Bike Stuff

Warning: For bike people only and will bore eveyone else to death

Before leaving Bariloche we had some major maintainance to do to the bikes because of falls, crashes, the weather, or just wear and tear from the terrible roads. After more than 2500km, we had to completely replace the drivetrains for both bikes; so new cassettes, chains and chain rings. My rear tyre was completely bald so I replaced this with something with a bit more tread. Argentinos are always asking why we are using 'road bikes', because they only really use mountain bikes. The shops don't seem to sell tourers like ours, so anything with drop handlebars and slightly thinner tyres is just classed as a road bike. 27inch wheels are not common here either, and presta valves are even rarer, so it has been almost impossible to get spare inner tubes, and the search for a new tyre (suitable for touring) required one to be sent from another town. Another rarity in South America are front racks; For such a popular sport here, we can't understand why tourers seem to rely solely on the rear pannier bags and an oversized bar bag. They always complain that the bike is overloaded to the rear and we know that you can fit a front rack to bikes with suspension forks. As a result, I have had to settle for a temporary 'fix' for my front racks as the queue for aluminium welding in Bariloche is days long. For this same reason we specifically bought steel bikes, but we should have thought more about the components that we fitted; every little town here has someone able to weld steel, quickly and cheaply. The rest of the maintainance work was just tightening brake cables, re-aligning the gears and true-ing wheels.