Carry On Pan-Am
Added on Tuesday, April 13th, 2010 by Carole Nash Editor
Carry On Pan-Am
Not far from San Carlos de Bariloche, Barry’s GS had an inexplicable electrical failure. It was tempting to blame BMW but in fact that would be unfair. Any bike that cartwheels across a field is bound to get an electrical issue and that it flipped over 360 degrees and landed on its wheels completely unmarked is a testament to its build quality. Looking back to the slopes of Patagonia, eight bikes were on their sides – no accidents – just blown over by the wind as each rider slid in the gravel to a halt. Barry’s bash must surely have contributed to a fused wire somewhere. I saw lightweight Peter Revill being picked up and blown across the road – 10 feet up he flew like a sparrow in the gale force wind, and when he landed, he said he enjoyed it.
As we all sat by our bikes on the ground, some standing by their bikes struggling to stop them being thrown onto the gravel, Nadine somehow accomplished her discreet toiletries and Tim said rain was in the air. We all looked up hoping it would stay dry. Rain now would be a disaster. On the Volcanic Explosively Index and the Saffir-Simpson Scale of natural disasters we were just bits of dust in a stiff breeze. Alex had lobbed my XT into a ditch while some of the others were upset that they had lost their sandwiches. Several riders had that morning put mayonnaise on ham and cheese baguettes which was then sucked out by, what to be fair was a tornado-like crosswind. “Nick, I’m really cross,” Steve said, “I’ve just lost my ham!”
As we picked up our bikes and tried to ride, I had thought about sitting it out, but that might last for days. If this was the ‘Toughest Motorcycle Expedition in the World’ surely it had more to do with someone’s ketchup disappearing into the bush or whether a strong wind had whistled up someone’s knickers? As we move forward from minor catastrophe to cataclysm, I have decided, on account of Roy, our loyal back-up driver being hand-cuffed to a lamp-post, to rename this trip ‘Carry On Pan-Am’.
It happened last night. Everything was going swimmingly, Jon the KTM rider had just fractured his pubic remus (along with three significant rib fractures, one of which was millimetres from a punctured lung) was now safely in a local hospital having a bed pan wash by a very pretty nurse. Bazza the Nutter (the one who did a wheelie off an unmade bridge and broke his chain) was now suffering the effects of that. Somewhere 70 miles north of Esquel he had his complete electrical miss-hap – in fact it proved to be his battery that had lost it’s will to live. Texts flew around and he was located and Roy was coming up behind like the Charge of the Light Brigade to sort everything out. Unfortunately the fuel injectors gained an air-lock and the pick-up packed up six minutes after his last text. Sending texts in Argentina is like being on the dark side of the moon – full of dubious necessity and you hardly ever receive them. It took two hours for Roy to isolate the problem and as he wound up the elastic band that powered the engine he was stopped at a police checkpoint.
The XT was now on the back of the trailer still covered in cow hair and Erik still had the papers. Roy’s understanding of Spanish was nil so when he said ‘no’ to everything trying to be helpful, they stretched his arms out as far as he could and hand-cuffed him to a small tree. It was dark, he was alone and reminiscent of the film Midnight Express he expected the worse. If he was going to be rodgered up the back-side by an Argentinean policeman, it clearly wasn’t going to be a fair fight. Roy used to be a Special Constable in Burton on Trent and was used to dealing with idiots. Incredibly, the policeman only wanted to check his papers and feel his pockets, and when he said that there was nothing there other than a few pesos, Roy said he’d left money on the dashboard of the truck. That resolved the problem and Roy was released and allowed to drive on, by which time Barry had been camping beside the road for five hours. Apparently he had been trying to flag down a car to borrow a local phone, but he has a special scary look at night so no one was going to stop.
Meanwhile back at the hotel in Bariloche, Clive had decided to ride west to Chile. My interpretation of this journey as an expedition rather than an adventure treads a fine line. How can you say each of the riders are not accomplishing something extraordinary on such a project, and yet….I have set the bar perhaps unreasonably high? On the lid this journey is a headline, inside the tin there is Lake Titicaca and Machu Pichhu and Atacama sand dunes that run down to the sea. Higher than this, there is air so thin you feel it will float away. It was incomprehensible to me that people didn’t want to suffer, something I find easy, something I do well.
“You know,” said Barry, “when John Cleese does his chicken dance, hopping in front of Sybil in the reception of his hotel, well, I think that’s like you having to look after us,” he said.
“Really,” I said,
“Yea, that’s good innit?” he said, because he always was so optimistic.
“Of course,” I said pondering, “I thought you needed to be unhinged to sign up for this trip in the first place?” If it wasn’t the riders struggling with the kind of reality that this trip offered, maybe it was me?
