EPISODE 23
Salt Flat Tires: A Bikepacking Roller Coaster Ride
Fueled by a quarter-life crisis and the desire to break free from routine, bikepacking newcomer Melanie Schautt embarked on a transformative half-year cycling adventure through South America with her friend Louise, a seasoned cyclist. From battling fierce headwinds and a near-quitting moment on the Carretera Austral in Patagonia to overcoming mechanical issues and a couple of injuries, Melanie had to be resilient to keep pedaling. Amidst the struggles, she also discovered the unexpected joy and freedom of finding her own pace, the value of enduring friendships, and the thrill of conquering challenging terrain, including the Lagunas Route and Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia and Cotopaxi in Ecuador. Melanie’s vivid storytelling may leave you craving to launch your own South American bikepacking adventure.
Episode Transcript
Melanie: Bikepacking is not having a good time all the time. Bikepacking is having a low low and then having a very high high. It’s a real roller coaster of emotions.
Gabriel: You just heard Melanie Schautt reflecting on her first bicycle tour, a half year excursion in South America with her friend Luise, a serious cyclist and seasoned bikepacker. After pushing aside thoughts of quitting during the Carretera Austral in Chile and overcoming numerous mechanical issues in Argentina, Melanie continued to gain strength and confidence. The journey peaked figuratively and literally on the Lagunas route in southwest Bolivia, a remote and rugged passage over sandy, washboarded, windswept, freezing, high altitude roads. The two friends continued through Peru and into Ecuador, where Melanie’s 28th birthday celebration provided a fitting finale to her life-changing adventure.
Sandra: You’re listening to The Accidental Bicyclist. In this podcast, you’ll meet people from all walks of life and learn about their most memorable bike-touring experiences. This is your host, Gabriel Aldaz.
Gabriel: Hello cycle touring enthusiasts! Welcome to another episode of The Accidental Bicycle Tourist. I don’t spend a lot of time on social media, but Instagram is how I met today’s guest Melanie Schautt from Germany. Somehow, among all the perfect sunsets and crazy stunts competing for my attention on Instagram, I spotted Melanie’s posts as she was about to set off for South America. That makes her the first guest whose trip I could follow in real time during 2024. As I learned, her candid and inspiring posts only scratched the surface. On this episode, be prepared for a healthy dose of strong winds, intense sun, amazing resilience, and enduring friendship, all part of Melanie’s unforgettable cycling journey in South America.
Gabriel: So, Melanie, thank you so much for being a guest on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast.
Melanie: Well, thank you so much for the invitation. I’m super excited to be here.
Gabriel: I would like to start this introduction in a very unusual way. And that is with an Instagram post that you made. That post is what really made me click follow or become interested in what you were doing. There’s a lot of stuff on Instagram and I don’t pay much attention to it. But I saw this post and it really struck me because you don’t read something like that on Instagram every day. So I’m actually going to read these two paragraphs word for word if that’s okay.
Melanie: Sure, yeah.
Gabriel: So this is a post from before your cycling trip. And you say, “Somehow I feel that my late 20s require so many big decisions that have a massive impact on my whole life. And most of these seem to be incompatible with each other. Additionally, I hear the ticking noise of my biological clock whenever thinking about taking decisions that go against conventional society’s path. I feel this longing to live an adventurous life, go long-term traveling, learn new things, meet inspiring people, be wild, cut my hair, live in a van. But at the same time, I feel like I need to strengthen my personal relationships, work on a career, specialize in a certain field, save up, grow my hair out, get better at my hobbies by joining regular training groups, and decide on a place to live.”
Melanie: Yeah, that is kind of summing up the struggles I’ve had last year, when I came out of university and started working for a bit, and you kind of find yourself in a situation where – now I’m talking for women, especially women that took quite some time for their degree, for university – and then those women that also want to have kids one day. And you know as a woman that you can’t have kids, or maybe you don’t want to have kids at 40 or 50, because the chance of having children is a bit less. And then you just find yourself suddenly in this span of, like, maybe three or four years when you’re like 27 to maybe 31, 32, where you have to do all those things that you want to do before starting a family. And you should work on a career because when you have kids, you have to put that on hold. But at the same time, you want to go adventure, and that was such a mess in my head last year and putting a lot of pressure on me.
Gabriel: I think a lot of people feel that way, and you just summed it up in such an eloquent way. You know, you want to cut your hair, you want to let your hair grow out. You can’t do both, but there is a lot of pressure now because women have this choice. Before, I think traditionally the path for women was much more defined and laid out. And now with this freedom and new possibilities come a lot of opportunities, but also this pressure that, “Oh, you know, every day is important. Which way am I going to do it? But what if I miss out on this other thing?”
Melanie: Yes, I’m also a candidate for FOMO, so that does definitely not help. But yeah, it’s like as you read from my post, it was just exactly that. Like I want to go adventure because I have this longing and I want to experience those things, and I know that I can’t get those experiences from just going out there for a month or two. If you want to go on an adventure, you have to, like, dedicate yourself to it. But this automatically means that you cannot pursue your career, that you have to leave certain relationships behind, of your friendships or even partner relationships. Really tough decisions because automatically if you leave a relationship or your career goal, it shifts your planning of maybe having a family. Like, it kind of jeopardizes that for a few more years. It’s really just a fight between your passion and the idea that if you don’t go now, you might not be able to in the future. But also, like, that you maybe need to save up money and have more securities because you never know what’s going to happen.
Gabriel: Right.
Melanie: Yeah.
Gabriel: Can you walk us through a little bit how you made the decision to go to South America with a bicycle and a friend? At least one friend. Sometimes it seemed like you made new friends because I did follow your adventures from a distance on Instagram. How did this all come together, given that before this trip you had these struggles?
