Riding to the Moon

Day 73 - Monday, January 13, 1997
Ushuaia, Argentina, Providencia Tierra del Fuego

10am Go to Las Hayas where I am received very kindly and given as good a hotel room as I have seen anywhere. Thank you Belen Zubieta.

11am By pure chance I run into the Don Guido CyberCafe, owned by Florencia Jorgelina Pastor. After I told her about the Riding to the Moon expedition, she offered me free connection time (normally $7/hour) and they have a very good connection here. I learned that our trip touched close to home in that Florencia«s mother had cancer of the uterus, but that it is in remission.

Aside from the connection, Florencia also arranged a radio interview for me with 94.1 FM del Sur. And one of her employees, Carlos, contacted a TV reporter, and by 5pm I was being interviewed in front of the Cyber Cafe, speaking in my broken Spanish for the Ushuaian audience. The TV reporter, Macelo Murphy, invites me to his house for dinner that night. It turns out his son is an exchange program in Pennsylvania.

9pm Dinner with Marcelo. Microwaved burgers--they were pretty bad; his wife is out of town, but I appreciated the effort and enjoyed very much visiting with him. He had a German exchange student living with his family as well.

11pm Ride back to the hotel in pouring rain past the murderous mutts. In my room, I pass out while watching a dubbed version of Godfather II. (Even in Spanish, I enjoy that movie).

Day 74 - Tuesday, January 14, 1997
Ushuaia, Argentina, Providencia Tierra del Fuego

11:30 am Interviewed about Riding to the Moon trip on 94.1 FM del Sur by Klaudia Gutierrez. Everyone is now primed for the rest of the Moonriders to arrive and complete the trip!

She is really cool and also has a music show on Sundays. After the interview she invited me to have "mate" with her. Mate is herbal tea which Argentinians drink out of these little metal cups with a metal straw -- it looks a little like a miniature water pipe.

So we had some "mate" /mah tay/ and then rode on my motocycle into the National Park to the end of Ruta 3, the very end of the road in South America.

Unfortunately, I did not much time to enjoy the park. It really is a beautiful place: mountains, trees, lakes, wildlife. My writing does not do it justice. Gary, where are you?

8pm Power Failure - I have 30 minutes of back up power to clean this up and send it. And since I am leaving early tomorrow morning, it is now or never. Thus, you have to settle for my choppy, incomplete prose. Sorry gang. I really tried to do my best in the time allotted. But since Dave, Gary, and Alex have the computer I can only write while in a cyber cafe like this -- which is where I have spent the majority of my time in Ushuaia. (No, I am not a nerd, I am dedicated :-)

Once again, thanks to everyone for your support. I am working on a safe return to my family and friends. 1800 miles to Buenos Aires.

Door-to-Door riding distance. My front door in San Francisco to Ushuaia as measured by the odometer on my KLR 650.

2. Guatemala - fell in heavy mud just 2 miles short of beautifully paved road. Broke my case and the computer fell out breaking 3/4 of the display.

3. Peru - on the way to Cusco. I had just replaced my broken case the night before in Nasca, but after 5 miles of bad road I hit some thick mud and planted the bike into the side of a big rock, putting some nice scrapes into my new case (and my left leg).

4. Peru - in Cusco, the infamous rear-taillight accident mentioned elsewhere in our journals.

5. Peru - on the horrible road out of Cusco that Jay wrote about. Truck was stopped right in the middle of a very narrow passage with a shear drop off. I had to pass on the drop-off side and there was thick mud. I thought I did everything right -- looked straight ahead, gave it a little gas, but next thing I know I was on the ground covered in mud and screaming in pain. Definitely the most painful wreck thus far. I pray I have no more.

6. Argentina - just past the Chile-Argentina border the "ripio" (gravel and sand) got really soft. Again, I lost it. Hit my left arm and elbow pretty good. I was riding alone and no one was around, so I did what I knew the other moonriders would have done if they had been there--I took a picture of my bike lying in the road!

* This list only includes the crashes I caused. There were two others: one in which Alex rear-ended me in Mexico and the other where Gary fell over on top of me in Ecuador.

USA	Mexico
Belize	Guatemala
Honduras	Nicaragua
Costa Rica	Panama
Ecuador	Peru
Chile	Argentina

Borders Crossed - 13
(had to cross the Chilean and Argentinian borders twice to reach Ushuaia)

Chillin' at the Tip of the World! ("Fin del Mundo")

Chillin' at the Tip of the World!
("Fin del Mundo")