Don´t Cry for Us, Argentina

Palquita to La Rioja: 70 km; La Rioja to Catamarca: 155 km

There are times when we feel like ghosts as we shuttle through towns, staying only long enough to replenish our waterbags and fruit bowl, and then riding on to the next pueblo, the next kiosko outpost, until night takes over and we must stop.

It is always such a pleasure, then, to stay a couple of nights at a place. There are friends to meet, wine to drink, fruit to share. And there are stories. Always there are stories that we carry, the ones that we find during the day and pass on, from one traveller to another. This is the one of the great joys of being on the road.

From Palquita (which is after San Augustin del Valle de Fertil), we biked hard and long (70 km) and were looking forward to exploring La Rioja, a relatively bigger city (Palquita is a one-horse, one-motel kind of town).

But La Rioja did not like us. And after the mocking of the border police, we did not like it. (I'm pretty sure the policia were sniggering at my passport photo, which I know hurts the eyes, but sniggering? Really, senores, I wanted to say, must you be so amused?)

We should have continued on, but we needed to do laundry, to take a vigorous scrubbing to our tired, calloused dogs. We needed a rest, and so we stayed. The city seemed to seethe, with hostility, with suspicion, with hustlers and crooks. It was the only place in Argentina to which we'd come that our hola was treated not as a greeting, but as an insult. Why are you here, what do really want? they seemed to ask us, giving us sidelong glances and second looks. All we'd known in this country was kindness and friendliness and hospitality so genuine, it swelled our hearts, so the change in demeanor and personality was deeply unsettling. It was the first time on our travels that we felt unsafe. People looked at us as though they would just as soon shank us as shake our hand.

Deputy Dawg observed that the people were so hostile in La Rioja, they refused to say their ''esses'', their words sounding bitten off in speech: no me guto; bata; no hopedaje aqui.

Even our hotel (King's Hotel) had a guarded look with its barred windows, its dark, heavy drapes in the lobby. It was falling into disrepair and slovenliness, even though it claimed 4 stars. It slumped in the corner, right across the city´s sanitarium. Niiiiice. The orderlies brought out the insane and the lost to fume and howl on the cement stoop outside for a couple of hours at night.

We left La Rioja just as soon as our laundry was done.

We set our sights on Catamarca and rode fast until we came to Chumbicha. We needed more water, some carbs; I asked the woman at the mercado if she could recommend a good restaurant in town. I told her we had great hunger. Her eyes lit up and she let loose a stream of adjectives that had something to do with heaven and god and pasta.

Her praises led us inside the barrio to a fort roofed in tin and wood and into the cocina of one Nonna, an angel masquerading as a grandmother. We were shepherded from the dining area of a few tables and a dirt floor, which looked as though it had just been swept, and into the nook of her kitchen; we felt like we'd won some kind of lottery. There were wonderful aromas rising out of the blackened pots on the stove, the scents complex and layered and surprising, like any good story.

She listed the kinds of pastas she could make for Deputy Dawg and when she came to gnocchi, he pounced on it and nodded. She ignored my request for just a salad, but a big one, por favor, looking at me as though I were a dope or an ingrate. Pechuga de pollo suprema, she announced.

The chicken was supreme, in every way. Grilled perfectly with the skin left on for flavor, tender and juicy to the teeth. The lime she had squeezed on it while it grilled over the flames was the perfect complement, leaving a citrusy tang with every bite.

Deputy Dawg took a bite of his gnocchi in a rich marinara sauce and wept. This is better than the gnocchi I had in Venice, he whispered. How can this be? Food this amazing in this nowhere place.

Nonna, we sang, Nonna. Where have you been our lives? She basked in our adulation and when we left, proffered her cheek, as an angel does when it casts its eye on those it loves.

We left the cocina, lighter than we'd felt when the day began and it was all because we'd found our way to Nonna, our angelina de gnocchi.

We rode like crazed and happy devils all the way to Catamarca.

-- Mad Dawg copyright 2007