Welcome to Tierra del Fuego!

The wind-swept, desolate archipelago that hosts the mythical town of Ushuaia, the end of the road for many a weary travellers' long journeys through the American continent. Land of the Fire - divided from mainland South America by the Strait of Magellan, it is the last piece of fragmented land before Antarctica.

Where has the time gone? We sadly no longer have the time to savour each day as we did during our travels and suddenly weeks and months fly by as we rush around our busy daily lives.

Yes, this IS sent out to deliberately confuse you - yes, we HAVE been back home now for six months - and yes, we really ARE that behind in the cataloguing of our adventures. It's lovely looking at the photos again though and re-living the experiences. Here we have a few more bits to share...

So here we are, in Villa O'Higgins, the end of the Carretera Austral. All this vibration has made a number of screws from our panniers and racks to loosen up. Some of them we don't notice in time and therefore lose. The end result is that we have depleted our stock of spare screws and are asking around Villa O'Higgins for anywhere we might be able to buy some. The answer is a resounding "no", but, as it happens in this part of the world, a rather touching (if not very effective) "solution" appears out of thin air: One of the customers of the shop where we had asked for screws overhears us, and later in the afternoon turn up at our campsite and gives us some screws from old bikes he had! Doesn't fit our bikes, full of rust, odd sizes - but still a touching gesture. People really go out of their way to help us here - warms up one's heart.

After recuperating in Cochrane's lovely central campsite, we continue South on the Carretera Austral. There is no question the rest of the way will be unpaved - the only question is how bad the road surface will be and how we will handle it.

It's the 1st day of 2012 and the sun is shining. The clouds are giving the blue sky a surreal quality. We've never seen quite such clouds anywhere else.

Leaving Cerro Castillo behind we enter the unpaved part of the Carretera Austral. 700km further South lies the end of the road, Villa O'Higgins. We have no idea what we'll do once we get there, but we have silently agreed to ride the length of the Carretera Austral. Not doing so would be unthinkable.