Distance: 58.93 km
Ride time: 4:15:22
Average: 13.82 km/h
Total: 23074 km
When I woke up it was still raining. The rain had now lasted for 36 hours straight and showed no sign of stopping. A serious problem was that all my things were now getting wet. Putting on my wet cycling clothes from yesterday was certainly not an experience I feel like repeating anytime soon.
I had some 50 km to ride before reaching Futalefu. At this stage I had stopped trying to enjoy it. Instead I was dreaming about sunshine. If there was one good thing to say about the situation it was that I was not freezing. If this had happened a few days earlier in the cold I could not have continued.
At some point I noticed that my breaks didn’t work very well anymore. I would need to tighten them up with an allen key. Unfortunately the key was not where it was supposed to be, so I had to look through both of my bags, searching for it. Not an easy task in pouring rain. Clothes, computer, camera etc. was getting even more wet than they already were. This was when I saw that my sleeping bag had fallen into a mud pool at the side of the road. At this point I was having a hard imagining that things could get any worse, feeling like I was hitting a true low point!
In the end I could do nothing but put the wet things back in the bags, continue to ride, and sometimes walk downhill when the road got too steep.
An hour later things finally took a turn for the better. The rain stopped and the blue sky appeared. This was happening just as I was cycling into Futalefu, a small village in the mountains, 10 kilometers from the border with Argentina. I quickly found a camp site and was finally able to dry my stuff.
Having cycled nonstop for 10 days and having experienced 36 hours of rain had put me to the limit. Tomorrow will be a well deserved rest day.
