It’s sat on my left shoulder, sat at ten to the hour, for the better part of a cycling morning, only starting to recede back to a ‘quarter to’ as the day’s heat reaches it’s zenith. We’re running up the Valle del Uco, heading for the stretched out conglomeration of towns that makes up Mendoza and it’s environs. Still in an infatuation with Ruta Cuarenta. Aconcagua is so massive a mountain that it takes it three whole days to pass us by. It’s prominence is immense, yet scale is hard to apportion. A weather front spreads, rolls out from the east, out from the Pampa and approaches the Andean cordilleras. It only reaches part way up the slopes. It’s only then that you start to realise the height and size of the barrier. Those low ridges that you took to be mere hills , are in fact high mountains in their own right, and would grace any north European bagger’s tick list or postcard collection. Only today these poor hills are down graded to ’Class II’, and accorded the graceless title: ’pre-Cordilleras’

Each day, as we slowly pass by, we have a repeat of near identical weather patterns. The rising sun hits the high glacial slopes, casting in soft peach and pale pink, whilst we, down in the valley, are pottering around in head torches. It’s a clear, warm morning as we set off, the prospects look good for another hot day. A thin blanket of cloud forms up, and slowly approaches our mountain, offering a respite from the sun, stealing our shadows but not our heat. It’s a slow, tentative convergence, a supplicant’s advance to the altar of the high gods. A penitent’s plea for absolution and exoneration from the paramounts. The request for advancement or preferment is rejected, onward passage is refused. Rebutted, the clouds melt back, dissolving, reduced to wisps and tatters, and our purloined shadows are reinstated.
The day advances, the sun climbs, a haze builds, dislocating Aconcagua from it’s earthly tethers, smothering out the brock of low grade tops. Now elevating the glacial and snow covered ridges to an ascendancy, to a dominium and a superiority far above a mortal’s world of nodding donkeys and grape vines, rushing trucks and fanciful cyclists. Hovering over, floating up, drifting off, wandering away.
　
　

If, after four months, much of it in Argentina, I can take just one single image away with me, one that sums up our experiences here, then I caught it today. It’s cerebral, rather than digital in depiction, although a re-enactment could be created for the blogosphere. However it wouldn’t include the surrounding, and preceding impressions and images that have been built together to create my mood, temper and humour at that moment.

We’d solved the techie issues, survived a dose of retail therapy, sourced last minute, walk-in, city centre accommodation, all with the novelty of a bath. We’d lain long past sun rise in a youth hostel, just so we could avail ourselves of the price inclusive breakfast. The coffee alone was worth it. Exited alive from yet another city, and we’re now cycling through heavy dapple. The road lined by hefty, shading plain trees, riding past butternut squash, honeydew melons and table ready grapes.. Stopped to eat chocolate cake in a bus cum sun shelter, chatted with two inquisitive boys and watched the last of Aconcagua float away in a heat haze. Life is good.

Late Saturday morning and we ease our way into Valle Tumulaya, an agricultural service town, that is in a bustling, unaggressive, pre-siesta mood. We’re circling the plaza; inevitably it’s another San Martin. Traffic is heavy, we’re moving slowly, spying out anything of interest. Which is a synonym for a coffee or an ice-cream. We ’re passing the end of a row of double parked vehicles, just as one pulls away. We were probably in his blind spot, but actually he hadn’t looked either, but in this instance it didn’t matter. A situation in, say, Haddington High Street, where I would have happily let rip with a choice of expletives and gestures, suffering afterwards the effects of an adrenalin rush. Not this time. I’m watching this from an vantage point to the rear, all of this slowly unfolding. The driver realises his error and apologises; The Navigator laughs and offers a ’de nada’ – it was nothing. A conversation ensues. ’Where have you come from?’, and ’where do you come from?’ It took us a while to distinguish the subtlety of the distinction. The driver’s hand comes out the window with a huge bunch of grapes. All whilst both are gently rolling along the street. It’s just so typical, so Argentine. Had it been Paraguay, he would have scored a telephone number just as instantly. The ease with which a conversation can start, the uninhibited offer of assistance, the proffered present, the pleasure of a minimally comprehended conversation. It’s all so positive. Life is good.

Forget coffee or ice-creams, we’ve got fresh grape pips to spit, so we retreat to the depths of the plaza, and are talked at by an old boy who used to race road cycles from BA to Chile and back. So typical. So Argentine. Life is Good.
　
　

