No day is ever wasted; however we do have the ability to squander them.  That is, days lost from a calendar. So it was surprising that she remembered her own birthday. The trigger this year was registration at a campground a few days earlier,. El Patron had given her a dated receipt, a novelty in itself. So having established that it’s a special day, I need to recognise it. She turned down my offer of a trip to the jewellers, on the grounds that the nearest was several days away – or did I just imagine that promise?  A night in a five star hotel?  None within miles.  Slap up meal?  Haven’t brought a tie. A visit to a spa, a full body make over? I’m running out of excuses. Maybe that’s why my cycling benefactor stepped in.

There at the side of the road is a sign that says ’Termales’ and Camping. The latter will keep the cost down, I suppose I can cover the latter; it can’t be that expensive surely?  We head down a gravel track, a route that gets narrower and rougher, but the hand painted signs keep us going in the right direction.  Eventually we’re deposited in a baked earth yard of a very small farm. I call it that, for want of any better term.  There’s a cockerel herding a harem of hens, two geese padding about, a young dog tries on his hard man act, fails, then presents us with his stuffed monkey toy. There’s adobe bricked out buildings that are part thatched in scrub brash, part reverting back to their original mud. Factors that suggest agriculture, yet there’s none of the supporting infrastructure: a tethered horse, a patch of maze, a discard of implements. Several children are running around in varying states of undress, the eldest greets us, yes we can camp here, come this way. We’re shown around a thick wall of trees, to a very sheltered patch of beaten earth, where the rest of the family are eating al-fresco. It feels like we are intruding on a private space, on private time.  I feel alien, my perceptions challenged.  They see nothing unusual; the cold, reticent north meets the gregarious south.  Never has my lack of language been so noticeable, so lamentable, for we find ourselves in a very Latino situation, where a period of hospitable conversation is required.  Pitching the tent creates a focus and a diversion, the fact that I chose a spot right under the chickens night roost, engenders an amusement.  Playing the clown, a mimed substitution for a tongue.

The rising wind, the progenitor of the storm falling out from the massive bulk of the volcano to our south, confirms just how sheltered we are.  The ripe apples being shed from above, exploding on the ground, only verifies our decision to stop at a ’spa’.  The term’s mine, the family call them ’baños’, the dictionary definition being ’bath’.  The dictionary is accurate, the photographs don’t lie, and if you can see the goose bumps on the birthday lady’s arms you can jalouse the temperature of the water.

It comes bubbling up from the nether world, a spring full of brimstone, cold and sulphurous. The map says ’thermales’; thermals don’t necessarily have to be hot, or even warm, so that didn’t lie either.  To be honest, we hadn’t expected anything different, hadn’t expected white marble halls and masseuses in cotton robes, palm courts and Turkish baths.  We’d hunted down these mapping icons, inscriptions taken as gospel from our trusted road atlas, only to discover a smelly swamp and a scatter of roofless, thatchless shacks.

After a day that ends with a crust of dried out salt and a shirt that can stand unaided, any accumulation of water, irrespective of temperature, is a bonus.  Desert washing in two litres of water is all right for one night, but a shower becomes necessity at some point, if we’re to be able to return to a town and polite society.  We probably alter the salinity irreparably for a week, I even wonder what chemical reaction might occur between hydrogen sulphide and conc. Sodium chloride.  Then speculate if I could be prosecuted by Trading Standards for offering a spa treatment, but only delivering a smelly cold bath.

The road climbs out of Chos Malal, a slow steady grind, warm work, the temperature rising with the elevation. A pick-up passes and pulls over. The lady driver climbs out, all concern. She’s concerned that we are heading out into the unknown. Are we prepared, there’s no shade, no water, no services, it’s going to get hot. It’s a kindly concern and we try to reassure her. Actually we’re flooded, held down with a drownable supply of water. However, the day’s climatically events unfurled to a different script, from what was evident at that road junction.

We have had some weather.

