By the time I shower and leave the hostel, the sun has set and the clouds have settled into a thick fog in the streets. Fluorescent bulbs cast an eerie half-light I associate with ghosts and the London wharves of Disney’s The Great Mouse Detective. Though I raid pastry shops, watch cheery locals play basketball, and fill myself with warm lamb stew, I can’t escape the feeling that something sinister lurks just beyond my view.

Georgie, his wife Eva, a boy we suspect is dating Pilar, and his niece Pilar.

The next day we descend from the cool mountaintops into humid banana plantations. The roads switch from bumpy to muddy, and I have to stop several times to clean a thick layer of clay from my gears. The afternoon drags to a close, I’m glad to catch up to Sam and Sven stopping to rest at a roadside market. They’re chatting with a squat Ecuadorian man. When this stranger sees me he pauses and, with an enthusiastic handshake, introduces himself as Georgie. He’s the owner of the market, and he’s offered to let us stay here for the night.

After Georgie closes up shop, he takes us on a quick tour of his property. Though his market is adjacent to the highway, he owns farmland that stretches further into the valley, where his house sits amidst fields of banana trees and cocoa beans. His wife, Eva, and visiting teenage niece, Pilar, come outside to meet us before we’re brought back our quarters above the market. The building is made of cinderblocks and mortar. We’ll be sleeping on the second floor, which is under construction and accessible from an outdoor staircase. Georgie tell us he’d like to turn it into a hostel, but it still needs a lot of work.

He’s right. We haul our gear upstairs to a nearly empty room with only a small mattress, its mosquito net, and a Disney princess comforter. The windows and doors are unornamented holes leading out to a thin concrete ledge. A large square hole in the middle of the floor opens into the market, and I can’t imagine its purpose beyond terrifying second-story sleepers. It’s perfect.

I set up my tent on the floor and head out to find a shower. Pilar finds me wandering and guides me to a tall concrete basin between the market and the house. A thick plastic pipe arches out of the ground next to it and is suspended at chest-level by a post. I move to aim the pipe into the basin, but Pilar scoffs at me. She turns on the water and angles the pipe even further from the basin. The water pours copiously into the soil. I’ll be washing in the open.

Without the scant protection of the basin’s walls, I’m forced to abandon what few shreds of modesty remain after three months of wearing only spandex. I hover at the edge of the basin, strip down, and edge into the water. I feel lighter as pounds of accumulated grimed fall off of me.

Eva and Pilar chat on the porch nearby. Though they’re ostensibly facing in the other direction, my shower is punctuated by a series of disconcerting giggles. I rinse, wrap myself in a towel, and return to my tent blushing.

Shortly after dark, Georgie comes by and offers to drive us into town for dinner. We agree, excited. We meet the family at their aging pickup truck a few minutes later. Georgie motions for us to get into the back and climbs into the cab with Eva.

The truck has foot-tall wooden walls extending upwards from its bed, and the back is full of cocoa cuttings in small pots and two plastic boxes of trash. There’s no room to sit or stand. I’m baffled until Pilar climbs up a tire to perch on the wooden railing, dangling her legs over the cocoa cuttings and beckoning us to join her. I climb up to my perilous perch, the truck shudders to life, and we jitter forth into the night.

Pots of breakfast meat stew in front of the market the next morning as Sam preps his bike.

Though we never top 20 mph, the ride is exhilarating. From our high vantage point the valley is a sprinkling of lights under a swirl of stars and scattered clouds. Sam and I are at the front of the bed, resting our hands on the roof of the cab. It’s too loud to hear each other speak, but Sam and I share a grin as the truck sways underneath; we both know exactly how much our mothers would disapprove. We look back to check on Sven and Pilar. She’s trying to explain something to him, but her shouting is muffled by the wind, and Sven can only shake his head and smile.

When we reach the very outskirts of town, its few lights visible but still distant, Georgie pulls the car to the side of the road, opens his window, and shouts, “Throw out the garbage!” Sven is sitting closest to the curb, and I can see his sad realization as Pilar chimes, “That’s what I was trying to say.” We’re all against littering, a disposition that’s only been reinforced by months of camping in the impromptu dumps that grow to the side of South American highways, but Sven is militant. Weighing the responsibilities of citizen and guests, he looks to Sam and I for guidance. We shrug.

Sven upends the first box it into the foliage. I expect him to cringe, but he doesn’t even seem upset. He dumps the second box, returns it to it’s perch, and turns back to Sam and me, smiling like he’s gotten away with something. Georgie honks approvingly and we start moving towards town again.

We get a group photo with Georgie and family before we head deeper into the banana plantations.

The town is small but lively. Old men laugh outside the general store, and passersby dot the sidewalks. Georgie parks near one of the few streetlights, and we hop out to eat.

Our dinner spot is a barbecue on the sidewalk. It’s ringed by a few plastic lawn chairs and tended by a smiling old lady. It smells fantastic. Georgie orders us all sausages, which are grilled with plantains, peppers, and grey chunks of something that might be meat. Sam, Sven, and I eat our bowls in seconds, which amazes Georgie and family. Wide-eyed, they encourage us to eat more. We oblige, and after finishing a second round (and a third for Sven) we grab some ice cream at the local market and return to the farm.

We say goodnight to the family and retreat our quarters. I’m woken briefly in the middle of the night by Sven’s curses; his sleeping pad fell through the hole into the market. As I chuckle in my tent, listening to him tiptoe over to steal Sam’s pad, the last of my cartel-inspired distrust melts away. Ecuador seems less a menace than a well-meaning prankster, implicating you in drug crimes one day and offering a room, dinner, and enthusiastic company the next.

