High Passes

Driving north when we were young invariably meant The Hobbit or The Chronicles of Narnia (since we weren’t limited to The Lion Witch and The Wardrobe and, in fact, a lasting and perhaps misfiring memory is the scene setting of a series of pools of differing colours which turns out to be from The Magician’s Nephew). These were played from cassettes, which meant that funny whizzy-whirring high-pitched playback mashup when wanting to rewind or skip forwards.

When the Twin Towers were struck and collapsed we were living in Bangkok and the TV on which I watched, mesmerised by the structural inwards collapse of these huge pillars — I was perhaps too young to grasp the horror of what was being played out on repeat by all the news channels — sat inside a beautiful polished wood cabinet in which was also found the VHS tape player that we’d hang onto for years, decades even, to come.

Less than a year later I started boarding school, at the archaically pre-approved age of 8, at the co-educational Abberley Hall in the countryside not far from Malvern in Worcestershire, and just up the road from my paternal grandparents. The school was headed by a John Walker, who’d soon achieve the lofty heights of  Tatler’s Head of the Year, and was sat atop a hill with a clock tower that was supposedly haunted and which would be abseiled from in summer months. It closed last year.

On my first day at Abberley it was remote-controlled cars that were all the rage with the inevitable blue and gold Subaru dominating the races on the macadam driveway, careering over the black and yellow speed-bumps and smashing up and over onto the lush green lawn of… we called it something like Top Bank but I can’t quite remember: the wide strip of grass that extended down from the front of the old, barely converted manor house (that now housed the youngest children and all the boys — the rest of the girls being pushed down the hill to a more recently converted loft) to a series of thick rhododendron bushes, and that was flanked by the driveway, in-and-out style. It was a steep bank that made for an interesting game of British Bulldog, making little sense to tackle with the onrush coming at a pace downhill when you could make up ground on the return leg, though in a big game a few suspect souls might calmly hideout the early stages in the amenably carved-out interiors of the foliage.

Remote-controlled cars eventually gave way to CD players in the hierarchy of high-tech toys and, whilst my parents would never have abided by the former, though nor did I ever ask for one, a Sony portable CD player was permitted. My selection of CDs would always be slim in comparison to my peers’ bulging cases and I’d be similarly late to the MP3 game and the iPod revolution that would follow hot on its heels. Amongst my collection was an Elvis Presley compilation that at the time was deeply uncool but now I have downloaded on this iPhone (SE, second generation, since my first was ripped from my hands one wintry night walking from work to King’s Cross alongside the brutalist Brunswick Centre) realising that it’s suitable cycle-touring audi-nourishment. Another uncool CD that I’d secretly, albeit scarcely play and which I’ve belatedly realised to be really quite good, was a godfather birthday present compilation of operatic music from movies; sadly I also can’t quite recall its title and any attempts to Google it back into existence steers me towards Queen’s A Night at the Opera which I should probably also download for the road.

It turns out — who would have thought? — that operatic rock of that ilk is a fantastic driver for the toughest climbs on a bike. Enter stage right one Opus and their Millenium Edition featuring the opening bangers A Night in Vienna and Live is Life, the latter the backdrop to one of the coolest moments in sport as Diego Maradona entertains the masses with a warm-up keepy-uppy dance for the ages. This album saved my sanity the other day as I pushed my 40 kilo bike out of Quebrada de Cianzo from 3,500m to 4,200m up a loose, rocky road that’s barriered at its summit to disuade foolish rental car tourists. It didn’t just lighten my mood, it made it sparkle. I’d been mentally prepared to slug this demon incline until that morning’s ill-mannered fight with my stove: I’d naively followed MSR’s advice that kerosene is superior to petrol when in fact it’s a bugger to start and is filthy as an elderly fridge’s backside whilst managing to pollute your pannier with its disorienting wafts and cancerous leaks. Altitude-induced confusion between “hierva” and “hierba” didn’t help as I had initially asked my kind hostess if she had any hot water and appeared to be offered herbal water instead, which I turned away in favour of more yellow-flamed torture.

A fair analysis would be that I’m a novice, a rookie, a newbie, and a twit. If I’d read the obvious signs, expressed not implicitly in the ever-growing WhatsApp group (from which I still haven’t been booted), I would be burning petrol like a good Argentine car, gently puffing its barely burnt remnants over surrounding, supposedly protected, habitats.

