The problem of getting out of Coyhaique was finally solved by Fabiola (and she wanted rid of me, of course).

Oh Dear

Wednesday
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She rang Luis, who runs a dairy truck empty to Puerto Chacabuco and thence on the boat to Puerto Montt. So, having explained that I couldn´t actually ride the bike to the truck because of the snow and ice, She arranged for Patricio (who, you may remember, brought the wreck back from the border) to come with his pickup and two rather nice strong young men to take the bike and boxes to the big truck.

Patricio used to do motocross so understands all about tying bikes down. Anyway, we found Luis and his truck; and we have to get the bike in backwards from the bed of the pickup, a height difference of at least a couple of feet. But now we had four nice strong young men, and Patricio understood about the sumpguard so everything went OK.

Next we found that the only tie-down points were on the ceiling. Hmmm. Patricio to the rescue again. We used the straps to hang the bike from the ceiling. It was in gear, and the front tyre was on the floor with the suspension almost completely uncompressed. Kooked OK to me providing Luisdidn´t do too much over-enthusiastic cornering (doubtful, given the conditions).

Patricio refused to take any money as he was so impressed by the rebuild, having had an intimate relationship with the wreck. I took a couple of litres of decent pisco round to him in the evening.

Next job was to get a flight; easy enough, Sky, 40-odd quid.

Thursday
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Airport closed. There´s no ILS (VFR only), so if there´s fog or low cloud there are no flights in so no flights out, mainly because of the proximity of a) large chunks of Andes and b) the Argentinian border (actually the airport eastern perimiter fence).

But Francisco made me go anyway just in case, and he was right (but only just).

Friday
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So here I am in Puerto Montt, and I´ve just had a text from Fabiola to say that Luis is arriving in a couple of hours, hurrah.