The five centavo change today came with history, an illicit, guilty childhood memory. For Bazooka bubble gum lives. It still comes wrapped around with a quasi cartoon strip, and the encrypted horoscope. Gone however, at least from this one sample, is the flesh pink colour, replaced by a menta green flavour. However it’s more green than mint. I would like to report on the elasticity of the aspartamine, the bubbleability of the produced balloon, but guilt and conscience are still strong, even after forty odd years. It was always a banned, a total no-no, purchase. Trash. Very non middle class. A cast of sweet that ranked in an even lower league than chewing gum and the penny tray. I give it a few moments of mastication, it swells up to uncomfortable proportions and just as quickly I’m scrapping a hole in the gutter for disposal. It’s as disagreeable as I remember, only now there’s no challenge of the forbidden fruits, no defiance of the illicit goods. No fun at all.

Six hours of ripio road is a wonderful substitution for a session of vibro-massage. However, if that surface can have the added assets of river rounded ball bearing gravel, and bomb crater pot holes, there are all the added benefits of improved poise, and body posture, better balance and complete composure, enlightened humility and self-depreciating humour. There’s the psychological pleasure of achievement in adversity, the addict’s high from endorphin production, the insomniac’s good night sleep and the gourmand’s total disregard for calorie counting. It can even be enjoyable, in much the same way as banging your head against a brick wall is fun…..when you stop. There are some, those at the extreme end of the alternative food world, who advocate a spoonful of rock dust daily; a few hours on the Seite Lagos road will easily accomplish your RWI, your recommended weekly intake. So ripio roads have their place in the tenderisation of body parts, in the stimulation of neural pathways and in improving muscle tone. Yet one of the places where they fail, is in facial aerobics. Cursing and verbally abusing the latest passing convoy only augments your RDI of dust, and excites the stress hormones, no matter how satisfying the initial response might be. So the travelling cyclist needs to find an acceptable method of countering this omission in the ’total body work out’. This is where three day old ’pan de campo’ comes to the fore.

We’ve headed back off the road that goes through those supposed, much warned, oft much feared, ’big open spaces’. So when a small peeling wooden board appears near the verge and claims ’pan casero y tortas’, you do as the Duke of Wellington advised his officers:’ never miss an opportunity’, we stop to investigate. He wasn’t referring to bread, but to ’calls of nature’, however the same rules and ethos apply. The forager returns, mission accomplished with three ’regional specials’ pan de campo. Griddle baked flat breads, the ’especial’ being a peppering of micro chipped goat jerky and a glaze of sugar syrup. Discus in shape, discus in weight and as it transpires, discus in consistency. Maybe the ’regional typical’ refers to the age as well as the dressing, for three day old bread does wonders for the facial muscle tone and the jaw line. Satisfying our ancient Neanderthal traits, an ancestral memory of tearing raw flesh from the bone and the mastication of fibrous vegetation. Refreshed with a sprinkling of water and toasting they start to improve. However they now have to out-manoeuvre the ’warm from the oven pan casero that we found around the very next bend. A situation that is nearly always inevitable, and incontrovertible proof of ’Sod’s’ existence. The picnic by the river bank that materialises around the corner, right after you’ve perched on a sharp rock, on a dusty verge, constructing a grit infused lunchtime sandwich. The near perfect tenting spot found early the next morning, after leaving last night’s less than perfect wild roadside camp. All come from within the same category. If only we’d carried on a little bit further….. – but it won’t work, it can’t work, because it’s against the rules, these places only appear, like Brigadoon, to confound and to frustrate. To prove that the trickster gods, Loki and his cohorts, have the upper hand, and to keep we mere humans in our lowly place.

With all this muscle stimulation and excitement comes physical ’belt tightening’, and a descent down the clothing size scale. I’d watched her step on the chemist’s scales and give soft smile of satisfaction. That 16 to 12 now implies an imminent requirement for fiscal belt tightening, as I can see the words ”new wardrobe” appearing just over the horizon. Just an other example of those ’benefits’ offered by dust and grit built ripio roads.
　
　

