Ephemerica

Since leaving Cafayate, we have been riding mostly through desert, which means heat (40+ degrees Celsius) with little shade and wind. For the most part, we are able to find a town with a restaurant to stop in for lunch and to wait out the hottest part of the day before continuing on, though we aren’t always so lucky.

Our route from Cafayate to Mendoza mostly followed Ruta 40, an iconic road for Argentina, similar to Route 66 in the US. It is also the route that Che followed for the Argentine part of the Motorcycle Diaries.

Setting out from Cafayate, we passed many small wineries and fields of grapes. We opted to take the longer, paved road to Santa Maria through the town of Amaiche, where we found a fun museum to Pachamama (pictured above) to wait out the heat of the day before riding the last 25 km to Santa Maria. The following day, as we were riding out of Santa Maria, 2 guys on a scooter pulled up alongside us carrying a video camera and large microphone and requested an interview. Matt did a great job of answering the questions (in Spanish) both in a live radio interview, then in a taped interview for the TV news. It took some quick thinking, especially when the interviewer wanted to know what we would remember about (the tiny little town of) Santa Maria. The real answer is awful pizza and overly expensive hotels, but Matt was able to talk about the beautiful landscapes and friendly people.

The rest of the ride from Cafayate from Chilecito was hot! It took us 2 days more than we had planned, first because a calf cramp and an impending thunderstorm forced us to seek shelter before we were ready to stop riding. We were really lucky that the house we stopped to ask for a camping spot had an empty small brick building we were able to pitch the tent in because not half an hour later, we were in the eye of a huge thunder and lightning storm. It would not have been a fun time standing out in the rain to avoid electricution through the tent poles. The other extra day was due to the intense heat coupled with no shade. From the intermediate town of Belen to the town of Salicas, it was 44 degrees and 100 km with no towns to find shade inbetween. When we finally arrived in town, we drank 3 liters of cold soda in no time. The next day, we had hoped to make it 120 km to Chilecito, but were worried about the heat since our energy had been completely drained from it the previous day. We struggled to make it to Piutil about 40 km away. When we finally made it, we found a restaurant for lunch and contemplated finding a hostel. After a liter of soda each and some yummy and much needed beef and salad, we stepped outside to see a huge thunderstorm approaching from the exact direction that we were headed. Since we were also exhausted from the ride, we decided to find a room for the evening rather than ride into the storm. When we saw the town’s only room for rent, we knew right away that it would be extrememly buggy and hot in the evening (much more so than camping would have been,) but were too tired to do anything but lie down and take a nap. When we awoke around 4 pm, the storm had cleared and our energy had been renewed. We decided to head back out and see if we could make it to Chilecito or at least closer to Chilecito. With only about 20 km to go, we were feeling tired again and decided to stop in a city that we saw many signs for, Famatina. It was just off the road, or so we thought. Another 13 km and 200 meters of climbing out of our way and we arrived after our longest day of on-the-bike time at 8 hours 31 minutes. We found a nice hostel where we could pitch the tent and a small cafe where a lovely woman who called us “mi amor” made us dinner.

We arrived in Chilecito early the next day and decided that we needed air conditioning. The room was a bit more expensive than we could really afford, but Matt’s grandpa had given us some Christmas money (thank you!), so we decided that AC (and cable TV) would be a great Christmas gift. We enjoyed it so much, we spend three nights! We mostly did errands and watched our favorite Latin American TV channels, but we also did get out to the La Riojana winery for a tour and some tasting. As in Cafayate, there wasn’t much to the tour, but we did enjoy the wines much more. We tried a line of wines called Santa Florentina and found all of them to be quite yummy.

From Chilecito, we deviated from Ruta 40 a bit in order to visit two parks. The first is called Talampaya National Park, where there is a huge canyon cut by a river that only has water after it rains. There are also many petroglyphs in the area. We visited the sites of the park in a van tour. There is a biking tour option, but it was a hot day and we had had enough of the biking in the heat. We were able to camp at the visitor’s center for the evening, then the next day headed to Ischigualasto Provincial Park. We arrived too late in the evening to explore the park that night, but were able to camp at the visitor’s center again. The tours of this park are done in a caravan of private cars in which the guide finds a spot in one of the cars or tour busses. A nice couple from Rosario (near Buenos Aires) offered to let us ride the tour with them and even let us try their Yerba Mate along the way. We mostly visited interesting rock structures formed by erosion as well as a moon-like landscape at the Valley of the Moon. Both parks together were named as UNESCO World Heritage Sites because of their archeological importance as one of the only places where you can see rock deposits representing nearly the entire Triassic period, in undisturbed sequence. This means that they are both big dinosaur fossil sites as well.

It was after Chilecito on the road to the parks that we first encountered the huge head winds that we rode into almost the entire way to Mendoza. We had been hoping to put in some long days to cover large distances, but ended up putting in hard days to cover smaller than we had hoped distances. For several days we were pedaling hard in our easiest gears on flat road and achieving speed of only about 10 kph. The winds almost forced us to take 2 days longer than we had hoped to arrive in Mendoza, but on our last day of riding we managed to make it 120 km after the winds let up slightly late in the day. We topped our recently set record for amount of time on the bike by 10 minutes and arrived at a hostal in Mendoza around 9:30 pm. The hostal was hosting an “asado” (grilled meat) dinner that night of which we were happy to partake. The meat was delicious and we had a fun time meeting the other hostal guests. We ended up going out for a beer with 3 Icelandic guys and a gal from Denmark. We learned a lot about Iceland and its history with Denmark (not so good) and generally had a good time. When we crawled into bed at 3 am, after leaving everyone else at the bar, we were utterly exhausted several times over.

After spending some time in Mendoza doing errands and visting the many wineries, we will be heading over the Andes to Chile. We have really enjoyed Argentina so far, and look forward to our return (our route will take us over the Chile/Argentina border 5 or 6 more times.) We are especially enjoying the salads (safe to eat and available with almost every meal) the steaks (no feedlots here!), the fact that Argentines travel (we don’t stick out as much) and the abundant campgrounds offering hot showers (when Argentines travel, they like to camp—the hotels are a bit pricey.)

On Jan 17, we celebrated one year on the road and 6 months of marriage. Both projects are still going well! We have come a long way fitness-wise—in our month in Argentina so far we have ridden around 1800 km, compared to 1200 km in our first month in Mexico. We may actually be able to make it to the end of the continent by the end of March (though we plan to spend some time in Buenos Aires before returning to the states.)

Posted by cindy on January 22nd, 2008 | Filed under: Argentina