Inflation is a fact of present day Argentinian life. It’s measure and value dependant upon the political persuasion of the calculator. Our assessor is the first encounter with a peso price. The cost of a bus ticket from the airport to the centre of town. It’s risen 20% in the last eight months that we’ve been away. Which tallies with the stories that we’ve collected from the British financial press.

Sticky label conversion: 85 to 215

Our second check will come in town. A quick trip up to the city’s major tourist drag: Av. Florida. A pedestrian thoroughfare, that by mid morning will be choked by a trip hazard of new age craft sellers and freshly breakfasted wandering tourists, tango-show-with-dinner touts and sundry business sorts. The navigator requires none of these, but searches for the pesomongers, the blue market touts. Not difficult to find, they’re staked out twenty paces apart, five to a block, calling “cambio…cambio…” to any likely type, but never to the Portenos. Locals who either don’t have access to Dollars or who carry a scowl like an Edinburger during that festival. ‘Blue market’, an officially unrecognised, semi official Dollar and Euro exchange, whose rate today can be found on the front page of the BA Herald. She returns with a wad of creased, tattered and well worn notes and an inflation rate of fifty percent.

Another repreese, were over west in the provincial capital of La Rioja, requiring a top-up of spending power. There’s no Av. Florida, for there’s few overseas visitors, no obvious cambio sellers. So she reverts to playing the ignorant gringa, and enlist the services of the visitor information service. Too often it’s hard to know what these establishments are in existence for, and on occasions the navigator takes a perverse pleasure in confirming these prejudices. This time it takes a ‘phone call to start the positive visitor experience. A young man appears some time later, say his father would be interested in purchasing some dollars. There’s a collection of cycle police, complete with sirens, hanging around, there’s a general tumult of population milling in the plaza. It feels safe for a transaction. Still as ‘father’ fails to materialise, the doubts mount. I suspect the parent is virtual, but a rate is agreed, the navigator is invited to ‘step this way’, invited into the privacy, in the back of the information kiosk. The same kiosk that’s operated by the local authority. Officially unofficial.

Two physical measures. But it’s on the gas station forecourt, one of the few places where prices are regularly displayed, that we see the creeping increases. A ticking clock that records the fact. There are others less obvious ones. The ghosts of priced stickers that are grubby sticky shadows of previouse costs, gathering dust on the shelf’s edge. The map that was added to our collection ten years ago, that has increased fourteen hundred percent. Packets of biscuits come as cylinders, irrespective of brand, a recognisable length, that offers a neat symmetry on a shop shelf. Only now they’re more bagel than biscuit in shape, having acquired a hole in their middle. A missing part that you can’t but help feel has a potential for further inflation.

What never inflates is the cost of public transport. Our commuter train into the centre of town has in real terms, deflated to a quarter of it’s value from when we first visited. The ticket to get all the way to Tucaman, that one and a half day trip is priced at around two quid.

The trick will be to leave the country with not a single spare pesos.

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That remnant of a fourth form geography class, delivered by the stereotypical tweed jacketed, leather elbowed teacher. The formula that confirms what you intrinsically know: it’s colder on the top of Ben Nevis than it is down in Fort William. The sum a simple deduction of two degrees for every thousand feet.

These last few days have been prime examples. St. Miguel de Tucuman is known for being the hottest place in Argentina, but this is springtime, we’ll be ahead of the heat, or so we’ve convinced ourselves. Getting off the overnight train in the early morning was ‘interesting’. A simple euphemism for ‘got to find shade’. Still we convince ourselves that ‘we’ve still to acclimatise, tomorrow will be easier’.

Two days of overcast weather allow for a hastened, chastised retreat, a race for the Andean foothills. Whose hills are pale, ephemeral cutouts on the horizon, that even as we rise out of the fetid fug of the sugar Pampascapes, fail to form a hard focus. Yet the botanical graduations begin immediately. Sugar to tobacco, a narrow belt of stone fruit and blueberries, thence to Yungas jungle and cloud forest. culminating in the golden tussocks of the high country. From the laser precision of cropping agriculture to a natural abandonment. Tangles of aerial rooted figs and flowering trees, the zipping flights of hummingbird. Where every tree is a forest. A festoon of bromeliads and air plants. Through this I can hear an un-Argentine noise, the singing tones of a cascading river. Fast moving crystal water is so unusual, it’s the perfect traveling companion.