A nothing weather day in Scotland, would typically be in mid to late November, it will be still, calm and monochromatically ashen gray. A gray that hems in a city street, that only confirms the realisation that this is just the start of the gloom season, a gray that precludes any likelihood of solar illumination. The only leaves left on the trees will be the insipid yellows of the ash, falling in a death rattle, despite the windless still silence. A day of monotone gray. A nothing weather day. A non weather day on the rain shadowed side of the Andes would be diametrically opposite to the Scots version, but would share many of the same characters. A day that starts clear, stays clear and ends clear. Blue sky from start to finish, sun up to sun down. To a northern Celt this is what you pay good money for when you booked those two weeks on the Costas, or optimistically predicted for your overseas visitor intending to go to Troon for the day .After multiple weeks of the same unvarying hot clear blue, a change, any change is welcome.
Three perfect examples of anvil clouds are marching, forging on in close order up the international border, an interesting meteorological phenomenon, but a good forty kilometres away, so of no consequence to us. Then, within what seems like moments, stacks of cumulus start building a boiling mass that bloats and inflates, billowing up to the stratosphere. Virginal white thunder heads. Purity against the blue, and a fair representation of the national flag. We’re still climbing, the road circumferencing the basal mass of Volcan Tolman, a mountain whose bulk is creating it’s own weather system. We’ve moved under the stacked up giants, moved under their shadows, the washing powder whiter than white gives way to a more ominous bruised cloud base, the innocence gives way to thunder claps. The sun loses power and we get a momentary respite. The temperature suddenly drops and hailstones start to explode on the road around us, shards of ice shrapnel ricochet across the tar, melting instantly to damp patches, releasing smells of burnt soil and hot dry grass. Now comes the wind, hurtling down and out from the mountain, but for once we’re in front of the storm, the gusts come like shock waves, powering us up the inclines, hitting us from the side, on the way too fast declines.

The following day we get a repeat performance, the same prologue, the same play, an assembly line of thunder heads are fabricated on the highlands, eventually reaching saturation point, overcrowded they start to migrate, down to the lowlands. Veils of rain shroud out the ranked ridges of volcanoes, creating soft focus cardboard cutouts, a stage prop of pop-up mountains. It’s a novelty, a concept that would normally disappoint , this prospect of cycling in the rain, now it’s a pleasure, however we still take refuge in a drain under the road. Pedalling in 26 degrees and a Gore-Tex is still akin to a sauna without the snow rolling. An over saturation of sweat and humidity.

One of the advantages of all this increased aerial climatic activity means that a few more photographs can be elevated up and away from the foreground. A succession of blue skies makes for disinterest and monotony, it also engenders envy and jealousy for a recipient who is staring out from an artificially light office, at a drab, damp, monochromatic, shadowless Edinburgh street. The fact that the photographer stopped to take that picture, that it was but an excuse for a breather from hauling a loaded cycle up an incline, a bike that has been recently augmented with a top up of water is of little interest and can’t be exposed in a few megabytes of pixels.  Oh, how we suffer for our art.

With advantages come disadvantages, from blessings come curses, with the wet come the flies. Little black sand flies, big brown horse flies, blood sucking mosquito flies and they all bite. Some have a sixth sense and perceive the swatting hand, others are slower and their desiccated little bodies are now being feasted on by a swarm of ants. Such is nature and it’s occasionally nice not to be on the bottom rung of the food chain ladder.

We did thank our concerned benefactor, I thanked her in absentia several times more, later that day and on subsequent occasions, for tempting the weather gods and any other arbiters of fate, my doom mongers of destiny. For not only did we get weather, we got contrasts and shadows, fleeting red puddles and nascent streamlets. Fugitives, who even now are in denial, effervescing to tide rimmed muddy holes and shiny braids of ghostly rivulets. Food for a camera, nourishment for a soul, both of whom who had been promised a tedium of hot blue skies.

