Author Archives: The Chronicler

Allow me to Introduce “Zonda”

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It has the feminine suffix, so I suppose that we should consider her in the female form. The trouble is, a whole host of pejoratives will come to mind; bitch witch being the mildest. Sounds like the stage name for a circus act, or the product of the cold world war days and the old East German sports pharma physical industry. “Sonya  the Shot Putter”  turned “professional”, mutated into “Zonda the  World’s Strongest Woman”
Dust in the air, pre-dawn


Shelter – one low thorn bush
and tent poles shrunken in
the cool of the morning!



She’s fast becoming an integral part of our travelling lives. She dictates our whole day, when we get up, how far we go, where we stop, how much water we carry. Zonda  is no act, she’s very real, even if she’s not a physical entity. For Zonda is the dry, desiccating, dehydrating southerly wind that blows up around midday on the eastern side of the Andes. For such a presence, she doesn’t make regular  appearances in travellers tales; maybe the winds of Patagonia are so all consuming that this wind gets lost in the narratives.  In the most recent edition of an English language visitor’s guide, Zonda is described as an autumn and winter, schizophrenia-inducing wind, capable of  raising the temperature from  frosty to  a  pleasant Scottish  summer’s day: from  0 to 20 degrees. A confusion of definitions that could be easily resolved by inviting the editors of said guide to try walking or cycling over the Arena de Campo on a December’s afternoon in 42 degrees of heat. Forget any split in your character, you will be reduced to a simpleton,  a raging ball of spilt spleens, vexatious vitriol and screaming tantrums.  Given these differing  tempestuous  descriptions, it’s maybe not odd that when we were doing, what passes for pre-planning preparation, a north-westerly  was suggested as the prevailing wind direction. Fine, possibly even true, but southerly Zonda seems able to trump that on nine out of our last ten days. She did deputise her cousin, Murphina, to take her place when she decided to take a day off, on the one day that Ruta 40  turned to the prevailing north-west. 
An afternoon, even an hour n the company of Zonda, will leave you zapped, zonked  and zombied.  Your  palate will be creased corrugations, your  tongue stuck to the roof of your mouth, your teeth all furred up, all accentuated by a fast dwindling supply of patience, lip balm and drinking water.
The pessimist accepts the inevitability of the situation and  bails out to a tent or a drain under the road. The optimist  looks for a positive and consoles himself with  the only positive piece of information that Zonda is good for: washed clothes dry fast, then he too heads for the same drain. The pragmatist turns the bicycle around and  heads the other way.
Which ever way you look at it, she’s still a bitch.

Books: Pandaemonium, by Christopher Brookmyre

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If you haven’t discovered Brookmyre yet, do it now. I finished this book at a gallop, breathless and heart pumping hard with adrenalin. Then went back and read it all again.

What is it about? If I said “a trip by a group of teenagers from a Catholic High School in Glasgow to an outdoor centre in the highlands of Scotland“, you’d perhaps think that senility was setting in. But that’s just the vehicle for a brilliant satire on the beliefs of the Catholic Church, mixed with a fair bit of cool sci-fi, comic bits that will make you weep, teenage angst, Glasgow patter, and some horrific bits of blood and gore that are so wildly imagined that you find yourself laughing out loud. Confused? Reading the book won’t really help. Those of you old enough to be able to quote large chunks of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ will perhaps understand. Don’t Panic.

Brookmyre’s earlier books have taken some potshots at several sacred cows and purveyors of mumbo jumbo, all in his incomparable style. His writing is rich, and he has a fine command of language. He certainly knows his subjects. If he wrote without the large helpings of Glasgow vernacular, I guess his audience might be wider; but this seems to bother him not one jot.

In my eyes, the books don’t fit into any existing fiction ‘genre’ – they’re in a place of their own. Haddington Library files them under ‘Crime and Thrillers’ – but that doesn’t seem to quite cover it. Other descriptions include Comedy, Politics, Social Comment, Action and ‘Tartan Noir’. I’d be interested to hear what you think.

Just to add a final snippet: since April 2008, Christopher Brookmyre has been the President of the Humanist Society of Scotland.
www.brookmyre.co.uk

Biotransfer: Gaucho Dog

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Dictionary definition: Gaucho:- a South American cowboy of the Pampas, identifiable by his horse, his long knife and his string of dogs.

