The last of Argentina

We made it to La Quiaca, the border town with Bolivia, late last night after a very long day covering 100km against a horrid headwind.  We´re both feeling the effects of the altitude too which makes pedalling even more of a struggle but we were determined to make it to La Quiaca last night for a warm bed and a hot shower after a freezing night camping at 3700m the night before.  We knew it had been pretty cold when we woke to find all of our water had frozen as well as the eggs we´d bought for breakfast.  Luckily we woke to a beautiful sunny day so we ate our scrambled egg icecream in the morning sun and gradually let our frozen bones thaw out before hitting the last leg of the Argentine phase.  It seemed fitting that our last day of cycling in Argentina also coincided with the Bicentenary celebrations so we woke up to fireworks and music from the nearby village of Tres Cruces. 

We will cross the border into Bolivia this morning, 4 months and 4 days after leaving Ushuaia, which according to the sign on the outskirts of town is now 5121km away.

Quite a lot of quebradas

We left Purmamarca this morning and are now in a place called Tilcara up in the Quebrada de Humahuaca, an amazing canyon that runs from above San Salvador de Jujuy up to the altiplano that borders with Bolivia.  As it stands we are now just 207kms from La Quiaca, the Argentine border town where we´ll be crossing into Bolivia. Our stop in Tilcara is a brief one, to use the internet and stock up on some food before heading on.  We´re hoping to reach the town of Humahuaca, 50kms north of here, tonight.  That´s assuming the next lot of climbing isn´t too horrendous and the wind decides to be kind to us.

Tilcara is a nice town, adobe houses and plenty of artesans selling all manner of alpaca ponchos, leg warmers etc.  (Ben bought some llama-adorned alpaca gloves yesterday, what a gap-year tragedy!).  The last couple of days have been pretty long and tiring as we´ve wound our way up from 1100m above sea level to 2500m.  Yesterday we climbed1500m over 80kms to reach the beautiful village of Purmamarca, famous for it´s Cerro de los Siete Colores - a multicoloured sandstone hill that´s amazingly beautiful.  Safe to say we are feeling a little weary and the air is beginning to feel a bit thin but the scenery is more than enough to distract us from the never ending hills and shortness of breath.

Before setting out on this last leg of the journey we had a lovely stop over in Salta, a beautiful colonial city with more than enough restaurants, bars and museums to keep us entertained for a few days.  It was also the last Argentine city we´d pass through as we decided to give Jujuy a miss and opted instead to spend the night camping on an airstrip a few kms outside of town.  It was a great spot with wonderful views of the mountains that we´re now trundling up, marred only slightly by the fact that the guard dog (a strange mongrel with 3-inch legs) barked at our tent all night. A sleepless night wasn´t the best preparation for one of the hardest days´cycling to date. 

The Quebrada de Humahuaca has been declared a UNESCO world heritage site and the Provincial government of Jujuy claim it as the most beautiful zone in all Argentina.  It is a remarkable landscape, no doubt about it, but it´s the second Quebrada we´ve cycled through in as many weeks so we´re still trying to decide which out of the Quebrada de las Conchas, north of Cafayate, and the Quebrada de Humahuaca is the most spectacular. 

Well, this is just a quick post to update on our progress and we´ll write more and upload photos when we next find a computer. 

Parrots and hamsters on Ruta 40

We left Tafi del Valle four days ago and followed the road towards Salta. It heads North East out of town and crosses the mountains behind Tafi at their lowest point - El Infiernillo (little hell) - at over 3,000m before swooping down into another valley and reaching the town of Amiacha.

Amaicha sits in the Valle Calchaqui between two mountain ranges with peaks almost 5,000m high to the East and West. There´s a sign in the Plaza de Armas that tells visitors that the town has a population of 5,000, lies 1,987m above sea level, and gets 360 days of sunshine each year. On a bright Saturday afternoon you couldn´t imagine a nicer place to be.

Having spent the night in Amaicha we rolled downhill to join up with the Ruta 40 once again. Not far from the main road are some Pre-Incan ruins which we visited. The stone walls and paths built into the hillside are the remains of a settlement belonging to the Quilmes Indians dating back to 800AD. The ruins themselves have been restored but the area feels really unspoilt, so you´re able to get a feel of what life must have been like for the people that lived there. From the very top of the ruins the views across the valley were incredible.

