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I woke up in La Quiaca with a really bad headache. I had known it was a bit stupid gaining altitude so quickly. The receptionist in the hostel made me some coca leaf tea, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. I wandered into town and found a pharmacy. The walk was down a hill, and I wasn’t looking forward to walking back up it. The pharmacist, a tiny little lady who looked Asian in appearance, sold me some wild garlic tablets, and told me to go to the market and buy coca leaves. The market was almost opposite the hostel. There were a few people setting up stalls selling vegetables, and after making chewing motions and pointing to my head while grimacing, I was sent out the back of the market to a lady who sold bags of coca leaves. I bought quite a large packet, and was surprised that they tasted ok. When I came out of the market, I met a French guy I had spoken to briefly in the hostel, and gave me a largish lump that looked like Nepalese hash and told me to break a bit off and chew it with the coca leaves, to give more flavour. He also showed me how to break off the sharp bits of stalk so that they didn’t hurt your gums. Under his instruction, I stuffed a wad in the side of my mouth with a small piece of the hash-looking stuff, and started chewing. I thanked him, and went back to the hostel to get the bike. The coca leaves worked; by the time I left town, my headache was abating. Time now to find out if I could still ride on dirt, after a thirty year absence. I followed Google Maps to the edge of town, and found a dirt road meandering into the distance. Here goes, I thought. To my relief, I felt OK almost immediately- whether that is because it is actually like riding a bicycle, and you don’t forget it, or because of the coca leaves, I couldn’t tell; nor did I care. It felt great to be starting on Ruta 40, for so long just a dream.
RN 40
I started Ruta 40 by taking a wrong turning some where on the road to Santa Catalina, which you can see on the maps below. I blame Google maps, but the roads are also numbered differently. Instead of turning right onto RP 5, which is part of RN40, I took RP64. According to Google, RN40 only starts where RP 65 meets RP 64, at Oratorio. Whatever, RP 64 turned out to be pretty interesting, and the Himalayan turned out to be great on gravel and in sand. Before leaving La Quica I had reduced the rear tyre pressure to 25psi, the front to 22. The accidental road I went on had some very steep and twisty bits. Problem is I couldn’t mount my damaged phone on the bike. I only noticed I had gone wrong when I joined what was actually a much better road, which turned out to be Ruta 40, 19km south of Santa Catalina. I toyed with the idea of retracing my route for about 2 seconds. A huge thunderstorm urged me onwards. I also still had the altitude headache, and had to keep chewing coca leaves to keep it at bay, so I ate some more and carried on.
On the hairpins you can see on the map just before Oratorio, I ran into a Brazilian cyclist pushing his bike up a hill. He seemed pleased to see me, even though we couldn’t actually communicate beyond start points and destinations. With weather around, and not much hope of reaching a village today, this guy had balls. Over the course of the trip, I would come to really admire cyclists.
In the distance, the riverbed that RN40 follows for several kilometres..
After 20 km or so on RN40, I came across a very excitable guy with two companions, who had driven from Ushuia, all the way up Ruta 40. They were in a small van and a little Fiat. They informed me the road was very difficult, and gave me pointers on crossing a river a little further on. Excitable guy suggested I carry my luggage across first. Seeing as they had got both of their two wheel drive vehicles across, I didn’t bother. The river crossing was fine. A bit further on, however, the road follows a river bed in a ravine that obviously gets flooded in storms. With heavy clouds around, for the first time on the trip I felt slightly uneasy. I wouldn’t want to be caught in this gorge in a storm. I was here that stupidity caught up with me. A loud graunching noise, followed by a sudden lack of forward motion, had me thinking the worst. I thought the chain had come off, or, even worse, snapped. In fact, it was a fleece I had strapped to the back of the bike that had made its way into the chain. It had also pulled the chain guard into the chain. I had just finished fixing it and readjusting the chain which seemed to have gone out of whack, when two bikers from Tucuman (which so far this trip seems to produce many crazy bikers) turned up on street bikes. One was on a CB250 the other on a Chinese 250. They hung around to make sure I got going again. I crossed a total of 6 rivers, only one of them deep enough to get me worried. But figuring that two guys on street bikes had just crossed them, I decided I didn’t need to walk them first.
Leaving the gorge, the road now became decent gravel, with reasonable grip. For a while, I made good time. In the distance, I could see it was raining. It looked pretty likely I was going to get wet. I just hoped the road didn’t turn to mush and cake up my tyres.
Rain ahead
A thunderstorm hit me just as I was passing Paicone, a tiny little village. I took refuge under a metal awning projecting from a big square building. It carried on for about 40 minutes, during which I saw absolutely no signs of life in the village. When the rain stopped, the area where I had parked had turned into a pool of red mud. Immediately I set off, the tyre treads got clogged and I came off for the first time on the trip. The bike was on its side in a morass of pink clay. I took the large dry-bag off, pulled off the higher pannier, but I couldn’t get enough purchase in the mud to lift the bike. It and me just slid in opposite directions. I couldn’t get any purchase in the mud at all. I saw a woman across a field and walked over to ask her if there were any men about, and she seemed to understand me.
Rafael
Ten minutes later, I was the afternoon entertainment. A young dude called Rafael took charge, using Google Translate on my phone to ask questions about my trip. An older guy said I wouldn’t make it to Cusi Cusi that night, due to 3 rivers I needed to cross. After asking about the possibility of a bed in the village a car arrived from Cusi Cusi and the driver said the rivers were ok. I set off again, crossing the first river which was on the deep side of comfortable for me, and I wondeed how much it had risen since the guy in the car had driven through it. It turned out to have a solid track in though, and I got across with no problems. The other two rivers were really low. As I got closer to Cusi Cusi, I could see I was riding straight towards another storm. Would I get there in time? The only other option was pitching my tent., which, if the road turned to clay mush again, would be my only option. Luck was with me, and I arrived at Cusi Cusi just as the storm hit. The hostel was run by a very excitable little fat teenage boy, who kept pestering me for information about my motorcycle. How old was it, how fast did it go, how much did it cost? When I showed him Google Translate on my phone, he got very excited, and told me his life story. I told him I needed to make a call, and he directed me to the village square, which had free wifi. After calling Jackie, I had a quick look on Google Maps to look at the next days route. I already knew from my illustrated tourist map that tomorrow I would pass through El Valle de la Luna, the Valley of the Moon, with lots of multicoloured rocks. Cusi Cusi itself wasn’t a very pretty village, just a cluster of low-slung stone houses set on a few streets radiating from the main square. It is named after a spider o the Salticidae family, Polybetes pythagoricus, which is a jumping spider that resembles a taratula. When I got back to the hostel, the boy’s dad had turned up, and between the two of them, they rustled up a very decent dinner of steak, rice and salad. My first day on Ruta 40 had been a long and quite difficult one, and I was very tired. I crawled into bed in my cold room, and slept for 11 hours straight.
