Camping and gravity are not compatible.  Place a full cup of coffee on what appears to be a level surface, and a tiny piece of grit will miraculously  materialise underneath.  The effect will be a rising tide of precious caffeine making it’s way towards a piece of electronics.  Wash out a pair of knickers and they will inevitably leap from your hands, to fall on the only patch of gritty, muddy ground around.  Grind a bike to the top of a mountain, with the prospect of a gravity assisted free wheel, only to find that it’s been cancelled, neutralised by the wind. Enthusiastic hand gesticulations will always end in an embarrassment and a red wine-stained tablecloth. The severed cream cheese wedge, sat on a plate, that catches in the wind, and ends cut side down.

It’s when camping that you soon start to realise that, not only does Nature abhor straight lines, but she detests flat surfaces.  A level place is a luxury, it’s why we seem to revere the often utilitarian, sometimes decrepit, Argentine ‘asado’ and concrete table.

So – do you blame Gravity, Newton or the hamfisted Scots cyclist?

Quechuan tradition requires that you offer your first mouthful of food to Pacha Mama, to Mother Earth. Tradition doesn’t say who or how it’s received, but I’m sure that the ants are her handmaidens.

They come in a selection of sizes and a compilations of temperaments. From the glossy black leaf-cutters that forage on vegetation, to a tiny rusty brown omnivores that have successfully gained entry to a  sealed bag containing a salami. Maybe it’s the chilli in the sausage that gives their bites so much fire, so much success in defending their prize. A pyrrhic victory, as they and the meat both ended as landfill. The Navigator is feeling victimised: the mosquitoes inject through clothes and have raised itching red lumps, a bee attack follows and now it’s the turn of the Fire Ants. How they can enter a double sealed ziplock bag, navigate round three-fourths of a screw top jar, is a question for our time.  What is certain, they will inherit the earth when those who, erroneously believe they have  priority on the food chain, have left. 

Road kill a skunk, grind it into the asphalt with unrelenting rubber, desiccate for a few months, wait until it becomes an integral part of the Macadam. The weasel teeth, the pointed nose, the double white stripes, that signature scent. The stink that lingers, the pervasive aroma of bad breakfast; of acrid coffee and burnt toast. Now add a rain storm and  the smell will liquefy, a vapour flowing like a thin fog, spreading from one carcase to the next, until the journey is dissolved in it’s gentle reek.

Too often the the roadkill debris is the sole evidence for the noises that emerge from the roadside verges. The multiplicity of croaks and grunts, weeps and sighs. The ones that sound like a wet chamois being wrung out, the distant, incessant car alarms, the road peckering digger, the greasless bearing, the overzealous referee. It builds into a soft cacophony, a background music that plays to the dark, right through the night. Yet there is one caller that had us perplexed.  A daylight song of falling sorrowful notes, that sounds like it might come from a bird, one that would complement the sad call of the Mourning Dove. The noise was coming up out of the flooded sedges by the roadside verge, and not, as I expected from the bushes on the fence line. It only takes a thrown pebble and the subsequent silence, like a flicked switch, to give the answer.  A frog.  Many frogs. I try to verify my own theory that the smaller the amphibian, the bigger the noise. Small Frog Syndrome.  All I ever get for my effort is a plop and series of concentric, spreading rings.  This frogs’ chorus will accompany us for several days, the noise becoming less languid and more manic, of turbo-charged F1Grand Prix cars screaming passed the chequered flag.  Are they a part of the carnage of blotted carcasses litter the verge, odourless dried out husks?  Then the next skunk broadcasts its presence.

The storm starts with silence.  A  rolling bombardment of flashes, clashes of bruised orange and grubby white, hemmed in, below the clouds on the farthest horizon.  The pounding of ironclads, the broadsides from the dreadnoughts of an historic navy. The dull, distant roar of inclement weather. Now the wind hits, caving and vexing the flimsy skin of the tent wall, an assault that first warns and then threatens, of the impending onslaught.  An invisible hand that shakes and pulls, that wants to wake us up.  A light shrapnel of spattering rain, is a prelude that soon transcends into a maelstrom of noise. The lightning losing contact with it’s thunder, as the blasts roll one on top of the other. The storm descends into a paroxysm of noise.  Our immediate world shrunken in, tormented by the near constant strobing of light, the pummelling of  the bombardment and the violence of weather.  Even the frogs are silenced.