Not a rock, tree or shrub to hide behind, let alone tie a tent down to, when along comes a vast heap of road-cutting spoil; a mountain of rocks that with judicious excavation, we’re able to create a platform and wall to shelter our tent. Shelter is always the issue.

Six nights of ever-changing, ever rotating experiences.

Don Avila’s wee campground

Out here, in a supposed ‘nothing space’, there are places trying to make a living, the passing visitor offering the prospect of some ’added value’. They get our custom. Without them life gets a little harder, yet more importantly, they deserve the support of their local government. It would have been nice to have been made aware of Don Avila’s establishment, of his proveedura, hospedaje, comidas tipicas, fresh water and camping at Buta Billon. We could so easily have stopped our day short, consequently passing by in the morning, and he missing a sale and ourselves a shower and an experience. Later we encounter Chris and Marge, two Canadians, again we top up on info, and on this occasion exchange oiling chains for a piece of dried goat jerky. A most amiable interlude.

‘Word of mouth’ as a means of advertising has always been known as the most enduring form of promotion, unfortunately doesn’t lend itself to an industry that needs to make a financial return. But for evidence of it’s efficacy take this tale from the campings in Malargue. We’re pottering around our tent, when a voice from behind asks “you must be the Scottish couple”. Pauline’s from Portobello, been cycling in the same direction as ourselves and has collected several evidences of our existence. Located and confirmed when she completed the register at reception and notices the word ’Haddington’ in the ‘Ciudad’ column. So we now know that the Belgian’s were heading for our ’spa’ camp and that the Canadians were also on their way. From her we glean all her gleanings on the road ahead, and end up travelling together for the next few days.

I’ve fulminated long and hard, wittered to my jotter, bored the covers off the ‘moleskine’ on numerous occasions about the dearth of hard, practical visitor information, of the plethora of glossy pages full of pretty, out of focus pictures and spurious, ineffectual wasted space. First prize, or at least the present leading position goes to…….. Enough is enough. I will return towards the end of the trip to enlighten you on the final positions in the “Tourist Guff League”. 

Pauline, having scored some favourite sustenance from the YPF

A cargo of extended families are loaded into an old, sun bleached, 1950’s Ford Falcon pick-up. It passes slowly, grumbly, in a cloud of belched sooty reek, and an explosive horn and a sea of hands, as it tacks, eventually tracking it’s way to our side of the road. It must be Sunday, they’re off to…., well it could be anywhere. Only there doesn’t seem to be a lot of choice of anywheres out here. The road is straight, the horizon lost to a haze and an optical ocean. Some five minutes later I look up, look along the road, the pick-up is still there. Are they five miles or five years away? It makes little difference. Time seems like a concept for cities. Eventually, slowly they are absorbed by the road, dissolved by the light, consumed by the horizon. We’re on our own again.

If you could harvest noise, what a wonderful resource it would be.  We’ve been blown off the road on two instances – literally.  A nor’westerly that has a hot sun and a cold coming out of a clear blue sky, coming at us from the Chilean Humbolt and accentuated, chilled further over the high tops to our north.  We’ve fought the blast for the better part of a morning, the forward momentum little better than a brisk walking pace.  It comes in blasts, catching the front panniers, pushing them, then, as you compensate, the wind gives a little and you’re in the gravel or over the median line.  Either way it’s not safe.  The countyside up to this point is completely devoid of shelter.  Not a rock, bush or tree large enough to hide or hunker down behind; it’s all tooth, hook and claw.  So when a decrepit wooden sign appears like divine magic and announces ’camping’, you pull over and investigate.  It’s an estancia of deceased farm machinery, piled logs and barking dogs. Skins of goats are strung up on the washing line, hoofs of a cow beside the track.  Not very promising.  But ’yes’ we can camp, the charge is a little over a quid, of course we stop.  I hope I’ve learned my lesson, for there are lined out rows of tall fastigate poplars.  It has shelter, the one commodity that we crave at this precise moment.