The road up to Valle del Tafi is marketed as the country’s longest continuous cycling downhill, and as is the standard on these occasions, is oft inflated to South American or World claim status. A eighty kilometre run. Comprehensible if you consider it as a downhill freewheel from Glasgow to Edinburgh. Which for us will be a long climb. A beautiful climb. We have those shade throwing jungle trees draped overhead, the resupply from the Rio Sosa and the company of the greater population of Tucuman escaping to the cool of the mountains and their Sunday asado. That lapse rate, it saves the sanity of a city. That blessed relief of physical geography.

Valle del Tafi has a similar history to the Raj hill stations of India, where the ruling Brits escaped for the season, only here the Tucumanos escape for the day. Hiring buses, piling into collectivos, loading up motos to stream in convoys up through the twist of hairpin bends, their ubiquity leaving us pondering if there will be any space for our tent. We need not have worried, for as the sun sets there’s a mass exodus. We’re told that it freezes at night. How will we survive?

That beautiful invigoration of cool mountain air and hot clear sun. You know from instinct, you don’t need the geography lesson to understand what it is like back down below. Lapse rates writ large.

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Perfect makeup, immaculate coiffure, dressed out of the city’s nicest stores. She wouldn’t look out of place in Edinburg’s Morningside or Glasgow’s Kelvinside and she isn’t out of place in Buenos Aires’ Niceside. The doña, the grand dame of San Isidro. She’s doing the daily shop at her local supermercado, possibly it’s the maid’s day off. Passing the bakery, she takes to a bit off quality control, snaffling a factura; those sugar encrusted two-bite morsels piled high, so invitingly, in the self-help trough. The treasure huntress. More evidences will be found later, at the verdura cabinet, where the vegetables wither under the dehydrating influence of air-con and the predation of the free pickers. Like the winter robin of a Glasgow childhood, that has already fat-tested the cream line of your school milk, so the styrofoam has partially been disrobed of it’s clingfilm and sampled. Free looters on the loose. Requesting the purchase of a pack of batteries in one store resulted in their incarceration in a security bag, to be released at the checkout. Thwarted treasure hunters. We met one French cycling couple who had been accused of ‘poverty’, for picking wild figs. On that occasion we too had watched overripe fruit dripping on the branch, covering the ground with windfalls. Nobody was interested in them. Funny Foreigner treasure hunters. Which might explain the carpets of crushed, sticky mulberries that we’ve ridden over of late. Of course it’s not just an Argentine trait; consider all the apples in the gardens in Haddington that never make it to the fruit bowl in the house.

What has triggered these thoughts was the disappearance of a certain kilometre post. Route National forty, Ruta Cuarenta is iconic in the Argentina psyche, in a similar league to the U.S.’ Route 66, or the A939 Cockbridge – Tomintoul. It runs from the Bolivian frontier to Tierra del Fuego. Over 5000km. We’ve played on it before, we’re back here again, but only for a few days. However, we do pass one of the more significant ‘k’ posts. Last time I liked the alliteration of numerals…RN40 4040, photographing and blogging the evidence. So it was somewhat disappointing to find that others had been attracted by the same significance and poached it. Souvenir treasure hunter.

If you’ve ever wondered where some of these liberated signages end up, try checking out Watson’s Lake, North Western Territories, Canada. They have a forest of acquired place names. Unofficially commissioned by inebriated students, it’s expanded to become the community’s main, well….only tourist attraction.

Anybody who knows our stair in Scotland, will realise that I too am not immune to collecting a certain type of physical trophy. Car number plates. One for each country explored. There’s but one single rule: roadkill only. Morally treasure hunted. Or as can sometimes seem to be the case: scalp hunted, taken from the not unfriendly driver but the enemy motorcar. Of course its at this point that my pinprick conscience reminds me; that incredible road, with it’s tunnels and bridges, its slick surface and two hour free-wheel, that’s saved over three hundred kilometres of deviation, wouldn’t exist without the infernal internal combustion engine. We’re all hypocrites at some point.