It’s not ideal, but it’s beautiful, and I’m willing to suffer a lot for a sausage dinner.

Ben (left) and Sam (right)

Sam and I fume at opposite ends of the terminal. I sneak glances at his smug, punchable face, fantasize about tearing it apart. He turns toward me; I look away.

We’re in Santiago’s International Airport waiting for Sam’s father, Steve. He’s flying down to ride with us through the Atacama Desert. We came early because he doesn’t speak Spanish, and we were afraid he would get lost on public transportation.

We arrived at the airport, got snacks, and sat to wait on a wide staircase overlooking the gate, the only exit for international flights. It was crowded. A tall blond couple stood in front of us, chatting to each other in Dutch. Their heads were a foot above the crowd, and from our vantage point we could see people furtively starting at them at them. It felt good not to be the most obvious outsider.

We exhausted our small talk a month ago, and we don’t have anything to share that the other didn’t directly experience. It was twenty minutes before we struck up a conversation.

Later, we would describe it as our biggest fight. We joked through the question until we found our positions; then the niggling began. Over the next twenty minutes we whisper-yelled and gesticulated wildly, tensing and raising our voices until we were ready to throttle each other.

Only the threat of Steve’s arrival stopped us, sent us slinking to opposite ends of the terminal. Neither of us wanted to explain a black eye.

It was a simple conversation. It didn’t segue into deeper issues, didn’t touch on longstanding feuds, didn’t even veer from the central question: “Would you rather be invisible or have the ability to fly?”

I like telling this story because it makes people laugh. The action are exaggerated, the cause slight. It’s an anecdote that illustrates — but doesn’t delve into — the uncomfortable truth of our trip. I’ve hated Sam more than anyone else I know, and Sam’s hated me just as much.

We’ve been friends for nearly a decade. We’ve gone to high school together, worked together, and even lived together. We don’t always get along, but we’ve always been jovial, always been able to put our squabbles in the context of our friendship. By my simple definition, friends are people who choose to be around each other. So what happens when you take away that choice?

I could hide Sam’s body.

It’s a small body, easy to bury in sand or roll off a cliff. I could fold it into my bike trailer, ride into the desert, and leave it for the vultures. I could be back in time for breakfast alone. These are my thoughts as I fall asleep in my tent.

“You’ve thought about killing me, right?” I ask Sam over coffee a few days later.

“Oh yes,” Sam nods vigorously. “All the time.”

We laugh. We’re past trying to hide our frustration. If it weren’t clear from the occasional days of silence — difficult when your days are spent together — it’s unmistakable when it bursts out in streams of curses.

We understand why we’re upset: we’re adventuring together. We ride together, work on our bikes together, and set up camp together. We eat in the same restaurants and stay at the same hostels. We make every decision together, which means that every decision is a compromise.

Where are we camping? Compromise. Where are we getting lunch? Compromise. What movie are we seeing at the theater? Harry Potter 7. What time are we going? Compromise. I describe this to my mom over Skype, and she chuckles knowingly: “It sounds like you’re married.”

I have to believe this undersells marriage. When I share my mom’s analysis with Sam, I scramble to find a silver lining: “In a real marriage the fighting would probably be mitigated by sex.”

“Really?” Sam asks. “When was the last time you talked to a married person?”

Thanks for killing my optimism, Sam. That really helps our bitter, sexless marriage.

We’re within sight of Torres del Paines, one of Chile’s southernmost national parks. The road winds past beautiful plains and lakes, green from the frequent rain.

It’s growing late; we begin looking for a campsite. We get excited about a lake that follows the road for a stretch, blocked off by an old barbed-wire fence. On the far side is a serene patch of untouched grass. We bike along the fence, looking for a spot where we can hop over, until we find a large sign that reads “Danger: Landmines.”

Ah.

We ride further. We’re tired, hungry, and we don’t want to be outside after sunset; the temperature dips below freezing. Soon we round a knoll and find a shed to the side of the road.

We’ve read about these on the blogs of other cyclists — small roadside sheds built for desperate travelers. This one is made from tin. It’s dirty, but convenient. We roll our bikes off the road, lift them over a ditch, and lean them against the shed.

It’s not roomy, but it has a fireplace (an old oil barrel with a hole cut into it shoddily joined to a stovepipe). The floor is dirt, and squeezed into the tiny space is a wobbly bunk bed made of 2x4s. There are no mattresses, not even a flat place for our sleeping bags —only wooden slats holding up a few pieces of cardboard.

We hesitate — our camp setup is more comfortable — but opt for protection from the wind and the warmth of the fireplace. It’s been a week since we’ve been warm at night.

We move all our things inside and begin to gather firewood. It’s easy; a nearby cow pasture is full of dry branches. We light our kindling ecstatically, huddling close to the meager flames. We continue to add wood, desperate for heat, until we begin to choke.

Despite the grate of ashes — a promise of recent use — the stove is a sieve. We throw the door open, hoping to empty out the smoke, but it’s too late. The stove is filled with kindling; we’re trapped outside until it burns through.

We look at each other, exasperated. We’re too hungry to wait out the smoke. We decided set up our camp stove outside, braving short trips into the smoke to rescue vegetables. The wind picks up, and the sun drops below the mountains to the west.