One of the lesser known axioms from the canon on “temptations of the fates” is Pottinger’s Law. As against the more generalised decrees promulgated by the ‘doom mongers of destiny’, this one is directly associated with roads and those who use them.

First brought to the attention of the general public, or more specifically the BBC Radio Four public, by the efforts of the late John Peel. Mr Pottinger, unlike a racially derogatory Irishman or the more generic ‘lump of turf’, is a particular, identifiable person. An Orcadian, acting as the islands’ BBC weather broadcaster, he noted that if two cars are motoring towards each other, they would inevitably meet at the narrow bridge. Simple and specific. It’s also remarkably accurate, and if you substitute bridge with dog walker, horse, cyclist or sheep for example, then the rate of incidence increases proportionately.

Saturday morning, the traffic is slight to negligible, we’re approaching El Cholar, visibility and sight lines are measurable in kilometres. A pick-up with it’s tethered, attendant plume of dust is in my rear view mirror, in front are three gauchos with a posse of dogs spread across the road, behind them another pick-up. Along with ourselves, we are the mobile imponderables, now fit in the one tangible fixed asset. A single lane bridge. You can see the inevitable unfolding.
Of course we all meet at once. As with ‘sail before steam’, so with ‘four legs good, two legs bad’ – our wheels counting as legs, dogs, horses and bikes assert their precedence and we all pass in a wave of good humoured greetings. A perfect Pottinger
　
　

(Note from The Editor: blogger.com seems intent on screwing this post up.  Seems to have taken a dislike to apostrophes.  So if nothing makes any sense, for once you do not have to blame The Chronicler.)

Slowly but surely I am coming to the conclusion that there is a deliberate conspiracy afoot. An intrigue between anywhere with photograph-ability and the electrical supply companies. It’s global and spreading like a mutating virus. This has been finally proven. Roadside signage has been erected, instructing, commanding, dictating me to take a photograph. “Thank-you, I wouldn’t have noticed those fantastic, sculptured, eroded rock towers if you hadn’t brought them to my attention, you even offered me a scripted title. You then allowed a column of pylons to march right across the foreground. Like lumbering enslaved giants, cowed and dejected they stretch out across the hillside.

So if you can’t beat the parade of poles, and let’s face it, I need their cargo to charge up my camera battery, then you just have to join them. Yet, there is a certain beauty in their outline and a degree of anthropomorphism. The tall structures found in the UK, I liken to an elegant patrician spinster; the more squat pylons of northern Europe are Homo erectus, new down from the trees. The trick is to incorporate the offending impedimenta, using their structure to tell a story, lead the eye into the picture or as a construct in their own right. There’s the tilting telegraph, like staggering drunks, that place and locate the grass swamped, disused, railway. Or the near infinite line of concrete poles, fusing as one with distance, breaching the distant horizon. The strung out pylons playing to the undulating road, rising and falling like a set of scales, metronomic in beat, scripted musical notation. Now, stand with your back propped against one of these wooden poles and you can feel and hear the song and the tension in those strung out wires. Then there’s the tall thin skeletal erections, their lattice work enmeshed with a thatch of twigs, the condominium of parakeet’s nests.

The digger has scraped out the sand choked gullies, the storm cundies that run under the road, a preparation for the next flood. The spoil heaped in a bing that offers us a perfect screen from the road. We

It
 ‘it’s safe out here in the campo’ roadside camps aren’t a felony, it’s quite acceptable, even normal.
Towards the beginning of the trip, we might have considered a pack-up and move on, to find a new, secretive site. Not now: our streetwise senses have for some considerable time been saying
 ’s rolling stock. A level of screech, that in the industrial work place would arouse the interests of the safety officer, and require the mandatory use of ear defenders. They could out perform, out compete any Argentine camp ground a 3am on a Sunday morning, however unlike their electro-amped competitors they come with an ‘off button’. They can all stop instantaneously, for no apparent or obvious reason, stop in perfect unison, an achievement that any choral master would be proud off. Our cola lorry site had it’s excavated drains, but what I hadn’t noticed on my initial inspection tour was the muddy puddles that had formed out of the last downpour, a short walk along the road. Now muddy puddles in the desert have the attractive ability of an electro-magnet in an iron fillings factory. In Australia, to encourage patrons to put the lights out in the toilet they place a notice on the back of the door: ’s pure coincidence, but our amorous amphibians have acquired an amped sound system that any stadium rock concert venue would dream about. A man-high corrugated pipe, two full carriageways wide. It’s remarkable what a din a combo of five frogs can achieve, it’s got the insistence of car alarms, yet without the annoyance. They employ the speaking tube, the sounding horn to maximum efficiency, sending echoing calls, love songs far out into the bush, far into the night. In the morning I check out the muddy hole; it’s pock marked with flooded hoof prints, each off which are a bubbling agitation of mosquito larvae, the whole area a churned up soft red glutinous ooze, into which our frog chorus plop. They’re no bigger than a thumb nail. Only proving the adage: ’small bodies, big noise’.
Our supposed, quasi secretive sites have one character in common. They come with critter noise. Our gaucho spotted place has cicadas and grasshoppers who set up a cacophony of chirrups, that merge and amplify as the sun wanes, a collusion of noise that sounds like the un-lubricated wheel bearings of Scotrail