Melanie: Even until like the beginning of the trip, I wasn’t sure if I was actually going to be on this trip for longer than a few months, but in the end, it was just a series of happenings, like I didn’t get into the new position of my job that I wanted to. In that job that I had here, like my weekly 40-hour job that I had, I met my friend Luise and she’s all about bikepacking, and I have actually never been on a bike packing trip. I didn’t even own a bike before this trip. She talked a lot about her travels that she’s done before. She’s even been, like, a semi-professional cyclist before. I have to say, I wasn’t considering going on a bike trip before. It didn’t really seem like a lot of fun to me to be sitting on a bike every day. In the end, she kind of introduced this idea that she wanted to go bikepacking in South America. Now, I’ve gone to South America before. I did an exchange semester in Chile, so I already knew that I wanted to go back someday because I love South America, I speak Spanish, I love the culture. That was kind of already this idea that I could maybe join her, even for just a month or two, and she actually found another person to go on the trip with her, but she also asked me if I also wanted to join. We could just go the three of us. At that time, I was still with my boyfriend back from then, and I could already see that it wasn’t really going in the direction that I wanted things to go. Maybe I can sum it up like this: like, we were living in a house together and I had this full-time job and I already felt like I was 45, even though I was 27.
Gabriel: Yup.
Melanie: I felt like most of my friends, not Luise, but most of my friends were also in a long-term relationship and we were, like, hanging out to have dinner at some point and I felt like, “This can’t be it.” I’m so young still and I’m already in this super routine and I don’t want to be there right now.
Gabriel: Yeah, you saw your whole life laid out in front of you and it’s like, “Okay, I’m with this person, I’m with this job, then we’ll get married, then there’s kid one, kid two, kid three…” I don’t know, but you kind of froze up when you saw that it had already gotten so set in your ways.
Melanie: Yeah, totally, and so at that point, I kind of already made up my mind that I wanted to go on this trip and I had talked to my ex-boyfriend about this – well, now ex-boyfriend – he was first supporting it, but then in the end, the relationship ended and I knew that now is just the perfect time to just go on this trip without an end date. So I only bought my ticket to South America. I had bought the bike before and – you might laugh at this because usually I feel like people prepare a lot for a long trip like this on a bicycle – but it was like maybe four weeks and up to the trip and I didn’t even know if I have to buy fork bags or what kind of bags do I put on a bike. I mean, I’ve done a lot of outdoor sports before, so I knew about all my camping gear, but I absolutely had no idea what to pack, like what kind of tools do I need? How do I even fix a tire? I knew nothing about cycling.
Gabriel: Well, Melanie, you do realize that the name of the podcast is The Accidental Bicycle Tourist.
Melanie: Yeah, I do.
Gabriel: This is what you are, you are an accidental bicycle tourist.
Melanie: One hundred percent, yeah.
Gabriel: You know, many of the people on the podcast are as well. The episode that I think about is “Odisea Panamericana” with Martina Gees, a Swiss woman who basically was convinced to go to South America with her boyfriend because he wanted to see it by bike and it was the same thing. She had a mountain bike, but she knew nothing about touring bikes or equipment or anything like that and she ended up staying in South America, even when her boyfriend left, for years.
Melanie: Nice. Yeah, amazing.
Gabriel: Let’s just get a couple of things in for our listeners. So when you say “here,” where is “here”? Where were you living that you had that 40-hour-a-week job?
Melanie: I was living in Innsbruck in Austria. I already made some decisions in my past where I knew, okay, I wanted to do outdoor sports. I live somewhere where the adventure is not so far away from your home, but still, even though it’s like right outside, basically, it’s such a different thing if you’re on a big trip or if you’re just doing something on the weekend.
Gabriel: Sure. But you are German by nationality.
Melanie: Yeah.
Gabriel: If I may ask, what kind of job did you have?
Melanie: Yeah, so I studied tourism, and at that time I was working full time for a tour agency, like a tour operator.
Gabriel: Okay, so it really seems like outdoors and meeting people, it’s a huge part of your life. So you at least were well-equipped from that point of view for such a crazy adventure. You know what it’s like to be freezing cold. You know what it’s like to be caught in a storm of some kind. You know how to talk to people and have problems solved. So in that regard, you were well prepared. Now as far as the bikepacking… not so much, but you had Luise.
Melanie: I had Luise. Yeah. Actually, I told her my concerns about this, that she is a very good cyclist and she’s a very good bikepacker. She’s done a lot of solo trips as well. And I have zero bikepacking experience and that we will probably need a long time to at least kind of narrow our levels together. To prepare for that, we actually went for like supposedly three day adventure through Switzerland on the bike. Ended up being only two because we got food poisoning from a water well, so…
Gabriel: Oh, no.
Melanie: And we tried another time just before the trip. It was in the middle of winter and we had a lot of problems because everything was snowed in and icy and we were in the end sent away from our camp spot by a ranger and had to sleep at a playground at minus seven degrees. So I should have known. I thought these were just circumstances that were very inconvenient, but this actually already set the stage for this whole trip.
Gabriel: See, I told you.
Melanie: Yeah.
Gabriel: You know what it’s like to endure those setbacks and that’s crucial.
Melanie: That is actually crucial. And I think it was actually it took me probably the first month to get adapted to those on the trip.
Gabriel: Yeah. In the last four weeks before you boarded that plane, you went on these trips and did you also get a little bit more savvy on the gear and the bike maintenance and things like that? Or did you rely mostly on Luise?
Melanie: I think in those preparation trips – like the first one was actually a few months before our departure – but yeah, I had like a very crazy set up like rental things from friends because I had to still buy my things. And it was actually not a lot of cycling. It was more like really testing if everything works, if we can fit everything inside. Actually, on the trip just before the departure, I realized that a lot of bags are not holding up as well as I thought. They were like slamming on my wheel. And I already saw that I definitely have to make some adjustments when we start in Patagonia. But I was absolutely running out of time at that time, four weeks before the trip. I actually had to move out of my house and store all my things somewhere. I didn’t know where to put all my things and I was basically a lot more busy and I had to sell my car and like all of those things were a lot more important at that time than really figuring out the perfect angle for my handlebar bags. I basically just left with a set up that was not ready to go yet.
Gabriel: Sounds like a hectic time. If I may ask, did the breakup with your boyfriend also happened during this crazy pre-trip time or was that later?
Melanie: Yeah, basically. It was six weeks before the departure.
Gabriel: What a time! What a time before the departure. Usually that’s the calmer time and then, boom! You’re in South America and it’s crazy. But no, you started the craziness well in advance.
Melanie: Well in advance? I mean, it didn’t really get a lot less crazy in the first month.
Gabriel: No, I didn’t expect it to.
Melanie: I did though. I did expect it to calm down. I was really convinced that all the hectic was before the trip and once I was there, I had a very different expectation of what a long-term bike trip would look like. I was imagining calm camping nights where we would just, I don’t know, have our dinner and then…
Gabriel: roast marshmallows?
