Don´t Cry for Us, Argentina

We left Difunta Correa in the dark, hours before daybreak. We had miles and miles to cover that day.

On the way out of town, we saw that a bakery was open, so we stopped for bread. The baker had just flipped a batch of semitas off the grill when I walked in. She did not seem surprised to see me. I wondered if Difunta Correa was a town of early risers or runners who liked to train before first light. I asked for four semitas, and she tossed them in a bag; her fingers were smudged black from the ash and soot of the parrilla. The semitas are like round popovers, but rise like puff pastry and break apart into soft, thin layers when you split them open. They were warm and steamed out of the paper bag and smelled like the bread my mother used to make on Sunday mornings when I was a child. I tucked them inside my handlebar bag, where all good things go, looking forward to having them glazed with raspberry jam or dulce de leche for breakfast on the side of the road in a few hours.

Daylight burning

There was no cloud cover so the air was cool on my skin as I rode. It was impossible to tell just how far the land rolled away from us, or how big the desert was, or where the sun would rise. I liked that. Our makeshift headlights on our bike racks carved tunnels of light out of the darkness, the only source of illumination in the wilderness, save for the pinpricks of stars scattered above us.

It seemed as if Deputy Dawg and I and the baker were the only people awake and moving in the world.

I felt a delicious thrill riding in the dark, let loose in the desert at that early hour, as though we were getting away with something that had been lost to us, though we'd not known it until just then. I felt as free and happy as I did when I was 8 years old, and had just learned to ride with my hands in the air, finding perfect balance between the forces in the world that keep you on the ground and those that have no such hold on you. When you are 8 years old and discovering your powers, the world seems more wondrous than anything you could have dreamed up, glittering with joys and secrets, which, if you were lucky or observant or both, would be revealed to you, one by one, over time. Riding out of Difunta Correa in the dark, cool morning felt like that.

We thought we would ride into Marvaes, about 100 km away, and stop for lunch, but when we saw Marvaes was nothing more than a few stone houses and a small market, we continued on.

The terrain was hilly, the river and creek beds were dry as bone. We climbed long, steep pitches of rock and scrub and I kept my eyes on the road, which always helps me to focus on the moment and nothing else -- not the next few seconds or those at the end of the day, after the ride and its struggles -- and at the top of the climb, I let myself look up, and there, in front of me, crossing the road about 20 or so feet away, was a horse. His mane was shiny in the sun and he was white with patches of brown. He showed no interest in me; he just crossed over from one side of the desert to the other and then he was gone, a spray of dust in the distance, as if he had suddenly remembered something he needed to run to. He was the most beautiful thing I'd seen that day.

When we arrived in Astica, it was 3:30 pm and we had covered 150 km. All the shops and the markets and kiosks were closed and we could not tell if there was camping in town. A woman who sold jam and chutneys and sweets on the edge of town told us that we could get showers and something to eat at one of the kiosks. She struggled to explain where the kiosk was, so she called one of her kids and told her to accompany us. Her name was Lourdes, she was 11, and seemed to be very popular for when we returned to the street, the Dep and I were suddenly surrounded by kids, about 18 or so, ranging from ages 7 to 12. We felt like Pied Pipers as we made our way to the kiosk, the kids chattering and laughing, curious about our bikes and our gear and about us. The girls were shy and sweet, whispering secrets to each other, the boys bold and full of talk, wheeling their mountain bikes around ours. They seemed to be quite certain we were at a great disadvantage with our touring bikes, which had skinny tires and no shock absorbers. As unflashy as they come. They smirked and gave each other the eye. It was clear the Dep and I had flunked out of the school of cool. They told us as much; we smiled and told them, si, si, claro. You are right.

The kiosk was closed, and so we hopped back on our bikes and waved goodbye to our young amigos who wished us well and told us we had to come back to see the town when everything was open, as though we could expect to see something truly marvelous then. Kids are wonderful like that -- the best things in life are the things they've always known, like their town, their friends, and their mountain bikes with tricked-out shock absorbers.

