On a bicycle you are able to stop whenever and wherever you want. Literally. The moderate speed allows you to enjoy every single detail of the surroundings. Take a picture, move on. It’s silent and environmentally friendly. It’s cheap. The physical activity is healthy and makes your body produce dopamine, the hormone of happiness. You name it…

When I entered a village riding my bicycle packed with my luggage, people noticed me, smiled at me, eventually said hello and would interact with me. Paradoxically, because I was alone, the probability that someone came to talk to me was even higher. Enter that same village driving a car and nobody would ever notice you.

The benefit of not carrying a tent, apart from the weight gain, is again social; you get to be in contact with locals in order to find a bed to sleep in. By doing so, you meet people who you never would have spoken to if you would have pitched your tent in the woods. Which is honestly what I normally do. The fact I wasn’t carrying any stove to cook was another opportunity to meet people, during my quest for food. In this remote part of Patagonia, food trucks are popular. Most of them are old buses that have been reformed into small restaurants, but in Cochrane, Rachel’s food bus is still working. Most of the time she is parked in between the houses of Cochrane but sometimes, they bring it to special events, to the football field or other villages along the Carretera Austral.

Of course, meeting locals is great, but meeting other cyclists is really part of the experience to. It sounds like a cliché, but there is a real genuine solidarity between bikepackers that goes far beyond anything you can experience in a sedentary life.

I was determined to reach the town of Cerro Castillo before dusk in order to find a roof to sleep under. On route I met Janie and Fabian who had been travelling months before I met them: we had a quick chat, then I left.

The next morning I woke up in the fantastic hostel I was surprised to find the night before. I knew that 120km were separating me from the next inhabited place. I had already travelled more than a week non-stop and I felt very tired, not to mention lazy, so I somehow postponed my departure. I watched the road workers leave, extending my breakfast, taking one coffee after another, re-reading the map all over again until it was definitely too late to reach my destination on time. I said to myself that I had no other option than take a rest day to be able to start fresh at the next sunrise. I still felt quite torn apart by my decision… and didn’t really know what to do.

At that precise moment, the door slammed open and two frozen cyclists entered the room. It was Fabian and Janie! They had spent the night in the forest and after the long downhill that leads to Cerro Castillo they got caught by the morning frost and only had one thing in mind: warm soup! Although we barely talked 15 minutes the day before, meeting them again was like seeing an old friend you were missing. We shouted and hugged each other with joy and the smile on their faces instantly swept away my gloomy mood from the morning. We sat on the table and I started sharing my feelings and thoughts with them, meanwhile they regained some colour eating their well deserved bowl of soup. It wasn’t long before Fabian asked me the following: “Why don’t you come with us now? We buy some extra food here, we cycle 60km together today and tonight you camp with us, we have a three person tent. So tomorrow, you only have half the journey left to reach Puerto Tranquilo.” I was thrilled! I felt so grateful for the proposal, everything was different now, never could I have imagined this plan just a few hours before.

On the boat from Villa O’Higgins to Candelario Mansilla I met Paula, an English teacher that lives in Coyaique, the biggest city of the Carretera Austral. Despite the fact that she is the daughter of the mayor of Villa O’Higgins, she had never seen the glacier so she took advantage of her visit to her parents for the summer holidays, to finally see this natural wonder. Today as I’m writing these words, Paula left her town and is travelling on her own across South-America.

Encounters are magic moments. Sometimes you are cycling for hours, on your own, lost in your thoughts or watching the landscape or singing a song if your are very tired, or talking alone… and suddenly, someone appears. Sometimes like a dot in the horizon that slowly gets bigger and bigger, sometimes suddenly, coming out of nowhere. No matter how it happens, it’s always surprising. You are suddenly getting to know a new person, whom the second before, you ignored even existed. You pass from being on your own to being with somebody else. Or you pass from being with your partner to being in a group. No matter the number of people, each combination makes a group unique.