The wind buffets me from behind and I continue to stumble forward in the heat.

Twenty kilograms of rucksack crush down on each shoulder. It is not an unbearable weight but it means that everything requires extra effort. Everything, like, thinking, smiling, suppressing sobs and trying not to be sick.

I lean forward to transfer some weight from my back onto my walking poles but a gust knocks me first from the left and then the right. I catch myself wearily, pause for a moment and remember that standing still is no easier than moving forward so reluctantly keep walking.

Ahead the road stretches as far as I can see and, according to our map, a lot further too. Behind me is much the same although I can’t see it right now because every time I turn my head, the wind whips away my hat. It was funny the first time but, on the hundredth, it is enough to lower me into an apoplectic rage so I avoid the luxury of looking over my shoulder.

A car speeds past to remind me of the utter futility of what we are doing. Why walk when there is a perfectly good bus? Why carry all of this food and water, endure this heat and be blasted by wind when there are perfectly good sheltered restaurants with air conditioning just a hitch-hike away?

My stomach gurgles and my mind wanders back to last night’s mildly fetid water. I need to empty my bowels.

Removing my pack is sweet relief but also a disturbance of the delicate equilibrium I have established in my mindless marching. It is a reminder that my shoulders are sore and that the back of my filthy shirt is drenched with days old sweat.

Even as I answer nature’s call, there is no respite. The wind fills my eyes with grit and I have to fight to stay upright. It takes two dozen tries to get my lighter working, each attempt punctuated by an agitated sigh. I piss on the embers – and my trousers – and cleanse myself with alcohol.

Laura has sought refuge behind a dip. I sit down on a thorny plant next to her (all plants in Patagonia are thorny), curse between my teeth and shuffle to find a modicum of comfort. My head continues to throb.

To quench our thirst we have chlorinated water with flies. To quell our appetite we have two hundred grams of dry crackers and a fennel flavoured salami filled with flecks of fat the size chick peas. We eat in silence.

Laura’s eyes brim as she stares at the ground. I am incapable of offering any consolation.

‘OK?’

She nods and we continue to sit listlessly, not able to rest, not able to continue.

We get up, the wind buffets me from behind and I continue to stumble forward in the heat.

I’ve just got back from Patagonia. The normal blogging schedule will now resume.

In a nutshell down south, we spent close to a week making our way to the Pacific coast, followed by a week and a half of hard walking, then about the same amount of time doing some more relaxed exploration.

Getting to the start was a long series of planes, stop overs, buses and hitches.

We had a tough initiation to our walking itinerary, punctuated with a few shorter days then some more hard marching along a hot, dry, windy road.

At the end of that road, we awaited a re-supply. We had bought eight days’ food from the previous town, boxed it up, and put it on a bus to be delivered ahead of us to the last settlement before making a dash for the east coast.

The box hadn’t arrived when we got there. The village had no phone signal to find out what had happened. The only places with a cable connection were a restaurant and a police station. Neither place spoke English so we relied upon my extremely limited Spanish and ability to mime.

In short, no one knew what had happened but they thought our supplies should arrive that afternoon so we waited. The bus never showed but they said it would be there tomorrow. The next day we found out the box was somewhere else but would be arriving at 4pm so we waited. Our supplies had nearly run out by this point so, when 5pm rolled around and we were told it wasn’t coming today, we could no longer wait. We stuck out our thumbs and headed back to civilisation.

We were reunited with the box shortly afterwards and probably could still have made it back to where we left off and completed the crossing if we put our minds to it. But we had already shifted gear and Laura in particular wasn’t enjoying the endless slog through a barren wasteland so we used the rest of our time to explore some more beautiful areas.

We hiked through Torres del Paine National Park, still in the grips of a huge forest fire, spent a couple of days kayaking down Rio Serano and slowly recovered from two weeks of hardship.

Photos, some stories and perhaps even some video footage will be uploaded over the coming weeks.

Thanks go to Swoop Patagonia, Walk Patagonia and Rosker for help with our trip.

But ask anyone about the territory to the east and you get little more than shrugs.

The west coast is beautiful. It has jagged mountains, spectacular glaciers, gorgeous lakes. However, from the sounds of things, the vast majority of the country down here is just a dry, flat, dusty expanse. That is where we are heading now.

By the time you read this we will have left the shores of the giant Lago Viedma and be making a bee-line for the Atlantic coast, some 150 miles away. We have loaded up with more than a week´s food and set our compass pointing east.