Our day passed in that way, each town or campsite that we rolled into either dashed our expectations or were without toilets, and so we would move on until we found ourselves in San Augustin del Valle de Fertil at dusk, exactly 13 hours from when we started that morning. We biked 200 km that day, our longest ride yet.

There are some days when you hop on your bike and you feel like you could ride forever, and the day answers in kind, opening a little bigger and bigger with each hour, unrolling beneath you like a dream you hope you'll remember always. And part of the feeling of forever is because you can't see how big the world is, you have no reference for anything -- not the stars or the sound of the desert in the dark -- but it's also because you remember the joy of riding with your hands in the air for the first time and remember again that a day of such new-found powers could lead you anywhere.

-- Mad Dawg copyright 2007

20-22 March, 160 km total

The day of the bees and the locust.

Cactus or ear?

My right ear is a rose. Or a cactus flower. Or, after the locust´s cannonball run into it, the coming of a pestilence.

This is what I have to conclude -- that there is something about the shape of my ear -- its lobe or the crest of the helix -- that makes bees or locusts think it leads to nectar or a love nest.

Three times on day 10, during the hottest part of the day, these flying snipers appeared out of nowhere and tried to ram themselves into my ear. My hand jerked up to swat at them, while my other hand tried to keep my balance as my bike serpentined and fishtailed. Three times I avoided a face plant in the road only because I got my legs out of the bike clips just in the nick of time.

It is a creepy thing to be desired by insects. Not in the way of mosquitoes -- their love is indiscriminating, unconditional. They adore anything with a bloodtype. But to have a single body part that insects find irresistible? Definitely freaky.

From San Juan to Caucete, we started the ride late in the morning. And regretted it. The days were hot and humid; the heat made the horizon and the distance shimmer in waves. The heat made us feel sluggish and drowsy by high noon. It was my kind of weather, but not Deputy Dawg´s. He was swabbed and spackled in sunscreen, terrifically hot.

By the time we got to Difunta Correa, day 13, it was clear we needed a better plan for knocking out the kilometers. We´d never get to Salta at the rate we were going, desert or no; flying locusts and bees, notwithstanding.

The plan was simple: We would get up early in the morning to beat the heat. Duh.

Monday, 19 March; 50 km

San Juan:

I like the sidewalk and street sweepers of a town. Their work seems so gratifying, so honest. They take such care, pushing their brooms and squeegees outside their storefront or along a road, sweeping it clean of cigarettes and lottery tickets, broken glass and scraps of paper, the discarded things of a hurried and careless people.

The street sweepers are up early with their long-handled brooms and their water hoses and buckets, washing away whatever has collected there from the night before. What is that law of the universe about entropy -- about how all things tend toward chaos? Something like that. The streetsweepers understand this law, I think. I like that they are out there anyway, keeping chaos at bay. Keeping things tidy is a small, but sweet pleasure.

I started to notice them in San Juan, I suppose because the sidewalks were always freshly swept and because the town is a pedestrian town. There are sidewalks and ramblas and avenidas, a beautiful plaza filled with sun and flowers.

We rested for the night in San Juan. The streets were quiet all afternoon for siesta, but at 9 pm, when we went out to dinner, the town had come alive. Sometimes the noise and motion of a town are comforting; these things made me feel like we were part of real life.

We were still in the desert, and it was still stultifyingly hot in San Juan, but it was nice to be back in a world of taxi drivers and coffee shop owners, florists and bakers and streetsweepers.

-- Mad Dawg copyright 2007

Day 8, Week 2; 120 km.

Getting out of Mendoza was a snap. It was a Sunday morning and the streets were empty of cars and buses and dogs.

Church bells were ringing in the distance. It was a good day for going to church or other sanctuaries, I thought: clear and bright and cloudless, the kind of morning that starts quietly and, as it unfolds, makes you think of your life, and how you are spanning time and where you would go, where you would be if you knew your wish would be granted, if the gods of loss and longing had asked you to name what it is you love best in the world and it would be yours, just for the naming of it. It was that kind of quiet.