We finish setting up and squat to watch the food cook. We start to make a plan. I think we ought to give up on the fire and get inside, but Sam disagrees. He says that if we can get through the kindling to the denser logs the smoke will dissipate. We’ll eat in a warm tin shed and watch a clean burning log as we fall asleep.

We explain our positions with relative calm as we grill our vegetables, come to a conclusion, and dine happily together.

Not quite.

Sam strains to make sense of the muffled curses I’m forcing through the towel wrapped around my mouth (I ran out of layers). He tries to reason with me, but I hold my cooking pan as aggressively as I can and gesticulate wildly. I imply that if I’m not inside soon, I will strangle Sam in his sleep.

We move inside at the first opportunity. Our food isn’t ready, so we bring the camp stove in as well. It runs on gasoline, the only fuel we can find this far south, and we’re unsure if the fumes will fill the shed to kill us.

We debate the issue through the door. I close it, Sam opens it. Ten minutes, no speaking.
It’s a study in passive aggression. Finally our rice burns. We split the pot without a word and retire to our slats.

As we fall asleep, Sam complains about strange headaches. I hope they’re debilitating.

I visit Sam in Grants Pass, Oregon, two months before we leave on our bike ride. He manages a river rafting operation in the summer, and I’ve come to raft, hang out, and finalize our trip plans. It’s a week of busy days, but by the end of it we’ve scrambled a loose plan; we’ll train, get matching gear, and take things as they go.

The night before I leave for Portland, Sam drives us down the Rogue River Highway. We park near a bridge to share beers over the river.

We make dumb jokes and toasts, promise not to abandon the other if we’re kidnapped, and speculate wildly about future exploits with South American girls. Sam tells me about his last year of school. I fill him in on my odd year living in Portland. We’ve been on opposite sides of the country for four years, and won’t see each other again until we meet in Colombia’s Bogota airport.

Finally we quiet. I stare at the dark river as it moves to the sea, the murmur of it barely audible. I’m awed by the scope of the trip, so unlike anything I’ve done before. I’m a novice, an idiot when it comes to this, and I’m happy to be in the company of another idiot.

“This is going to be a good thing,” I say to Sam, “It’ll to be nice to finally have some real time together.”

Our plan is to catch a ferry, ride it overnight, and arrive in Puerto Montt on Thanksgiving morning. We’ll find a buffet, eat as much as our touring cyclist’s metabolisms can handle, and most importantly, get away from each other.

Sam and I have been biking together for a month now, and in that month we’ve managed to spend only eight hours apart. Unless we have a hostel where we can safely stow our gear, we’re tied to it, and without cell phones we’re fixed to each other as well. We make every decision together, react to compromises with the same glower, and resist the same impulses to punch the other repeatedly in the face. Though Thanksgiving ideally pulls people together, we want nothing more than a day of solitude in the big city and the chance to talk to those we miss back in the States.

We don’t know the ferry schedule. There is no official website, and every town we pass through provides us with a different date and time. We do know is that the only ferry for the next two days leaves tonight.

Which is why I’m screaming “fuck!” at the top of my lungs on a Chaiten dock, glaring at the outbound ferry not thirty feet from the shore. I saw it docked from the other side of town, couldn’t bike fast enough, and now Thanksgiving is ruined.

Sam pulls up seconds later, and the sight of the ferry sends him into a flurry of curses. We both need to take this out on somebody, and we’re both conveniently close. We say some shitty things to each other, walk our separate ways, and finally reunite in silence thirty minutes later. We’re pissed, cold, and unwilling to pay for a hostel. It’s getting dark, and although the townsfolk said we could find free camping on the beach, the Chilean policemen firmly disagree.

“There is camping down the road,” one suggests, ”near the roundabout.”

The roundabout boasts an abandoned hostel, but no campground. Sam and I duck into a patch of trees, crush a bed of happy-looking plants, and call it good. It’s exactly the kind of spot an environmentally conscious camper avoids, but it’s hidden, and we’re willing to play dumb if we get caught. At this point, we’re willing to be dumb. We probably already are.

We set up our tents in silence, and soon a wild dog wanders into our makeshift camp. This is standard. Our Chilean friends often describe Chile as “el país del perros libres,” or “country of the wild dogs.” Packs of them roam the streets, although they’re more pitiful than threatening.

Moved by the Thanksgiving spirit, Sam offers the dog a piece of bread, rendering it gratingly obsequious for the next 48 hours. We call it Amigo, then Go, then Go-go, and finally, after a quick gender check, Lady Gaga.

Once camp set, we part. Sam explores Chaiten’s abandoned districts while I practice ukulele on the beach. I read dire portents in the heavy clouds on the horizon, and mope up and down the shore until I’m tired enough to sleep. Fittingly, Lady Gaga keeps us awake all night with inexplicable barking.

We break camp early the next morning and head into Chaiten. We both feel better, buoyed by a cocktail of intermittent sleep and holiday spirit. We decide that we can spring for a holiday hostel, and begin to search the town. As we pass the façade of a large of a surfer lodge, a voice booms out in song. It’s “Puerto Montt,” a Chilean classic, and one we’ll hear again and again over the next day and a half. It’s Javier Alahandra, the lodge’s owner, who waves us over and insists that we stay with him.

Though the lodge is furnished with expensive looking tables, a beautiful fire pit, and a well-stocked bar, it’s empty as a ghost town. He gives us a quick tour of the restaurant before taking us upstairs to see the lodging. Though the second floor has at least a dozen beds, it looks as if nobody’s slept there in months.