We left Quilmes and set our sights on Cafayate, Argentina´s second biggest wine town after Mendoza. The Ruta 40 passes through some beautiful little villages on the way and we were easily lured into one of the bodegas by the side of the road for a mid-afternoon wine tasting session. The road to Cafayate was flat and fairly easy going (except for a few bits towards the end of the day when the wind got up) and the views down the valley were breathtaking. Brightly coloured layers of rock in the distant mountains looked awesome in the late afternoon sun. We saw wild hamsters running between burrows by the side of the road, and lots of bright green parrots swooping overhead. There was the usual smell of decaying road kill on the wind from time to time but we´ve got the knack of holding our breath when we see a carcass approaching...

 

Cafayate in Autumn is quite beautiful. The leaves are turning on the trees and the vines and the town pops up out of the scrub of the valley (where nothing grows except wirey bushes and the kind of comedy cactus you find on the menu of any self-respecting Tex-Mex restaurant) like an oasis. As you come into town it´s hard to miss the main square and we sat and rested our aching limbs there, watching the world go by for a few hours before finding a place to sleep for the night. 

The next day we got up and decided to go and explore the Rio Colorado that lies about 5km out of town. We were expecting a fairly tame stroll through some woods to the big waterfall that everyone tries to find, but it turned out that the walk was not for the faint-hearted. In fact by most people´s definition it wasn´t a walk. Almost immediately we found ourselves having to clamber over enormous boulders and hang on to rocky ledges for dear life in order to follow the river up into the mountains. Luckily we had a guide to help us out along the way, and we saw some incredible waterfalls. The swimming was not for the faint-hearted either. Aparently the best months for swimming in the waterfalls are December to February. After that the water gets a bit chilly, so we decided to stick to paddling...

The Northern provinces

We´ve been back on the road for 10 days now after a wonderful 2 week break.  We spent 4 days milling about in Mendoza tasting wine at the Trapiche Bodega before winging it up to Cordoba and having the most relaxing and wonderful stay with Paul and Christine in La Cumbre.  Our break marked the half way point in our trip and was also sadly time to say goodbye to Danny and Team Pichanga.

Rehydration is the name of the game.

It was difficult to say goodbye to Paul and Christine after such a wonderful stay - we were so well looked after, so well fed and so well entertained.  But time seems to be flying past and we are wondering how we´ll ever make it to Peru in time so after a final lunch with Paul we heaved ourselves (literally) back on our bikes and headed out of La Cumbre with no real idea about the road ahead just a vague notion that we needed to keep heading northwards.  Our late start that day meant that we only made it about 30kms from La Cumbre before calling it a day somewhere between Capilla del Monte and the historic village of Ischilin, where we planned to make a stop the next day.  Being back in the tent came as quite a shock so we made an early start the next day and wound our way up the rather rough track to Ishcilin.  The road was covered in a layer of deep sand, making pedalling up the steep hills hard work and coming down the hills more like skiing.  Still, we made it to Ischilin that night and treated ourselves to a night in a lovely hospedaje.

The next morning we got an early start and made it to the town of Dean Funes in no time at all.  The only thing that stopped us on our way was the sight of the most enormous pig lying by the side of the road.  Everyone here seems to keep a pig grazing by the side of the road, and they seem to have two main roles: 1. Providing sausage meat at some point in the future.  2. Eating rubbish meaning that all the owners have to do is dump their rubbish on the side of the road and leave the pig to do its thing.  When we arrived in Dean Funes we were greeted by a slightly overzealous Police officer who, suspecting that we might be the 21st century incarnation of the Wild Bunch, insisted on taking down our details.  Dean Funes provided us with the opportunity to stock up on food, but didn´t seem to have much else to offer, so we decided to carry on to Villa Tulumba.

Tulumba is a sleepy little town by day, with a beautiful church and many surviving elements from the arrival of the Spanish at the start of the 18th century, but by night it turns into a hive of activity with several dive bars and a nightclub that doesn´t turn down the volume until the sun rises the next morning.  Sadly the owners of the only campsite in town were away so we were forced to take a room in some man´s house.  On first glance things looked fine but on closer inspection it was clear the sheets had never been washed and the whole house smelt overwhelmingly like a septic tank.  Needless to say the combination of pumping techno, barking dogs, cockerels and the pungent aroma of drains made for a fitful nights´sleep.  We left early the next morning feeling like we hadn´t really been to bed at all.

