Sitting here in our Airbnb in Buenos Aires, ready to board our flight tomorrow, is totally surreal. But before we get to the emotional stuff I'll take you through the last couple of weeks of our trip.
We entered into Uruguay after two weeks of ups and downs in Brazil. The nearer the end drew, the less energy we seemed to have. All the excitement and stress and tiredness of the last six months was finally catching up to us as we realised that we really were going to complete this - nearly 20,000km in seventeen countries, two more than expected!
We travelled down the east coast of Uruguay, and from what we saw it was a charming, pretty and peaceful country. The prices were similar to that of Brazil/Argentina/Chile, but to us it had an extra charm that had been lacking in recent weeks.
We only had a couple of stops before Montevideo - Punta del Diablo which was a quaint seaside town with sandy roads and teeming with attractive holiday homes (but totally empty this time of year!) and a seafront campsite just 30km from the city.
By this point everything was broken. The trouble with doing a trip like this on our budget is that we had to stick to 'cheap and cheerful' stuff, and so by this point everything had been well and truly put through its paces and goodness knows how some of it lasted so long!
To give you an idea of why our patience was beginning to run a little thin, by the time we were in Uruguay:
Tom's jacket no longer did up
Tom's helmet had no visor
One tent pole was broken so our tent was very wonky
Our headtorch only worked if you held it at a certain angle
One camping mattress had a slow puncture
The tankbag had a huge hole in the top and the magnets kept falling out of the bottom
One pannier had had to be welded on
The topbox would only lock at a very specific angle
To name but a few. However somehow, the bike was still just about holding itself together after our latest brutal repair job that involved a lot of welding and will mean a whole new clutch when back in the UK!
After a lot of peace and quite riding down the coast, riding into Montevideo was a bit of a shock. But as with most of the more developed countries that we'd been visiting in this last part of our trip, riding through the city wasn't too stressful.
We were in a slight state of shock when it came to trying to absorb that this was the last leg of our trip; the last destination; the last ride. We just went about our usual business: unpacking the bike, finding a safe please to park it, checking in to our hostel.
I think part of how we coped with the strange feeling of elation, accomplishment, sadness and fatigue was by ignoring it entirely and just getting on with what we needed to do. We emptied the bike, repacked things that we wouldn't need that could go straight back to England, and rode the bike down to Wave Logistics who escorted us to the port.
Paperwork complete we took her to the depot, where we returned the next day to watch her being put into her container, where she would spend the next month. This is where it all became a bit real, as we waved goodbye to the thing that to us had somehow become more that an object or a vehicle. Which, despite numerous faults and breakdowns, had somehow carried us 19,581km from Mexico to Uruguay, to 88 destinations in 17 countries, through deserts and across mountains, through jungles and along coastlines, and enabled us to visit places and see things that many travellers could only dream of.
Sadly we saw first-hand the damage that we as people are doing to our planet, through the sheer level of waste and plastic that is so evident everywhere. But we also saw the kindness in people, the openness and helpfulness of so many nations, that puts to shame some of the narrow-mindedness that we have come to know in the countries we've lived in. We saw poverty like we have never seen before, but also a kind of contentedness in simple ways of living that made me look twice at the smart phone in my hand.
Even now, on the last evening of a six and a half month adventure, it hasn't fully sunk in that it's over. It's the kind of experience that words and pictures just can't fully explain, and I don't think our outlook on life will ever really be the same (and I wouldn't want it to be). What we have seen is only a tiny part of the mind-blowing stuff this world has to offer, and it's because of this that I know this won't be our last trip.
So thank you for following along, and stay tuned - another adventure will be on the cards before long.
