Look who’s here…!!!

Michel's planned route through South America...

Late yesterday evening, I was sitting in my room, banging away at my keyboard, when I heard a voice outside that had last spoken to me in Amsterdam, in August last year…!!

I walked outside, to see my good friend Michel Jongens, who looked a little worse for wear…!! He had just ridden in from Argentina, and had covered not only a long distance, but had a few hundred kilometres of hairy off-road riding thrown in to boot…!!

He was covered in dust, and his lined face shows the results of what can only have been a very hard day’s riding…!!

Michel has covered the entire Eastern coast of South America, by starting out from Surinam, and riding through Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina to get to Ushuaia, and then back up through southern Chile and parts of the eastern side of the Andes in Argentina, to get to Santiago…

I had made tentative plans to join him in Rio, so that we could ride down to Ushuaia together, but never managed to complete my Aussie ride in time to make it happen…!!

He arrived a day earlier than I expected… He was also a day earlier than the hotel expected, and was subsequently turned away because they are fully booked for the evening…!! It was already getting dark, so we did not have too much time to chat, as he had to go look for lodgings elsewhere…

Early this morning, while I was enjoying my second cup of great Chilean coffee, he was back again, but hung around just long enough to dump his gear, before heading off to BMW Santiago to have his bike serviced…

"Put down that book and step away from the bike...!!" The intrepid Michel Jongens arrives at Patio Suizo...!! "Good to see you again, my friend...!!"

I had put aside the day to deal with the usually laborious process of clearing the Big Fella through Customs at the airport, and promised to meet up with him later…

After he had left, I sat thinking about how surreal it all was… We had discussed meeting in South America more than a year ago, and now that moment had actually arrived…!!

I remembered the many uncanny similarities that we shared, and also how well we had got on, from the moment he walked up to me outside his apartment and said,

“Ah… So you’ve arrived…!!”

We had never met before that day, and had “found” each other on our respective blogs… He had just completed an epic journey from Amsterdam to Kathmandu, and was raring to be off on another adventure as soon as he was able…!! Little more than a year later, his bike was crated and heading for South America…!!

Great guy, good friend, and another of those people who have become part and parcel of my own journey… And here he is, in Santiago, Chile…!!

Unreal…!!

©GBWT 2011