If a gaucho consumes meat three times a day and we pack two asados away, does that make us two-thirds a caballero? 66% gaucho, then I remember that I don’t have a machete: remove ten points from my score. But a gaucho without a horse is like the chronicler without his mount , a lost, non person. So that leaves me with the dog; and unfortunately we definitely have one of those.
I’m sitting quietly reading an e-newspaper at a table in Cachi, when I become aware of a dog lying quietly at my feet. It’s not your usual tick-parasitised, flea infested street dog; for one it’s quiet, clean and it’s behaviour suggests “pet”. From experience we know to ignore these hounds; if you want to get rid of them – and most fall into this category – just reach down, as if to pick up a stone and the effect is immediate: exit one cur at top speed, tail between legs. This one was young, with the physique of a small Alsatian, German Shepherd, which I have subconsciously named Gaucho Dog. A while later a river-rounded granite stone, a good dog’s mouthful, is dropped on my toes; GD sits down waiting for me to play. Still I ignore it, giving absolutely no encouragement. I can guess where this might lead, and I don’t want that to happen. This goes on for quite some time, the stone being pawed, the ingratiating, pleading looks; still I ignore it, still no encouragement.

It hangs around all evening, then disappears. Good, I guess that it belonged to the tent that had pulled in earlier in the afternoon. The threat of any hurled stone was never going to deter it , it would only end in a never-ending game.

At some point in the night, one of the street dogs came wandering past, and from what sounded like a few inches from my head, there was a low growl. He, it’s definitely male, is lying outside the tent on guard. Several times throughout the night I hear it chasing of other dogs. At first light I find it lying, waiting, under the parrilla, waiting for the day to start.

We pack up the bags, load up the bikes, still he’s lying waiting, expectant. The moment we move out, he’s up and settles in right behind one of our rear tyres. I know then that we’ve acquired a real Gaucho’s dog, the genuine article, and a very real problem. Back in El Carmel we had watched the mounted police leaving there guard post and collecting posse of assorted unwanted dogs and the problems they had in trying to shed them. Then seeing them coming back off their beat, a string of dogs trotting along behind. These dogs must be born with this instinct of following the horse.

We need some bread for the road, so we ride around town searching out the early opening bakery. We lose GD on three occasions, only to be reunited each time. Eventually stocked with moving on supplies, and at this instance sin dog, we head out of town and go south. Maybe he’s had enough of our ostracising, our boycotting of his games. There’s one road into Cachi and another out, a choice of two points in which to pick up a couple of gringo travellers; there’s GD waiting at the correct one . This dog is a natural. The road will be three days of ruts, washboard and sand. There’s never going to be chance to outpace this dog, top speed will be little better than a fast stroll. Our only hope is that he will get bored, give up and turn around. It never happens; he settles in behind the rear cyclist, settles in for the long haul. Even when he draws the snarling, barking guard dogs from each and every farm and finca, he will snap and growl once or twice, then pad on, keeping pace with us.

We are his horses and he’s got to keep up, even as the temperature rises. He’s panting hard, starting to throw a limp. He might jump into the occasional irrigation ditch to lap down a drink, then he’s back in his appointed station. What started as a bit of a novelty is starting to spook us. At no time have we shown any encouragement, no playing, no food, no water. I try, eventually throwing a stone, far down a banking and, as we expected, it wanted to play. We got a good distance away, whilst it rooted around looking for my projectile. I even thought we had shed our follower but not for long; there he is rooting along beside us again, the same stone in his mouth. Now, our only hope, is an “interesting bitch” might appear to divert his attention. No such luck. At Seclantes we sit in the park making and eating some lunch, GD just goes and lies down in the shade, watching waiting. I even got the length of preparing a rope, with the intention of tying the dog to a bench seat, then pedalling off, in the hope that someone would release him later on. We consider the possibility, then reject it. He just isn’t our responsibility.

Yet we get a guilty feeling, anybody watching us passing will be thinking: look at those stupid gringos, they’ve been feeding a street dog and now it’s going to follow them all over the Andes. The temperature’s rising and the road breaks away from the valley, rising into a waterless, shadowless desert. This dog is suffering, trying to find any acceptable relief thrown by a boulder, shrub or crag, even the narrow stripe of shade thrown by a telegraph pole. Still we don’t encourage him. I still have a hope that he will turn back to the last village, a hope born more of desperation than expectation of success; but no, he keeps pace and when we stop for a breather, he tries to shelter right under my bike. That’s when I definitely know that it is either bred from or is a lost Gaucho’s hound; we’ve seen the dogs sheltering under a trotting horse virtually between the legs.

