Remember yesterday when I said climbing was hard? Naturally, I made it harder.
Today I spent a good part of the day trying to fix my tire. It kept deflating continuously.
I pumped air into it repeatedly, but within an hour it was flat again. I suspected the pump was damaging the valve. I was also in the middle of nowhere, with no option to replace my pump so I had to keep going. (Note to self: test every piece of equipment before leaving.).
In my Sisyphean struggle to fix the wheel, I asked some people in a car for pliers. To my shock, they had one and were kind enough to actually give me the pliers for good. I'm not such a good mechanic to actually fix this so I could describe my day as: ride, pump, flat, repeat.
What kept me going, surprisingly, were the drivers passing by, celebrating with honks and cheerful shouts of "¡Vamos, vamos!". And there were so many doing this, on average 1 out 5 cars where cheering for me.
Around 1 hour before the peak I found a restaurant, Google Maps said the food is average and quite expensive, but I needed the fuel and how bad a simple hamburger can be? At least the view was incredibly astonishing and realizing that I’m not in a middle of nowhere anymore was calming my nerves.
After my meal, while I was pumping the tires once more, a friendly guy approached me, he was driving a car with Swiss plate and that made the conversation so much better, what were the chances? I might also add that it was the first time I was not judged for not speaking german, italian or french.
(I’ve even been judged inside the Arctic Circle in Norway, by a group of Swiss Italians for living in Ticino without knowing the language.)
He was doing the same route as me and we both shared the same deadline (February which is the end of the summer), that scared me a bit, will my legs handle it? Now, they only need to handle the remaining part of this climb.
I abandoned the plan to cross Uspallata Pass (3830 m) and chose Paso Internacional Los Libertadores (3200 m) instead. This mountain pass is lower elevation as you go through a tunnel.
However, cyclists are forbidden from going through the tunnel so I loaded my bike on a truck and someone took me to the other side, I didn’t even need to wait 5 minutes for that!
Right before, what struck me is the magnitude of the peaks surrounding me, I was already at 3200 m elevations with these sights in view:
Day summary:
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