One main artery led away from the city center -- Ruta 40 -- and we tracked the signs for San Juan as we rode, and 6 km later, the city freed us and we were off, following the blacktop through and past the smattering of five or six pueblos that always trickle out of a city, small towns that you can never find on a map. Dogs barked at us, but only half-heartedly, as though they were drowsy or toothless. They felt the quiet, too.

In the distance were mountains, solemn and hazy in the heat, pushed up from the earth like loaves of crusty bread left too long in the oven to bake. They were reddish and riven with age and unremarkable. I could not compare them to anything that pleased me, so after a while I stopped trying. Some people factor prime numbers or dream of things they would still like to do in life when they ride; I try to think up pleasing similes. Deputy Dawg listens to poets: Springsteen and Neil Young and Dylan.

Hazy desert mountains

The road ran on and on between the mountains on the left and scrubland on the right. There were strange things growing in the scrub: trees with a loose canopy of long branches, burred and sharp, and bushes with tiny silvery leaves and thorns. They looked like delicate coral growing in a long-ago sea.

I´d been watching Deputy Dawg as he inched along ahead of me in the distance, and suddenly, the blacktop road became part of the scrub and the heat and the red mountains, and with a start, I realized we were in the desert. It was like falling headlong into a furnace. It seemed to have happened all at once, the desert, the way that love or kindness or catastrophe happens.

When we stopped for lunch on the side of the road, we did not discuss the desert or the heat or the fact that we were not prepared for this turn in our ride: we had not brought enough water; the town of Media Agua was another 50 km away. We did not know if there would be a hotel or a hostel there; we did not know what we would find, but we hoped that our luck would hold and there would be something for us -- a clean room, water, a cafe.

We would talk about this later, when we were safe in our room in a pensione in Media Agua, the moment when the arc of a day turns from ordinary to dire, and you find yourself in a wilderness that you had not expected to find, the moment when you remember again that your hold on life is always tenuous and the best that you can count on when the day turns on you is luck -- luck that whatever you´ve brought for the journey will be all you will need to get you through the day and to a place of rest at night.

Memorable: The Green Apple, a vegetarian restaurant in Mendoza featuring sandia (watermelon) juice: fantastic!
-- Mad Dawg copyright 2007

Bariloche to San Martin to San Martin, 450 km total for week 1.

Week one was a bad comedy for the rollin´ dawgies -- a major false start, two flat tires, not nearly enough fruit nor candy, and featured a headwind that, while never completely nasty nor unbearable, was testy and tiresome all the same. The worst kind of scene stealer. It followed us from Bariloche to Villa Angostura on day one and showed up again on days 5 and 6, as we rode from San Martin to Volcan Lanin, some 17 km from the border of Chile.

Dos Caballos Down!

There are, as every travel hound knows, good winds and bad winds. A headwind is in a class of its own. It´s a killjoy. And like most killjoys, you just grit your teeth and try to get through the encounter with good humor and enough fruit. Which, as I mentioned, I did not have enough of.

But there were moments of unsurpassing beauty, as there often are when you´re travelling through open country. The Siete Lago (7 Lakes) district was especially dazzling, and while day two to Lago Espejo found us slogging through 40 km of soft sand combined with dirt and loose gravel, terrain more suitable for mountain bikes -- which we did not expect, a road map being what it is to the rollin´ dawgies: unstudied; ignored -- we still managed to be awed, and at the end of the punishing day, delighted, that we could set up camp right across a lake so still and clear that we could see the trees and the whole of the burnished sky in it, and then, moments after dusk, rings of light across it, as trout swam up, disturbing the stillness as they took swallows of air.

Deputy crossing guard spies dazzling view

Day 3 was memorable for two things: the end of the unpaved road in the lake district (that´s ripio in Spanish, a word we would get to know in the days ahead) and Lago Falkner campground, where we met Gemma & Pablo, a young couple who had just opened the campground. They were warm and lovely; Gemma offered me a banana moments after we arrived. I knew we were going to be friends. We also met Rob from Alaska, a fellow bicyclist.

Jammin´at the end of the ripio!