At first glance, it‘s hard to tell if this ‘site’ was a hoped for, optimistic project or a has been, had-it enterprise.  Football posts outline a weed strewn patch, municipal style park swings are disappearing under a spreading willow tree.  The baños are dry, the stalls doorless there’s no water in the tap.  Two round, slab sided, bamboo thatched shelters, for sun and not rain, are mouldering amongst a litter of rusting garbage. Rotting sardine cans and twisted corrugated iron suggest an age to the place, yet the charcoaled graffiti states that Raul y Ani from Zapala were here on the 11^th, the spent fireworks and empty Cava bottles suggest a party at New year. So the ’site’ must get used, possibly at week-ends, perhaps as a fish camp.

Somewhere on a parallel universe my alter ego offered his better half the opportunity to visit the baubles counter of the local jewellery store. Personally I thought I had offered it in this, my universe, but I’ve been advised otherwise. This dislocation of ideas my explain my initial confusion between two close running rivers. The Rio Diamante, which on closer inspection turned out to actually be the Rio Actuel. It was the latter that offered up the solution to the ’rocks on fingers’ conundrum.

On the strenuous advice of other cyclists, we’ve made a slight detour from the direct run between Malargue and San Rafael, going to El Niuel and dropping down into the Cañon de Atuel. We’ve opted to forgo an asphalted road for a session on ripio, so are hopping that the effort will be worth while. On some occasions these grit road have required so much concentration that it’s been difficult to take in anything of our surroundings. Our guide book was some what less than overenthusiastic: ‘the locals call it their Grand Canyon’, and ’it has four dams, but still worthwhile’. The same author had also described El Niuel as ’podunk’. Not the world’s happiest chocolate button. The latter had given the impression of a ’three Gorges’, vast areas of flooded and swamped canyon lands, geological treasures lost to our insatiable thirst for electrical power. His first description had suggested a corniche road that stays up on the surface, offering the occasional glimpse down into a hole. The Arizonian version is ‘Grand’, as in massive, but it’s near impossible to gain any comprehension of depth, short of climbing down inside, there’s little to offer any intimation of scale. So we head off the main highway to find out for ourselves if there is a difference.

The indifferent, unflattering ‘Podunk’ would describe a rather large proportion of rural towns, so I assume our author got out the wrong side of the bed that morning.

The first three, of the four dams turn out to be low key affairs, the captured lakes are narrow ribbons of water that act as mirrors for the cracked and broken faces of the surrounding cliffs. Quiet oases of green, weeping willows and fruiting peppers, the tall tasselled plumes of pampa grasses covered in the activity of wild bees. The only discordance being the pylon line that climbs out of the deep gullies. Yet water seems like an alien element in this environment. Volcan, the master mason, the creative builder. Agua, the master sculptor, the ephemeral, transient visitor, who on the seasonally, fleeting visits, has over an aeon, carved back down, slicing through a mish-mash of geological time.

The final dam, forces the road out of the cañon and back up onto the plateau, back up with the palo verde thorn and the bright, hot, concentrated noon day glare. It’s here as I’m tracking the last hair pin bend that I notice something different under my pedal. Stopping isn’t difficult, preventing a roll back down the hill is the problem, that and getting going again. I hope what I thought I saw will be worth the effort. I walk back, there in the middle of the road is a cracked open ‘thunder egg’, a geode of white crystals. My solution for the jewellery counter, non encounter.

The Araucaria is the Pehueña for the Mapuche, the Chilean Pine for some, and the Monkey Puzzle for others.  A tree that appears as a singular sorry specimen in a semi-detached suburban setting. Isolated, lonesome, centre-staged on the front lawn, outgrowing the planter, outgrowing the home.  It’s only in an arboretum that they start to exhibit their grandeur; yet still it looks stage managed, an exhibit in an exhibition. A trophy tree to complement the stuffed stag’s head in the grand hall.  They never seem natural, at peace with their adopted, translocated environment.  Dioeciously gendered, these solitary misanthropes are sexually frustrated, chaste, celibate.