Eventually our road climbs over a low col and we descend down to the next valley. A ribbon of acacia and pepper shade trees mark the line of a stream. When we cross the Rio Molinos our following, trailing hound decides that a drink is a greater necessity than duty. At last we’ve lost him. Gaucho Dog: one very clever dog. Just how clever we’re about to find out.

I had half expected him to have found us out overnight, and when we rise before sunrise, we were grateful that he wasn’t around. Whilst not our responsibility, he had played fully on our heartstrings. In another circumstance he would be an immense asset, for there’s no doubt that he already has every instinct for herding cattle and sheep.

We’re leaving town on the only road in or out, we’re only moments away from the last house, when from under a truck comes Gaucho Dog. He’s limping and tail wagging, his whole body language one of warm welcome, all ready for another day on the trail. I swore, cursed, and near wept in equal measure. We don’t need another day of devotion and loyalty. Has he eaten?, is he fit?, is it going to get hot today?, I’m not sure that he would make another full day on a section of Ruta 40, that styles itself ‘Heart of the Moon‘. The strange thing is that several local cyclists will have passed him under his truck on their way to work, but they didn’t offer the same potential for adventure.

I now commit my first crime, in frustration we try to chase him back to town, I try the stone hurling, only to get confused whimpering, running around until he gets in front , lies, cowering, waiting. I try tying a rope lead knowing that there’s little chance of being able to lead him anywhere. I’m right. So we decide to enlist some help. We head back into town, back to our campground, to ask Sr. Patron: if we tie Gaucho Dog to a tree, would he release him later in the day? The Navigator’s Spanish is fully up to the task, he only laughs, there’s no surprise at the request. I suspect that it happens all the time. So we tie him to a tree, he whines once as we pedal our guilty consciences away. We look back once, GD has lain down resigned to not getting a chance to run with the strange cycling caballeros today. Maybe tomorrow, then.

Chicoana to Cachi and The Quebrada de Salta.

