can’t.
‘I will take all the high passes there are’
But that was what I’ve said back home in The Netherlands. Now I am on Ruta 40 and the prospect of climbing yet another pass is not too joyful. Though, I am enjoying way more than I was in Bolivia, only because everything falls together, just right into place.
It must be because he had recognized me as a shepherd. A shepherd of piglet. He, an attractive Argentinean man a copy of an artistic talib, his beard more than four fists long.
Cycling Cindy