Unmemorable Riding
Added on Monday, April 19th, 2010 by Carole Nash Editor
Unmemorable Riding
The route out of San Carlos de Bariloche was extraordinarily beautiful. Situated in the shadow of the slopes of Cerro Otto, the road rose and wound deeply into the Nahuel Huapi national park. Following Lake Nahuel Huapi, the road clung tightly to every contour, a bead of bends that would have followed one of the passes guarded jealously by generations of indigenous Indians. Early Spanish explorers would have been desperate to hunt down the wealth of the ‘City of the Caesars’, local legend of which attributed to these parts.
The expectations from a journey are unbelievably high, yet some towns are so unmemorable it beggars belief that a few hours after experiencing one of the best rides in years, some of the towns can no longer be remembered so much is passing through my head. That is maybe more to do with my inability to remember and process quickly enough what I have seen, and that only the jagged edges prick my consciousness and only the truly dramatic stick there. To be fair, a biker on the road glimpses only parts of the day, sees snatches of mountain compared with how much time he spends reading the surface of the road. A bump or de-rumble here, a cliff edge across the way, cramped as I am between a rock side and a very long drop to a scratchy plain below, riding is more to do with simply staying on the bike than absorbing the view. Chilecito comes and goes in minutes – a town of several thousand people relegated to forgetfulness almost before I’ve left.
Long straight sections of tarmac curb my impatience as the link between interesting parts of the days’ ride begins to lesson. It is a perfect combination of sweeping bends in glorious mountainous scenery sandwiched between long sections of road so true you could embarrass a sharp edge. Likewise, Argentina’s cities are built in street blocks, a grid of street names like in any great American city, and their long distance roads follow this mathematical latticework. On the route 40 out towards Farmantina, the road forks at Pitull to continue its demonic journey to another set of mountains which it never intends to cross. At San Blas de los Sauces, a ribbon villages which stretches along the road for ten miles before being cast away as route 60 crosses and takes me to Almogasta, I am suddenly in a small cheeky little place with a plaza and a quietness that belies belief. After Villa Mazan the 60 rises above the plains and back into the corners I continue until begins to get dark.
Covering an area the size of Portugal, the province of Neuquen indicates the northern limits of Patagonia. The unmistakable fairytale cone of Volcan Lanin can be seen for miles. Meaning ‘choked himself to death’ in the local Indian language Mapudungun, it is now thought to be extinct and that is how we said goodbye to the toughest part of Route 40. Now we were in an area of arid desert-like conditions, defined by an area of huge glacial lakes, jagged peaks and fulsome forests. Vast expanses of parched steppes and museta replace the windswept landscape we had come to know. The spiky Cordillera has replaced the great Patagonian Andean forests and the delicate stone stacks that stand proud against softer sediments, look like pillars from the Gods.
Between San Carlos de Bariloche and Zapala the lakes were once graced by flocks of wildfowl now eaten by perch introduced by European settlers. The road wound between mountain peaks until I reached a plateau of sorts that signalled the start of a journey entering the second half of our adventure in Argentina. As the landscape flattened nearing Zapala, vast vistas of mountain ranges sat tantalisingly close but were in fact faraway. As if cut from the thinnest basilica, layers of mountains stood sandwiched by a fine mist that gave off a sense of strangely dominant fragility.
