No longer do you need to ask: “where are you going to?” For now there are no options left, there’s only one road left and that one comes to a dead end.

‘This Road Ends in Water’

To wit the waters of the Beagle Chanel and the southern Argentine city of Ushuaia. The question now has to be: “where did you start?”

For us there is no easy, simplistic answer. By saying “Valparaiso….” just seems to be selling us short. The Chilean capital’s port feels like it’s just up the road and in our ‘lang sang’, it is.

“Where have you come from?”, is one of the oft asked questions and how we reply is determined by how perverse you want to be and who you’re talking with. I don’t like to appear superior, big-headed, or accused of telling ‘porkie pies’ or being a ‘peddler of fake”. So I suggest somewhere a few days back up the road, pass some pleasantries, comment on the weather if they’re of an Anglo-Saxon persuasion and go on my way.

That all changes when you meet another cycle traveller.

It’s open season for a bragging bonanza. The explanation is simple; anybody on a bike in Ushuaia is either just starting or has come some considerable distance. It certainly won’t be “just two days up the road”.

So does the Silk Road out-score Crossing Australia? Does a Round the World out-trump Four Years on the Road? Does a Traveling Family outstrip a nine year old Nikky cycling fourteen miles home from school every day?

Everybody wins on the bragging board.

So please allow us a moment or two for some ego-preening.

We started in Inuvik and its taken us 91,000 km to get here…. it’s been seven years on the road over the last 15. (there’s actually another 60thou’ in the Antipodes, around Europe and at ‘home’, but we’re not bothering about them, it only confuses the issue).

So the end to a “guy lang sang”, one that’s been composed in several verses. Some have been sung in the round, others are linear, a song narrative that might have sounded at moments discordant, verging on anti-tonal. Today has found a finale.

Maybe it would be a slight… to call it ‘a crashing crescendo’, but the last three days of the ride were a fitting resume for that which had gone before.

A fortnight of flat, treeless pampa days, one of the last being a 222 km epic, suddenly gave way to low rolling hills, lenga woodland, to which an horizon of glacier, crag mountains, sun, wind and rain can be added. To call the transformations a surprise would be an understatement. But as a synopsis for our travels it’s near perfect. Emotional rollercoaster. Serendipity writ large.

Tonight, as I tally the account, I’m left thinking that I really must simplify the story by drawing a map, and wondering – how the hell did this happen?