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What a difference 24 hours and a height rise of 2,100 metres can make.  In Chicoana we had sun, sheltering  in the local plaza,  listening to the locals greet each other with “muy calor”;  it’s gratifying to know that they to are suffering under this sun also.  Eating empanadas,  licking ice creams,  watching a  talent show  for local singers –  the winners were good, the runners up rank karaoke amateurs.  Late afternoon and the temperature has hit 40 degrees. Twenty-four hours later and we’re sitting in a tent wrapped up in sleeping bags, wearing all our clothes. Suddenly  all those extra jerseys, gloves and thermals that have  huddled, neglected and  mouldering  at the bottom  of the panniers  have a use.
We’ve left town, left a hostel near full of  a ladies 35th reunion, left behind the street sweepers clearing up after a  Saturday night that’s not long finished, left behind the competitive singers and the Mariachi bands. Slipped silently, like thieves in the night ,from our lodgings into the pre-sunrise day, and started climbing up the Cumbres del Obispo. Away from a near monoculture of non-food tobacco production and through a series of climatic zones. Rising running along the Rio Escope, along a superbly graded road. The result of the road engineers following sense and the ancient mule trails and not those of their own imaginations which are usually fuelled by the limitless power of the internal combustion engine. In Moncona we’d encountered just such a crime. To save a few kilometres of contouring track they carved a laser ruled line, allowing no respect for topography, mules or cyclists. The result was a series of 25% hills.
The vegetation shifts from thick  bush and forest, to drift sand and shattered rock. The weather reflects these changes, a heavy clouded sky that’s turned to a persistent drizzle, has accompanied us up through the green country. But always up in front there has been the carrot of a sunlit red hillside. The sun, the cacti and the dessert all arrive, all coincide, as we ascend through into another biosphere.   We climb, the river now falling far below, now a thin braided ribbon lost in a vast flat bottomed valley of gravel, that in the wet will be filled wall to wall, the monochrome occasionally punctuated by solitary deep rooted  bright green weeping willow tree.  The steep valley sides, striated walls of iron salted greens and reds, dotted with sparse tussock grasses. Dropping down through this scape of dun coloured lands, are vertical microclimates, a mere tens of metres  wide.  Verdant gashes of oozing fecundity. We ride through one such, riding under deep shade green fig and white fleshed peach trees.  Bags of the latter are for sale on a lonesome roadside stall. Then, just as suddenly, you’re back in the stark sterility of the desert.
Still the road climbs, the score increasing on the altimeter.  An accumulation of metres all safely banked and not squandered on a roller coaster of  declivities and re-ascents. The  route choosing to contour deep into a side valley, crossing  a dry arroyo bed, then  gently rising back out , returning to it’s original itinerary, back to a   generally northerly direction . A mild, tender ascent that works with, and not against the land. We refuel on empanadas and rotten instant coffee, which at 2,200 metres is like a nectar of rocket fuel; we’ll need it, for now the real work starts. The gradient remains mule track, but the surface goes from asphalt to gravel. There’s 21kms and a further 1,100 metres of climbing to go, which, once the safari of racing  Toyotas  have passed in a storm of dust and scattered  grit, we settle down to a steady rhythm, a steady accumulation of height.
The advice to those who wish  to visit the national park at Los Cardones  is to get up there early, before the late morning cloud  envelops the tops. This,  for a cyclist  poses a problem: camp in the lower valley and suffer a dark time alpine style start, then an altitudinally induced , heart thumping race against the clock and the mountain; or tent it on the summit. The downside of the latter option  is that the last 1,000 metres of approach will be in a wet cold mist, with the possibility of a sufferfest on a storm blasted moor. The upside, the potential bonus, is the possible, teasing expectation of a mountain sunrise. In the clag , the near whiteout, we listen for the ascending and descending traffic, trying to gauge which might be the service bus or the fuel tanker. Both require the use of the whole of the road at any of the multitude of hairpin bend; they’ve passed us going  over, we know that they’ve got to come back sometime. A local woman surprises me, she morphs out of the gloom, standing, waiting, swaddled in a volume of bright shawls and blue skirts,  silent, motionless at the side of the road . A bus must be imminent. The  low visibility shortens our world down to the scree banks and the sudden  surprise of small flowering cacti, splashes of blood red in the murk. As the few and infrequent cars go by they offer encouragement, yet we can’t reply, we need both hands on the handlebars for control over the river rounded ball-bearing gravel; we need the concentration to keep going.  The gradient is hard to judge, I know that it’s still going up, yet it looks flat We’re running on a near empty tank, suffering for low carbs, and lack of altitude acclimatisation. On the final three kilometres the wobble starts, we’re safer and quicker pushing the last few tens of metres to the summit. The Navigator has led from start to finish, pushing the pace.  But it’s only when we reach the top and I see her hypoxic  lips –  she claimed it was only the contrast to the tan – that I realised we needed to stop.
There was never going to be a problem with a  pitch for a tent, there are a selection of suitable spots where the cloud fed streams cross the road, the trick would to choose on with a view for the morning. It’s a cliché, but also a perfect truism:  ‘Good decisions are never made with tired minds”, so with this in mind we just fling up the tent in the first safe place.  Above the road, amongst the Spartan tussocks, a full unexpurgated unsheltered view of wet cloud.  The potential was there for a good dose of sufferfest. Now at 3,310 metres – it sounds better in metric feet: 10,923ft – you would expect some wind, but it went flat calm as the light faded.  Not long after closing up the tent and settling down, the drumming rain stopped, leaving an eerie, vacant silence. An occasional vehicle passes around our high eyrie promontory, the occasional door opens and later closes, which always sets off a spurt of adrenaline, until you remember that there’s a travellers’ shrine around the last bend. At some point I come to, there’s  a diffused light coming into the tent, instinctively I know that it has to be good news. I get up, a  waning  final quarter moon is rising out of the valley cloud. The air is sharp, the sky crystal clear above, the whole  panoply of a southern sky is  arranged overhead. It’s stunningly beautiful. I’d like to whoop, jump  for joy, but that would only tempt the mountain gods and their  Irish cousin into spoiling the morning by drawing a veil  up and over us.  We neither sleep well, the first few nights at height are always the same, the vague shadow of a headache  that reminds you  that you’re  high up, but the potential pay off is there.
Pre-dawn and we’ve got the stove running:  it’s fully leaded coffee and dulce de leche fortified oats, it’s  four layers  and full Gore-tex , it’s frozen alpines and frosted  grasses. The old moon is high in the new sky, the sun rising fast through the  inverted, clouded horizon. Suddenly the first shafts hit the  high top behind us, the shadow line racing down to engulf us. We both just sit and marvel; it’s  spiritual moment. I’m not sure that we had in any way planned  this, planned for this perfection, but we have one  of the grandest  tenting spots  imaginable. Neither photo’ nor word can convey the feeling of sitting   high on a mountain at dawn. The stillness of the air, the feeling of newness, of a nascent day breaking into life. It’s an  immediate, raw, unrepeatable, irreplaceable  moment of time.
What follows a start like this should, by any law of averages, any rules of justice, be an anti-climax. After last evening’s climb on loose gravel, we had  anticipated a rough, rocky decent, what we are offered is a slow, long easy angled slope of smooth tar. We leave gravity and the bikes to roll us gently along, dropping us into the mist that’s drifting around the hillsides. I had wondered if  the conditions were in place for a Brocken spectre, when , there running alongside me, is a fogbow. Like it’s cousin the rainbow, it’s refracted light passing through a prism of water, only the fogbow devoid of colours. Ethereal and vaporous , it appears and disappears, as we drift, rolling along .
Another weather first and a road that has just pushed it’s way into an over crowded “ top ten”, yet we haven’t reached the reason why this place is designated a National Park.
The high flat puna,  the expanses of weather shattered rock and gravel, the few tussocks of dry, brittle grasses, grazed by wild  donkeys and a few thin cattle,  gives way to a  canyon of chocolate brown vertically  striated rocks, topped by sentinels of Cardones, or cacti. The road now turns sinuous, twisting between outcrops, freewheeling  through long easy corners, then takes one last bend and opens out onto a vast monumental plain of sand, grit and gravel.  The columnar cacti set out like an army in open order march, now transfixed in time; an over-replicated Antony Gormley  installation, the stylised figures cockaded with fresh flowers, staring out  across the gravel levels, to the real high tops of Cordillera los Andes.
A classic, in your face road. A new picture around each and every bend. A moonrise, a sunrise, a temperature inversion  and a fogbow all before second breakfast. Sensory overload.  Picture postcard; sweetie tin productions. Easy, bite sized, pre-digested gobbets of tabloid tourism. An antithesis to our experiences of  the differing areas we’ve passed through so far on this trip. The  teeming madness of Buenos Aries,  the quiet solitude of Uruguay, the rolling hills of Misiones, the unfashionable Chaco and now the dry savagery of Los Andes: all are individuals, all are parts of a whole. Some are easy on the digestion, some take time and more assimilation to get their full calorific values.
1959, 1962 1971 1974 1995 2001 467 480 501

