We are sitting in the lounge of Hostal Sendero Sur in Santiago waiting to catch an Uber to the airport for our flight back to South Africa via Sao Paulo. Our flight is only at five o'clock tomorrow morning and there is an eight hour layover in Sao Paulo. This means we've got a lot of time on our hands.

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Without a doubt, the Carretera Austral was the highlight of this trip (for varied reasons) followed by the ferry trip back to Puerto Montt and the crossings of the Andes. Maybe because of this, the bits in between were more humdrum day-to-day living rather than touring. Still, our trip to Chile and Argentina have been a lovely experience.

I think our decision to head southwards on the Carretera Austral was a good one. Apart from the prevailing wind direction, the advantage was that we were always heading into more remote areas rather than being confronted with more development which is the case when going northwards.

This trip was very different to previous ones in that we had much more social interaction, both with other cyclists and travelers as well as locals. This aspect was very much a highlight for us, even though we are unsociable people! Our Spanish developed slowly over the post three months and we are still pretty useless but we did manage to get by without meaningful problems. It helps that Google Translate works quite well between Spanish and English.

I was dreading the weather and in the end it chased us northwards but I am also impressed that we handled it without problems until we hit our target of Puerto Natales.

What might we have done differently ?

I think we should have started a month earlier which would have given us extra time to get all the way to Ushuaia while the weather was milder. However, this wasn't possible and I am not sure we lost too much by stopping at Puerto Natales.

We should also have had better warm gloves. Our hands were the one part of our bodies that felt the cold. Proper rain trousers are also something I think we need if we do a tour in similar conditions again. I am fully converted to Goretex. Our Goretex rain jackets and Goretex running shoes kept us dry without us ever feeling as if we were in a sauna. The rest of our gear also worked out well.

The bicycles ? What can I say. They seem to be bullet proof. After almost fourteen thousand kilometers of touring over the past year they haven't given us a single problem. Thank you Thorn and Rohloff.

We're not sure where to next but we expect to spend about six weeks in South Africa before heading off again. The current thought is the UK and Ireland. We have a few friends that we would like to see spread across the British Isles and cycling would be a nice of doing it.