Santiago to Santiago

Time is now working against me and I am running out of time, at least for this season of my life. I now have less than 30 days before I return to the States and the weather is turning colder than I had planned or expected. Actually when I look back on this last year, I see many faults in my ability to plan, but I do believe I did a good job in researching gear and almost everything has held up sufficiently. However, I have done a poor job planning for seasons and wind direction in the countries I have travelled to.

One thing is that I changed my route at least 100 times in the last year, and this has given me a lot of freedom. The last major change I made was to go to Ushuaia, the southern most city in the world. It is the southern most tip of South America and this cut out Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay, which I was sad to do, but realized I was running out of time and I would never be able to do them justice, so the best thing I could do is save them for when I return. Changing my route means I have a very strong head wind to deal with and a winter that is quickly coming on so, I made a bold move with the advice of many friends in this part of the world, to bus to the Southern tip and bike back to Santiago. This works just the same, other than now I have the wind to my back and will be with the winter that is coming on.

So now I will be biking north which will be the first time I have biked north in my whole trip, and actually I am glad to have bused first because it has taken me almost twice as long to get there than I originally expected, which means if I would have bused back after biking down then I might has missed my plane because the bus ride took twice as long as I expected. I am glad to find the weather here not as cold as I expected, but it is wet and this wet weather can make for some cold riding. Thanks to Mike I now have a proper sleeping bag and cold weather riding gear. So here I come Santiago!