‘scuse me?

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Mutual language practice at 6am!



This is The Navigator trying to get a word in edgeways.

I’d just like to make mention of the Kindness of Strangers – I know that Kate Adie wrote a book with that title, but as we travel we’ve been meeting the kindest strangers.

Folk that stop on the road to make sure you have enough water; who stop for a chat; who insist on raiding their own supplies to give us gifts of fruit or bread; who help with directions; the lady in the fruit shop who wouldn’t take payment for my small purchase – “it is a gift”; Emanuel, who, when we asked for directions to a campground, jumped on his own bike and guided us on to the right road. There have been so many kindnesses, large and small. All of these folk have joined us in our adventure for a little while, and become a great part of it.

There is no way we can individually repay all these kind folk; all we can do is to pass on the kindness to someone else. In the hope that one day a circle will be completed.

Salta: Approach and Retreat

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and the pool was – empty.



We came to taste, but you spat us out.

We don’t do cities very well, cities are for cars not people. Salta as written up by the guide books suggested it might be different. I’m always sceptical, but susceptible to a good suggestion. We knew that the municipal camping boasted the largest swimming pool in south America, and it had been recommended by several people. However we take bets when we see the words ’Balneario’ – a place for swimming – as to whether there will be water in the pool, river or hole. Or will it be reverting back to bush, with a tree growing out of the base. Empty, cracked and broken is the norm. Salta looked a likely place to for a lay up, a town to investigate, a chance to take a breather, collect some ideas and to buy the work’s Secret Santa gifts.
The main drag through town bisects the place, leading directly to the municipal camping, which makes for simple navigation. We’d had a short day, which is useful, cities have a habit of being able to anything between 10-50% to the end of the day.