It’s an innocent piece of plastic, this size of a very thin paperback book, an open lattice of plastic.  We first encountered it within moments of arriving in Argentina, as we came through customs at Santo Tome, lying at the side of the road.  Obviously a discard, less obvious was its purpose.  Possibly a one-off, for which we would never get an answer, something of no real account, of no matter.  Only we would keep finding them, not everywhere, but in certain areas that we passed through.  Places that would yield up a good number, but only in Argentina.  A mild curiosity of no great import.  Yet curiosities have a habit of growing, especially if your mind is configured, wired or afflicted for facts for facts’ sake.  Neitche’s collection of information for an inner psychological enrichment.

The answer, when it eventually appeared, turned out to be more prosaic, more internal, physical enrichment.  We’d been blown off the road by a wind storm, taken refuge in a room, decided against cooking in the toilet cubicle, resorting to bread, wine and cold cuts of meat.  Instead of being sold in a cling-film covered Styrofoam tray, the smoked ham and sliced beef is sold placed on our mysterious latticed, book-sized white plastic piece.  A somewhat prosaic, boring answer to a less than earth-shattering question, but my piqued curiosity is satisfied.  Where a few clicks of a mouse, or a typed entry in a title box give access to an instant answer, it is refreshing to find a question that can’t be Googled or Wiki’ed.

Now we can go local and ditch it in the traditional way.  That completed, I just have to find a new, inquisitive challenge.  Could it possibly be the question as to why a roadside shrine to San Cetayano has four pairs of sunglasses in it?

The scene: our family’s daily outing to the shore on an Isle of Arran holiday.  The Kildonan coast is a vast empty strand of chre red sand and we are the only encampment on it.  Windbreaker and deckchairs, spades and buckets, flasks and sandwiches.  All for that great old Scottish tradition, the seaside dook and the post-glacial swims ‘chittery bites’.  The only family, yet when another descends through the dunes, they establish themselves within quiet talking distance.  So this human magnetism, this herding or clanning that we experience in Argentine campgrounds is not a particularly Latino trait, only they have raised it to an art form.

We’re established in a ‘walk-in’ area alongside another cycling couple and a backpackers tent.  The Sunday day campers have all left, extinguished their parillas, taken their appetising savouries of cooked meat and packed their deckchairs.  The dogs have cleaned all the bones away, ripped apart the overflowing bins.  The site is near empty, the choice of pitches great.  Yet they manage to erect two tents within our guy line range.  Most odd.

A wooden fence protects us from the road; however, this structure is not a substantial enough barrier to say to another car-owner, ‘Keep Out’.  He has removed a spar, driven in, parked up and replaced and repaired the defence.  Most odd.

Father has arrived early, he’s the advance party.  He’s snagged a concrete table and parilla, kindled up a bag of carbon, the coals already glowing ready for the rest of the family.  They arrive, a car stuffed with beef and multiple generations.  The load is disgorged to full volume of Spanish rap, a bass beat that is now in direct competition with a speaker set pumping out the local radio station.  It is playing a tradition of accordion tracks and adverts for local businesses; a discordant clash of tastes.  We are strategically positioned between the two, yet nobody bats an eye, makes any comment.  I just can’t see a Dutch-run campground staying silent.

We retreat in front of this onslaught, retreat to the inevitably-named San Martin to sit in a Sunday silence of heavy shade and deep tranquillity to search for and catch a WiFi hotspot.

Later we return; our rapping neighbours are playing handball, which seems to involve trying to hit our tent at least once in each phase of play.  Once might be construed as an accident, twice a possible mistake; three times is ignorance.  Eventually the car is loaded and the ignition key turned.  Nothing.  The rapping has flattened the battery.  There is a god, after all.  Only a Fiat 127 with six incumbents is easily bump-started.  The leave, leaving the noise to the accordions that have been outgunned all afternoon.  They too, when their time comes, require a push.  It seems like a traditional part of the Sunday afternoon down at the local Municipal Campground.  Not too dissimilar to that dook and chittery bite.