The real, lasting treasure that’s there to be hunted are the lasting images from a trip. The Sunday that we get hijacked and force fed asado steaks with chilled red wine. The presentation of a bottle of frozen water as the thermometer cruises around one hundred degrees. That short time between first light and sun up, when my world is cool and crystal sharp. Images storable only on memory.

Still I hunt a camera image that can encapsulate a place, a time, a trip. To be in the right airt at the right time, with the presence of mind to notice. To capture not to steal. That is my kind of treasure hunt.

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When we set off on our travels in 2003, we took no technology with us. None. Nada.  No mobile ‘phone, no laptop, no camera (yup, that’s right, no camera), no tablet, no Kindles, no electric boiler.  We bought phone cards in whichever country we were in, we used the Internet wherever we could find it – libraries, cafes, etc.  We used book exchanges, wrote letters and postcards, and had acres of paper maps which we sent home to long suffering friends when we were done with them.

 This should be the definitive version of this posting. The old blog site that I was happily working with has blown up, the tech wizard managed to recover all of the intended drafts. This new site has, with the latest connection decided to put the ‘publish’ button where the save button was a few moment earlier. Hence the rather truncated, unpunctuated blurb that recently came your way. That’s my excuse. I apologise..

I 

There was a time when the first dance on a long trip, the first hop from provincial capital to Central hub, would be a cramped affair. A short bump in a commuter plane, crushed by the tribes of power suits. You were prepared to thole the momentary sufferfest; after all it was only for an hour. The next jump would be considerably longer, but so too would be the leg room. That’s all changing. Only it’s in incremental centimetres. I’m convinced there was a point, a mere half decade ago that I could rest my head in my arms on the seat-back table in front, to ease the cramps and a dearth of circulation. The fellow sufferer ahead could recline and not snap my spine in twain. Not anymore. Don’t drop that portion controlled butter pat, for it will require the gymnastics of Houdini to recover it. There is but one sitting position, one that would have a posture tyrant salivating; “sit up, back straight, no slouching, or you’ll get yur knuckles wrapped”. It takes a contortionist to to find a position that might just allow for some broken sleep. It’s more ‘transports’ than journeys, as in an 18th century transports, of hulks, convicts and Botany Bay. It’s termed cattle class, when in fact it’s more ‘cattle crush’; that iron crate that a veterinarian uses to restrain a soon to be non-bull, whilst he wields the scalpel. 

As can be gathered, Air France is not high in my comfort estimations. Yet what is easy to forget is the fact that we’ve traded comfort for price. So with this thought in mind, and the guide book’s rather sniffy comments: ‘…a little like stepping back in time….that might appeal to those in no hurry…’ We buy tickets for a twenty six hour train journey. Vinyl covered bench seats, open window ventilation, and a reputation for non arrival. For compensation there’s the sense of adventure at a pace more akin to a cycle tour, with a fare structure that panders to the eternal thrift merchant. Buenos Aires to Santiago del Estero, Good Airs to St James of the Marsh all for the price of a coffee on Scotrail. Inflation is a fact of Argentine life, yet this is the quoted rate in our ageing guidebook, all the other suggested prices for comestibles are so antiquated as to be irrelevant. What amounts to a free ride, a ‘get out of jail’ card. Yet another hassle-free escape route from the Megapolis Buenos Aires. The shame is the near death of passenger rail travel in a country that at one time was dependent for it’s development on the iron horse. A situation that is highlighted as we pedal away from the station. A brand new road that cuts a swath through one barrio, bridging roads and free of inconvienient intersections, terminating on the terminal concourse, all for the sole use by the Argentine bus services. A statement of intent: rail is dead. 

The promised delays never materialised, we won on the seating lottery, our bikes rematerialised at the other end. That, in my estimation, counts as a success. We score the three-seat bench, but don’t acquire the third passenger, which gives us the possibility of one bed, and another on the floor. We’re far from alone in these arrangements, walking the aisle in the middle of the night was an adventure trip avoiding the stepping stones of sleeping faces and prostrate lilos. Then, for a further bit of colour, as we enter Rosario, we get the local kids game: ‘stone the train’, and now realise why the windows are made of cracked Perspex.