Lights attract moths,
Moths attract frogs,
Frog attract snakes.
Now put the lights out!

Our water hole attracted the bell clanking cattle and the frogs. It
 ’s all too easy to look at these ’big open spaces’ and to expect to encounter emptiness. The tracks disappearing off from the highway will lead, eventually to a habitation, the dried out dung will have come from a cow, goat or horse. It might look like a semi-arid desert, but as our last two desert campings prove, it’s not depopulated, it’s not deserted.
It’ve established ourselves under a thorny acacia tree, reading books, writing blogs, studying maps. Sitting out the last of the day’s heat. It’s a perfect spot, it seems quiet, devoid of evidence that might suggest recent activity. No car tracks, no hoof prints, no river beds. We should be undisturbed. Which begs the question: where did the bell wearing cows clang in from? And, how did the Pepsi-Cola tooting lorry see us?.

Loncophue: reprovision and head out of town. Four kilometres and just under an hour later we’re back in the same place. I’ve been blown into the ditch once and visited the far side of the double yellow line. All it would take is for one of our swerves and an overtaking truck to coincide; enough said. We retreat, it’s the better part of valour. The tourist office is closed, it’s only super high season, so it’s difficult to tell if the campground facilities might be unlocked. We’re not alone in this dilemma, they, however, can move on, we cannot. So we fall back on our standard retreat: a Hospedaje. The first is full, the first time we’ve encountered this problem. Señora’s reticence as to the status of her four rooms makes me suspect that she didn’t fancy our bikes taking up oily residency in her place. The second is empty, maybe not a good sign. The outer aspect are not conducive, but like our previous experiences, any refugio in a storm is still a refuge. We’re led through a side gate and into a courtyard waist deep in lupins, roses, gladioli, snapdragon, kniphofia, delphiniums, poppy, sweet william, topped by a fruiting peach and a grape vine. Never judge a book by it’s cover. The room is immaculate, the shower hot and we have a veranda to laze upon., all for less than a cramped, overcrowded, Bariloche campground. Such is the market and the mantra: location, location, location.

To celebrate, or commiserate our evening’s fortune, the forager heads for the rotisseria, but it’s closed; the heladeria for further field work on ice cream varieties. Dulce Patagonia, Moka Crema and Tramontana. Then the super mercado for the second time today, she causes mild amusement when she asks for bread, ’how has she eaten a dozen rolls already’, some antipasto, and a selection of cold cuts. There’s also a bottle of vino tinto, a bottle from the bodega at the bottom of the world, a bottle of Ventus. A weird sense of perspective or a wicked sense of humour. The label says it all. An insult to injury or a case of thumbing your nose. If you can’t beat them, you may as well join them, even if that’s under the table.

We might be sheltered , inured to the wind in our secluded private room, but the poplars on the crest of the hill, up on the plateau are bent over telling another story. Maybe that bottle of red called ‘The Wind’, will need time to work it’s magic, that or it’s evil, devilish ways. It’s near full on dark, still the parrots keep flying in.

Head wind, soft, penetrating rain, a 70km stretch of near straight road. A 6250m cerro to our left is consumed by cloud, the low red hills on our other side, vague, amorphous out lines. We’re all lost in a soft white world. A trip across the road side berm, and now I understand why there’s little agriculture. In the dry the tierra is a baked solid mat of wind blown dust; in the wet it turns into a slime of undrinkable glutinous sludge. Eminently campable in the dry, in the wet, a mud-fest. It’s been a while since we’ve had similar conditions; oddly, it was heading for exactly the same destination, Villa Union, back in December.

Accident book entry records, partial hole in Gore-Tex trousers, spilt powdered milk in pannier and a possible bruised knee. Despite my attempt to dissuade it, the spider continued its death march across the road.