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.
　
　

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.

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…..