Crossing the pass from Aconquija turned out to be not that big a deal after all. The heavy rains from the night before forced me to pass through some washed out roads but all in all the pass was reasonably straightforward at only 650ms of elevation from the plateau. Cresting the summit would mean traversing into another new province, the jungle province of Tucuman. The road towards the the town of Concepcion did not provide a warm welcome, I was descending but it was raining and the road was possibly the worst of my trip through Argentina so far. Just lots of boulders embedded in the muddy tracks making progress slow and painfully jarring. I would run into Asphalt 20k from Concepcion but I was so caked in mud that I had to have a quick shower with baby-wipes and change into something a bit more presentable al fresco before arriving into town.
Concepcion was simply a reasonably big grid and not the most aesthetically pleasing place I have seen. Naturally the plaza marked the centre of the town and it was here that I would meet Sonia. She flagged me down with such enthusiasm that I feared she may be a rabbit-boiler. In fact she was simply overwhelmed at the sight of somebody new in town. Indeed, while Concepcion was a big place it seemed to have little to offer, so little that it had only a few hotels for business types as opposed to the usual cheaper mix of accommodation. There were so few tourists that the information office was not for tourists at all but for people who needed help with paperwork to move here for work reasons. Simply tourists don't come here at all. The cheapest bed in town was the local love motel but when I had to talk to the receptionist through a piece of wood to protect my identity much like a sinner facing a priest in a confession box, I became a little uneasy. My discomfort increased with the couple in the queue behind me, a fifty year old sugar-daddy and a girl who looked no more that twenty-one texting. It was 4pm. I bailed in the hope that I could find something a little more respectable that wasn't going to charge me by the hour and thankfully I found a room in the hotel by the plaza for a reasonable amount of pesos. A large twin-room to myself, TV, breakfast and a huge bath-room .... a stroke of luck considering I had resigned myself to spending a fortune or else listening to passion all night.
Sonia and I had agreed to meet for chats later on. I suggested the ice-cream parlour based on what a girl in Mendoza had told me was the secret to Argentinian girls. Regardless of any aspirations I would at least get a good ice-cream and have a different conversation. Sonia was one of the few Argentinians I had met outside of Bs. As. who had good English; she had studied English in university. She now struggles to teach English to uninterested school children. These kids can't see a life beyond the town of Concepcion and so question the reason for learning English at all. It is such small-town thinking that made her so excited to see me. Just like she would provide me with a different conversation I would do the same for her. She had plans to study in the US when she was younger but because her mother neither encouraged nor discouraged her she read between the lines that her mother wanted her to stay. She remained in Concepcion and has done little real travel in the meantime. However, she knows possibly more about the world than anyone I have met on my trip so far. This is because she has amazingly globe-trotted through the world of books instead. She is so well read that she understands the mentality of most nationalities through their literature and history. She has read more Irish literature than I ever had to in school. I was stunned at her articulacy in the English language considering she never actually managed to spend time in an English-speaking country. Her passion for books stretches to philosophy too and so the conversation became a little heavier as we pretty much got to grips with most of society's ills. It was a little mind-blowing and such a pleasant surprise to meet such an educated mind with perfect English in the middle of small-town Argentina. While the Argentinian mentality exhausts her such that she feels like an outsider amongst her own people, she stays to play play-station with her seven year old son and his mates. It would seem that such a curious and global thinker is trapped in a small world but through her son and her books she has a degree of serenity that most people, yet alone the privileged travelling-set, could only aspire to.
Four hours of conversation later, punctuated only by those noisy motor-bikes, and we called it a night. Startled and bemused by how great the conversation had been I was not going to spoil it with a desperate lunge as only Irish guys can do. Perhaps, if I had done the Irish thing and met her for pints instead I would have been suitably brave or stupid. Another Facebook friendship it would have to be ... the immaculate Concepcion indeed.
Talk soon
Marco