It’s at this moment, at the height of the attack, that we hear a new sound, and feel the spatter of rain drops.  On peering through the bug-net door, we find a white dog shaking itself dry.  He, they don’t do ’its’ here, looks pathetically at us, as if to say  ’no way, José, am I going back out there’. I’m not sure how he managed such a feat without pulling a peg, but I suspect it’s not the first time he’s preformed this trick.  At least there’s no barking.  I hope there’s no fleas.  When I check a short while later, he’s curled up tight, unlike the flooded-out ants who are evacuating to high ground.  The massed swarms, that are crawling over and through our marooned panniers.  At this rate we might have to apply for refugee status.

Our  tent is starting to  acquire the features of a water bed, as the groundsheet ripples with a rising tide of puddles.  As the crackle of shorting out electricity fizzles across the sky, the vibration of the hammering blows rise up through the ground.  It’s now that we get the mortar round, an explosion that shatters into my sense, an instant injection of adrenalin, a racing heart rate.  The smell of wet camp-fire drifts into the tent.   How close?…Too close. 

We seem to be trapped between two competing  storm cells  The belligerents truculent invective and quarrelsome abuse reaches a peak and then, slowly they disengage.  Two battered, punch-drunk combatants that are still reluctant to back down, still they fire off an occasional retaliatory salvo, a final spat.  Now the rain settles down to a wet night, we breathe out, stepping down the picket from it’s puddle watch, as the tide turns and the ponding gets a chance to drain. Only the ants seem to be the new invaders, attacking  through the zip’s defences.  Besieged, we resort to defence, repelling this next invading army of fugitives.

 A rhythmic beat of rain settles in, the frog chorus resumes and the dog sleeps in the night.

Fighting bulls and prancing heroes present a particular set of problems for the monumental sculptor.  Whilst both are quadrupeds and therefore could have four potential points of contact with terra firma, yet the latter is dictated by a tradition that states: all conquering heroes’ horses must be gallopers and ‘paw the air’. It must make for some interesting sums for the artist and the engineer, calculating the stresses and strains, the balancing point, with and without a head full of defecating pigeons. Both of whom must dearly wish that our hero was a better horseman and that he could get his feisty beast under control, and ‘would you watch where you’re waving that stick, it’ll only end in tears, you’re  going to poke someones eye out with it’. There’s little concern for posturing, it’s all about balance for the concrete toro, a bovinal sentiment of ‘four legs good, two legs….I’ll fall over’.  A solid stance or a raging case of elephantitis, a genetically modified object or excessive overengineering?  A beast that looks like he’s been cloned from Albrecht Durer’s Papal rhinoceros.  At least his dignity and ’raison d’etre’ are entire, hanging free, unlike his brethren who grace the ring-road roundabouts of Rockhampton.  All are from a similar mould, anatomically perfect, each muscle group balanced, long in the back, deep in the chest.  A demonstration that’s a credit to the Australian breeders and the Queensland sculptor and a demerit for the man on the concrete mixer.  One Brangus’ is supported by the indignity of a metal rod, whilst a Braford’s has dropped and crumbled into dust.

The Victorians would have been mortified by this blatant display, this representation of sexual reproductive organs. Remember they were the generation that put skirts on chairs to cover the immodesty of bare wooden legs, which might explain why the ‘Moffat Tup‘, the Scot’s border town’s monument to local agriculture, is emasculated.

All local heroes in their various ways.  The condition of the puritanic tup and the indignant Ozzy beefies  have entered into their own local folklore. Whilst  the military horseman, because we’re in Uruguay, has by law to be General  Artigas, stuck up on a plinth, in the middle of a plaza, has become an improvised bird roost. The Los Toros, is now El Toro as he’s  been shed from his heard and corralled on a roundabout at the entrance to Pasos de Los Toros, his drove mates’ images now rendered to bottles of fizzy grapefruit juice.
Dignified reality or prudishness primness? It probably depends upon your age.

On a ripio road, out in the campo, on a route that redefines the definition of the term ’quiet’, one that might  require the addition of either a superlative or an expletive.  Little by way of traffic has troubled us, so it should be no surprise that, when we stop to fill our water bottles at an estancia’s water bore, a couple on a moto will pull over and present us with an ice cold bottle of water. ¿De donde son?, ’ally manny’… it must still be Uruguay.

WAVE  v. (no obj.)  move one’s hand, or other appendage, to and fro in greeting.   (ORIGIN)  old English: wafian. 
(USAGE) 

Landrover wave: (mainly UK):  the restrained elevation  of one finger above the steering wheel.

Motorbike wave: (mainly European): elevation of left leather clad leg from gear peg, extended only to other bikers in greeting and cyclists in sympathy.