I’d also be riding a hardtail mountain bike with wider, stronger rims and a comfier, less racey/aggressive handlebar, and I wouldn’t have a carbon fork that can, apparently, experience rapid and total failure able to flip you on your head and… nothing pretty results. But all said and done this gravel bike, this Sonder Camino with its kindly-taped-and-hidden titanium frame, has done remarkably well. My selection of the 1x Shimano GRX version has proven to be both a wise and downright daft choice since, whilst the Carratera Austral as a standalone trip would have extolled its virtues (though no more so than a SRAM setup), later departures from paved roads and kind gradients have flagged its severe gearing limitations.

Shimano? SRAM? GRX? What is this? Shimano and SRAM are the major players in bicycle components, manufacturing most of the world’s bicycle gear and brake systems. GRX is Shimano’s gravel-specific groupset (gears and brakes, the whole caboodle, shebang, stuff) and I have a preference for Shimano because of its greater prevalence which others may dispute until they land in South America and discover they can’t find their SRAM diddly fiddle when they need a replacement. (Admittedly gravel bikes are non-existent here so I may also be fubar’d if I did require, which I was scarily close to being convinced I did, a new shifter or, oh hell, a rear derailleur.) But GRX, Shimano’s baby, doesn’t appear to be so loved by its creator, being more a Frankensteined road set, a sexier Claris but a Claris nonetheless. (Shimano’s road bike groupsets have strange names like Sora, Tiagra and Ultegra, bizarrely breaking ranks with the mid-range 105: Claris sits towards the bottom end, and I’m being unkind to GRX.) Its gearing is severely limited. It’s like Shimano has created GRX for pros only, who crunch out big power numbers and weigh as much as a noughties supermodel, forgetting that most gravel bikes are sold to Joe Bloggs who likes to take his 5kg antique tent with him on weekend jaunts around the South Downs. So I’ve crunched through four chains, a cassette and am now using an electric bike chain for its longevity and walk more to avoid expensive repairs. Mechanical sympathy. I’m sympathetic. And possibly mechanical.

(I’ve also been through a pair of tyres and one rim which, by the time I noticed something was terribly awry, had a crack around every drive-side nipple, an unfortunately avoidable lexis that makes me sound like a pervert with bizarre kinks.)

So you say that this flawed creature survived the famed Carretera unscathed… what went wrong? Well, yes, it was a new and true vehicle at the time. Its skin hadn’t developed lines and liver spots; it was smooth, radiant, youthful. And maybe it hadn’t yet experienced the tough stuff. Bizarrely I rarely used the lowest gear in the first weeks, saving it for the harsher slopes about which we’d been warned. A stupid idea that could only have resulted in unnecessary chain stretching: I have learnt, and this appeared very odd to me considering how hefty they appear, that chains are a disposable component, much like how twazzots of our generation replace their iPhone upon each new release, washing their lithium-ioned sins with Bitcoin and the careful unboxing of their 5-eyed 15. But it’s true, for else you have to far sooner replace the cassette and chainring too, a more expensive (if questionably heftier) operation. I hope you’ve learnt something today too.

What went wrong? It wasn’t the first two Andean passes. And it wasn’t even the third. These three I’d decided upon with major input from the recently engaged Tom and Meg when I managed to catch back up to them just in time in Punta Arenas. Paso Libertadores, which confusingly appears to have the aliases of Cristo Redentor and Uspallata although I like to think (unwittingly perhaps correctly) that these refer to the full-hog slog to the top rather than the traffic-tunnelling bore, was a non-negotiable, especially after Isaac showed me photos of that topmost section, a dirt road to an erect Jesus. But I wanted to cross the Andes thrice. Pino Hachado was chosen for its situation allowing a preceding passage through Conguillío, that post-apocalyptic paradise of Monkey Puzzles and turquoise lakes, whilst Pehuenche was chosen on the basis that it led down to Tom and Meg’s favourite camp spot of their trip at Tricahue.