Melanie: Yeah, and just, I don’t know, do some yoga before going to sleep and gently packing up the things in the morning.
Gabriel: Oh yeah.
Melanie: I don’t even know if that happened once.
Gabriel: Yeah, I love it. Then yeah, let’s get into the actual journey. You flew from Europe to where?
Melanie: Santiago de Chile, because I still had a few friends that hosted us for, I think, two nights, and then we continued our flights down to Puerto Natales in Patagonia.
Gabriel: An amazing place. So you got the bikes in Puerto Natales and you assembled them and you started riding straight away?
Melanie: Basically. We had a few days in Puerto Natales where we did all the setup and tried to decide on what to shop for the first days. I had some experiences in this area, but honestly, I had no idea how to really structure and do all the organization. At this point, it was the three of us. It was Luise, one girl, Blanca, and me. So we started off three of us and it did not last for long, this trio.
Gabriel: So wait, we need to introduce Blanca. Who is she?
Melanie: Who is Blanca? So Luise, I met at work, I think we just talked about this, and Blanca is a friend of Luise who also was at that time available for a long-term trip, and she had planned this also for a long time that she wanted to leave Innsbruck after her studies and she just finished her studies just before this trip and wanted to come with us.
Gabriel: I thought maybe there had been three of you and there were three of you. But now you say that it did not last long.
Melanie: Yeah.
Gabriel: What happened?
Melanie: So when we started off the trip, I think the first two weeks were probably the most chaotic ones in terms of everything probably: getting used to the weather, getting used to the speed we were all cycling in. I’m not a very unfit person, but it’s a lot different to be cycling than to, I don’t know, go hiking or to go ski touring… you’ll know this. When we started the trip, of course, all of us were so motivated and Luise and Blanca were very fit in the beginning in cycling and I was not. I did a lot more breaks than they did and we really had to just figure out in the beginning how do we do this together. Yeah. In the end, I don’t really know where or when it happened, but I felt like I was holding them back a lot. Communication-wise, we also had to learn a lot how to communicate. “Hey, this is my speed,” and I also had to learn how to say, “You guys go ahead and I’m totally happy being behind,” without always feeling bad about being behind. When you head through Torres del Paine National Park, it’s a lot of hills. Our second day was, I don’t know, 70 kilometers with 1,600 altitude meters and lots of wind, lots of rain and those conditions are just really tough.
Gabriel: Patagonia is a wild place and a very challenging place to get your cycling legs, and that’s what you were facing at that point.
Melanie: Exactly, and actually, after three days, I also got a major flu and then I was out and Luise and Blanca did their thing for a while and I tried to hitchhike towards the next city with my flu. Didn’t work out as well and it was a huge chaos. In the end, we kind of met up together, went to El Chaltén together and that’s where Blanca kind of decided for herself that she wants to do her own thing and wanted to figure out if she wanted to do something else. In the end, a little spoiler, she actually met a guy in El Chaltén and they ended up climbing together now for a year and she actually found her boyfriend.
Gabriel: There you go.
Melanie: That’s really nice too and from that point on, Luise and I cycled together and that was actually a really good decision because it was a lot easier for the two of us, maybe not in terms of cycling but in all these other aspects like finding a place to sleep, what to eat and all these other aspects, we get along really, really well and I think that’s maybe almost more important than the same speed of cycling.
Gabriel: Yeah, for sure. There’s lots of ways you can be compatible and I’m sure you got fit over time and that narrowed the gap in terms of cycling speed.
Melanie: Totally, yeah.
Gabriel: El Chaltén is in Argentina. At some point, you went from Chile to Argentina and then…
Melanie: Back to Chile.
Gabriel: Okay, the Carretera Austral.
Melanie: Yeah, that was my nightmare.
Gabriel: Really?
Melanie: Yeah.
Gabriel: Oh, okay.
Melanie: That was my big mental challenge because after the first two weeks when we got to El Chaltén and then we headed over to the Carretera Austral, it was a lot of excitement. Of course, it was tough but it was just a lot of excitement on the beginning. “Wow, we made it! We’re here!” And then start the Carretera Austral where we had very bad weather. A lot of headwind because we went from south to north which I would not recommend to anyone out there. So basically, almost every day was just about headwinds. It was super rainy and we just had this phase, I don’t know why, where we always had, like, five degrees during the day. It was just really cold. So even like the spectacular views that you should have on the route, we often couldn’t even see. Yeah, in that time, I really had a tough time because it was like my first bikepacking trip and I thought, “This is it.” Camping wasn’t as glamorous as I expected it to be. It was a lot less free time than I thought. At the end of the Carretera Austral, I actually remember writing it down on my diary, I said, “I’m not going to do this any longer. I am only going to get to the end of the Carretera Austral and then I’m going to sell my bike and I’m going to fly home.”
Gabriel: No way!
Melanie: I was so sure. I already talked to Luise about this that I think that I’m going to make it to the end of the Carretera but this is not what I think is fun to me. Yeah, I was just looking forward to having a place where I can just relax on the ocean and just be warm and not having to camp in the ditch again and just packing up all my things in the rain and being cold all day long.
Gabriel: Wait a minute though. As someone who nominally followed your trip, I don’t remember a post saying, “I’m quitting” in… I guess we would consider Puerto Montt the end of the Carretera.
Melanie: Yeah.
Gabriel: I don’t remember I’m-calling-it-quits-in-Puerto-Montt-because-I-hate-this post.
Melanie: Yeah. Yeah, because I was very ashamed of myself. I told everyone at home that I’m going on this long bikepacking trip. I knew that people were doubting me too, and then I was on this trip and I was realizing, “Wow, this is really hard! I didn’t expect this to be so hard.” So I was at this point where I didn’t really want to publish anything about my feelings. Always when I thought about I should share what I’m thinking, I was always like, “You know, maybe I’m not quitting yet. I’m getting to the end and then I’ll see kind of in that mindset of being like maybe I can just quit tomorrow. I can decide when I get to Puerto Montt what I’m going to do with my life.
Gabriel: And how did Luise react to this?
Melanie: Honestly, both of us didn’t really have a lot of fun on the Carretera Austral because both of us were really cold. I also imagined a bike trip to be a lot more social. It was just the two of us because everybody was just going from north to south, so we didn’t really meet a lot of people on the road.