Best thing about Day 4: 15 km into San Martin, a downhill rush that made us forget the ripio of the past. We swooped and crowed, feeling like condors. Kanye West was playing on the iPod and between his beat and a tailwind (a good wind), I discovered flight.

Slice of San Martin

Day 5: We rode out of San Martin, rested and buzzing with caffeine, ready for the 132 km day into Alumine. Two and a half hours later we found ourselves in Junin de los Andes, smug and twitchy as bandidos, having executed like bandidos the first leg out of San Martin. Could there be two more efficient or better prepared travel dawgs than Deputy and I? No, I thought, I don´t think so. At mile marker 65 km, the dep and I were stopped dead in our tracks with the sight of a steep ascent and ripio as far as the eye could see. A thorough study of the road map revealed that there would be at least 70 km of ripio.

The feeling was mutual as it was sudden and deeply felt: no mas ripio!

The Dep and I decided to head to Chile, where Mt. Pucon is. We like mountains. (And turning back to San Martin would be too humiliating.) We turned into the headwind (slight, but still unpleasant) and ran into Rob from Alaska, who was also biking into Chile. Our journey, even with the headwind, suddenly became a happy adventure, three bandidos on the road. Four hours later, we set up camp near a stand of Araucana trees and a clear and gushing river, snowmelt from Volcan Lanin, which rose like a white corona against the blue sky. A hard day´s ride, but we feasted like kings and queens on an impromptu salad of apples and blue cheese and tomatoes and avocadoes AND risotto with four cheeses. And, a bottle of limoncello, chilled from the icy stream. Could there be three luckier bandidos in the world? No, I thought, as I dropped off to sleep with the chimes of the river as it swirled and the scent of pine needles blowing in the wind.

Volcan Lanin

Day 6: We biked back to San Martin. A tete a tete conference early in the morning (when all difficult, but good decisions are made) and a hard look at the map showed that a detour into Chile would take us too far off the track. We would backtrack, as painful as that was, and reroute to Salta. We said goodbye to Rob, buen viaje, amigo, and I gave him an apple for the road. We loaded our bikes and after a kilometer or so, found that the wind was behind our backs and, we hoped, so were the gods of good travel and good map reading.

Day 7: bus ride to Mendoza. This is how a bandido executes: with a good transit system.

-- Mad Dawg copyright 2007

Nuts and Bolts of the Ride
The higher the number the better the thing, except cost, for which higher is more. Ratings are relative to the rest of the country, except for People and Cute, which are relative to everywhere in the world that we have travelled.

Bariloche
Food 4
Shops 4
Cute 4
People 4
Cost 3
Hostel 41 Below: 4 ($30)

90km Ride to Angostura via route 40 and route 231
Roads 4
Scenery 4+
Facilities 0
Bathrooms 0
Traffic 3
Difficulty 3

Angostura
Food 3
Shops 3
Cute 3
People 3
Cost 3
Hostel 41 Below: 4 ($30)

25km Ride to Lago Espejo Chico via route 234
Roads 3, then 0 (Ripio, unpaved)
Scenery 3
Facilities 0
Bathrooms 0
Traffic 3
Difficulty 3

Lago Espejo Chico (Campsite)
Food (our own)
Shops 0
Cute 3
People 2 (he did a poor job of cleaning los banos)
Cost 1: $2 per person

40km Ride to Lago E-Chico via route 234
Roads 0 (Ripio, unpaved)
Scenery 3
Facilities 0
Bathrooms 0
Traffic 3
Difficulty 3

Lago Espejo Falkner (Campsite)
Food (our own)
Shops 0
Cute (beautiful) 4
People 4+ (Jemma and Pablo were wonderful)
Cost 1: $2 per person

45km Ride to San Martin via route 234
Roads 3
Scenery 4
Facilities 0
Bathrooms 0
Traffic 3
Difficulty 2-3

San Martin de los Andes
Food 4
Shops 4
Cute 4
People 3
Cost 3
Hotel (apartment rental at 326 Fosbery): 4 ($20)

-Deputy Dawg