It might not be fast, but what’s time on a tour? It might not be smooth, but the motion memory will rock me to sleep the next night. It might not be modern, but it still works. It’s another perfect way for a cyclist to circumvent the torc that strangles a capital city.

 Remember to placate the Lords of Misrule. Take not their name in vain, for they will come back and hit you where it hurts most; usually a puncture when you’re running late for the train. These pantheons of pranksters come in many guises, but it’s the mischief makers that you need to watch; Kili, Loki and that wee imp, Murphy. They’ve always had a field day of opportunity with each new technological innovation. The broken spoke on that first oxen cart. The typo on the first Gutenberg printing press. The burst radiator on Mr. Ford’s first model T. The ‘Houston, we have a problem’. It’s well understood by every farmer that a combine harvester never breaks down on a wet day and that when there are only two cars in the whole state of Pennsylvania, the tricksters will ensure that they crash head on. So as we enter the last week before we flee the winter and the house sitters move in, so the ‘Captains of the capricious’ will choose now to burst a pipe, leak a roof, fail a radiator. We got lucky, it was only an electric iron that deceased. An implement that until recently, lurked near redundant in a cupboard, that gave out on the second last uniform shirt of the season. Having partially failed the ‘mischief test’, Lord Misrule returns for one more effort as we’re about to pedal off properly. Another gremlin. It’s a comment on how addicted this western man has become to his ‘opiate of connectivity’. Only eleven years ago, we set off on the ‘long tour’, our level of technology was a pencil and a jotter. An atlas of maps. No mobile, no computers, not even a camera. We survived, we thrived, we used an object called a callbox, for the vicarious travelers back home weren’t ethereally connected to social media. This time the ‘Queen of Cunning’ has defuncted the tablet charger. Replacement will inevitably be overpriced, over-rated and not over here. She has another giggle; the spare is lying plugged in beside our bed…..in Scotland. 

Transporting two new hub geared wheels for our hibernating cycles, a retro-fit that requires a degree of modification, would suggest a level of confidence that might be more hope over expectation. A hostage to fortune. The possibilities for the trickster are legion. Starting with the Ikea wobble: the missing irreplaceable part, closely followed by the sino-scripted manual: pictograms of confusion, or the possibility that you’ve ordered the wrong kit: the AD/0144, when what was intended was an AD/0114. So whilst an alteration in the comfort of our own front room, with the reassuring knowledge that rescue from ‘Mike’s Bikes’ is just down the street and there’s a returns envelope for errors, would be reassuring, we’re the wrong side of the equator, behind a customs barrier with punitive tax charges. Got to get it right first time. So if we’re to tangle with the Lords of Misrule, a strategy of war will be required. The Plan, with its components of anticipation, speculation and resident mechanic. Thus far the best way to thwart the ‘Deils Of Deceit’, is to give up, cancel the order, return to plan: original. Yet we’ve been here before, this is the third trip that we’ve dreamed on this modification, only to renege, only to meet someone on the road who’s toting a hub gear, only for the wee green eye of avarice to intrude. Of course it’s ‘want over need’. For so long we’ve been in thrall to the Great God Shimano, with his spurious upgrades that are simply a bolt size change, with his use of condescending jargon and a mumble of part numbers. It will be interesting to sit as an acolyte before a different deity.

The omitted part, the Japanned manual, the dyslexic order? All is well. All parts present and correct. The journal is an English written workshop bible. But it’s the engineering that stands out. It’s exquisite. It’s German. My mechanic, the one I brought with me, is in cycle heaven. Of course it works, She got it right first time. Well….there was that one moment, that one place where the Lords of Misrule could intrude, a sliver of hope, a place at which to ruin the whole project.

What comes next is anorak tech, but anybody who has ever tried to fit a rear mech on a pedal bike will understand how frustrating it is to hold a spring-loaded part whose sole ambition is to blacken a thumbnail, induce hysteria, damage a thread, render a cycle useless. We came close to defeat, to disaster. Of course the thread got nipped, which had the Lords of Misrule salivating and myself speculating on the Spanish for ‘Taps and Dies’. Some coffee and lateral thinking has the trickster temporarily in retreat. It’s like playing the ‘puggies’, a few coins will drop, just enough to tempt you back into the game, for next time it might be all four fruits.