Gabriel: It’s such a different experience when you go from north to south because you do meet the same people at different places and you get to know them. If you cross the United States, you will have tailwinds if you go from west to east. If you do the Carretera Austral, you will have tailwinds from north to south, usually.
Melanie: Correct.
Gabriel: Also, from the altitude point of view, one direction may have really crazy steep climbs and the other direction, it may be more gradual or just more advantageous in some ways. That is actually a very important tip. Whenever considering a route, think about which direction to go on. They’re not equal. A lot of these famous routes, there is a preferred direction to do them.
Melanie: Yeah, it’s true.
Gabriel: But most people don’t think about that, actually.
Melanie: Yeah, especially because in advance when we thought about this, we thought it’s a cool thing to just start in the south and just go all the way north and not go like, “Oh, we’ll start at the north end of the Carretera Austral, we’ll go south and we’ll take a bus back up and then just see what happens.” It didn’t really make sense to us.
Gabriel: Absolutely. I understand that a lot of people want to start actually at the very south, in Ushuaia, and go from there.
Melanie: We were also already scratching like the edge of the season, so a lot of shops were closed. We really had to calculate with food and stuff. Oftentimes, you know those little heads-ups when you’ve been on the road for two or three days and then you pass a cute little cafe and you think, “Oh, nice, a shelter!” And then it’s closed. So that almost became like a running gag for us.
Gabriel: I was going to ask what month you did it.
Melanie: We were there in March, on the Carretera Austral. Yeah.
Gabriel: Okay, so that is pretty late.
Melanie: Yeah. I didn’t take enough time in the beginning. I should have taken a lot more time to just go slow in the beginning and not try to rush and keep up, but just rather find my own pace. That’s just how it went.
Gabriel: That’s how it went.
Melanie: Yeah.
Gabriel: And it made you stronger in the end.
Melanie: It did, absolutely. To your question that you had before, what Luise said to this, because I said that, “I can’t really imagine cycling on after this stretch. I think I want to take a break after the Carretera Austral.” I think I call it a “break” in my head, not a quit, but I was pretty sure that I’m going to quit. I kind of imagined to, I don’t know, take some time off somewhere on the ocean while Luise was already kind of planning to do some off-road treks on the Argentinean side, just heading north from Puerto Montt. Yeah. But then in the end, everything came a bit different because once we got to Puerto Montt, we looked at the map again and we’re like, “Hey, why don’t we just give this another shot? And we’ll just go this way and then we’ll just see what happens and then just take a day by day.” And that’s kind of what we did from then on.
Gabriel: I love it. You just took it one day at a time.
Melanie: Basically, yeah.
Gabriel: Did you cycle the entire time or did you take some public transport at some time? As we’ve discussed in the first episode of the show, Chile is something like 5,000 kilometers long. That’s a huge distance, so how did you move up?
Melanie: From there, I don’t know if you know the Región de los Lagos, which starts there. For the first time, we actually had a good weather window for a week and we just took our time to cycle around the lakes there. We crossed over to the Argentinian side and also for the first time on the trip, we split up, which also made a big difference in the end for me because for the first time, I didn’t follow someone or made decisions together. I was just doing my own thing, even though it was just for a short amount of time. I was realizing that, “Hey, doing bikepacking by myself is actually really fun.” Yeah, and that gave me a lot of motivation also to continue. And we also met Giacomo, one Italian bikepacker who joined us for five or six days or even a week. No, more, I think, on the northern end of Patagonia towards the Conguillio National Park where we just had amazing volcano rides. It was really, really cool and really important to me also to meet other bikepackers and to see that everybody is just finding their own speed and their own pace at doing this. There is no guideline of how to be a bikepacker, but you can just choose your own way of bikepacking. That really started to inspire me and just made me want to think about, what is my pace of bikepacking? And what do I really want? And slowly I was kind of getting into it. And then from the north of Conguillio National Park, we took a bus to Santiago.
Gabriel: Okay.
Melanie: Yeah.
Gabriel: So then you’re in Santiago and then it was back on the bicycle. There’s the Atacama Desert that is well to the north of Chile.
Melanie: We actually didn’t cross the Atacama Desert. From Santiago we crossed the Andes towards Argentina. We cycled north, crossed the northern part of Argentina where I was also pursuing that solo bike packing for, I think, two weeks, because I wanted to see, like, is this really something that I like or is this something that I just do because we kind of had this plan together? But then I realized in those two weeks, I faced a lot of mechanical issues, but I kind of managed to get out of these situations by myself. I met a lot of amazing locals and I realized, wow, with a bicycle, you really get in touch with locals and you really get to places you would have never gotten to on, I don’t know, public transit or as a conventional tourist.
Gabriel: I don’t know if you had this experience, but if you have a mechanical problem in some small town somewhere and the locals really want to help, it’s just incredible what creative solutions they can come up with, with whatever they have, to get your bike running again. So did you have any of those crazy moments, where you had to just sit back and there were some local people doing stuff and you were just like, “Okay, maybe this will work.” Did you have any of those moments?
Melanie: So many! In Northern Argentina, I had a lot of issues because, as I said, I was cycling alone and as you might have sensed before, I had no idea about my bike actually. I had a lot of flat tires and I did learn how to change a flat tire on the road. That stretch, it was just full of spiky things on the road. So I had, like, flat tires every day and I was really getting annoyed by it. So I went to this little bike shop in the middle of nowhere. It was literally just a room in a house and the guy that was working there, it was just his hobby, kind of, to have this bike shop, but it was the only one in the village. And he said, “Well, why don’t we just put tubeless liquid, like the tubeless liquid, into your tubes?” I thought, I’ve never heard of this before and I’m not sure if that’s a good idea to put the liquid into my tubes. I actually had a phone call with my German bike shop before they did it because I was really not sure. But in the end, they said, “Well, we haven’t really done this before, but should be no problem.” And that’s when I just sat back and was like, “Okay, guys, do what you have to do. But if that helps me not having so many flat tires anymore, please.” And I can say I’ve never had a flat tire again after that.
Gabriel: If your valve has a removable core, then you should be able to squirt tire sealant into your tube and have it seal most flat tires.