The OED definition for ‘Artesanal’ – a craftsman produced product, usually handmade.  Our possible definition, when the adjective is applied to beer, bread and icecream would be ‘more expensive, and of no discernible difference to its non-artesanal cousin’.

Artesanal cerveza will still be a blond beer, a lager.  It will still be a generic, fizzy, gut-distending liquid.  Of no noticeable difference to its South American brewed, germanically named euro-associate.  A Stellapilsner or a Heinekenweiser.

With artesanal icecream I find I can’t taste the difference between the mass produced ‘Arcor. Indus. Arg’ product and that of the handcrafed variety.  I even wonder if the appellation of artesanal applies to the fact that they take the mass produced and add a few nuts and give it a localised name?  I do, however, feel that several more weeks field research will be required to finally confirm this supposition.

The artesanal pan can be more problematic, both hit and miss.  A rustica will still be white, but might be more chewy.  But essentially on a blind tasting will be no different from the store purchased baguette.  It is a case of purchase more in hope than expectation.  Caveat Emptor.

As with all generalisations, you feel you have confirmed all the facts when along comes the exception.  It is the white bread rule.  If artesanal is non mass produced, made in small batches and sold locally, then our latest experience of tortas fritas and pan casero fit the artesanal title nicely, even if neither make the claim.

‘Siete Lagos‘, a much touted tourist route north from Angostura, a boutique resort where boutique and expensive are synonymous, is a mix of asphalt and grit.  As a cycling day it was a case of surviving convoys of car-induced grit storms, a pebbledash of loose stones and biting horseflies.  The scenery is a classic tourist ministry of picture postcard productions.  Flowering pastures, green lakes, steep valley sides, much of it viewed in a soft focus of pale, swirling dust clouds.  We were well warned, it is a classic cycle route, just don’t attempt it in super high season.  Interestingly, about 40 other cyclists chose to ignore the advice forbye ourselves.  It takes a lot of concentration, picking an immediate route that won’t leave you floundering in a lateral moraine of loose sand, sliding down the roadside berm.  Down and wipeout.  So, by the time we hit the hard top, fingers are stiff from gripping, body plated in a sweat-encrusted dust, mind tied tight from concentration.  The last few kilometres are an exhilarating downhill, fast, smooth and there, at the bottom of the hill is the perfect campground.  Lodged between two lakes, cropped grass, views of mountains, enough wind to deter the insects.  Perfect.  We are prospecting the possibilities for the actual tent position when a gent with his sons and a basket go by.  He shouts over: ‘Tortas Fritas?’  It’s his last bag and there’s no way we are letting anybody else get them.  Now comes the reason for holding a cache of small change and low denomination notes.  It is always a cash sale and there’s never change.  We don’t have quite enough, but he is keen to clear his basket, so we get the bargain.  ¿What are Tortas Fritas?  They make a deep fried pizza supper look healthy.  Take a piece of bread dough, shape it to a flat briquette, gaff it on a hook, then dip into a vat of boiling beef dripping.  Simple.  On another occasion the vendor suggested that we add a spreading of butter to help improve them, taking the grease-saturation index up to coronary cholesterol extreme.  As ‘gasolina para cyclistas’ at the end of an interesting day, it was nectar, but was it artesanal nectar?

The pan casero experience happened when the campground owner in Alumine offered to make some one evening.  It is a loaf baked in a conical cob bread oven, all the heat coming from the base.  It gives a thick, crusty bottom and arrived at our tent hot, ready to melt butter into.  No artesanal appellation again, but it fits our definition of good bread.

I have long known of my lack of affinity with things of a mechanical nature.  Spring wound watches will happily keep time whilst lost in a drawer, but apply them to my wrist and within 2 days they will be defunct.  Give me a zipper and I can either jam it irreparably or manage to remove the closure off the end within moments.  Inconsequential problems, unless the timepiece was lovingly inscribed by your new bride, or the zipper keeps a flyscreen in place when camped in a malarial swamp.