We rode on the next day through some beautiful rolling farmland that could have been in the home counties, and after a lunchtime stop at a roadside parador for beer and crisps (lunch of champions) we made light work of the 80kms to Villa Maria del Rio Seco, arriving in time to enjoy the early evening sunshine and get a taster of the Primer de Mayo celebrations, which like most holidays in Argentina seemed to involve lots of meat, a rodeo and a helping of drunk gauchos.  Feeling fairly exhausted after a long day on the bikes we treated ourselves to a clean bed and some amazing roast chicken in the only restaurant in town, that happened to be on the forecourt of a petrol station.

Next day it was back on the bikes and we cycled all morning up and down endless hills and through torrential rain to get from Villa Maria to Ojo de Agua where we planned to stay the next night.  Ojo de Agua is one of the worst junction towns we´ve seen, full of mentalists and unbelievably depressing.  It didn´t offer much in the way of appealing sleeping options or for that matter appealing eating options so we decided to keep going and try to get to Santiago del Estero as quickly as possible before we were eaten alive by any one of Ojo´s mental one-toothed residents.

Santiago del Estero was the first Spanish settlement in Argentina.  From the guide book it sounded like a good stop off and after some research we found three things that we really wanted to do there: visit the Museum of Anthropology; see some of the original colonial architecture; and sit and relax in a legendary bookshop that´s also a bar.  Sadly we failed on all three fronts: the Museum was closed because they were moving it to a different building; all of the colonial architecture (bar the Cathedral) has been knocked down; and the bookshop/cafe/bar has gone out of business.  Still, we got to stay in the Savoy Hotel (likely to be the only Savoy we´ll ever be rich enough to spend the night in) and had a good rest for a few days.


Feeling rested and ready to take on the next long stretch we took the very long and straight road out of town thinking that we´d spend the night in Termas del Rio Hondo, a spa town 70km away, but got there to find that all it had to offer was a lot of seedy overpriced hotels and a filthy campsite that smelt of raw sewage.  We decided to keep going north and ended up camping at a local football club on the edge of the pitch.  This was also covered in rubbish but at least we didn´t need to pay for the privilege of sleeping on a landfill site.


The next day it was insanely hot but we managed to record our longest day of cycling yet - travelling almost 95km from the football club to Santa Lucia.  The views from the road to Santa Lucia were incredible with the Andes looming in the distance like a giant wave getting gradually closer to us.  In the last few days the notion that we´ll soon have to get over that 5km high wave in order to get to Peru has become increasingly real.

The ride from Santa Lucia to Tafi del Valle was one of the hardest day´s cycling so far. Starting at 400m above sea level the road goes up and up and up for 60km before reaching the upland plane that Tafi del Valle sits on, 2,100m up.  We knew it would be a hard day´s work so we started early, reaching El Indio (a 50ft high statue of an Indian about to throw a spear into the valley below and some artesans selling ponchos and dulce de leche-themed snacks) in time for elevenses.  It suddenly felt like we were cycling through those classic Andean valleys that you see in films with creepers hanging thick from trees enveloped in mist.  From El Indio we kept on climbing (lots of hairpin bends - we counted at least 24) until we found ourselves deep in the clouds.  Despite our determination to keep going the fog was so thick that we could hardly see the road ahead and were in real danger of being knocked off the road by cars and trucks battling through the downpour.  At this point a small roadside cafe came to the rescue, providing us with a warm drink, homemade alfajores and shelter from the pouring rain and freezing cold.  It was hard to beleive that we´d set out that morning in sweltering heat and ended the day surrounded by clouds wearing every single item of clothing and still shivering.  We finally made it to Tafi that evening and headed straight out for steak and chips, a fitting end to an epic day.


At the moment all of the hills around Tafi del Valle are masked by clouds so we can´t really appreciate the beautiful views but it has the laid back feel of a typical hill station.  We´re staying in Estancia Los Cuartos, which dates back to 1617.  It´s probably the most traditional Estancia we´ve visited so far, and the perfect place to rest given that the weather isn´t so great, with lots of thick alapca rugs everywhere and (supposedly) great views of the surrounding hills.