Leaving San Jachel, Ready to Go
Added on Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 by Carole Nash Editor
Leaving San Jachel, Ready to Go
The route out of San Jose de Jachel took me away from route 40 and in the direction of Huaco and along side the Sierra Andean de la Battea. From the west the sun left a smudge on a dirty brown lake but the magnificence was measured in size rather than charm. The road narrowed and wound between cliff sides of the Battea until I joined the 40 once again. Long straights gave me no choice but to ride toward mountains that seemed to take an age to reach before bearing slightly towards Guandacol. After a sharp change of direction towards Villia Union I met up with a group of riders already on their first café-con-leche and the toughest motorcycle expedition the world has even known had stopped for elevenses two hours early.
I had to construct some business and went online at a YPF station by the plaza in the town centre. It was challenging in itself to try and bridge the gap between such worlds. Over the Cuesta de Miranda the road gave off wide sweeping bends until 10 kilometres either side of the two thousand metre summit, the tarmac gave way to red piste and gravel.
From time to time Erik said something that amused – I call it the Philosophy of Erik. “If I get stopped for speeding in Peru I tell the policeman that I would like to pay but I do not have any money, so I pitch my tent and make a cup of tea and offer the officer a cup and after two hours he says ‘please go away, you really piss me off smiling like that when I am not happy, you can go away and don’t come back,’ and I do as he says, but here it is too fast, there is no time to put up my tent”.
In Catamarca three of the lads popped over to a house of ill repute to become generous benefactors, in the biblical sense, of the fragile Argentine economy. Such supportive measures were paid for by the hour and remarkably, two of the riders had shagged themselves into a stupor at every available opportunity since Buenos Aires. That morning, despite the less than salubriousness of what was mistakenly called a hotel, everyone was bright and breezy. Finding a few dead cockroaches in their room was now seen to be no worse than sharing with live ones, so small mercies that my clients were now not so shallow as to simply only need clean sheets. Jonny was panicking as usual. So many of these riders are used to being in control of their lives that if they are a percentage point outside that envelope they feel uncomfortable. His GPS settings, which he had spent weeks preparing, were no longer useful and he started to talk in a higher and higher voice. “But I have no map and no GPS and ze last bit of my control has been taken away from me,” and his voice began to squeak very loudly, “zis project is called ze Nick Sanders Exploration instead of Expedition, no?”
Everyone managed the 7am start with a perky smile and as usual, in Catamarca morning traffic, we set off. Sugarcane was everywhere, tall leafy shoots that closed the horizon down to either-side of the road. The route ambled through the shabby edges of small industry vibrantly trying to make a living. Argentina is also a land of shop keepers and trucks carrying cargo from place to place. At the edge of a town, men lined up across the road burning tyres. It was a protest about low wages, and being tourists, we were let through the small friendly cordon until at St Lucia one shop steward thwarted our progress. He would not let me through. This happened during my first record attempt the length of the Americas in 1996. I was on schedule to ride from Ushuaia to Prudehoe Bay in under 30 days when I rode into a similar cordon north of Meddallin in Colombia. As well as being the kidnap capitol of the world, the FARC movement was at its strongest, I had to deal with this mob. Over 400 farmers were angry at the prices the government were forcing them to sell their crop and all but one shop steward let me through. I had to make the ferry that night from Carteghena to keep the record alive but it wasn’t to be as I was forced off my bike before the police dragged both me and my machine out of what had become a violent affray. So this time around I kind of hung around and smiled, when as fate would have it, an Argentinean biker turned up and said a local had told him how he could ride through a back way across the village and come out the other side, so we did.
The group were ahead as Caroline and I climbed into cloud. The water in the rivers began to wash around boulders and as the mist clung around the treetops it made me think of my home country of Wales. Like home, it rains as if in a cloud forest most days. Here such a forest is called a Yungas. It is a whispering land where the trees and the cloud absorb all the sound. There was no ricochet from my bike against the bark of the trees, no return at all from the racket of my engine, just nothing. The mist lapped around the gills of my bike complementing the sound of water being dashed against boulders. The foliage was dense. It was a jungle. Then suddenly, and it was really quite quick, the cloud forest opened up to a plateau and then to the widest of plains contained by magnificent mountains. At Tafi del Valli the eternally snowy peaks gave their name to the Nevados del Aconquija, a landscape of the Gods. The extinct volcano, Cerro Pelao, stood there, a spent force, now shoulder to shoulder with the rest of its craggy brothers, and it was from here that cloud drifted down huge crevices like a waterfall emerging from a dream.
On the other side I descended from over 10,000 feet to plains of vineyards that stretched as far as the foot of the faraway mountains. Everything was brown and green. At Cafayate I met up with the riders at the campsite on the edge of town and the first person I spoke to was Jonny. He acknowledged that the day’s ride was excellent. This was a deep admission that my scent of route was to be trusted.
The next day in the main square of Cafayate the trees are quite still. Views that seep through the tree lined streets are of high brown mountains already eroded of colour by a warm morning sun. The pace of life is gentle. Dogs saunter in a friendly way and little boys on bicycles ride on errands for their mum. It’s a Saturday and everything is calm. There is no business for me to be done, no sponsors to satisfy, no family to appease. The riders have been sent on their way and I relax with a coffee. In the Cafe de los Vinas the interiour has the feel of a conquistadors chamber, high walls lead to ceiling of natural wooded beams. Wicker chairs are positioned around mahogany tables and echoes of waiters in the kitchen.
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The view from the bike today was of striated rock forms bent with immense pressure. Cacti and red dirt reminded me of a mini-mid-west, a small Texas or New Mexico. Away from the mountains the sky was deepest blue and the weather on the tops of the sharp edged sierra, traps clouds on the uppermost reaches either, by an inversion or simply as cotton wool balls are spiked by thorns.