The beauty of this triplet is that their altitude and severity would steadily increase, as can be expected from a northbound criss-crossing of this continentally-scaled range. Pino Hachado is a relative baby, being entirely paved and standing at a paultry 1,880m: I’m going to round most figures here because there’s wild disagreement about the precise numbers, often finding the figure on the pass sign to state a figure 100m out from what a GPS device will claim, 50m out from what the government sites write, and a wildly fluctuating deviation from Wikipedia, which could be somehow related to the mountains’ rumbling tummy and their long-diagnosed Eczema — “derrumbes” signs being common and superfluous.

Pino Hachado marked my harsh introduction to an Argentina that isn’t populated by Russian tourists splashing dollar bills. From the fertile green of southern Chile I crossed into a Rolls-Royce jet engine exhaust. Despite its vertically-challenged rank and relaxed gradients I still decided to break my journey to the summit with a final night in freshly watered Chile at the border town of Liucura, finding a spot by the river where I could wash and enjoy a final evening in relative civility, unaware that my next night, the first of my second Argentine stint, would be disrupted by motorbike racing until 5am. That day had included an unanticipated tunnel, a wondrously random cycle lane and a forest fire. Crossing over the summit the next day the beauty was first amplified with funky volcanic formations (many a hexagonal-columned smorgasbord topped by Monkey Puzzles), and then ground to banished dusty ugliness as the full scale of the desert yawned and awed itself to the horizon. It was a strange sensation to find yourself being sucked dry, thrown to the dry wind on a straight road to a hell named Las Lajas.

Pehuenche, on the flip side, would mean escaping the blow dryer for that green and pleasant land. At 2,550m this was a not insignificant step up. Here is when I admit that I’m writing this — hands circle around all above and what will theoretically follow — because I’m finding it easier than finishing the magnus opus that is the article about People. To avoid spoilers and to provide a teaser I’ll simply say that I made this particular pass a whole lot harder by visiting some hot springs (termas) between the customs office and the border which meant I had to descend to re-ascend on the day that I wanted to make my international passage.

The lower slopes of Pehuenche lulled me into a false sense of speed security. By fuck was I fast. Ineos, sign me already. Rocks, rocks everywhere. Goats of all complexions. Gauchos doing their thing. And then you round a corner in a tighter section and bam, 7pm you say? When the Chileans will shut up shop and switch on a film and leave you out on the gale-blowing mountainside. Good luck. That was a dark few hours. It didn’t stop me pausing for photos, until I realised I really was up against a bare brick wall. I then did something stupid. I’d paused my Garmin (cycling computer that records my rides for Ineos, hint hint) and forgotten to restart it before a rapid descent section that preceded an equally sluggish ascent on the painful roller-coaster into brutal headwind that took the road around the stunning high lake of Laguna del Maule, a body of water I came to despise for time banishing a dip in its inviting freshness. When I realised, I backtracked like a madman. To add salt to the opening wound, the former Chilean customs control flailed its iron skeleton at me, teasing me with its proximity to only reveal another 20km of headwind-bashing undulating nightmare. Expletives were animalistically roared to the wind. A car passed, and another. At least they’ll tell the Chileans that some fool is heading their way, I thought. I thought wrong. And so ensued an episode of which I am ashamed. The USA - God bless America and its border bullies - would have thrown me back. Chile almost did.

Ah, you want the story. Ok, fine, just don’t hold it over my head.

I arrived with a minute or two or maybe even five to spare, I don’t care, the door was locked and that last car was there. No bother, I knock. And just then the car’s owners return with an SAG fella who’s going to check their car for any illicit apples and he spots me and tells me simply to enter by the door from which they’ve appeared. It starts well. I’m relieved. I’ve made it. There are some border crossings that allow you as much time in No Man’s Land as is reasonable to cross by foot or bicycle or horse or ski. And there are others that mandate a same day policy. Pehuenche is the latter, I think, but I’d never actually asked, although the requirement that I return back to customs from the hot springs before crossing appeared to have been a clearcut sign. Whatever. All is going fine. The third of three processes is a visit to the “don’t smuggle your apples” SAG folk and ordinarily you just grab the QR code using their wifi and fill in the form and hey presto. They had signs up with the QR Nokia snake game rip-off, and there was wifi, but the SAG officer wouldn’t let me use it, thrusting a paper version in front of me. Intently watching me fill in the entire form she then took it from me, crossed out my name and said, “You can’t do that!” Which had me confused. Now I realise that this is going to be difficult to empathise with but that kind of felt like she was deleting me. Backspace, backspace, adios. At this point I simply look, and feel, like a stunned rabbit. And then she rips and balls up the form and throws it in the bin and thrusts me another form with a firm, “Do it again!” I should say that I’d started our interaction by asking plainly if I could fill the form online as I had done before (yes, I both asked could I fill in the form and said that I had done that before) to which she’d dismissively said that this time I’d fill in the paper form. And that I’d crossed out the errors I’d made with clean strikethroughs such that a machine could read it, just like in multiple choice exams and all forms really, but apparently this machine couldn’t make sense of my errors but could make sense of their stamped pre-filled responses that had a position variance of A3 to the page size’s A4.

