Into Argentina! We made the crossing at Villazon/ La Quiaca. The Bolivian border officer declined to stamp my passport, telling me ‘we don’t do that at this frontier’, but agreed to put an exit stamp on a blank piece of paper. Weird. Hopefully that won’t come back to bite me one day.
The Argentinian side was pretty relaxed. They just scanned the chip on my passport and pointed me towards the xray scanner, before turning us loose on the other side.
No time to lose! We wanted to make it to San Salvador de Jujuy for Christmas, which was just a few days away. We made up a rough plan to work the intervening time around a few stops in the more interesting villages on the way down, and started pedalling.
Also, public infrastructure! Even in these middle-of-nowhere towns there were basic conveniences, like picnic areas set up with rooves to provide overhead shade from the sun. Just a few little indicators here and there that we were now in a more affluent part of the world.
The first day was pretty basic. Big, gently rolling plains. A continuation of the altiplano. We were grateful for having a bit of the tailwind though, which wafted us along rather nicely.
We spent a night at Abra Pampa, and then made a steady climb up to Tres Cruces. From here on out it would essentially be a long, steady descent to Jujuy. Time to finally leave the altiplano behind us!
The roads were pretty narrow. Essentially the same sort of thing that I am used to back home in the UK. Non of that luxurious North American style with a separate, paved shoulder marked out on the side of the road.
Raquel complained that she couldn’t make progress riding her bike on the gravel shoulder. She was running 650b 47c road tyres, which had done incredibly well on the trip so far, but they just weren’t hacking it for riding at speed on the rough stuff. So she opted to instead to try riding on the white line at the very edge of the asphalt.
Argentinian drivers appeared to be more rule abiding than their Bolivian neighbours, properly giving way to one another, and not crossing any double yellow lines in the centre to overtake us. But, they also seemed to be driving a lot faster, and with noticeably less empathy for cyclists than their Bolivian counterparts; we experienced some of the closest high speed passes of traffic of the trip to date. One particular cooperative of intercity bus was a particular menace. Imagine having a double-decker bus come hurtling past, flat out, blaring the horn, just centimetres from the tip of your handlebars. I got the distinct impression that we were being encouraged to get off their private racetrack.
I definitely moved a lot slower this time around, essentially starting at the equator, and only just getting beyond the tropic of capricorn after 9 months of pedalling. However, I feel that by taking my time I was able to explore my surroundings off the bike a lot more than on previous trips. Peru made up the vast majority of that time, and I feel like Raquel and I did a pretty good job of visiting the greatest hits of that place.
Putting my science teacher hat on for a moment, this whole province of Jujuy has some really incredible geology. Here you can see strata on the hillside that date from the Pre-Cambrian (before the development of complex, multicellular life), through to the end of the dinosaurs, the Cretacious period. The land has been forced upwards and actually rolled over upon itself by tremendous forces of tectonic collision (we are still in the Andes after all), resulting in the more recent red and pink rocks being positioned underneath more ancient strata (those greys and yellows).
Seeing such a vast span of geological time laid out before us in a story of many colours is a really humbling experience. The entire history of our species of noisy, moderately intelligent apes is just a miniscule part of the bigger picture. One day the high tide line of human achievement will be nothing more than a thin, sooty band on the side of a mountain like this. We really shouldn’t take life’s troubles too seriously. Enjoy life. Try to make some good stories, before our time eventually runs out.
We made it to our intended destination of San Salvador de Jujuy just in time for Christmas, and got settled into our cosy Airbnb, where we spent the next few days eating and drinking, and slobbing out in front of Netflix on the sofa.
We reluctantly got back on the bikes and left Jujuy, feeling considerably heavier than we had been upon arrival.
It was a bit of a slog, pedalling in the sun. It was high summer in the southern hemisphere afterall. We rolled down into the bottom of the valley, camped, and then hauled our way back up the other side towards Salta. There was a more adventurous option available, the ‘Tourist Route’, via El Carmen, where you go over the tops, visit a couple of lakes, and then drop down the other side, but we felt pretty much done with all those sorts of shenanigans.
Actually, we ended up deciding to just finish the whole trip, while in the middle of pedalling up to Salta.
The last few weeks of riding had felt pretty aimless and lacklustre for me. Just kind of phoning it in. Physically, we were both pretty much good to go as always, plenty of energy. But, mentally, it was getting very repetitive. It had been a bit over 9 months on the road for me, and I was increasingly craving some mental stimulation. Bike travel is fantastic and all that, don’t get me wrong, but I guess I have a limited attention span for this sort of lifestyle, and eventually it feels like bumming around, instead of an epic adventure. I had almost zero desire to do any more sightseeing, or anything really, except just sitting around, drinking malbec, and playing on my phone. There were a couple of interesting day trips to do in and around Jujuy, mostly things like waterfalls and multicoloured mountains and that, but I didn’t really feel like doing anything that wasn’t already on our route.