However, to these two can now be added a further category; anything that involves the three letters w, anything that requires a connection or a transmission through the ether.

The Kindle went first, the screen deciding it preferred a triangulist’s montage of multiple images, followed by a refusal to connect to the weekly edition of the New Statesman; finally resolving the issue by going defunct.  The Kindle having achieved this conclusion, the netbook decided it needed to join in.  It took its cue from the book reader, catching some of its viral contagion, rendering the screen so dark it was only discernible at midday in the full glare of a southern summer sun.  Then decides to enter ´cook´ mode: place an egg on the screen, and you will have a sunny side up ready in moments.

Who knows what the cause is.  Abandoning the tenets of keeping it simple and stupid, renouncing my creed of technophobic credentials or the 80km of consolidated ripio grit road, that more closely resembled a riverbed.  I, and by inference, everything on the bike has been shaken, rattled and rolled. Hour after hour.  All the clever bits of kit (for ‘clever’ read ‘expensive‘) have been tightly packed, sealed up against the persistent, penetrating dust.  Or more likely, I’m just plain hamfisted and should not be let loose with anything more specialised than a claw hammer.

So it was rather heartening when The Navigator’s Kindle decided it too couldn’t connect even when we sat under a transmission mast.  I wasn’t the only source of infection of techno-murphdom.  Paranoia was setting in.  Was this another piece of over-hyped, westernised baubles being despatched back to base, home to Mother?  A series of communications with Amazon, or at least ‘India’ eventually produces a response: enter 311.  Remarkable.  20 seconds later we have the tanks rolling into Cairo and all the back editions of the New Statesman.  Occasionally my faith in this new, incomprehensible world of instant, ethereal information and communication is restored.  Which is more than can be claimed for my lifeless, defunct, inanimate, impedimenta.

A note from The Navigator: new netbook which speaks to us in Spanish.  You would not believe the issues involved in buying a piece of technology here – or perhaps you would.  Another story for another day!  So please forgive any spurious characters appearing in the text due to the different keyboard layout.  That’s my excuse, anyway!

All Alpine Heidis and apple strudel, sugar waffles and cuckoo clocks. Little Switzerland, right down to the walrus moustached gent, the wooden gnomes and the steins of artesanal beer. The main street, the only street is compacted river gravel base with a topping of soft bull dust. Even our tyres raise up a cloud of talc that hangs, suspended among the pine and myrtle trees, then a bus passes and our mildly opaque world is instantly converted into a choking opaque world.

Slowly, out of the storm, up in front, a red blob emerges in the middle of the road. At first it appeared detached yet oddly ambulant, it leaves an odd spoor. Then it’s attendant materialises, taking form and substance, becoming human then traveller, then sack carrier. The red transpires into a roll along suitcase, ploughing a single furrow through the deep dust, staggering from pot hole to pot hole. An object so dislocated from it’s usual environment that it’s red with mortification and embarrassment, more used and suited to the superior airs of hotel foyers and airport concourses. The carrier hauling this rig turns out to be tres petite, her dwarfing rucsack is in the throes of birthing a sleeping bag and as I pass I realise that an other is in the final month of pregnancy.