I lost it. The wind-induced anger boiled over. I filled the new form as I frothed at the mouth with an expletive-laden rebuke of the aggressive and senseless attitude she had taken. Big, shameful error. The next minute there’s some guy at my back going — and at this point I only know of its dictionary translation — “Hey, flaco!” (“Hey, skinny!” though in fact “flaco” is used as equivalent to “guy”) and he then states (or asks, the memory is hazy), “You’re going back to Argentina.” That could have been interesting. I was back at Abberley receiving a dressing down for finding something innocuous funny and saying so, Mrs Quatermas rebuking me in the strangest way, or was it Mrs Duckham (unkindly but fairly nicknamed by a friend’s parents “Fuckham” for being, well, unkind)? This time, however, there was a sense of justice being doled out because I was clearly in the wrong. I was also alone. So it was with a huge sense of gratitude that another colleague of theirs took the completed form and led me outside to inspect my bicycle for hidden compartments full of apples. He wants to understand what happened, and he’s empathetic, even sympathetic, apologising for the “flaco” man and giving me some advice for camping spots down the road. He doesn’t rifle through my bags as he trusts me when I say I’m no apple smuggler.

Maybe it’s good going that that has been a singularly lone outburst in over six months. But it could have been catastrophic. And it is incredibly embarrassing. Yeah, I didn’t want to tell you about that.

Fortunately the next border crossing I’d be leaving Chile and I had no concrete intention yet of returning. I was worried that I may have a black mark against my name. What if I cycled 200km from customs to customs over a more pregnantly young and spikey Andes further north only to have Chile tell me, “You’re a naught boy”?

Well the next crossing didn’t even have a Chilean side to customs. At Libertadores, the heaviest traffic crossing between Argentina and Chile, the two countries that don’t always see eye-to-eye have an integrated control building on the Argentine side just above Puente del Inca. Now, on the Chilean side there’s a Laguna del Inca, so when I SOS’d the WhatsApp group — which probably should have booted me on the spot — I was really quite confused when asking if there was a Chilean aduana to be answered, “No, it’s integrated at Puente del Inca.” Face palm.

There’s a famous section on the Chilean side called “Los Caracoles” (literally “The Snails”). I’m going to say, and really I don’t believe this to be uncontroversial, that it’s butt-ugly. Only if you have a drone can you make it look appetising, much like dousing garlic oil over French escargots. (And I don’t even like garlic.) It’s all concrete, and it’s rough concrete at that, so bad that they were doing works on it all the way up, meaning a deranged traffic light system that there was no way me and my 40 kilos could obey and nor did the lolly-pop men think I could, happy to wave me through to risk my life squeezed between precipice and brake-burning lorry on every single hairpin.

Grey concrete, grey mountain. There’s really nothing to write home about by this point. It didn’t help that I’d unwittingly camped by other roadworks down the mountain at 2,200m: they woke at night and plugged their diesel generator with the sorry consequence that I woke to a tent of fumes. But then you reach Portillo. And this is where I dived in for an American style second breakfast of a burger. Because there’s a huge yellow hotel overlooking the Daniel Craig eyes’ coloured lake that’s hemmed in on the remaining sides by steep, craggy mountains.