“Sleep an hour in each one!” he jokes.

We’re charmed, and have our bags up and unpacked in minutes.

We spend the next few hours chatting with Javier and cleaning our bikes, washing 2,000 kilometers’ worth of dirt and accumulated grease into the ashy streets. We go through boxes of napkins and a full container of Q-tips, and, at the end of two hours, we have a pair of beautiful, gleaming bikes ready to be sullied.

Javier is delighted to have us there — we remind him of his son, a whitewater kayaker now living in Canada. We’re increasingly thankful for Javier as well; everybody else we see in Chaiten wears a dour expression, as if the ash grayed them to the core, while Javier is buoyant, often breaking into song. Though we first see this as a perk of living in an abandoned city, we soon realize it’s a benefit of being Javier Alahandra.

After we’ve finished or work, Javier offers to take us to a nearby hot springs if we’ll pay his way in. We gleefully accept, and minutes later we’re stuffed in the cab of Javier’s pickup, his dog Rocky riding along in back.

Perhaps it’s because we have just spent a month going 15 mph, or maybe Javier is a really terrifying driver, but Sam and I have white-knuckle grips as the pickup careers out of Chaiten. When Javier finds out we’re from California, his entire face lights up.

“Hasta la vista, baby,” he growls in a hybrid Austrian-Chilean accent. “The Governator?”

We nod, and he smiles.

Twenty minutes and one bumpy dirt road later we arrive at the hot springs. After a month of freezing our way across Patagonia, it’s one of the first times we’ve felt warm, clean, and happy all at the same time. Javier takes us to see all the different pools — one for bathing, one for smoking, and two small, caged in pools where the boiling water first comes to the surface.

After this tour, Javier heads to the owner’s cabin to share a mug of yerba mate while Sam and I disrobe and sink into the hot springs.

After a few minutes of soaking, Sam and I start to tool around the pool, and at the far end find a pair of pipes bringing boiling and ice cold water in to one side. We take turns drifting between them as they mix, experiencing in quick succession every temperature tolerable and intolerable. We’ve brought our waterproof camera, and after a series of delicate underwater balancing acts, we’re able to photograph of the experience.

A welcome rain feeds the pool, and we enjoy it alongside the only other soakers, a pair of sisters from Argentina and their husbands. We share stories of our trips, though our Spanish and their English are both lacking. When we mention our final destination, Colombia, one of the husbands lights up.

“I’m from Colombia,” he says.

Although the sisters are ready to go, he lingers to describe his country in beautiful detail. His wife tugs on his arm, and he begins to walk away with an apologetic smile. The sisters stop to grab their towels, and he takes this opportunity to sneak back to us and offer a piece of parting advice.

“You know what they say about Colombia,” he smiles, leaning in. “The best behaved women are your wife!”

He winks and walks off.

On the truck ride back home we talk with Javier about Thanksgiving. Once he understands the basic concept — Americans shamelessly eat huge amounts of food in the name of tradition — he gets excited. We stop by a small general store to get some chicken, drive out to the edge of town where a carpenter and his wife serve as the town’s stopgap bakery, and swing by Javier’s sister’s store for a box of wine.

We return to the lodge to prepare dinner. Javier is chef as well as owner, and while we prepare guacamole and set the table, he disappears into the back to do mysterious and amazing things to the chicken. An hour later we open our box of wine, sit down, and eat a sumptuous Thanksgiving feast on the patio. Javier gives us a rundown on American culture over dinner: he likes Westerns and Dolly Parton, although it’s Terminator 2 that he can’t stop quoting. He disliked Bush, saying he has a “¡cabeza de pistola!” (gun for a brain), but seems excited about Obama.

Against all odds, this Thanksgiving has become what so many of our previous Thanksgivings have tried to be: uniting. Defying our admittedly slight expectations, Sam and I are having a fantastic time — and with each other! The food is good, we’re a little drunk, and Javier’s quips and unpredictable speeches on American culture have kept us laughing all night. We’ve built an impromptu family out of the ash, and while it’s not a substitute for our family’s back home, it’s not trying to be: we’re all uncles here.

After another hour of wine and winding conversation — Javier has a lot to say on Hugh Hefner — we retreat to bed. Sam plays Christmas music quietly on our ukulele as I repeatedly mishandle candles into impromptu haircuts, and we’re soon asleep in a very, very quiet Chaiten.

We’re up early the next morning, determined to catch our ferry this time. We say our goodbyes to Javier, laughing too much to allow for any cheerful catharsis, and bike down to the dock. We wait an hour in the rain, watching car after car load on the boat, until they allow us to wheel our bikes onto the deck. Lady Gaga whines from the shore, and I catch Sam looking back with wistful eyes.

The trip so far has been part adventure and part race, though we have no reason to speed. It took being trapped at Chaiten, unable to move forward, for us to realize the value of being here. It’s another part of the world, a lifestyle we may not get to live again, and we get so much more out of living it at a slow pace.

Sam and I don’t talk about our Thanksgiving miracle on the ten-hour ferry ride to Puerto Montt, but we do talk, and enjoy it, which is another miracle all together.

Post-Scipt: I can’t talk about Thanksgiving without mentioning my wonderful family. While I was away in South America, my brother and sister took it upon themselves to make a surrogate Ben out of paper-mache to take my place at the table. OtherBen is pictured below.