Melanie: Yeah, they call it “ghetto tubeless,” if you have like the tubeless liquid in your tubes. The guys that were working there were super young and very dedicated to the sport itself. Definitely no money, but so much passion for cycling. So apparently that’s like the thing there. Like everybody just has tubes and puts the liquid in the tubes and that’s how everybody rides there.
Gabriel: I like the expression, “ghetto tubeless.”
Melanie: Yeah.
Gabriel: Good. That was a fun mechanical story. That was your most interesting mechanical adventure while you were on your own?
Melanie: I had another one where I had the problem with the valve of my tire and that was like my first mechanical issue and I was so desperate because I had to even, like, camp right next to the road because I could literally not move anywhere with my flats and broken valves. And I got picked up by this Argentinian guy and they had like, literally, like a very, very limited bike shop with only like one stand for the bikes. And then it was like two people that rather looked like, I don’t know, like teachers or something from there and like, not like mechanics, and they were kind of like doing things to my valve with tools. I don’t know. And I was just sitting there not watching because if they break that valve too, I didn’t know how to continue. That was maybe the more rustic one.
Gabriel: That’s what I was describing earlier.
Melanie: Yeah. I have to say though, to this day – because they now follow me on Instagram – to this day, they message me every week and asking me if God is still protecting my way and that everyone in this village is still asking for my situation. So it’s just incredible who you meet on the road. Yes.
Gabriel: Luckily, you can report that God is still protecting you.
Melanie: Yeah, totally.
Gabriel: So after two weeks on your own in Argentina, you rejoined Luíse and you got ready to cross into Bolivia together.
Melanie: Yeah, in the very north of Chile, Argentina and the south of Bolivia, there is this three- country corner and that’s where we crossed into, which I would say the probably hardest route for me on the trip, the Lagunas Route towards the Salar de Uyuni.
Gabriel: Salar de Uyuni is the world’s largest salt flat, the remnant of a prehistoric mega-lake called Lake Minchin. Over time, tectonic shifts caused the lake to gradually shrink and evaporate, leaving behind several smaller lakes and vast salt flats. The high altitude and arid climate of the Altiplano region prevented further significant water inflow. Left behind were layers of salt that accumulated over millennia into the thick crust we see today. Picture this: A seemingly endless expanse of blinding white salt, punctuated by towering cacti and the occasional llama. During the rainy season, it transforms into a giant mirror reflecting the sky, an unbelievably stunning sight. Cycling across the Salar presents unique challenges. The surface is surprisingly hard but uneven, the sun and wind are intense, and the high altitude demands respect.
Melanie: That was an absolute crazy ride, which tested my limits to the maximum but also gave me so much confidence about my bike skills.
Gabriel: Can you expand on that? Crazy in which way?
Melanie: Absolutely. I think almost everything about this ride was crazy. It’s a very, very remote route. It goes from the north of Argentina. You cross over into Chile for just a tiny section and then you have a border crossing to Bolivia and then you’re crossing about 400 kilometers to the next village which is Uyuni, and then from there you can go onto the salt flats. Luise and I, there was kind of the point where we already met back together after my solo mission in Argentina. We kind of discussed about the next steps for our bike adventure because I realized at that point, okay, bike packing is actually really fun to me and I realized that I’ve gotten really strong, this independence that you feel, this freedom, so I did want to test out more of, like, what more limits are out there or what more can be explored, how is this going to continue? So we decided that we were going to tackle the Lagunas Route in South Bolivia. What makes this route really hard is that it’s always on the Altiplano, it’s always above 4,000 meters and there’s a lot of challenges as of water supplies, food supplies, shelter, temperatures and yeah, so basically we said, “Okay, let’s give it a shot.” We kind of calculated this route to be seven days for us or eight days. Got food stocks, we got a lot more water supplies for our bikes and the beginning was already like so hard. To kind of spare this very windy road from Argentina to the beginning of the route which is, I don’t know, maybe like 150 kilometers paved road with headwind, we hitchhiked in a huge truck. They had to stop on the path because there was an accident before them so we got dropped off at the Chilean border station by them super late at night and just to set the stage it was minus 12 degrees when we got there. We were at 4,800 meters of altitude at the border station of Chile to get into Bolivia and it was dark. We were super tired and we heard people in the Chilean station inside and we asked if we could maybe come inside and pitch our tent inside to not be exposed to this crazy weather outside and they just said no.
Gabriel: Ouch!
Melanie: So we had to set up our tent, we actually put up my one person tent and slept the two of us in my one person tent so that it would be a bit warmer and that was probably one of the most terrible nights because in this same night Luise’s air mattress valve broke. We woke up really early and then we wanted to actually cross into the route but we knew okay, how can we tackle the hardest route on our trip so far without a working air mattress for Luise? So what we did is we hitchhiked down to San Pedro de Atacama so we did go into the Atacama Desert in the end, bought a new air mattress and hitchhiked back up. Then we crossed the Chilean border towards the Bolivian border station and when we got there it was already closed so we had to spend another night at the border station. This already took two days off of our food supplies, of course. So this was already like a difficult start. Telling this was just so much bad luck and especially like the border station was supposed to be open until six. We got there at four but it was already closed because they just felt like nobody else would come past there. Anyways, the next day we started off into the trip and the first days were truly amazing, I have to say. A magical experience, we were feeling really good with no altitude sickness. It was very empowering to see these amazing landscapes and we felt super strong and cycled a lot in those days. I don’t know how well you know this area but there is a volcano called the Uturunku. This volcano is known to be one of the highest roads that you can do with a bicycle onto a mountain top. You can almost get to 6,000 meters with your bike.
Gabriel: Wow.
Melanie: Yeah.
Gabriel: I’ve never been to Bolivia.
Melanie: You should, it’s amazing. And also very tough and the food is very terrible. But the landscapes are absolutely stunning.
Gabriel: Wow, so you can bicycle to the top of this volcano, almost 6,000 meters.
Melanie: Yeah, almost 6,000 meters. I think the road goes up to 5,800 and then you can hike up for the last 200 altitude meters. I already felt like when we started off towards the Uturunku that I’m probably not going to make it, because I wanted to save my energy for the rest of the route. But for Luise it was one of her big dreams to do that. So I gave her the space to just go and fulfill her dreams. I went back to the village and hung out there.
