44.1 mi / 10.7 mph / 985 ft. climbing
Home: Lilum Studio AirBNB

The closed border station turned the highway into a dead-end road overnight, so as expected, we had a good quiet sleep in our tent at the picnic area. More importantly, no police or park rangers came to roust us out. The first vehicles did begin arriving well before the 8am opening of the border, but again, I guess there is only one place for the Chilean workers to arrive from? It was in the mid-40s when we got up, but that’s 20 degrees warmer than the last time we pitched our tent atop the spine of the Andes!

We pedaled less than two miles to the border station, and although we were there at within 40 minutes of opening, a busload of high school kids had beaten us, so we were probably waiting in line for 30 minutes as they all got checked out of Chile first. When it was our turn, we walked to the window, showed our passports and “PDI” receipts from our entry at Arica. The agent asked about our vehicle, so we said “bicicletas”, and then presented the bicycle registration forms that the agents at Arica had also generated and given to us. It seems we could have gotten away without them, since he just handed them back to us anyway, and stamped us out.

The Argentine entrance station is 0.8 miles further, with the official border in the center of the no-mans-land between them, and that’s the point where the road turns to gravel. Rett had me race ahead so that I could beat the bus to our place in line, but it passed me with still a quarter mile to go. However the kids must have gotten a speech from their teachers first, because we were able to park our bikes and enter the office before they even started getting off the bus. Phew! And then entry to Argentina was quite quick and simple: give passports at window #1, give the address to our AirBNB for tonight, move to window #2 where we were asked about vehicles, and nothing additional was needed for our bicycles, not even an inspection of our bags. Our passports didn’t receive any stamps, which I later confirmed is expected, as Argentina has gone fully-electronic some time ago. We also weren’t told how much time we were granted, but checking our status online confirmed the expected 90 days.

90 days in a new country, the seventh of our nomadacy! (we only plan to use a fraction of that time before returning to Chile).

There is no massive descent from the 4000 foot pass; we would only drop 1500 feet over the next 40 miles, though most of that happens on the first seven miles of gravel famously rough enough to have generated conspiracy theories (“they keep the section unpaved and in poor condition to discourage too many people from crossing at this border!”) Except…the gravel wasn’t poor at all! Long sections of it were so smooth that it might as well have been paved. That’s because they’re doing a bunch of construction right now, and given the width of the compacted sections, it’s presumably preparation for paving it. So, conspiracy theory busted! It was a huge unexpected boon to us, because we had been expecting to take 90 minutes or more to get through it, and with the delay at the Chile border, and the continuing heat wave, we didn’t have any extra time to waste today. Instead we were back on pavement (though then had to take time to pump our tires back up) in less than an hour, including plenty of time to stop and take pictures of the more-open landscapes on the east side of the pass.

The normal pattern here is for the winds to flow from west to east over the mountains, and then pick up speed on this side as they flow downhill without much to stop them. That would have been really helpful for us today, but unfortunately the pattern was messed up and we were served some head- and crosswinds instead. But, that meant they were more-cooling than if they’d been pacing us, which was important on our third day of upper-80s temperatures.

After crossing a good-sized one-way wood-surfaced bridge, Rett found a way to clamber down to a pretty spot on the riverbank where we could have lunch with our feet in the cold water, and soak our shirts before we continued on.

The river-cooldown lasted only so long, so Rett was super heat-exhausted by the time we reached our AirBNB, and with no host answering, was reaching her wits-end. I wandered down the street to a bakery and bought a pile of cold drinks, after first verifying that they took credit cards, since we didn’t have any Argentina cash yet. I also noticed that it was one of the only businesses that was open, proving that we’d crossed a culture boundary in addition to a physical boundary: siesta-culture is alive and well in Argentina (afternoon closures between 1:30pm and 4:30pm seemed to be the average).

Once our hosts finally let us in, their flower-and-tree-filled back yard turned out to be super-cute, and the inside of our standalone little block apartment was a perfect match. Once showered and cooled down (they had a fan!) we walked out to the grocery store which had the worst produce we’ve seen in South America; hopefully that’s just a one-off! Heavy rain came down while we were cooking up dinner, hopefully marking a break in the heat.