I am sure that the scenery will not be as inspiring as it was during the first two weeks and no doubt we will be cursing the endless drudgery but these all contribute towards the motivations for a trip like this. To get away from the honey pot areas and explore those places less visited and to set a challenge, as physical as it is conceptual, and see it through to fruition.

I don´t anticipate phone signal during our crossing so the next update may well come from Puerto Santa Cruz on the east coast where we plan to arrive by January 24th. Here we go…

This one was south across a lake that was difficult to get round without crossing borders and several hundred miles´detour. It also only ran twice a week which meant either marching close to 100km in our first two days, or a four day delay.

We shouldered our heavy packs and took option one.

The Carretera Austral is the southern highway of Chile. It is a long dirt track with infrequenct traffic whose final stretch to the small outpost of Villa O´Higgins is only reachable by ferry. We saw a couple of cyclists, a handful of cars timed for each ferries arrival and almost no one else during our hike.

Our track rose from the fjords and into the mountains where huge condors emerged from the trees to ward us off their nests. Vast lakes flanked us on both sides and wild glaciers ran off peaks to within spitting distance. It was beautiful and we had it to ourselves.

It was also a purgatory that we had to ourselves. Long days pounding our feet over and over into rocks below with the hot sun above pounding into our heads was tiring. Nausea crept in within minutes of every rest stop. The soles of our feet ached but most of the pain was dull, non-specific and body wide.

We weren´t sure we could make it in time for the ferry. Marches got shorter, rests got longer. We powered onwards past the 12-hour mark on our second day, crossing the final river, parched through not drinking enough, hungry through not eating enough, and weary from walking too much.

A jeep pulled over in the darkness at 10.30pm.

“Do you guys want a lift?”

We were a few hundred yards from the village.

“Yes”

We collapsed in the back. If this was cheating then it felt remarkably like success.

It took us three planes, five buses, four hitch hikes and a few stretches of walking over five days but we made it to Puerto Yungay eventually.

One memorable hitching point saw us in the same layby for the best part of 24 hours. Someone told us they´d come back for us in the evening, the policemen said they were sure we´d get picked up the next morning but still we waited, swatting flies, chewing grit and baking in the sun.

But the beauty of hitch-hiking is that it only takes one person to stop to make your day. They took us part way to our ferry, then a pick up truck threw is in the back for long enough that we could walk the final 20 miles. Except that meant another day´s delay as there was no way we´d reach that evening´s boat.

Until, 20 minutes before departure, a jeep screetched to a halt in response to our extended thumbs, squeezed us in with the other passengers and belted it down the dirt tracks at top speed, rolling onto the ferry just minutes before departure. We were hot and sweaty, tired and dusty but had made it to the Pacific coast.

The plan is to walk across Patagonia. We will begin our trip in South America by spending New Year’s Eve on the floor of Buenos Aires airport awaiting an early morning flight. I’m not sure if that’s really cool or really sad.

Anyway, here is the broad plan:

Part One – Getting to the coast

The first hurdle is getting to the Pacific coast. Most of it is blocked by the Patagonian ice cap. There are a few gaps, however.

We intend to travel down the Caretera Austral using a combination of planes, buses and possibly our thumbs, to reach a tiny place called Puetro Yungay (it’s near Rio Bravo and Caleta Tortel) where we will jump in the sea.

Part Two – South through the Andes

It would be a shame to visit Patagonia and not spend time amidst those beautiful mountains you see on the adverts. As such, we will spend about a week walking south from Puetro Yungay along trails and past lakes through Villa O’Higgins to El Chalten.

Part Three – Crossing Argentina

This will probably be the harder bit. Walking across miles of what sounds like barren scrub land. We are hoping to arrange a supply drop along the way otherwise we could end up having to carry enough food for two weeks’ walking.

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We are thankful to Primus and Rosker for our lovely new titanium stove. And to Swoop Travel for all their generous help so far.

Happy New Year everyone!

I suspect that many of you will already be aware of the website CouchSurfing.org or can at least guess at the principle.

It’s a network of people all over the world who are willing to offer cups of tea, showers and/or couches on which to crash. It operates entirely without the use of money – which suits me well. You can sign up to either offer a couch/coffee or just to find willing hosts for wherever you are visiting.

It’s obviously a very useful resource for backpacking, cycle touring and the like, but also a good way to find locals in some of the more obscure reaches of the world. I used it, for example, to find someone that could help me with an expedition to Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East after Google failed to throw up any results.

