Advice to make sense of the purchase of your next bike; learn what to look for when you choose to save money by buying used, and how to get the best investment when you purchase a new bicycle.

Between February and March, 1989, two members of The Gea Org and now, Andinia.com, (Pablo Edronkin y Marcelo Nuñez Avendaño), left Buenos Aires on two bicycles on our way to Ushuaia, the capital of the Tierra del Fuego province (which administratively includes the main island of Tierra del Fuego, Staten Island, various little God-forsaken islands and rocks, the Malvinas or Falklands, South Georgia, the Southern Sandwich and Orkney Islands, and the Antarctic Terrriories).

Ushuaia is also the southernmost city in the world, with a latitude similar to that of Bergen, in Norway, and a really cold place to live in with a weather that cannot be described even by means of Hollywood special effects. Cape Horn and the Magellan strait are quite near, and Antarctica is closer than any big city in South America.

This trip took us over 4.500 kilometres over a month, eleven hours and two minutes, to be precise; in our way thorough the last portion of the Pan American highway system we went over the Patagonian desert, steppes and tundra, fjords, channels, lakes and mountains, and besides losing about 20 kg of body mass each, we certainly got a crash course in biking, literally.

We had to find our way pedalling against the winds of Patagonia that often stopped us on our tracks and left us with - literally - zero or negative speed; we had these howling winds against us during all the way except after leaving Puerto Natales in Chile: we could go on 'sailing' in our bikes over the road to Punta Arenas over 52 km without touching the pedals. So is the wind down there.

At the time, we did not use mountain bikes but plain-vanilla, race training contraptions, inexpensive, without any sort of fancy things (and that means NOTHING AT ALL), no gear, no performance-enhancing devices, no nothing.

We had to care, repair and even reconstruct our bikes a couple of times; we christened them with two unspeakable Russian names, and we would have murdered them more than once if they had been organic life forms.

After passing thorough the glaciers of Calfate, Mount Fitz Roy, Port Piramides with its hundreds of thousands of penguins and whales and sea lions, and towns like Puerto Natales, Punta Arenas, Rio Turbio, Rio Grande, Tolhuin, Bahia Blanca, Trelew adn Sierra Grande, we certainly got the hands of biking and bike maintenance; so we know what it takes to purchase a new one.

Today, the market and technology have improved; biking enthusiasts and adventurers have a lot of different quality models to choose from, but despite all these improvements, you should still not take anything for granted.

If you are about to invest 400-ro-so euros for a simple and common bike, and more if you are trying to get one of those high-tech racing models available, it makes a lot of sense first to stop, think and read whatever information is available to you.

Andi if you are wondering how we got back from down there, a Lockheed Electra of the Argentinean Navy gave us a hitch, luckily, because then we were thinking that we were trapped within the Gilgamesh epic.

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