Two finger wave: (mainly Anglo-Saxon, Europe, North America): extended by vehicle operators to any incumbent who might have delayed them for a nanosecond, and by incumbent to departing vehicle for a lack of courtesy, respect for road space, or their red necks.

(with obj.) Maté Wave: (Uruguayan): Full elevated  hand movement, with it’s attached bombilla, sometimes preceded with a headlight flash and hoot on the horn.

Whilst being the noun for a collection of 16th century Germanic dances, is, with the addition of a question mark, a request from the locals as to our nationality.  The assumption being that all pannier carrying cyclists are German.  We’ve been asked so often, I begin to wonder if the question doesn’t have another meaning.  A local colloquialism implying ‘overloaded cyclist with a sunburnt nose’.

Strangely, the same conversation in the southern United States, would end with the question as to whether Scotland was close to Germany.  The great geopolitical conundrum: is an elephant close to a louse?  On those occasions we would just agree, on these we offer some further clarifications, ’al norte de los Reinos Unitos; it’s easier than having a Spanish language discussion about a nationalist government’s  single question plebiscite or renegotiating re-entry to an economical union.                      

‘Where are you from?’, as a conversational opener, is an improvement on the more conventional discourse about the weather. ’bit damp, but they say it’ll dry up later’.  ¿De donde son? has led to a discussion about the differences between neighbours and the fiscal advantages of being an Uruguayan pensioner living in Brazil. The former also yielded  our first ‘Tott’ encounter.  Jesus lives on the road, moving from job to job by bike, living in a poly-sheeted dome tent.  He confirms that it’s legal to roadside camp for a couple of days and that you’ll always get a free meal and a bed in an Uruguayan estancia, but that it’s a lot harder in Argentina.  Our first ’tott’ of the trip, and it’s in a foreign tongue. Accommodation recommendations, it makes for a nice change from the usual dire warnings about the dangers of road cycling.  But then cycling isn’t a deviant activity here, even our transfrontera pensioner has only recently upgraded from push-pedal to kick-start moto.

The comedian’s stereotypical portrait is of the towel draped, sun lounger thieving Fritz; my image of the Germanic traveller  is closer to a motorised version, the Mercedes converted truck with a rack of jerry cans, the stash of sand ladders, the tiers of headlamps, and a world bragging map on the back. We, on the other hand will carry on being ‘Ally Manny-ing’ Scots cyclists, helping to bolster our version of a stereotype.

And just how close can an elephant get to a louse?  Very. Especially when it stamps on it.

I do like the quirky dislocation that language can produce. This one didn’t throw me , but I did like the short loop, the little mind game it threw me into.
  
‘50 Hollande: Total Liquidation’.  It’s the lead line on a flyer, pasted up in the petrol station window, deep in dairy country. What has the French president done to annoy the agricultural fraternity of central Uruguay?  Are the French farmers up to their usual dastardly tricks, burning cow carcasses whilst the gendarmerie placidly look on?  Or have they genetically modified fifty new presidents, that have escaped and now require erradication before they self-replicate and  take over the Reichstag, the German parliament?

The answer is, of course, immediately obvious: the advert is for a remate, a roup, a displenishment sale.  All the stock must sell, it’s just unfortunate that France’s unpopular premier shares the same name as a breed of dairy cow.

As a postscript, and another piece of inconsequential trivia, I now need to concoct a title for this piece, which has lead me down yet another lexiconic slope. If regicide is the killing of a king, what is the ’cide’ for a presidential termination?  My ’Roget’ didn’t help, but amongst associated suggestions were ’uxoricide’, ‘vaticide’, and ’Thug’. The latter caught my curiosity, because it has been given proper noun status. It transpires that they were devotees of  the Hindu  diety Kali, who waylaid travellers and ritually strangled them.  Another one of the many words that have passed into the English language by way of Hindi and Sanskrit.

So in the absence of a proper dictionary definition for my conundrum, might I be allowed to offer a plausible one: ‘Bovicide’?

Fact One: Last night we slept in a cutting, on iron sleepers, between steel tracks of a disused railway. 

Fact Two: Tonight I watched a passenger train rumble across the Rio Negro. 

Fact Three:  My map shows this line to be one and the same to the one that we slept on last night. We had wondered as to why, given the world wide demand for ferrous metals, why the disused ties and rails had not been salvaged or stolen.

Time for some answers. The railways finally closed in ’88, then reopening again in’95, $30m is being invested in their resurrection, using Paraguayan wooden sleepers, funded by Russia, in lieu of debt repayment.  A rolling programme of replenishment that is heading for last night’s camping. That’s change.