Suddenly I realise I am getting confused. Days and places roll into one. In fact it all gets mixed up. I start writing about events and places before they have happened and when they do there is a sense of déjà vu! Confused? That’s travelling for you. The next day, or was it the day before, at St Isabelle the one and only gas station on a long stretch of road is without power and cannot serve fuel. The electricity supply stopped ten minutes before I arrived allowing half the group to continue while the rest were forced to wait. Across the way from this windswept flatland Jonny Johanson, that great Viking of a man arrived looked equally confused. “Why is there no electricity here,” he said, “it says on my GPS that there is electricity everywhere across the Pampas,” and then he realised he had half a ton of fuel on board and left us to fend for ourselves. The last time I was stuck at a gas station with an electricity outage was during my Parallel World journey, when for 36 hours in Tanzania, I squatted a delightful little hotel on the edge of a windswept small town. Here it was just windswept. Two small dogs were snapping at their fleas while mum and her puppy tussled playfully. More riders turned up but still no power. Every time some of the riders stopped they smoked more and a few were getting fatter. If this was an expedition for middle-aged men to find their youth, it was for some a missable moment. And, there are those on this trip with questionable health yet, against all the rules of science, they are dumbfounding the experts. Dr C expected half of them to have dropped dead by now so saving on hotel bills, but I held out more hope. The quest for eternity comes in small moments yet for some they never come at all…”no show without Punch,” as my old dead mum irritatingly used to say. These mad looking large chaps with questionable medical issues will get to Alaska and live to a long age. Jonny once told me that an Indian guru said to him many years ago in Singapore that he’d live until he was 85 years old. His total belief was based on the fact the chap got half the name of his wife right – Helger something (isn’t everyone from Norway called Helger something?) – he believed in his immortality.
The BMW squad had come and gone. They would be soon sitting in their hotel quaffing beer and regaling themselves of the times they never got it wrong. Good for them. We on our Japanese bikes were the also-rans, the ones that graced the rear. Then it got worse. The electricity outage in this God forsaken blister threatened to go on for days and I had visions of the trip not reaching Alaska because a fuel station in an otherwise dusty puddle in the Pampas hadn’t paid its electricity bill. At this point, the group of Argentine sports bike riders who passed us earlier, who we passed when they ran out of fuel a few miles back, turned up. “Your wife, she has dangerous eyes,” one of them said about Dr C after he’d been seated for a few minutes. “You should see what she’s like with a proboscope,” I said, but it got lost in the translation. Nevertheless it was good humoured. I was a little sheepish when they asked where we where from and said that we had a rider from Norway and a Malay bloke from a headhunting tribe in Borneo. English was maybe a bit sensitive as we were just then drilling for oil near the Falklands. Personally I wanted to say that Los Malvinas is probably a shabby bit of rock not far from Antarctica that is valuable in as much as someone else wants it. I think if Argentina said that it didn’t interest them because it was a costly place to maintain and that the inhabitants were a load of ridiculously rich sheep-sh****rs, we’d probably end up giving it to them.
40kms up the road I finally ran out of fuel. The 10 litres of petrol stored in the back-up vehicle was in fact diesel so that was me on the trailer for now. It was lovely looking around. On both sides of the road, vast areas of bush land were encircled by kilometres of fence. To me it looked like a bush farm, but that of course was not it. To enliven the drab view I invented pumas and vicunas prowling around the undergrowth. I pretended I could see yellow brea, a broom-like shrub to add dazzle to the dirty browns and greens.
That night the riders were discontent. The flat straight roads were not to their liking. Several of the riders refused to ride on piste and that made routing a problem. Do I disregard their interest for the sake of the larger group who would ride anywhere, or do I respect these people for taking from the trip what they were capable of enjoying? Their involvement meant the price could be kept at a level other rides could afford. It was a simple economic judgement on my behalf that meant some fabulous personalities would not be disenfranchised from something that might in some important ways change their lives.
On the road to Mendoza a text came through from crashed rider Jon Hemmings. After being taken by turbo-prop to Buenos Aires he was now flying first class to London. The bike insurance specialists Carole Nash had done a tremendous job, even supplying pretty nurses for those important clean-ups. As a long time solo adventurer I was astonished at the help he had been given to get home. Me, I would fester in some cockroach inhabited mud hut waiting patiently for the pain to subside, while he was returning to a comfortable existence full of truncated dreams. Back here the road was once again long and straight. Bordered by tall quick growing trees called Alamos. In 12 years they can grow to the size of a four-story house and are planted as windbreaks to protect vast acres of Rioja and Malbec vines.
By nightfall, I had reached San Jose de Jachel where I thought the hotel quite charming. Neon writing illuminated tourist photographs of areas of local outstanding interest. There were examples of interesting geological totems, standing stone stacks, dry canyons, plains of desert, perhaps half a dozen things to see before moving on. The riders had started to arrive during the early afternoon whilst we in the back-up jaloped in at half past eleven.