At the entrance I had just my fourth strange interaction in Chile, though this time closely following on from round three that was Mr Balaclava security guard in the Los Andes Jumbo supermarket. (This Jumbo not being the same as that of the honey bees of Jumbo-Visma, now Visma-Lease-a-Bike.) The receptionist/doorman sees me struggling with the bike and opens the door to abruptly say, no niceties, “You can’t bring that in.” Pause. A biggie pause. Big enough to squeeze my bike through. “Ah, sorry, good morning.” So that was cool, he recognised his manners on the floor and picked them up. Plain sailing from then on. Right on into the huge restaurant, not a soul around, a white-clothed table overlooking the lake. It’s a ski hotel. Lining the walls of the corridor leading to the bathrooms are signed squad photos of Italian ski teams. Looking out at the mountainsides I pick up the steel cables and pylons of scarily angled chairlifts. I don’t think anyone is learning to ski here. Upwards of 3,000m and only Olympic standard Downhill runs available, you must be fearless.

Next stop: tunnel or dirt road. Stop at 3,200m or go see Jesus at 3,800m. There’s a slim chance I wouldn’t take the latter if Los Caracoles had lived up to their reputation. Only slim, and now zero. Dirt road it is. Finally escaping the lorries laden with apples and the coaches with oblivious tourists. It made the journey worth it. I met Jesus and had a thick hot chocolate laced with rum; I’m sure The Good Man would have approved. Or that Scoundrel Christ, to rip off Philip Pullman. Up here you can see Aconcagua, although others tell me you can’t, that it’s hidden by a smaller monster. Who cares, it’s stunning. The Argentine side is more colourful, more varied, a whole lot less grey, and a whole lot more sketchy as the sun starts to fade and there are tunnels to negotiate. Once you round a corner in the valley and head due east you’re smacked by a ferocious wind: there’s no free downhill over the Andes. Consequently I have to stop short of Uspallata and camp by a boisterous stream off a side gravel road where there are various ghostly monuments to the liberators for this is the path that General San Martin took in 1817 to invade and attack the Spanish Royalists in Chile at Chacabuco, a valley above which there is another climb that I’d taken to arrive at Los Andes and begin my own onslaught upon the rocky peaks.

The following day I rode like a madman the 140km to Mendoza. Along the way, at the end of Embalse Potrerillos, I latched onto a group of Argentine roadies and clung on for dear life for as long as I could, repeatedly dropped on any rise due to my gravitational handicap, repeatedly catching their older legs on any flat. Their leader swung up alongside to have a chat. They were a tour group and the day before they’d climbed from Los Andes to Portillo… well now I’m thinking, “They think they’re hard because they climbed to Portillo. I am hard because I climbed to Jesus.” My free tow ended on the next positive gradient.

And that was supposed to be that.

Until it wasn’t. You see, I had plenty time to fill because Rufus was going to join me in Salta and Salta really wasn’t that far away. Obvious conclusion drawn: cycle the highest pass between Argentina and Chile. Twice.

And why not chuck another nutty pass into the mixer… the 52 from Mendoza to Uspallata, crossing a sideshow cordillera, a sideshow that would result in my longest ever climb, finally succeeding Hurricane Ridge’s 1,400m by catapulting to 2,000m. Hurricane Ridge is a super climb in the USA’s North-West (forgetting oil-weird Alaska), taking you from Port Angeles up into Olympic National Park. Just as pizza originated in New York, so Mt Olympus is found in Washington State. The bucket hats that Rufus and I have were bought at the gift shop at the road’s end from where we watched forest fires in the distance: watching forest fires is no hobby, I promise.

The 52 I kinda messed up. Leaving Mendoza about two hours later than intended, due to my bike not being ready for pick-up until that morning (handing myself over to a tubeless setup to end the puncture streak even though I had, maybe still have, little clue what to do when it backfires), it was all going so well until sun set and I found myself descending a sandy-ass road that dips into a series of dried river/stream beds in the dark. Oops.

For Paso Agua Negra I made no such mistakes. Not to say that I wasn’t nervous. Almost 200km separate the customs’ buildings and over the top is an 80km unpaved section that Google has no clue about since rockfalls and overflowing rivers have created a myriad of variants, only one of which is sensible by bicycle. I’d be camping at at least 3,500m, which ended up being 3,850m, an altitude I had not yet experienced let alone slept at, and I’d be doing so in a tent. To top off the nerves the death of a French cyclist in Peru had just been announced.

For Agua Negra a multi-day crossing is facilitated by a basic system of numbered slips: you tell the Argentines when you’ll rock up at the Chilean control, they give you the receipt and note down the details that they then relay to their opposite number over the mountains. If you don’t turn up by the communicated day, they’ll come looking for you. Not because you’ve been naughty. It’s for safety. So if they found you chilling out with a beer admiring the view then they might consider you a brain cell short of a goldfish.

