English Summary

Hello everybody

As I gave this link to some people who don't speak German, I'll try to make an English summary once in a while.

I started my trip in December 2009 by boarding a fright ship in Hamburg, Germany. The three following weeks were pretty easy as I didn't have anything to do but eat, sleep, hang around and watch waves. Of course I often visited the ship's bridge and was explained how things worked. That was quite interessting. On this frighter trip we could go on shore twice. Once in Le Havre, France and once in Santos, Brazil. We also had a funny Christmas Party on the ship.

We arrived in Buenos Aires on December 25, and I left the ship the next day. I spent the following few days organizing our bus trip to Iguazu in the North of Argentina. That was exceptionally complicated but turned out to be well worth it. In the morning of December 29, my brother Florian arrived and the next day we set of to Iguazu.

The Iguazu Falls are among the greates waterfalls on earth and are extremely impressive and beautiful. We spent two days in the National Park on the Argentinian side and one day on the Brasilian side. They are both worth a visit, not only for the falls but also for their awesome butterflies as well as for the Coatis. The Coatis are cute little animals which are supposed to feed on insects but who prefer human food and are not afraid to search for it even inside people's backpacks.

After another day in Buenos Aires we rode our bicycles to the airport to have them packed for the flight to Ushuaia. Simple in theory but very complicated if put into practice. It took us "only" 3.5 hours to find out how and where this could be done, with which company the bikes to fly and how much it would cost. But it worked, we had our bicycles about half an hour after we landed in Ushuaia.

This southernmost city is a strange place. Not one house looks similar to another one, quite beauthiful houses are just next to others that look like turned-around halfpipes. And the word "summer" definitly isn't suitable to describe the temperatures we met there. It rained everyday, and when it rained it was cold. We spent two nights in the city and two nights in the Parque National de la Tierra del Fuego, which is very nice.

The day we started cycling north was the wettest day we had so far. Which means it just rained all day. Fortunately we found a warm place to sleep and dry our things. After two more days we arrived in Rio Grande where we stayed for two nights in a nice camping at the sea shore. Then we set of for San Sebastian, the border to Chile, where we arrived after one long day against strong winds. We crossed the border very early next morning, and were lucky not to encounter too much wind. To compensate for that the second day in Chile was quite bad with lots of wind, steep ups and downs and the same bad sandy gravel road as the day before. In the afternoon we made it to Porvenir and took the ferry to Punta Arenas.

The day we left Punta Arenas we found out what the term "strong wind" means. After our lunch break we couldn't continue because of side winds which nearly blew us of the road. We had to camp in a bus stop shelter that night. So we tried again the strategy of getting up very early and start before the wind. That worked quite well until noon when we literally hit the wall. That wall was made of wind that was so strong that we had to push the bikes up the hills, hoping for shelter on the other side. There was nothing but even stronger winds and even pushing the bikes became impossible. We finally managed to stop a truck who took us Puerto Natales where we are now having a two-day break before heading into Torres del Paine National Park.