Argentina

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

Fruit, the universal currency

When you´re travelling through many countries, you need to stay sharp as a tack in dealing with the various currencies. The kip, the baht, the peso, the euro, the dollar. The daily swings, the drops. The highs and lows of money are a lot to manage -- oh, the MENTAL OVERHEAD -- which is why I´ve chosen a far simpler model.

I deal solely in the currency of fruit. That´s how I like to travel. No lopsided economies. No messy math.

With fruit, there are no imprecise equations. Who could mistake the exchange rate of an apricot to a durian? Or a lychee to a prune? No one could. Everyone knows the value of a prune.

Offering fruit to a fellow traveller is how I make friends. A pleasure to meet you. Are you weary, friend? Would you care for a pear?

Fruit never offends. It never calls attention to itself. It is its own sweet self; its goal is always to get along. But like currencies, there are some fruit that are more valuable than others, a few that I cannot live without day to day: the mango, the banana, the apple.

The apple, ubiquitous, unsung, is the gateway fruit. It leads to good conversations, philosophical musings; sometimes, pie. An apple is a wonderful thing. I make sure to always have a couple of them in my handlebar bag during times of famine and hardship, when the road is long and the hills are heartbreaking. You never know when you need a Waldorf salad.

Which is why I travel with a salad bowl. But I´ll save that for another blog.

-- Mad Dawg copyright 2007