Having cut across the ripio to the pretty little town of Barreal we were granted about 80k of respite in the form of sealed roads through the small nothing towns of Calingasta and Villanueve. From there Mike, Jeremy and I had no choice but to embrace the ripio once more. Our maps do indicate what is ripio and what is not but we can never tell what type of ripio it is going to be. One hopes for the best but one has to expect the worst and be prepared to play that dreadful game of patience. The locals tend to be pretty accurate in terms of their assessment of road conditions but naturally they travel these roads in pick-up trucks requiring us to add a little more severity to their assessments. What a local might describe as flat could be a 1% climb for 50k; enough to hurt you.
We decided that we would carry enough supplies to wild-camp as we would have a fair bit of climbing to do out of Villaneuve and the next proper shop was 150k away, over 100k of which was ripio. Of course, if took us over 45 minutes to pay for some bread in the local shop in Calingasta before we could leave, the pace of life can be so slow here. However, we eventually set off on the warm-up section of asphalt before the hard road to come. On such days you simply ride as far as your legs will carry you, what you cover today you won't have to cover tomorrow and all that. However, the ripio was particularly sandy and when going uphill it was particularly difficult to power through. On top of this, there was a very long series of false summits to this 30k climb and a pretty severe head-wind. It was brutal riding to say the least. Wind is rarely a cyclist's friend but it's more the non-stop noise of wind blowing through your ears that annoys the most. We managed to crest the worst of the climb but we were still climbing a very slight gradient into a gale. In the end we called it quits. It didn't make sense to force our way through these kind of conditions slowly when we could recover and have more favourable conditions in the morning when the wind is usually dead. The only thing now was to figure out where to pull over out of the gale to pitch camp. Setting up camp in strong winds is a pain in the ass. Thankfully we managed to find a man-made bowl in the desert, which must have been used as a watering-hole for cattle at some point. There was no evidence of life, rather the opposite in the form of a cow's carcass literally pecked to the bone leaving a nice clean hide if we wanted to dress up as Barney Rubble.
sand-pit-stop
at last a 'wind-break'
wild-camping in a watering hole - the bike was used to anchor the tent in the galeAlthough we cart camping gear, we generally try to end up in or near a town so as to be able to get food, water and a shower. In this case Mike and I were camped simply in the middle of nowhere. The night sky was spectacular and it's funny lying in your tent thinking that only the man in the moon knows that you are there. It's a very strange sensation travelling on rough roads that only a few cars might use a day. In these scenarios I tend to get the feeling of being a cowboy; my steed and I nobly traversing these vast plains carrying enough supplies to get us to the next hint of civilisation. I often think of myself from the point of view of a satellite image; this tiny dot moving north through vast chunks of what seem like brown nothingness from an aerial point of view. Such thoughts always makes me smile.
The next morning we plodded on. We knew that we would hit the crest of the false flat at some point and so hopefully a bit of gradient in our favour would better enable us to carve our way through the sand. To add to the sensation of being cowboys we would be tracking Jeremy. He had not seen our camp the night before so either he had cycled past it or he had gotten up the road earlier in the morning, either way it was fun tracking him. His tyre tracks were all over the road at first so it suggested that he had either cycled in the dark or he was tipsy ... or probably both. Eventually we caught him so that finished our little game of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The road surface had changed from sand to rock making life difficult for Jeremy as he had already popped a spoke. Three spokes later and a rare pick-up truck came to his rescue. My bike is built for such rough sections allowing me to embrace the downhill stretch and hammer over the rocks at full-tilt ... or at least until a large boulder bounced up and whacked me on the shin reminding me that I should slow down.
Mike on the road from nowhere
and the road to nowhereSuddenly two things appeared on the horizon: one was a line of trees suggesting civilisation, the other was a cloud of dust approaching us further down the road. Well, what do you know it was the real deal; a bunch of gauchos riding onto the same vast plains of nothingness that I had just been travelling through on my steed. It was really cool to see and it made all the fatigue worthwhile.
Talk soon
Marco
gauchos on the horizon