Tribe Adventurer Domingo Cullen tells us of his epic journey, cycling 3,200 kilometres from Bolivia to the southern tip of Argentina.
When i’m old and sedated by my years perhaps I’ll dine out on the memory the English summer of 2013, a time I spent at 3000 metres above sea level cycling through an endless Argentine winter. Argentina is much more than just a combination of the world’s greatest footballers and the world’s most beautiful women. The first thing that slaps you clean across the face is its size.
It got so desolate sometimes that for want of a smoother surface I made my isolation count and camped out in style.
I saw some heavy sunsets, cactuses bigger than houses, villages dedicated solely to the production of condiments, next level petrol stations, some of the world’s most informative road signs and Argentina’s answer to Bradley Wiggins.
It is only by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of a country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.
I definitely think the physical memories of places are intensified by the exertion it takes to haul your tired behind through them, and if I put my mind to it I can remember details of every single day of the 45 I spent in the saddle. The sun on my back, always the smell of the tarmac, the dirt coating my skin and the dryness at the back of my throat that no amount of water could assuage. You forge strong bonds with particular roads you graft through and villages you collapse in. I don’t exaggerate when I say at times I felt even the walls were speaking to me.
And the one constant, the thing that keeps you going, on and on, face down through gritted teeth into the unrelenting headwind…
– asides from some expertly brewed early morning caffeine
injection –
is the thought of what might be round the next bend in the road, down into the next valley…or over the next hill.
When that stops mattering you might as well sack it all in and hit up Cafe Jack.