It’s a good time to be a gringo. The sun shines down bright and beautiful on the Ecuadorian verdure, and while the past 10K have been relentlessly vertical, the air at 3,000 feet is crisp. The mountains around us are covered in a patchwork of a dozen different crops, each clinging tenaciously to its steep slope.

I ride around the corner to find Sam and Sven, my cycling companions, waiting by the side of the road, bikes propped against the hillside to the right and jerseys drying on the barbed-wire fence across the road. I’m off my bike and topless in seconds, though there’s neither time nor sunlight enough to dry what has become, essentially, a garment of sweat held together by a collection of loose threads.

Snacks are eaten, shit is shot, and we enjoy a small measure of relaxation before the car appears.

It’s a small Ecuadorian-made sedan, and it rolls down the slope at a brisk pace. In front of us it jerks sharply to the right, brakes, and comes to rest against the curb across from us, nosed gently against the barbed wire and our fetid jerseys. I notice the overgrown remains of a road on the other side of the fence, really just two faded tire tracks that run downhill quickly for twenty feet before ducking behind a large boulder.

A small Ecuadorian man in a fedora emerges and promptly begins to uncoil a length of wire that wraps around two adjoining fence poles. Ah, I think, another low-tech gate masquerading as a fence. I don’t associate this with anything suspect, but rather the economic conditions of the continent.

Mr. Fedora successfully unwraps the first fencepost, and I realize that my jersey has a scant few seconds before the fence topples and irreparably ensnares it. We hurry across the road and grab our sopping shirts just in time, and as the fence falls Mr. Fedora turns to us with a worried expression and shouts “help me!” as he begins to push the car.

I can see it’s a bad situation. The sedan is in the downward lane of a hill with a steep grade, and while there hasn’t been much traffic, it’s a precarious position if another car comes along. Plus, it looks like the car had been dead the entire time, possibly broken. It seems like the ideal situation to express the friendly, helpful nature of the American gringo.

We each put our weight against the car — the three cyclists in back and Mr. Fedora standing at the open driver’s side door holding the steering wheel — and, with a mighty heave, the sedan clears the curb and rolls directly onto the fallen barbed wire fence.

The front tires blow out immediately, but Mr. Fedora continues with a businesslike focus, hopping over a fencepost to keep up with the car. His hands jerk on the wheel, and the sedan almost flies off the cliff to the right. He saves it in time, though he continues to run alongside the car rather than jumping in. The pair quickly rounds the large boulder and disappears.

Mr. Fedora’s levelheadedness throughout forces me to evaluate what just happened: Why wasn’t the car running? Why was the road to Mr. Fedora’s farm so overgrown? And why would Mr. Fedora drive alone if he needed help getting his car there?

These musing are cut short by the sound of a car flying off a cliff and exploding.

Sam, Sven, and I immediately reach the same conclusion: we need to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. We scurry toward our bikes and start to put on our damp tops when a chubby, middle-age woman putts down the hill on a moped and stops at the fallen fence.

She looks at us, then at the fence, and then finally turns towards us again with a concerned look and asks, “Where’s the boy?” We mutely raise our fingers and point through the gap in the fence. She eyes the fallen posts again and mutters, in a tone clearly meant to be overheard, “This is a problem.” She remounts on the moped and disappears up the hill.

The air of mystery isn’t just palpable at this point — I am actively palpating it. My brain turns it over, knitting its frontal lobe in consternation, and palpates the hell put of it. No, this is not a mystery we want to solve. in fact, this is a mystery we would rather know nothing about. It is a mystery in another language, beguilingly written, with one too many hats.

I almost trip in my rush to get to the bicycle, but I am on it, trying to snap my shoes into my pedals, when Mr. Fedora emerges from behind his boulder.

Mr. Fedora has lost his fedora. In another situation I might have taken minutes to think of a new nickname, but here he instantly becomes Mr. Drove-His-Car-Off-A-Cliff-And-Has Blood-Running-Down-His-Face. He stumbles across the grass with all the grace his mild concussion allows before pausing at the tangle of barbed wire and wood separating him from the road.

A more altruistic man might have immediately dismounted to help him across this obstacle over the fence, but mired in a miasma of confusion and fear, I pause, giving Mr. Blood time to make eye contact. He locks his eyes to mine with eerie concentration raises a finger to his bleeding face, purses his lips, and makes the “Sshhhhhh” motion.

Sam, Sven, and I say nothing. In five seconds, we are pedaling away at record speed. This is how races should start, I think. This is how lives end. I glance backwards just in time to see Mr. Blood pick his way haphazardly across the fence to spin woozily in the center of the road. The lack of control makes him even scarier. Seconds later we’re around the corner. I can seen Sam and Sven instantly relax, and somehow I share their optimism: We’re safe.

We’re not safe. Less than a kilometer up the road we encounter Lady Moped descending again. We flash her a trio of big, friendly gringo smiles. With a face of cold Ecuadorian stone, she raises her finger in the same terrifying gesture.

“Shhhhh.”

We ride faster. There aren’t cars on the road, but if there were we would be passing them. We make the wind look slow. We cover 3 kilometers in roughly 14 seconds. I’ve almost returned from whatever dark corner my sanity was hiding in when we round the corner.

Two police trucks, two troop transports, and thirty Ecuadorian soldiers with machine guns are performing a drug bust on a house 20 feet from the road.

By some bizarre stroke of luck or survival instinct, my reaction is to continue biking at a steady speed with a blank expression on my face. An outside observer, even one with a machine gun, would not see a man slowly realizing he had participated in the disposal of a car full of drugs, guns, bodies, or some nefarious combination of the three. No, just another gringo in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s the blessed disinterest of the soldiers that lets my attention drift slowly to the other side of the road, where an eerie gaze burns directly towards me.