Gabriel: Did Luise make it to the top of the volcano?
Melanie: Yeah, she did. I’m really proud of her. She is really strong.
Gabriel: Wow, and also at that altitude I just can’t imagine the lack of oxygen and how difficult it must be to just turn the cranks. You know, pedal. I’ve never been at that altitude.
Melanie: It’s really crazy, yeah. On my previous trip to South America I’ve done an expedition to a volcano that’s also above 6,000. It’s just so tough from 5,000 to start hiking for 1,000 altitude meters.
Gabriel: Yeah, it sounds tough. Well, congratulations Luise, that’s quite an achievement.
Melanie: Yeah, even though this achievement of course also meant that there is the Lagunas Route which is straight through that area, through the Altiplano in South Bolivia. And with the detour through the volcano we had to go all around and then so it was a lot more days that added to this route and the route itself is already hard. So the route itself is probably four or five days but we, with this extension and we had to add in another like rest day because of course you have to rest at some point. And that’s when things really started to get really tough. A lot of wind, Luise and I continued after that and our food supplies were already going really low. We had no more vegetables and fruits. For lunch we always had instant polenta, instant mashed potatoes, ramen, pasta. The weather was always negative something, and it was really tough. So tough at some point that I ate a llama soup even though I’m vegetarian, offered by locals and. It is what it is. At some point, you just need some energy and something warm.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Melanie: There was only this one tiny shop on the middle of this route. It’s not even imaginable for us being so spoiled with these supermarkets here that have literally everything. But in that area, like, those supermarkets have Coke, cookies. If you’re lucky, a pack of pasta, but only if you’re lucky. And we found a can of peaches, and that was I think the best can of peaches I’ve ever had because we hadn’t had any vegetables or fruits for such a long time. So, I remember us sitting at the floor of somewhere and just eating like these pure peaches out of the can.
Gabriel: It’s amazing how good food can taste when you’re at the limits of your endurance.
Melanie: Yeah, totally. So yeah, this made it really hard and it was I think day seven which was really a nightmare. We woke up, it was minus seven and it was that day where the sun just didn’t warm up the day. Usually, once the sun was out there it was kind of acceptable to ride, it was fine, you’re moving and the sun was kind of warming you and it was okay. But that day, I don’t know why, but the sun was just not warming and it was so cold. We had breakfast at ten because we were kind of waiting for it to warm up a bit more. It was so cold you have to imagine like the water just froze while we were cycling in our food bags in the bike and we had breakfast and the spoon would just freeze to the side of the bowl. So exhausting and then it was a lot of uphill in the sand.
Gabriel: Hopefully you did know that you would encounter these very low temperatures and you had clothing that would make it bearable at least, right? You were prepared in that sense.
Melanie: For sure, especially concerning the nights, I do have to say that I am very proud of myself for being a very resistant cold sleeper. I might not be the best cyclist out there but I was never freezing at night. I have a really good sleeping bag. Just putting all like extra things into your sleeping bag I think already helps if you have like an extra jacket or something, just put it in there. We had nights at like minus fifteen or something. That day it was actually… there was this one point, it was the absolute down point. We were just so, we were so exhausted. We were cold, we didn’t want to eat this food anymore and also we were just, like, exhausted to the bones. Like it was windy and we knew we couldn’t get to the sleeping spot that we wanted to get to because it’s just too far and it’s too hard in the sand to cycle. I was just so exhausted. I just told Luise, “I don’t want to do this anymore,” and Luise just looked at me and she was like, “Me neither, I don’t want to do this either.” Then we just sat there, the both of us and we just cried. We were just sitting next to our bikes and we were just crying and we just knew nobody can get us out of the situation. You can’t just wait for a bus, you can’t hitchhike, you cannot do anything, you just have to get your shit together. Yeah, we waited for an hour sitting at the ground until we kind of said, “Okay this is not helping, we don’t want to be here anymore. It’s so tough. We don’t have a lot of food anymore and we do not have a lot of water so we have to keep going.” And, then somehow, magically, I discovered the tunnel for me. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in the tunnel.
Gabriel: Melanie, I have a one-year-old son so I spend a lot of time in the tunnel.
Melanie: You don’t even have energy anymore and you just get into this tunnel of like the last resource maybe of energy. Then it was those, I don’t know, maybe 22 kilometers on sandy roads and we just blasted through these 20 kilometers and I don’t even know where this energy came from and I couldn’t even look up. I was just in this tunnel. I just had to go, go, go and then I don’t know, it was like one and a half hours maybe and then we made it to a beautiful camp spot that we didn’t even consider before. And yeah, in the next two days, all of a sudden we knew we were kind of over the hill and then we realized that we did it and just really enjoyed the last days on that route. We’re so proud of ourselves that we did it, yeah.
Gabriel: Definitely, the vultures were already circling overhead.
Melanie: Basically, yeah.
Gabriel: You were at the limit. You were definitely at the limit.
Melanie: For sure, yeah. Yeah.
Gabriel: Very, very cool.
Melanie: Yeah, and then realizing that even without prior experiences and bikepacking, just that I’m able to do those things, especially after the Carretera Austral, where I realized that I want to do something that’s fun. I want to go and sit in the ocean and just have a good time. That’s not what bikepacking is. Bikepacking is not having a good time all the time. Bikepacking is having a low low and then having a very high high. It’s a real roller coaster of emotions and the fun and the highs and positive emotions, they’re not given to you on bikepacking. You have to earn them and they feel so much better. Like on that route, the Lagunas Route. Of course, it would have been easier if you just took a jeep along those and just look at it, but it doesn’t feel as amazing if you finish it. Then once you are on this route with your bike all by yourself and you know that you’ve just cycled for 10 days through the desert and you have these views and you just see these landscapes. You’re all by yourself, this remoteness, that feeling is so incredible that it’s not instant fun and it’s way better than instant fun. It’s like earned fun.
Gabriel: Another one of your posts, that’s incredible and it really made me wonder how you did this, but when you get to the Salar de Uyuni, this Instagram post makes it seem like you’ve done all of this with some crazy professional equipment. You have like a drone shot or something going over the incredible salt flats.
Melanie: “Salt flat magic in 3, 2, 1” and then it turns, yeah.
Gabriel: I mean, that was an incredible post.
Melanie: Yeah.
Gabriel: Was that just done with your smartphone or what?
