21st january 2020
I left El Sosneado about 10 am, after a decent sleep interrupted by trucks and dogs barking at 6am. The road was ok, quite a few twisties, great scenery, different types of rocks: mostly desert with the occassional green oasis-like village. A vast improvement over the past few days. The temperature had dropped considerably, and for the first time in a week I wasn’t sweating almost quicker than I could drink water.
Then, after passing Barancas, I hit an unexpected bit of dirt. My excitement at a bit of change was tempered by the fact that, initially, it was the worst bit of road I had been on yet. Deep rutted gravel which tended to grab the front wheel. It was like riding on a bed of marbles, the bike sliding around, getting caught in ruts that would peter out into thick gravel, with the occasional pothole thrown in for good measure. After 20km or so of appallingly bad gravel, it turned into a harder surface, with heavy corrugations. When I could get some speed up, it wasn’t too bad, but in areas where the road had been churned up into a mess of ruts where the road had been wet recently, I had to slow down. For the first time on the trip. I found that in some stretches, the bike was taking such a battering that it seemed the very act of shaking itself to bits was using all the engine power, and in places I struggled to accelerate. I saw very little traffic, save for one guy who pulled over when I had stopped for a break after over an hour of battering, to see if I was still ok. He told me I had another 60km of dirt before I would hit tarmac near
Rio Colorado
I ran into two Scandinavian cyclists just finishing their lunch and stopped and chatted with them for a while. They had been riding around the world for 18 months. If some bikers think they are hardcore, believe me, they have nothing on many of the cyclists I met during the trip. These people don’t have the luxury of reaching a town every night. If the weather turns, they either have to set up camp wherever they are, or just keep peddling. Most of them can cover 80-100km a day, on any surface, some of them even more. I met one guy later on in Chile who was averaging 120km a day.
One of the cyclists (apologies, I have forgotten their names) saw me taking some snus (Swedish chewing tobacco) out of my pocket, and became quite animated. He hadn’t seen any snus since they had been in Thailand. I gave him a full tin, took a pic, and then it started raining.
Cyclists
I now had about 40km of dirt left. It started pelting down. At first it just hardened the road a bit and kept the dust from other vehicles down. But it wasn’t long before it got slippery, and the rain was so hard that I could hardly see where I was going. I had to slow down to about 30kph, as aprt from the road being very slippery, I could hardly see. Rain had got inside my visor, and I could feel my crotch getting wet. I stupidly put on my waterproof over-tousers before leaving the cyclists. I started getting cold, and put the heated grips on. For the second day in a row, a vehicle that had caught me up from behind slowed and kept station behind me. The last 20 or so kilometres seemed to take forever, Just as the rain stopped, I hit tarmac again, and the car overtook me with a honk and a wave.
Temperature had been dropping steadily all day from 32 when I set off to 19 in the storm. When I arrived in Chos Malal I had to join a queue to get fuel, and the temperature had gone back up to 33. These queues for fuel are a regular fixture in Argentina. Although I was now sweating again, I wanted to camp, so I headed for the municipal campsite, which turned out to be much cooler than the town. After cooking some pasta with tuna, Fabian turned up. He is a 63 year old dude who goes fly fishing by motorcycle. On his little 250cc Chinese Skua 250 dirt bike, he goes fishing all over the Andes. On his bike, in addition to his fishing and camping gear, he carries wine and a huge cooler full of ice, plus a soda syphon.
Chos Malal campsite
Fabian
We spent the evening communicating using Google Translate, becoming far more fluent as the evening progressed. Fabian would put some red wine in our glasses, then fill them with the soda syphon, the trick being to down it before the froth subsided. I contributed a cheap half-bottle of whisky. Fabian gave me a Boca Juniors baseball cap, which caused endless amusement for the rest of my trip when I ran into River Plate supporters. It was around 1am before we went to bed. It was a great end to an interesting day; 384km, of which about 110km were dirt.