It’s Mr. Blood. How he had found his way up the hill in his misbegotten state is beyond me, but he locks his eyes to mine and sends a simple message: you live by my grace.

We don’t stop to speak to the military. We don’t stop to drink, eat, or pee. We are all but sure that every passing car is full of cartel hit men, and as the day stretches on we are increasingly befuddled by their failure to murder us.
By mid-afternoon we tell ourselves we’re safe, and turn off the central high mountain road on to a more obscure path headed towards the other side of the country. “It’s more scenic,” one of us says.

Yes, the others nod.

Scenic.

Photo by Patrick Moore

If I remember being dry, it’s abstract and distant. Water drops from the sky in sheets, rushes down the mountains from the shock-blue glaciers in countless waterfalls, and forms wide puddles across the dirt road. I pedal blindly, unwilling to lift my eyes into the stinging rain. I hear the birdcall slash out from the jungle and I pedal faster. It’s the shrill chirp of a dilophosaurus ready to spit its (fictional) venom and blind me.

At least that’s how I interpret it. Ever since I placed the eerily recognizable South American foliage as the backdrop for Jurassic Park, I’ve been unable to see this as modern wilderness. My route winds through the wild mountains of southern Chile, and the isolated territory, plagued by constant rainfall and inescapable mud, recalls (at least to my dinosaur-obsessed inner-child) the greatest film of our time.

The trees climb upward in prehistoric spindles, lush green shrubbery covers the ground, and there are creatures everywhere. Sure, these cows, horses, and eerily shrill birds aren’t the scaly beasts I loved and feared as a boy, but they’re daunting in their own right.

As I move from jungle to grazing land and back again, I spy a shifting patch of white on my left. I turn in time to see a 600-pound bull slowly turning his head to follow me — nothing else on his body moves. I want to stare back into his dull brown eyes, to show some sign of mammalian camaraderie, but I don’t trust myself on the bike enough to turn away from the muddy road. As I putz away, I can sense his interest wane, and I’m glad for it.

The night before my riding partner Sam and I camped in a cow pasture splashed with firs, the only semi-hidden camping spot on a long stretch of back road. We set up our tents in the rain, dodging piles of manure and glancing around furtively for any sign of nearing cattle.

We knew that cows were docile animals, unlikely to maim us and less likely to eat us, but we were also in their territory. Sure, they’re being raised to grace our dinner plates, but doesn’t this hubris echo John Hammond’s ironic certainty in his dinosaurs? “Nature finds a way,” Dr. Ian Malcolm reminds us, and that night I dreamed of the ways cows would find us, goring our bodies after eating through our tents. My nightmares that evening resembled a Gary Larson cartoon.

We’re 40 kilometers into the day, and I pause for a snack of cookies that the rain has already turned to mush. One hundred yards ahead of me, the road disappears into the fog. I squeeze the cookie paste from its tube as I move back and forth to shift the warming rain inside my jacket from left to right. Mid-slosh I hear a bleating to my side and turn to find a pair of goats standing behind a short barbed wire fence.

They look bored and not particularly cold, bothered more by this biker than the endless monsoon. I know that they aren’t bait for a tyrannosaurus, that they’re just another of the thousand farm animals that fill these scattered patches of grazing land , that the thirty feet of cool, reptilian hunger I expect to lunge out of the woods at any moment exists only in the fantasy I’ve reworked countless times since 1993. Nonetheless, I swallow my cookie mush a little hastily and bike on into the rain, head tilted down, watching the puddles for ripples.

If you want to catch more of Sam & Ben’s adventures, you can find out more at their website Again with the Biking.

La Carretera Austral, a magazine article tells us, is one of the certain goods left behind by Pinochet. He pushed the army to construct this winding gravel road through the gorgeous glacial regions of southern Chile, and it now provides access to a handful of sparsely populated villages and long stretches of beautiful, surreal wilderness. It dead ends at Villa O’Higgin’s, a tiny town with a few farms, a single-paved block of road, and a ferry that crosses Lago O’Higgin’s, the deepest lake in South America, once a week.

This famously beautiful road is why I’m biking through the Andes shortly after midnight, slipping on gravel and half-listening to an episode of This American Life on my iPod. The road varies from single-lane track to a loose collection of rocks, interspersed with sections of impossible uphill. Obnoxious birds caw from the black on either side, and a light mist falls continuously. The snow line begins roughly 100 feet above us, growing uncomfortably close as we ascend, and the mountains loom in the harsh moonlight. I am ecstatic.

For the previous two weeks, Sam and I swept across the empty plains of Patagonia, a landscape rich with scenery that ranges from flat gray prairie to sheep-speckled flat gray prairie. It had been two weeks since we’d seen a tree, weeks that seemed stretched to months by the relentless headwinds blowing southeast from the Andes. Camping options were limited, and on the worst day we were forced to pick between the field with the horse carcasses or the gravel pit with the sheep carcasses (the gravel pit won because it blocked the wind).

It was early November and we were both ready for something new. With the help of the internet we learned of a path. From Chaltén, on the Argentinean side of the Andes, you bike out 35 km on a gravel road, catch a ferry across Lago del Desierto, hike your bike and gear across a horse trail for 22k to the southern edge of Lago O’Higgin’s, catch the once-a-week ferry across to Villa O’Higgin’s, and you will find yourself in the midst of a Chilean Eden.