Melanie: I bought a little DJI.
Gabriel: You had a drone the entire time?
Melanie: No, no, no, no, no. I don’t have a drone. It’s not a drone. I had a DJI gimbal camera. It’s not an action cam. It’s really just like a tiny stabilized camera. It’s great because when I’m on the bike and it’s shaky, I can just have it and it goes against the shakiness. I bought it used for just 180 bucks and it was a really good way to make videos, even though like for Instagram, I used my smartphone most of the times, but I’m currently editing my YouTube video, which I’m going to release soon and that’s where all the cool videos for my DJI camera are going to be.
Gabriel: Oh, wow, a YouTube video.
Melanie: Yes.
Gabriel: You’re going to have to keep us posted on this one.
Melanie: I will.
Gabriel: So what it looked like kind of a drone flying low to the ground was actually you were bicycling and you had this steady cam.
Melanie: Yeah, I was cycling really fast behind Luise and then making those shots. For the salt flats, because it’s such a magical place. it’s amazing, We actually took a lot of time to take good footage.
Gabriel: That post was amazing, very spectacular, seemed professional almost.
Melanie: Thank you.
Gabriel: Of course, you know that there’s that tradition that you have to ride naked through the Salar de Uyuni.
Melanie: We did that.
Gabriel: Okay.
Melanie: Not all the way because you also have to consider that it’s, like, very, very cold on the salt flats.
Gabriel: Most people do a short stretch and they take a shot from a discrete angle most of the time.
Melanie: Yeah. There will be a shot of that on the YouTube video. It has been recorded, of course, like, also from a distance. There were also made some funny photographs that we had to sort through because some of them were not child safe. But yeah, no, we’ve had a hilarious time taking those pictures. I mean, I think everyone taking those pictures on the salt flats is just absolutely hilarious.
Gabriel: Did you meet other people either riding through or it’s like, “Oh yeah, they’re doing their naked shot right now. Cool!”
Melanie: Luckily, we ran into no one while we rode our bikes naked. I’m very happy for that. Though we did hear stories from friends who were just, like, undressing and then a guided jeep tour pulled up right next to them. So yeah, really enjoyed that story.
Gabriel: “On your right, you see the bikepackers who are…”
Melanie: Yeah, who are what? They’re not wearing anything. Now, we did actually meet a Japanese couple that had been riding their bikes for two and a half years around the globe and we just met them on the Salar. And I was a bit startled by them because they were super friendly, but their eyes were super red because they didn’t have sunglasses.
Gabriel: Ooh.
Melanie: Yeah. Before that, they never had an issue because they’ve never been on like a desert or snowy area. And once they got to the salt flats, they realized that they really had to figure something out and then they said they couldn’t even sleep at night because their eyes were burning so much. I couldn’t even take off my sunglasses for even a minute because it’s so bright. So I don’t know how they survived, but yeah, I think apart from them, I think we didn’t meet anyone, no.
Gabriel: Wow. Those poor people.
Melanie: Yeah. Well, I think that’s a lesson learned for them.
Gabriel: I hope there wasn’t any permanent retinal damage done.
Melanie: Yeah.
Gabriel: So that was a positive experience.
Melanie: Yeah. But for the rest of Bolivia, we actually took it really slow. We didn’t cycle as much. I actually had a knee injury because I was really stupid. I just went hiking and twisted my knee a bit and then when I was out and also couldn’t cycle and I couldn’t hike and was a bit frustrated.
Gabriel: You had a knee and an ankle thing.
Melanie: Yeah. That was really stupid because it also made planning for the next stretch a bit difficult because at some point, Luise especially realized that she was starting to feel like she wanted to return home soon. I wasn’t at that point yet, but also we realized, okay, we really have to reorganize this trip. We’re not going to be cycling to Colombia, which we kind of thought of in the beginning all the way only by bike. So we kind of had to choose what stretches are we going to cycle, what stretches are we going to skip by bus, et cetera. And then that knee and ankle thing really slowed me down again, also knowing now that we didn’t have all the time in the world anymore. We took a few buses to cross through Peru because we decided, okay, Peru is such an amazing country. I’ve actually traveled through Peru before. I already had a grasp of Peru. We said, “Okay, if we want to do one last month bikepacking together, we’re going to do something that we can fully see.” And then we decided on Ecuador and took buses to the northern edge of Peru. And that also gave me the time to heal off because I hurt my knee on a hike and that took maybe like two or three weeks to heal off properly. Just when it almost healed off, I just twisted my ankle in Cusco in Peru. Luckily on a bike, I feel like you don’t really need a working ankle so much. So the pain that I had, it was a lot worse when I was walking than when I was cycling because I didn’t have to roll off my ankle. I just had to be steady.
Gabriel: You really didn’t do a whole lot of bicycling in Peru.
Melanie: No, no.
Gabriel: I recall from one of your posts that in Peru you were victims of a theft.
Melanie: I was in the north of Peru. Luise’s backpack was stolen and Luise’s handlebar bag was kind of stolen. Luckily nothing super essential for the bike ride, but still super annoying. Clothing was in there, merino clothing.
Gabriel: How was it stolen, do you know?
Melanie: We were at like a semi-official campground on the ocean in a super calm area. It was just us at that little campground though and we had the bikes a bit further away from the tents. We had the tents closer to the ocean and the bikes were kind of at like a shelter and we didn’t bring all the bags to the tent. Apparently in the night there were some people just passing through that shelter area and as we were the only ones at the campground and the main house where the owners of this area were situated was also a bit further away, people could just walk past there. Yeah, also big learning for us again to really just take all the belongings, even if it’s like an area that you think it’s pretty safe, just take everything that you want to be safe with, closer to your tent. For the rest we always had our bikes super close to the tent, sometimes I even locked it to my tent.
Gabriel: Mm-hmm. Okay. And you’d left those bags overnight on the bikes.
Melanie: Yeah.
Gabriel: Yeah, that is a riskier thing no matter where you are.
Melanie: Totally, yeah. But at that point it was such a nice area that we were in, we were so relaxed and also just getting back into the bikepacking mode after our rather few relaxed weeks in Peru. And yeah, and then you’re woken up again and then you have to organize yourself again a bit better.
Gabriel: Right. And go to the police station, which I’m sure was an exercise in complete futility. They had you fill out some paperwork.