The “few woods” of the guidebook transpired into over three days of arboreal splendour.  It’s never fair to compare one locality to an other, the”this looks like….”  Each place is unique, comparisons are unjust.  However if you know and admire the remnants of Caledonian pine forest of the southern Cairngorms, you will recognise this countryside.  Substitute a granny pine for an Araucaria, an understorey of heather for the temperate bamboo and you have the Valle Pehueña.  It’s no real surprise as the geology and the climatology are similar; free draining, slightly acidic volcanic soils, the extra elevation compensating for the warmer latitude. A whole age range of trees are present, from the gawky juviniles, that in a northern garden centre require a remorgage, to the young adults with the classic profile of the arched window, to the ancients, the patriarchs and matriarchs who were already well established when Willy the Norman was writing his Domesday Book.  They’ve shed their lower branches, forming a candelabra, an inverted umbrella, exposing a trunk of elephantine legs a skin of deep wrinkles that snag swatches of lichen on the wet weather side.

As we climbed up the valley, away from Alumine and found our first puzzled monkey, of course we had to stop and admire this single specimen standing alone in a forest of Southern Beech.  Photographed for evidence and prosperity, we might not get to see many more: such is the suggestive power of a guidebook. We round the next corner and there’s a few more, spread out over a tumble of broken rocks, a crystal green river running in the valley bottom.  Then more and more.  We both burn off pixels at every turn.  It’s not difficult to accept a polytheistic concept, where a spirit inhabits rocks, rivers and these grand trees.  Each individual looks and feels like it’s growing in it’s accepted place, in it’s given space.

Not wanting to give up too quickly on these trees, we decide to head off up some side roads, ending up in Lago Alumine and the municipal campground.  A setting that has tempted us to stay for an extra day.  In theory it’s a rest day, so we headed off for a short, unencumbered cycle.  Armed with the tourist office’s information, a glosst piece of paper that comes with little indication of distances or heights, no scale.  More drawing than map.  However it does indicate a road – it could be a track – disappearing off the side of the page, heading for the “ski parque”. It goes uphill, or at least we make that basic assuption based on the idea that snow sports need elevated spaces.  The roadside storyboard map is of little assistance.  Actually it’s downright inaccurate.  More story than map.

We head off in the general direction indicated, negotiate our way through the border customs and immigration post despite the fact that we don’t intend to enter Chile.  The drawing – it lost any credence for the superior title of map some time ago – seems emphatic about the ski area being on the Argentine side.  It’s that Ordnance Survey conditioning again, that instinctive belief that all maps are accurate.  They don’t lie, they can’t lie.  Unusually, on this occasion there is a roadside sign to indicate the correct gravel road, and we head off up into the hills.  Unusual, as even major roads can happily bifurcate or merge with out the help or hindrance of roadside sign.  We’ve met cars, or at least their drivers who have been forty kilometres along an unintended or plain wrong route.

With a degree of confidence – surely the signage can’t be wrong? – we pass through commercial conventional pines, planted in ranks, blocked in regiments.  Trunks brashed, cropped clean like squaddies, all one age, recruited in the same year.  Then passing into another biosphere of Southern Beech, the Nothofagus, and then the Araucarias.  Unlike their near cousins, these pines march to a different order, preferring a more archaic, looser command structure.  Stoics, patient, unperturbed by the upstarts lower down the hill.  The road carries on climbing and so do we, and cresting the hilltop, we find an open plateau.  The ancient’s woods have given way to small pockets of pines in sheltered gullies, leaving space for a rising tableland of volcanic scoria and ash, dotted with what at first we took to be tussock grass.  It’s only when we stop to inspect that we find a few low growing, mat forming plants.  Hebe rikensis in three forms, and a saxifrage.  We move on, stopping moments later for a single bright pink flower- a wild tulip, then a sisirynchium (spelling?).  I’d gone to one side of the road, the navigator to the other, we both call over “I’ve got a new one here”.  The list grows, many are familiar, even if the names won’t come to mind, a mimulus in a damp area, then a wild yellow tulip.  Higher still and the selection changes, the geraniums, the asteraeceas. All the myriad relations of the dandelion family: the composites, or as one naturalist named them, “hawk’s weirds” Chrysanthemums, calceolarias, “over here I’ve got another three new ones”, Berberis, possibly a pernettya and “another one of them”.  We didn’t start a count, but there must be in excess of fifty different species of flowering alpine plants.  Every single on would be a delight and a treasure in a stone trough or a small, well constructed rock garden.  Anemone, sedums, pasque flower.

