We’ve finished, parked the bikes up and are getting ready to return to NZ. 21,000 kms of South America completed, great taste of the Andes and then followed by Uruguay, Paraguay and half of Brazil. All good, no worries with bikes – they’ve been serviced, stored and await our return in a few months when [...]
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Gareth Morgan
Always a highlight of these rides is spending time with UNICEF folk on the ground and looking and learning about the work they’re doing. Today we spent in the capital of Paraguay visiting projects that are focused on getting kids off the streets, lifting their hygene standards and in short making their life better. Life [...]
They are great to visit and certainbly deserve thei ranking as amongst the world’s most spectacular (and largest). I remember them mainly from the movie The Mission and those scenes where Jeremy Irons as the Jesuit priest was leading the Guarani to land above the Falls, climbing the cliffs beside them and being pursued by [...]
The world’s largest hydroelectric power station at Itaipu. What do you say about these types of projects – over our lifetimes we’ve seen heaps of them – starting with the dam at Arapuni, then the big one at Arrrateatea near Taupo (got a tour of that at primary school in 1965) and then stepped up [...]
Central and northern Uruguay is home of the gaucho – boots, breeches, belts, buckles and berets – the Basque influence is heavy and these guys dress like this every day for work. Indeed we passed one that was also wearing a black cape. the pace he was galloping along at, all that was missing was [...]
As the two of us persist on the traverse of Eastern Patagonia, knowing that the arid Pampa will come to an end and the 3,000 kms to Buenos Aires isn’t really that far after all, the monotony of the traverse is broken by a few diversions we make. First to the Welsh villages that line [...]
Well we have to leave Ushuaia and Teirra del Fuego now, time to head north. Just 3,000 kms to Buenos Aires up the east coast and across the pampas. But we’ll make a push first to get 1,000 kms up so we can break into some new country and back to warmer climes. Also this [...]
12,000 kms after starting in Lima, Peru we have reached the southern extreme of this leg of worldbybike. Ushuaia, the capital of Argentine Tierra del Fuego is a beaut wee city on the shores of the Beagle Channel. Last port to the ships that these days bring 45,000 tourists a year down here for their [...]
Just as Chile boasts of San Rafael, Argentina has the Perito Moreno glacier to skite about. And it’s a beauty alright, slightly easier to access than via a 5 hour each way boat ride. In fact we rode the bikes from El Calafate to the face, or at least to where it faces off against [...]
Or Chile’s Ruta 7 as this 1200 km road from Puerto Monte to Villa O’Higgins is otherwise known took 10 years and cost 11 lives to build. It only serves 100,000 people and the country it runs through must have been hell to build a road through. But the General Pinochet regime – and the [...]