Christmas time is over and now it’s Argentine holiday time. It’s good to be around other people, the campgrounds are busy, personal space at a premium. On one occasion it was impossible to plot a route from the tent to the sanitarios without infringing upon someones tent space. Nobody seams to care, so we give up apologising, and just trip over their guy lines for a change. As we’re non-auto ambulant, we’re sent to the ‘walk-ins’ the car free tenting area. A feature that meets with our full approval, memories of reversing RVs and camper vans negotiating onto our tent, are still too fresh. Being ‘sans car’ means we’re placed with the back packers, so raising the average age, a happy band who come in a cloud of music and deodorant. There tents are ‘tardises’ of nylon and plastic sheets, their sacks bulge fly fish rods and tin cups, silvered bed rolls and extension cables. Given that public transport covers virtually every single locality in the country, it’s not that surprising that we encounter them in the most interesting of localities. Another dust cloaked road, this time well north of Valle de Angostura: three lads emerge out of the latest lorry induced grit storm, it feels like the middle of nowhere. Their damp washing draped on their sacks, garnering an armour of Andean dust, a tent swinging loose, a sheathed guitar hung like a holstered gun. It looks like a recipe for a sufferfest: tramping the hot dusty road, being peppered by a shot of pebbles and stones, hoping for the Good Samaritan to pass and offer a lift. Yet they seem totally unconcerned. Unconcerned, because there is still a culture of hitchhiking, still considered honourable and safe, that and when things get tough, there is always the collectivo to be flagged down. That day we were to pass several more hitching parties, only to be re-passed by them as they and there bags are blasted clean, pilled into the back of pick-up trucks. They all wave, either in sympathy or in congratulation. We, on the other hand will get clean when we dive into a lake, surrounded by cattle cropped grass, snow topped mountains and a flora of lupins, lilies and buddelias, our own Switzer alp.
　

A word from The Navigator.

This is the first trip where we have carried electronic wizardry.  Bad Move.

The first to bite the dust was the Freeloader Solar Charger.  It just did not work at all.

Then Chris’s Kindle; it appears to have a bruised face, and refuses to work any more.

Then Lesley’s Kindle; no longer wants to connect to the ‘Whispernet’, so I can’t get books, periodicals or e-mail.

The last straw was last night – the Netbook, purchased in Paraguay – the screen is no longer lighting properly, so I’m sitting on the grass in the campground, trying to keep the screen in the sun so that I can see it and me in the shade so I don’t fry.  The result is a bit a a fried Netbook and a contorted Navigator.  Not to mention that the WiFi is not man enough to upload the pictures.

Bear with us.  The Netbook and Chris’ Kindle will be shipped back to BsAs where we shall decide what to do with them.  Not sure if we’ll be able to score a new Netbook here in Malargue, Mendoza, or if we’ll have to wait until we get to San Rafael.

Anyone got any suggestions about the screen?  I can see it in full sun, but the backlighting is gone.  I’ve tried the Display Properties in the Control Panel, to no avail.

Grumpily,
The Navigator

The words are a promise in a guide book and like a ‘manna from heaven’. The prospect is for relaxed daylight breakfasts and afternoon cycling without the pressure of early termination due to Zonda winds or dessicating heat. The possibility of regular resupply of water and the chance to camp on grass, of lakes and running rivers. The novelty of solid butter and the colour green.

This clean cut green and the crisp hard blue will last as long as we stay high, up amongst the mountains, amongst the snow fed lakes. Yet move an hour to the right, to the east, drop off a few contours in elevation and the change is dramatic. The hillsides are more rounded off, the cliffs more eroded, it’s an older, more dated landscape. Everything is spikes and thorns, hooks and needles, where your skin is a pin cushion. It’s gone from wet green to dry dun. From mountain to pampa. It goes dry and the temperature takes on a new meaning. The rios are empty, the deep rooted fastigated poplars are the indicator of a history of a running river. The afternoon sun is harder, more threatening and now we will have to accumulate a fresh supply of water carrying bottles.

We start to move between these two worlds, dipping down from Caviahue to Chos Malal, from a mountain lake and Aurucarias to a scrub of thorn and eight kilos of bottled up water.

With apologies, the photos will not load at the moment.  Look back later!  The Navigator

’Supermercado Todo’: the supermarket that sells everything, or ’everything smells’ of washing-up powder. I can smell it outside the store, it’s coming from the air ducting. Which asks the question: are they pumping it through the shop?, in the same way that UK stores tempt the credulity of their customers into believing that they have an in-store bakery or a coffee grinding plant. The sublminal message being, everything is clean in hear. Unfortunately our oats next morning are tainted clean.