All this in a ‘esqui parque’ that wouldn’t threaten a Kitzbuhel or any Austrian ’dorf, with it’s truncated ’T’ bar and basic button tow, but would be brilliant on Nordics, in a plaster of deep snow, ski-ing through these monkey puzzled pines.  It’s an area that might have been plastered over by a wash of designations, of acronyms, by a protection of restrictions.  The preservation comes from a blanket of snow and an alternative, much hyped attraction.  All the vehicles that pass – there’s quite a few – have only one intention: to drive up to the highest point, up to a crater lake of an extinct volcano.  Observe, turn around and drive back down again.  Which poses the question: is indifference and disinterest the best protection for wild areas?  Probably not, but it does seem to work in this instance.

On subsequent days, we’ve been to similar elevations, in similar conditions and found some of our specimens, but never the spread or diversity of plants up on that plateau. A highlight, a chance, serendipitous encounter; a grand ‘day off’.

The tale goes that the Araucaria was brought to the attention of European gardeners by the botanist, Joseph Banks, who would have used it’s Latin name. The ’monkey puzzle’ monicker can be attributed to the planter of Pencarrow gardens in Bodmin, who is credited with the statement, on first encountering the tree, “there’s a tree that would puzzle a monkey”.  A bit lame, a tad apocryphal.

Meanwhile, still working hard on the quality control…..

Too many businesses are getting way too savvy, getting way too security conscious, so we’ve developed a strategy to combat them that is, on occasions successful.  Firstly ask at the tourist office, to which we get one of two answers; “all businesses have one”, translation: all secured, or, “try the internet café”, translation: “we’ve got one, but I’ll be damned if you’re getting to play on it”.  Next, find the YPF petrol station, hunt the logo, and see if they are connected.  If they are, then they always give us the code, of course we buy a coffee that can be made to last an hour.  Some town halls are remarkably enlightened, openly offering the service, as part of attracting service and visitors into staying in town.  This collection comes courtesy of one such: Villa Union.  Some hotels give access then sting with a charge.  Should this game plan fail we revert to establishing ourselves in the plazza, extract the net book from it’s dust proofed bag, fire up and see who answers back. There’s always a few, but the connection is naught above a bar, need to get closer, yet the domain address can be convoluted, contrived or plain abstract; it’s out there but which way to head?  The Editor goes for a walk, perambulating the square.

Chos Malal: we’ve accumulated a supply of material, a need to do some business, we need to communicate. We need a hot spot.  It’s a Sunday so we’re negated from one source, the internet café, the locotorio, yet several named addresses are available.  So the Navigator cum Forager lives up to her title and heads off on the hunt to divine and source a connection.  Eventually success comes from a new and unexpected source – the local hospital.  It even has a shaded bench right outside.

We can now communicate, until the battery power gives out, or the techno gremlins in league with that supreme of the thwart: Señor Murphy interfere.  There was a time when you searched for a landline, now that’s a sign of the old times.  In these new times, with the advance of mobile ‘phones, finding a public call box is near impossible.  They were never a common piece of street furniture here; people relied on the locutorio, yet these too are in decline, some we locate have their windows covered over with fading, five year old newspapers.  Closed for siesta, closed never to reopen again.

Sometimes you feel that the Victorian explorers of a previous age had an easier time of it.  Maybe they didn’t have the advantages of accurate maps, NHS travel clinics or clean bed linen, but they could get away with a note sent home to their sponsors every second year.  An attachment to a cargo of plundered curios and a box of specimen plants.  It was Dervla Murphy who tells of the pleasure of travelling in a pre internet age, in the Shah’s Iran.  She would be unable to contact any of her kin for a whole six weeks.  No ‘phones.  Letters too slow.  Responsibilities only for herself.  Such decadent irresponsibility.

Of course the internet and all it’s associated appendages are an advantage, a great support vehicle.  I wouldn’t have the fun of producing these missives, of publishing photos, of gleaning some information on what to expect further up the road, or of that recommendation for tonight’s parilla.  It’s just how remarkable a morning can evaporate, how much battery power can disappear in the exercise.  For stolen Wi-Fi never comes with a power point.

We are still grateful to the unsavvy or the plain philanthropic who wittingly or unwittingly allow us to plunder their connections.