The logistics seemed inconsequential compared to the benefits, and perhaps that attitude is what leaves us here, 20 km outside of Chaltén, racing to make it to an overpriced ferry in the dead of night. I curse under my breath every time I hear a waterfall, completely aware that now, for the first time in weeks, I am completely surrounded by a vibrant, natural beauty, and that it is invisible to me. I tell myself there will be more waterfalls, but a part of me knows that these roadside wonders will be unmatched.

Sam and I pause to put on rain pants, which takes fewer than three minutes to devolve into passive aggressive arguments over cookie rationing and the merits of the Wu-Tang Clan. Sam has the only working headlamp, so as we grumble he’s forced to crane his head to follow my hands as I search for the rubber dishwashing gloves that will keep my gloves dry.

I knock a cookie out of my bike bag on to the wet ground, and the light instantly follows it. I watch Sam’s headlamp hover over it — he would eat it in a second if I wasn’t forcing him to hold our bikes up. I bend down and toss it into my mouth, and it’s the bastard combination of gritty and sweet that I’m learning to enjoy. I toss Sam a cookie from the bag — we have to be fair about these things — and we ride off again.

Forty-five minutes later we’re at the lake. After a few bitter words I acquiesce, and we camp on the spongy, visible patch of dirt by the side of the road rather that the comfortable looking turf of the graveyard across the way. We’ll be asleep in less than ten minutes. In a week we’ll be on La Carretera Austral drinking from Glacial steams and sleeping in the shade of the large, welcoming trees we’ve been promised.

If you want to catch more of Sam & Ben’s adventures, you can find out more at their website Again with the Biking.

Ben Bateman (left) and Sam Welch (right)

Stand on this craggy shore and look south to find an interminable, icy sea, reaching out to Antarctica, bearing well-stocked boats and tourists in the blissful pursuit of penguins. Turn around and you’ll see streets climbing the steep hills into a small town, and in the center of that town is the dubiously named Status Casino.

ENTER A BEGGER, I imagine, and you may leave a prince, heir to the tourist town that is Ushuaia. It’s the southernmost city in the world, and not shy about letting you know — signs everywhere proclaim “El Fin Del Mundo,” which lends a tonal majesty to all proceedings. “Of course you can do laundry here,” my hostel manager Gabriel says, “everything is possible at the end of the world.”

BUT THE END OF THE WORLD is just the beginning, as the tag line for this film doubtlessly reads. My friend Sam and I, running on some bastard combination of optimism, insobriety, and ambition, decided some months ago to bike across South America. What happened between then and now has yet to unblur, but suffice to say that on Tuesday we stepped off a plane with two bikes, bags full of gear, and a tween’s command of Spanish split between the two of us.

OUR PLAN is to bike up to San Sebastian, head east into Chile, and find our way to La Carretera Austral, a supposedly gorgeous route that works its way through Patagonia. From there we go north through Chile, Peru, Ecuador, and finally Colombia, with its disconcerting slogan, “The Only Risk is Wanting to Stay.”

TRANSLATION has been the most amusing of our problems, from Sam asking a postal clerk for thirteen lightenings (he meant stamps) to the horrified face of the cab driver when I said there were a lot of beautiful girls in Buenos Aires (apparently “girls” does not cover women). A somewhat poor understanding of the number system caused us to barter up our laundry prices, hand over far too much money for simple items (though thankfully merchants have given back the excess), and awkwardly tag along on the end of a funeral procession under the belief that a street’s numbers continued on the other end of a cemetery (they did not).

HOPEFULLY WE WILL LEARN, but until then there is a world fraught with simple social situations waiting to be confused, and we are moving towards towards them one pedal stroke at a time.

If you want to catch more of Sam & Ben’s adventures, you can find out more at their website Again with the Biking.

Going through high school is as challenging as being trapped in the back of a sociopathic hillbilly’s truck. You’re not sure how you got there, not sure where you’re going, and the hot, terrified urine of your best friend is pooling under you and soaking through your jeans. Maybe you’ll spend the rest of your life in this backwater hellhole, maybe you’ll escape all the way to a frontwater hellhole, but at this moment you’re faced with a choice: you either let the misanthropic oakie behind the wheel take you home to shuck your skin off into his aging sausage maker, or you find a way to take the wheel for yourself.

Leaving high school for the outside world is a lot like strangling a hillbilly captor. No matter what you’ve been taught you’ll feel unprepared, but with just a little bit of luck, the benefit of surprise, and a sturdy length of rope joining your wrists, you just might make it. Sure, the world may thrash when you first jump on its back — the world only wanted to quietly close the property gate behind its faded 1982 Ford Bronco. No doubt the world’s had a hard life, probably scraped through most days selling or using meth that it stole from a cousin or cousin in-law. In any other circumstance, you might even have some strange, sad sympathy for the world.

But right now it’s you or the world, and as it claws at you, blindly trying to sink it’s ragged nails into your neck, you have to hold on. Ignore its husky cries; you know what it wants to say: “Let me live and things will be different. I won’t knock you out behind the bowling alley and drag you, unconscious, into the bushes. I won’t blanket you with bruises or forget to take my logging equipment out of the truck before I toss you in the bed. I won’t whisper to you again, make promises to specific parts of your body, or sing along to only the most discomfiting Lynyrd Skynyrd verses.”

