The end of the road

A final newsletter and a big thank you

Hello friends, family and those we've met on the road! Welcome to the twenty-fifth and final edition of our newsletter, written from a plane flying over the Atlantic.

Since we last spoke, Ed and I have been spending time off the bikes in Ushuaia and Buenos Aires, easing back into our lives as city dwellers, preparing for our journey back to the U.K and reflecting on the scale of our achievement.

But first, we need to recap our last days on the bikes. Our final challenge was to traverse Tierra del Fuego, a large island at the bottom of the continent that’s shared between Chile and Argentina. It’s home to plenty of Antarctic-adjacent wildlife, some beautiful unpaved roads, and not much else, to be honest, making for a logistically tough but beautifully remote final stretch. And thankfully, despite a notable dip in temperature after we crossed the Magellan strait, the weather stayed just on the right side of autumn for our final foray.

We had been expecting the riding to be less rewarding, having heard from others that the last stretch into Ushuaia was a bit of a chore. We were fortunate, however, that a border crossing at Paso Bellavista had recently reopened for the first time since the pandemic, meaning that a bikepacking route we’d been eyeing up for months was suddenly scalable. We enjoyed being some of the first cyclists to take this way in a few years, and encountered a plethora of welcoming refugios (shelters) and abandoned buildings to keep us safe and somewhat warm along the way.

Highlights included a visit to a penguin colony, lunch reheated in a log-processing factory canteen, camping in a former hotel plant room while overlooking a beautiful lake and a night spent in the back room of a bakery famous for welcoming cicloviajeros. It was such a fun way to get to Ushuaia, and we savoured every moment of our last days spent together in the beautiful landscapes of rolling pampa and ancient forests. We even rode up one final pass through snow-topped peaks before our final descent into town, for old Andes-times sake.

Arriving in Ushuaia was much like arriving in any other town of 80,000 people - plenty of industrial estates and bad drivers. But at this point we were both set on reaching the sign that we’ve seen so many other cyclists grinning next to, and we pushed into the wind for a final few minutes before pausing, a little dumbfounded, in front of the quaint little scene painted on the Fin del Mundo board. We videocalled our parents, chugged a beer, I had an ugly cry, and a nice German man took some photos of us. Then we checked into the most expensive hotel of the whole trip and sat in the spa’s hot tub for the afternoon. It was prettayyyyy great.

The next day we awoke in our plush king-size bed and decided we hadn’t quite had enough bike riding. Leaving our bags at reception, we took a swing down to Bahia Lapataia, which is considered more of a true ‘end of the road’ for the South American continent. Pleasingly, it’s in a national park, so we enjoyed our last little spin among yet more beautiful mountains and forests to the final bay, which was, considering the amount of other tourists there, surprisingly serene.

We spent the next few days recovering in an apartment, meeting up with other cyclists and processing the fact we weren’t going to be riding south anymore. Seeing fellow rider Marshall really helped put our achievement in perspective; he and our friend Jeanne were the first other cyclists we met in Alaska, and despite the fact his journey has been a little more disjointed than ours, we found ourselves at the end of the world at the same time after not seeing each other for the nearly two years we’ve been on the road. It was super fun to reconnect with someone who had seen our naive faces at the beginning of the trip, and it felt like a lovely full-circle moment.

Since then we’ve been balancing some good old fashioned touristing with our need to rest and reacquaint ourselves with a life not spent moving towards a set goal. Buenos Aires has been a perfect place to do that; it’s such a fun city, with amazing food, beautiful parks and enough art museums to satisfy even us. We’ve loved lounging around our little casita, consuming daily ice creams and spending time with pals we’ve made at various points, passing through on their own journeys home, and local friends of friends, who have been delighted to show us the joys of the city.

We even took a few days holiday from our holiday to visit the world-famous waterfalls of Iguazú, which were absolutely awe-inspiring. And because the falls are situated across a border, this jolly also facilitated a visit to a surprise 15th country, Brazil. It was just for a few hours, but we’re claiming it.

So, what’s next? After seeing our parents, we’ll be returning to our flat in Deptford, south east London and readying ourselves to return to the world of work - we both have something lined up. It’ll be an adjustment for sure, but we’re trying to appreciate the prospect of stability, and we’re both looking forward to small things like wearing more than one set of clothes, having access to a blender and being able to put toilet roll inside the toilet bowl.

Day 1

We’re hoping to return to a more ‘normal’ life while keeping the things we’ve learned and gained from this incredible journey at the front of our minds. Barely passable Spanish aside, the friends we’ve made will be the lasting testament to the trip. We’re so full of gratitude for the people who have helped us along the way, and our friends and family back home, who kept us afloat when we were having a tough time. We want to say the world’s biggest thank you to all of you; you have made our silly little holiday the most special experience of our lives. To our core group of compañeros who we’ve ridden and spent time with while here - you know who you are, thank you so much for putting up with us.

This is where I’m going to play the sub-editor card; I’ve never been a real writer, and as such I can’t put the enormity of our gratefulness into words. So I won’t. Thank you all for sticking with us. We can’t wait to see you again, wherever in the world it may be.

The stats

• 23,700km ridden

• 310,000m of climbing

• Highest pass: 5,100m

• Biggest day: 122km

• 670 days from Fairbanks to Ushuaia

• 15 countries

•  22 editions of ‘Toot or Boot’