Agua Negra was spectacular. Sure, I crossed a sub-zero stream — the water froze in my pot when I washed up, supergluing my poor sponge to its botty — and I took a wrong turn when it came to the variations and ended up carrying my 40 kilo bike across a delta of streams and thorns and loose rock. But I also slept well, had breakfast in bed, and re-met ze Germans Peter and Marianne — and their pals Dachma and Tom — for coffee and cake at the 4,780m pass, an apres-ski replete with the customary mixed scent of sweat, sun cream and piss. At least for me. And the scenery was something. On the Chilean side I spied a penitente field: an ice formation that resembles reverse icicles sticking out the ground, created when the sun vaporises the ice, skipping the melting stage, acting in a positive feedback loop on an initially uneven surface. I also spied a burnt-out car just left there up above 4,000m. The Chilean side is even more dramatic. Here the colourful mountains have been nabbed by Chile. Purple gravel sits in largely dry valley beds with greens, oranges, reds, blues, blah blah blah lining the bald mountainsides. And when you finally pass below the aduana you move into the famous Elqui territory of dry brown rock slopes full of cacti complete with vineyards producing Pisco. Because of the numerous photo stops I ended up camping by the river just 20km down from the customs, at 1,800m, instead of crashing a wedding anniversary (you’ll have to wait for that one). At that altitude I wasn’t going to be cold so the tent roof stayed off and I could take advantage of the famously clear Elqui skies and stargaze. Let’s forget the full moon. Though that moon did create funky oddities. The aggressively steepled peaks, reflecting the moonlight, became chalky and grew in stature such that I became genuinely miffed that a huge cloud was gathering to dump on me in a place rain rarely visits.

A week later, on Easter Monday, I returned. The conditions were less clement. A cold, harsh wind was funnelled up from the Pacific. I found a shepherd hut for the night at 3,750m. And mice appeared. A week later the pass was closed for the season. It had finally rained in Elqui and blanketed Agua Negra.

When Rufus and I rendezvoused we had a tour in mind. It’d take us up Abra del Acay, the highest road in Argentina, touching 5,000m and closed to motorised traffic for some months due to a storm that swept away some of the road. Rufus was so keen that he threw himself over his handlebars on day one — admittedly the work of a total failure of a carbon front fork, on a smooth tarmac road — necessitating a significant change of plans, a curtailing of the cycling and a logically subsequent improvement to wine consumption. However we did take in the 3,350m Cuesta del Obispo that sees a scenery change over the watershed to dry your eyes (or wet them, dependent upon direction). Because Freshfields’ idea of a hamster wheel involves very little physical exertion, Rufus took his sweet time. So instead of making Cachi for our first experience of high-altitude viticulture we pitched the tent at 2,800m behind the walls of an abandoned (or only-ever partially-built) building and watched the sun provide a Chinese light show for the ages. Dinner was a less rich affair.

And then Rufus left and I was back to being alone, and that stings. The eyes sting and there’s pepper in the nez. So I went looking for something barmy to distract myself and also to make up for my decision to swerve the lagunas route out of fear that my barely-insulated arse wouldn’t cope with the -15C nights. I’d been told about Calilegua and the back road to Humahuaca by a retired Belgian couple living in the Uco Valley, and fate decided to take the reins and send first a Tom my way that was heading there and then an Aussie couple that had driven to the rainforest of Calilegua to spot jaguars (which Tom hadn’t mentioned, nor had the Belgians come to think of it). A week of riding from Salta to Humahuaca via this crazy road that visits three abras. Abra del Viento (yes, the wind was strong), Abra Azul and Abra de Zenta. All 4,600m. Shy of 200km of unpaved mud, rock and sand. Abracadabra. On the fourth day I climbed out of the cloud at 3,250m and suddenly saw that rainforest had at some point fallen away to bare rock and occasional scrub. On the sixth day I traversed the 4,000m section, and on the seventh I rose again, from Cianzo to Hornocal, pushing my bike every inch of the way.

Books:

Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo

Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins by Rupert Everett

The Narrow Road to The Deep North by Richard Flanagan