Remember what the world has done to you, how it burst, violent and growling, from the tepid dark. Remember that the world has told you nothing but lies — lies and truths too terrible to bear. Remember that if you let go, if you still your hands for one moment from its grizzled, welting neck, the world is going to kill you.

So hold on, past the initial jerks and that first, terrible stillness. Hold on past the world’s frantic attempts to unlock its belt knife, past whatever blows the world is able to land on your sunburnt body. When you hear your friends calling from the metaphorical truck, begging you to help them, know that you are doing what you must. If you pause for one moment to reassure them, all is lost. You won’t pant in the roadside thistles wondering if you’ll ever be able to forget this, won’t vomit your own bile into a heavily ripped faux-leather passenger seat, or feel an indescribable chill when you turn the world over to find a name tag reading “Dale.” You’ll just be fucked.

My fellow graduates, don’t be fucked. Stand up, take a deep breath, and strangle the ham thick breath out of whatever hillbilly is holding you down.

Thank you all so much, and drive safe tonight.

(Bow, raise raw hands in acceptance of applause, and politely leave the podium).

Illustration by Hallie Bateman

After what may be our briefest period of consideration to date, the Academy has chosen to refuse your request for a seventh submersible. Your exploits with sea craft, ostensibly in the name of the RAUE, have been of such dubious legality and purpose that, were it not for the nigh inexplicable public adoration you have managed to raise for yourself in the Queen’s country, we would have ceased associations long before now.

If these words seem harsh, they are quite to the purpose.

As it is, your most recent exploits have propelled you beyond salvation. We have never encouraged the exploration of the unfathomably deep Rottardum Crevasse, are not insured for losses resulting from “Hitherto Unknown Beasts of the Deep,” and put no stock in your reports of discovered — but never recovered — treasures at “the bottom of the sea.”

How you managed to survive the destruction of six (six!) of our Royal Academy’s fine submersibles baffles and disappoints us every day. Admittedly your first loss, the HMS Cruxton-Bently, was an unprecedented boon for the RAUE. Not only was your discovery of the sub-African Sea Gorilla colony on the front of every newspaper from here to Shanghai (and elsewhere, I would wager), but your brilliant number-fudgery guaranteed the incident massively profitable through our erstwhile successful insurer.

But the loss of your second vessel, the HMS Tre Bleu, brought neither the promised below-seas Northwest Passage nor the remains of the failed Franklin expedition, and your failure to insure your vessel against ice damage because “ice floats on top of the water” led to a 100% loss of property for the Academy.

Nonetheless, your improbable rescue by seals brought the RAUE good press, and with increasing pressure to be a “green” organization, we felt obliged to retain one as clearly favored by God’s creatures as yourself.

Admittedly we were responsible for the loss of the HMS Sturgeon .We placed Dr. Pfinkly on your sub knowing full well that he worked for Dutch Aquatic Intelligence & Sciences. We should have foreseen his mission goals, but we valued his skills as a deep-water astronomer too highly. The Academy again offers its apologies, and commemorates you for saving the lives of the better part of your crew.

But you have never provided us with a sufficient explanation for the loss of the HMS Brighton-Laurghie, despite significant press coverage and innumerable interviews following your unexpected and inexplicable return (after four years!) from who-knows-where in a clearly stolen Russian spacecraft.

Regrettably, most donations to the Academy at that point were marked solely to finance your exploits. Against our most ardent desires, we were forced to procure for you the HMS Bellington Post-Quarterly. May its crew know peace in death.

It was on that ill-fated voyage that you found the now infamous Rottardum Crevasse. It is clear to us now that this discovery, whether based upon myth or hearsay, was the true goal of your mission, especially considering the Indian Seabats cited in your grant proposal do not exist. We suspect that if they did — again, they do not — that you would not have begun your search for them off the coast of Iceland.

The very public “First Descent” may be the largest press fiasco in the history of the Academy, not excepting the 3rd Minister of the Underseas drowning of his entire family in their Babryswich home in 1873. The HMS Bellington Post-Quarterly had been below waters for less than one hour when your private escape submersible resurfaced. While the Academy was not surprised to learn that you had a private escape submersible — after your escapades, it is eminently logical to carry one — but rather that you had the gall to use it. Your claim that your men were still alive in the crevasse, struck with madness and trapped “in a world of many terrors, a world transmuted from dream” are mere fantasy and supposition. Your life sentence at Cherbyshire Prison was a fitting and just rejoinder.

We needed no assistance in conjoining your escape from Cherbyshire and the disappearance of our new flagsub, the HMS Hennimore Baptist, which is to say that your letter to the Herald Tribune explaining such, the Academy’s ineptitude, and your plans to return to the Crevasse to rescue your crew was completely unnecessary.

The incident is three months past now, and it is no exaggeration to say that we were quite surprised to receive a request for another submarine — by Polar Falcon no less! You claim to have found your crew alive amidst host of far-fetched beings and treasures. While you display no end of inventiveness and charm, it is not the purpose of the academy to finance your personal fantasies, and it is therefore my delight to inform you that the RAUE will not be sending a sub to rescue you in the Rotterdum Crevasse, will not be informing other governmental agencies of your missive, and will not, by any mean, reinstate your rank as Captain.

Instead we will be taking tea with Bixleton Thurgood, a promising young seaman and biologist from Haxington. Of course you are invited.

I am attaching to the selfsame Polar Falcon in the hopes that it is trained to return to you. Best of luck.

Sincerely,

Pentforth Runtbottom
14th Minister of the Underseas

Illustration by Hallie Bateman.