Melanie: Yeah, that was crazy. We did have some insurance for the bags.
Gabriel: Okay. So then you got to the border with Ecuador.
Melanie: Mm-hmm, yeah. And that’s kind of when the last month started of our trip and at that point I also partnered up with Socialbnb which is a platform for sustainable accommodations. It’s almost like an Airbnb but connected to local communities and they had a lot of homes and experiences in Ecuador. And so we kind of combined this bike trip with visiting some of these Socialbnbs and made our route through the Andes, kind of avoiding the coastline which was politically a bit unstable. After being in the Ecuadorian Amazon for a bit with the bikes as well, we finished with a loop around the Cotopaxi, which was probably one of the most amazing routes I’ve done on this trip.
Gabriel: Yeah, let’s talk about that.
Melanie: Yeah, sure. It was kind of the finishing of the trip. It was the time where Luise was about to fly home and I had a volunteering project in Colombia because I thought maybe, in the end it would also be nice to just not be on the road all the time but also just to sit back before I go back to Europe and really kind of reflect on this journey before I just head back to normal life. We knew this is the time frame. It was actually my birthday too during these days and there was this Italian bikepacker, Giacomo, that I mentioned earlier that we met in Patagonia who was going to be in Ecuador at the same point as well. So we invited him too.
Gabriel: Wow.
Melanie: Yeah, it was a bit crazy though, because he actually at some point took a plane to Colombia and headed southwards while we just headed on northwards and then we just met in Ecuador again. It’s really funny the paths, how they find each other again, it’s hilarious. So we chose this route which is a route from bikepacking.com too. I feel like it was almost my idea and it was because I kind of wanted to test my limits again on this trip and kind of see how far I’ve come from, I don’t know, cursing my bike away on the Carretera Austral to choosing a route from bikepacking.com after this half year of cycling. It did start off a bit rough because on the first five kilometers I realized that my brakes had a problem and they were like clenching too much because I had them switched before the loop around the Cotopaxi at the bike shop and they did a bad job at adjusting them. So they were braking all the time and I was getting so frustrated.
Gabriel: Okay, the pads were rubbing against the disc.
Melanie: Yeah. So yeah, we had to like take my bike apart three times to try to get those brake pads further away. But yeah, as soon as we had that figured out, we had the most amazing days around this volcano. We had good weather. We had amazing camp spots, great talks, and an amazing feeling of this vastness of landscapes. And then on my birthday morning when I woke up in my tent, they had actually prepared a cake and champagne for me in front of my tent. It was absolutely amazing.
Gabriel: So when you say “they,” that’s…
Melanie: That’s Louise and Giacomo. Yeah, so we celebrated friendship and freedom and it was just really, really great. I had a descent for about 2,000 altitude meters on that day, so it was a really good day.
Gabriel: Wow, what a memorable way to celebrate your… twenty-ninth?
Melanie: Twenty-eighth.
Gabriel: Twenty-eighth birthday. And then that was it. That was the end. So Luise went back to Europe and you stayed on in Colombia, you said?
Melanie: Yeah, right. I spent like three more weeks in Colombia and then I headed back to Europe.
Gabriel: I have just two more questions. So one, as you think back to that time, is there anything that you’d like to mention? Did I miss anything, or?
Melanie: I think we got a lot of it. Maybe one very interesting encounter that also inspired me in terms of like life decisions was when I was solo bikepacking in Northern Argentina, I met this couple, Claudia and Uwe, from Germany. And they were traveling with this huge camper van for the last 15 years in South America and North America and adopted a stray dog and they’re, like, maybe 55 now, I think. And they’ve been just living an amazing life on the road. They invited me to just ride with them in their big van for a little bit because the roads back then were just super straight and super boring. Of course, I said yes, and then I just joined them for a few days and then we shared so many stories from the road. It’s been really amazing, yeah, meeting those people.
Gabriel: That brings us back to the beginning of the conversation and your original post that you made before your trip. And now all of these impressions and, for example, hearing the decision that Claudia and Uwe made to spend 15 years on the road and see how they live. What is your thinking now? You left, you were 27. Now you’re 28.
Melanie: That’s a very good question and I think I’m still not finished reflecting on those questions. But I do have some things that I want to keep. I don’t see myself being back in a 40-hour week anytime soon. My life strategy right now is to avoid this main path, kind of, like not saying that I’m avoiding it completely because you’d be an outcast otherwise, but, like, finding my own way because, for me, I realized I can’t be working at a computer every day, that’s just not me. And I also can’t work 40 hours a week straight because it just kills my creativity and my passion. So what I’m doing right now is I’m finding several different freelance activities or seasonal work projects that will enable me to work on different things at the same time that I’m passionate for and also give me the freedom to go on other bigger trips if I feel like it, and I do feel like going on another big trip because it’s just the most freedom you can have. At the same time, having these work projects still connects you to the friends around you because if you’re just on the road all the time, you’re just starting to lose your community and your long-term friendships.
Gabriel: So you want it all, basically.
Melanie: I do want it all, but for now I think this is a good compromise that I can do. One thought that really helped me in this life struggle of choosing these different life concepts for this limited amount of time that we have right now before having kids or starting a family is that all those things that I can do when I’m older don’t have to happen now. For example, I’m passionate about playing piano and doing music and having different sports and hobbies, but I can do that when I have kids. I can do that when I’m 40 or 50. I might not be able to take half a year off when I’m 45 to go bikepacking somewhere. So really see what are the things that I can do later too and just postpone them for a bit.
Gabriel: The transcript for this episode is available on the Accidental Bicycle Tourist website. I welcome feedback and suggestions for this and other episodes. You’ll find a link to all contact information in the show notes. If you would like to rate or review the show, you can do that on your favorite podcast platform. You can also follow the podcast on Instagram. Thank you to Anna Lindenmeier for the cover artwork and to Timothy Shortell for the original music. This podcast would not be possible without continuous support from my wife Sandra. And thank you so much for listening. I hope the episode will inspire you to get out and see where the road leads you.
Gabriel: I have one more post that I wanted to comment on and then we’ve got all of them: “How to make chocolate.”
Melanie: That was not the one I was expecting!
Show Notes
If you would like to explore Melanie’s posts for yourself, her Instagram is @livingintents. She also maintains a website with additional information.