A bit like coming out of a daze, the rose tinted glasses of wanderlust had slipping off my nose, and I woke up to find myself in a strange land, with a strong desire to get the hell out of there, and back to a place where I could hear my own language.
I know that after a decent break, all these pretty mountains would once again fill my eyes with wonder, so better to leave them on the shelf, to be enjoyed again in the future, with the right mindset.
I felt exactly the same back in Mexico in 2023, at the end of my last leg of cycling from Alaska, and, after taking a year or so off in Quito, I was ready to get back on the road again. I guess that a lot of round-the-world cyclists just push through the kilometres, despite the mental fatigue, or perhaps they don’t even feel this way? I don’t want travelling to feel like work. If it does, I might as well be working, and actually making money, rather than pissing it away.
Raquel was still good to go on. She had only started riding with me in August, about 5 months into my trip, and so was in a completely different headspace. She was happy to keep plodding, and see how much further we could manage.
We’d bounced these conflicting feelings around a bit a couple of weeks ago, back in La Paz, Bolivia, and had then resolved to just keep moving and see what happened. Unfortunately for Rak, I was now dead set on stopping. She didn’t want to carry on riding solo, and so we decided to point our bikes up the last big hill, to our abrupt finish line, in Salta.
We caught the bus from Salta to Buenos Aires. We wanted to at least see the capital city before flying home. It involved a 24 hour bus ride crossing the whole country at a diagonal. Not exactly a comfortable time.
Alejandro has got to be one of the nicest, most generous, and down to earth humans on the planet. No ego, just love. He’s currently in the process of printing the third book of his travels.
His second book was the first that I’ve managed to read completely from cover to cover in Spanish, and it really opened my eyes to the possibilities of long term travel on an extremely limited budget; Alejandro deliberately leaves his cash savings at home, and just works and volunteers his way around South America. I really recommend that you check him out if you can read in Spanish!
He can supply his books in both physical and electronic formats. Get in touch with him via his Instagram account.
So that’s it, we’d reached the end for now. A lot of emotions were swirling around. Difficult to sum up really. I felt a strong pull to move onto the next thing. Be productive. A different type of adventure.
This leaves me in the interesting situation of having two distinct sections to fill in. The middle bit between Mexico City, and Quito, and the bottom bit between Salta and Ushuaia.
I can’t predict exactly how we are going to go about it, since my touring philosophy seems to involve doing whatever I feel like at the time, but I would prefer to finally finish this journey in Ushuaia, and so I will probably try to get that section from Mexico to Ecuador done first, leaving the extreme south for last.
I hope that Raquel’s example can serve as inspiration for any readers who might be sitting on the fence regarding giving bike touring a go or not. Give it a shot! I believe that this is the most affordable, accessible, and rewarding form of global travel that there is. Once you try it, you’ll be hooked for life.
Having Raquel along was also a massive improvement over spending virtually the whole time in my own head. I guess a noticeable drawback was that we tended to stay inside our own comfortable social bubble, rather than spending time getting to know strangers, like I would have done if I had been alone.
I guess that that’s the contrast between solo travel, and going with company. If you want to experience complete immersion in a foreign country, I reckon that solo travel will always have the edge, assuming that you are a self-sufficient type that can confidently accept long periods of isolation between interactions. By contrast, travelling with a partner feels like bringing an emotional support blanket along with you (which is obviously wonderful). You get to create shared memories with someone, but you have to make compromises in the way in which you travel, and you also tend to bring your own culture along with you, rather than being obliged to make yourself vulnerable, and become part of the scene in which you are passing through. Both ways are great. It’s been interesting to have had the opportunity to experience both perspectives.
Last time, when I stopped in Mexico, I immediately signed a 2 year contract with an international school in Quito. After just one year on the job I started bouncing off the walls looking to get back on the road again. This time I’m not planning to take so much time out, in fact, we’re hoping to get back to riding as soon as late 2026.
So, Raquel’s flown back to Ecuador and is working hard to save up cash for the next section (she’s hooked on the whole bike touring thing apparently), while i’ve flown back to the UK. Latin America is fun and all that, but back home I can make a lot more money, much quicker. I also really want to experience a solid period of time in my home country, visiting family and friends, and enjoying proper strong English cheddar cheese, before I go off sleeping in hedges on the other side of the world again.
Stay tuned to the blog, because I’ve got lots of bits and pieces currently in the works that will be getting published in the intervening time.
Route notes for Pan America Part 2 from OsmAnd.
I’m going to see if I can upload my GPX files onto the page here. In the meantime, here are some screenshots, and, if you would like access to help with your own route planning, drop me a message on my contact page, and I’ll send the GPX files over.
Ecuador
Peru
Bolivia and northern Argentina