I’ve no affiliation with CouchSurfing and I am sure there are other similar networks – please do add them in the comments below – but I thought it was something about which it was worth spreading the word.

Just because someone has achieved great expedition feats it does not automatically make them a great person.

It is quite common to describe someone who has completed a great expedition as “an amazing person” or similar. I would dispute that assumption.

Such achievements should be rightly recognised and hailed for what they are: feats of physical or mental prowess and such like. In most instances, it would be reasonable to assume that the successes imply some impressive qualities in a person. But I don’t think it necessarily follows that this makes them a better person.

Achievement on an adventure often requires many admirable qualities: motivation, perseverance and determination to name a few.

But success can also be aided by other less favourable attributes: arrogance, selfishness and stubborness to name some others.

For most attributes however, including the positive ones – e.g. kindness, honesty, thoughtfulness – performance on an expedition will be entirely uncorrelated. I suspect a sample Everest summiters is no more likely than anyone else to help a granny across a road or be polite when asked for directions. In other words, in most instances, there is no reason to assume that completing a big trip will have any bearing on someone’s desirable personality traits.

So hail all those who have conquered great mountains, oceans and ice caps as great expeditioners but don’t go assuming that makes them great in any other respect.

‘My friend does that’, shouted down the lady from the side of her boat as my now wife and I swam past in the river below. ‘It’s that “Wild Swimming” thing, isn’t it?’.

I smiled and said Yes but something about what she said irked me.

She was friendly enough and she was right about the name – “wild swimming” is indeed the most common term for it – but there was something in the way she said it and what was implied. It made wild swimming sound like something special when it’s really not.

Wild swimming is not a sport. It is not something for which you need to train or buy specific equipment. You do not need to have any expertise nor do any research before you start. It’s not “Wild Swimming” – with capital letters and quote marks – it’s just swimming that happens to be outdoors.

Branding the act of being in a natural body of water for pleasure is useful in that it gives a focus to all those who love it – and there are many – and acts as a beacon to which others can flock. Websites, societies, guide books, forums. These are all great tools for sharing the cold water tonic and the more people that drink it, the better.

But it’s important to remember that for all the hype and discussion, wild swimming is no more sophisticated than what kids do at the beach and no more complicated than jumping off a jetty fully clothed.

Surely the single greatest task for advocates of outdoor swimming is converting the unconverted? In elevating its status, however, there lies a risk of alienating potential enthusiasts . “Wild Swimming: The Sport” has a tinge of exclusivity attached when swimming outdoors is anything but.

So, outdoor swimming fans, please keep making a splash about the joys of open water but don’t build it up too much or you might undermine your own cause.

My wife, Laura, recently visited the Kingdom of Bhutan. Here is why she thinks you should too…

1) The yeti lives there.  It is the only country in the world with a dedicated yeti nature reserve and sightings are almost guaranteed.*

2) Television, the internet and mobile phones were only allowed in the country in 2000.  It remains a very traditional place, where planning and even dress codes are strictly enforced.

3) The national animal of Bhutan is the takin, an animal which defies classification.  It was apparently created when the ‘Divine Madman’, an infamous religious figure in Bhutan, was challenged to perform a miracle.  He ate an entire cow and an entire goat, and the takin was created when he put the goat’s head on the cow’s body after lunch and the resulting creation stood up and walked away.  Not a bad party trick.

4) It contains (arguably) the highest unclimbed mountain in the world, Gangkhar Puensum.  There are several other unclimbed peaks, but before you start planning your trip, access to most of them is prohibited out of respect for local spiritual beliefs.

5) The food is hearty and warming.  The national dish is chilli and cheese – an odd concept but it works.

6) Privilege.  High costs mean tourist numbers are low, with none of the crowds of neighbouring Nepal.

7) Peace.  The rural way of life prevails and life is relatively calm even in the main towns.  Traffic is quiet enough that even Thimphu, the capital, has no need for traffic lights.

And two reasons not to…

1) Cost.  Visitors pay a daily charge – currently $240 for a solo traveller – and this quickly mounts up.  However, this does cover absolutely everything, regardless of your activity.

2) Independence.  It is practically impossible to do a trip unaccompanied by at least one guide – but at least this is included in the daily charge and affords you an invaluable insight into the country.

* The Next Challenge accepts no liability for this guarantee.