The bikes are ready for a road test. Time for an interim settling up of the Diddler’s Ledger: am I happy to trade a fully operational bike for an unchargable tablet? It’s a No Brainer.

BHow can you get excited about a new travel, even one that’s scoped to last half a year? When between one and ones adventure are sixteen hours of aero transport, sandwiching between fourteen hours of enforced layover? Thirty hours of dead butt. To which I can now add the spectre of industrial action.

Excitement is the anticipation of the pleasurable, the unknown and the hunt for the quirky. Only there’s little anticipation to be found in these prospects. The guarantee comes with an enforced inoculation of pathogens and recycled farts, the promise for a purgatory of haute coutureial shopping. And by the way, Air France pilots have been on strike for the last ten days.

Now I’m no different from the next person, I like a deal, that and I like to burnish a reputation for thrift. We even, on occasions, learn from our previous experiences. So yet again it’s a ‘red eye’ flight into Northern Europe, followed by an overnighter down to South America. Which begs a question: does an accountant somewhere take pleasure in creating flight packages with the maximum of inconviences, or do they hope through the medium of tedium that I will succumb to pleasurable retail experiences afforded by tax-free diamonds and stiletto heeled shoes? At least on this occasion we did take cognisance from previous travels and avoided an additional stop-off in Brazil and decided against sleeping out on the terrazzo of Edinburgh International. The former a tale of bureaucratic inefficiency, the latter one of ‘enhanced visitor experience’. One, a three hour queue of only ten persons, just to acquire two boarding passes, the other a sleep deprivation of incessant fire alarm tests and inquisitive police constables.

The early flight requires an anti-social check-in which would necessitate a six mile hike and an ‘all night bus’ to get away from home, so it’s a cheap room in central Edinburgh. An oxymoron, especially as we’re offered the seventh floor view of the capital’s iconic establishments. The North British, the Scott Monument, the Old Town, the Royal Bank, all spread out across the rooftops of Princes street’s department stores. A quirk, a fluke or has our God of Cyclists out trumped the ‘Lords of Misrule’? From St. Giles’ crown tower on the horizon to Top Shop’s air-con to the fore, from the Castle’s ramparts in the west, to the clanking tram down by the ‘gardens’, the panorama stretches from Altars to Mammon, from the Dark Ages to the New Enlightenment. (Give it another ten years, and you’ll start to hear Edinburgians crowing about their tram, whilst the Weegies in the West will point out that they’ve had a rapid transit Metro system for over a century). 

We sit in our alumina tube on the edge of the runway for an hour, whilst ‘awaiting clearance from Brussels’. Only we’re supposed to be heading for Paris. Maybe someone’s worried, now that the pilots have returned to work, it will be the turn of French air traffic controllers to catch the revolutionary fever, and seconded services to the Belgians. In truth, our return to Buenos Aires was hassle free, even our new ‘tax paid’ diamonds; our new Rohloff hub geared wheels came off the carousel intact. That, and to my eternal grief, the navigator reneged on my offer of new stilettos, opting for her cycling sandals.

This ‘journey” is simply a means to a “destination”. Now the real journey can commence. Time to rebuild the bikes.

I’ve been thinking about Chile a good deal today.  

I woke in the early hours to news of a big earthquake just off the coast of Chile, in the vicinity of Iquique, with tsunami warnings all along the coast.

Having an insomniac night, which happens occasionally, I gave in and got up. On YouTube was footage of cities being evacuated in the dark – in particular, Iquique.

Iquique was where I ended up in hospital for three nights last December, having my broken elbow sorted.  In a very nice clinic, right on the seafront. Clinica Iquique couldn’t get much closer to the sea, and, sure enough, the first surge was about 2.5m and flooded ‘a medical clinic’ and the bus terminal.  My room was on the 5th floor,  the operating theatre wasn’t.  

Now we’re wondering about the people that we met, who were so kind to us; what state the attractive waterfront is in, how our seaside campground fared; how far through the low part of the city the water travelled, and was our wee hostel affected.  Fortunately, there seem to have been few casualties, although the police are still hunting for the three hundred escaped prisoners. These events so often happen in places far away, just names on the map. Iquique is much more than that for us.