The last few days Thomas has been out on a fly fishing trip with the same guys who trekked the glacier last week. They ended up having a great time fishing (and enjoying Russian vodka in the night. Haha) and today they were departing. These guys were pretty hardcore. Beint was using this trip as research because he would like to come back and start a tour company (and work with Thomas and Sandra). Peter was in the army back home but was thinking about changing jobs soon. They both were going back to winter and weren't to thrilled about it. Haha.
Today Adam from Ireland and I were going to take bikes out to try to bike the National Forest north of town that I wanted to make a trail map of. It was a beautiful day out so we were in high hopes of a good trip. I had my GoPro out and ready to go. The ride out of town was lovely (minus my shoelace getting caught in my peddles and making my chain slip off -- it was easily fixed). We got to the entrance to the park and realized we had to do a lot of uphills. The bikes we have available for rent at our hostel are not in the best shape and my back tire was lower than I would have liked. The roads/trails were also gravel which made riding uphill nearly impossible. We ended up walking and pushing the bikes all the way to where the actual entrance was and had to pay 3000 pesos each (about $6 each). And then it was more uphill. Every time the trail would appear to even out or slope down we would get on our bikes, only to have it be awesome for about 5 seconds before it would go sharply up again. So aggravating!
We finally found what was marked as a bike trail jetting to the left of the road. The road we were on up until this point had been one with cars that lead to where there was a lake supposedly. We never got that far. About 15-20 minutes into the only slightly better bike trail, the crappiest thing happened that could have happened when we were almost to the top most point of the forest: my back tube somehow began falling out of the tire, making it unridable because it couldn't turn! I just looked down and cussed, then started laughing. I called Adam back and we both looked at the damage. There was nothing we could do but to go back. He volunteered to carry my bike back and I pushed his. We had good spirits about the whole disaster and had an enjoyable time laughing about our bad luck as we were walking/pushing/carrying back down the trail and to the dirt road. After doing this for more than an hour (or so it seemed) we finally flagged down a passing pickup to help us get into town. The driver was from South Africa and had two other passengers from Chile and volunteered to give us a lift to the edge of town even though he was going the other way. They were a lifesaver! We hopped off on the edge of town and we went towards the plaza where we sat and ate our sandwiches we packed followed by some amazing ice cream from a local streetcar vendor. We stopped by the grocery store on the way home for some beverages because we felt we deserved it and needed it after this ridiculously disastrous day.
That night I told the story to Thomas and Sandra over dinner and we all couldn't stop laughing about the whole situation. I still can't stop laughing about it.... Hahaha...