The cold temperatures finally arrived and we put our liners into our motorcycle gear and got the thermal underwear out. We had to be at the ferry terminal by 8:30am and the staff loading the ferry were very helpful and used wooden blocks to chock up Andrew’s bike to stop it from falling over. We met another riding couple from Bulgaria on two Hero bikes and Elena and I tried to exchange batons for the WRWR relay but we had technical issues and may have to try and catch up another time.

After a calm and relaxing 2 hour ferry ride we rode through the town of Povenir and then rode about 40km on a well maintained gravel road – we saw Commerson’s dolphins playing in the white caps – before we found the perfect spot for our first wild camp. We set up tent in the wind shelter of a fishing hut and I went for a long stroll along the rocky beach while Andrew held a siesta out of the wind inside the tent. We saw more dolphins just in front of of our tent and had an early dinner before retiring to bed with the temperature plummeting to near zero and the cold wind made it feel extra cold but we were cosy warm in our sleeping bags all night. It was a day of many “firsts” for the trip – first ferry ride, first proper dirt road section and first wild camp 👍🏕️

After a late breakfast and packing up camp, we left by 1:00pm and had another 80km of gravel road to negotiate – there were major road works and mist of this section will probably be paved before too long. The last section already had a perfectly sealed road next to us but for many kms we were still on a gravel road next to the newly built sealed road in a 40km/hr zone but that did not stop cars passing us with oncoming traffic😳😡. We reached the border and crossed back into Argentina. We rode to Rio Grande where we are staying in a house in what used to be a kids bedroom – the bikes are securely parked in a locked garage next to a table tennis table snd a world map where visitors write their name and pin to the place they are from – we are the first Australians and Austrians 👍🇦🇺🇦🇹. We have the entire house to ourselves. We went for a stroll to the city and had dinner and took pictures of the full moon on the way back. We saw a group of people taking a dip in just their swimmers as the full moon rose – I was very tempted to join them but did not wear my swimmers and had eaten way too much for dinner 😉