We ignore the ‘No Cycling’ signs, just like the motorists ignore the ‘no overtaking’ signs, and run down the autopista. It’s fast and furious and drops us exactly where we want to be. Too good to be true? You bet! The vast camping and leisure complex is closed, something about ‘peligroso’. The latino catch all, or excuse that may or may not mean something is dangerous. Interestingly, the cyclist who had given us the recommendation had stayed there last year and had watched the pool attendant sling a bag of chloride on his back and proceed to walk up the pool emptying it, so chlorinating the water. Maybe health and safety has started to make an incursion here.

So our nice simple plan is confounded, and our usual city suspicions are confirmed. We’re now sent on a wild goose chase, being directed in various directions to the varying locals idea of a good campground. The result is a tour of the industrial belt, the airport district and the motel land. Finally 35kms later, we’re somewhere well to the south of Salta, down a dead end road, beside the local penitentiary. A base to explore a city by car, it might be, on a bike it is not. It only proves that cities have sold their souls to the internal combustion engine.

Fundamental Errors and the Run Out of Ciudad del Este

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I’ve made the unpardonable traveller’s mistake. I’ve created a prior image of Paraguay, based on a few chance comments and the topography that we passed through to the east. I don’t think I’ve ever been so ignorant a place before. Could I have named the capital? Possibly. Did I know any history? I was vaguely aware that it had had it’s fair share of unsavory rulers, beyond that: nada. I had read and enjoyed John Gimlette’s book “The Tomb of the Inflatable Pig”, but with no personal reference points, it had simply been a travellers tale. To the east, in Misiones it had been heavy commercial forestry, subsistence farming of tobacco and manioc or small pockets of original growth jungle. Little Indio towns had been mentioned, so I had created a mental picture, one we had seen one afternoon. The wooden grass thatched shacks, a family of children with a monkey trying to pose for photo opportunities alongside roadside stalls selling woven baskets and jungle fruits bromeliads and orchids.

Of course the reality was almost diametrically opposed to this imagined picture.

Coming out of the urban sprawl of Ciudad del Este: the youthful upstart that has only just made it’s half century, heading due west for Asuncion: who likes to style itself “The Mother of the Americas”. At over five centuries it does have age on it’s side. We’ve left the downtown, wild west clutter of cut price emporia. The spurious named tee-shirts, the pirated CDs, the fake DVDs, the sham Reeboks, the bootlegged Nikes. Now comes a ribbon development of small brightly painted businesses selling intelligent batteries or religious statuary, moto tyres or rolled barbed wire, cerveza Budwieser or combine harvesters, frutas & verduras and gridlocked cars. interspersed within this brick and mortar jungle are the smoked glass and chromed steel edifices of the German euro car importers, the complete agro supplies industry and a full pack of financial services. All primary indicators of where the agri-industrial money lies.

Instead of forested jungle closing in around the road, the country side opens up soya and wheat, corn and dairy fields stretch away to a rolling horizon. All the mega agri giants are in attendance: the Cargills, the ADMs and the Parmalats. It’s a broad picture of extended intensive agriculture. Slowly though, other images start to appear. The small roadside tables of mixed herbs, chopped and pounded in a mortar with a wooden pestle for the national drink, terere. An iced yerba mate. The preponderance of Canadian Holstein cattle blood lines, opposed to the Hereford and Brahmins of Argentina; a legacy of the German speaking Canadians who came here in 1929. The rows of small stalls all selling identical stock. The twelve in Mingua Guasu that sold only Cantaloupe melons, the ten in Estigarriba that only sold gourds and oranges. The rows of small sheds in Caaguazu that sold hand made wooden hobby horses or the rows of second hand plastic drums in Luque. The chipa sellers, baskets balanced on their heads, jumping from moving bus to accelerating collectivo. Then there are those motels, the love hotels that post and precede, bracket each and every town. All start to give a distinctive Paraguayan feel, rather than the broad brush South American one.

It’s pleasant to have your preconceptions challenged, your prejudices punctured, on this occasion they have been utterly deflated. Crossing Paraguay had been a short cut to the west of Argentina, so I suspect we had been a bit apprehensive; born of ignorance and the “them over there” tales. I know for a fact that we were disrespectful and that we didn’t give enough time to the place. Yet sometimes you need short tastes to act as appetisers, confidence boosters.

As we cross the Rio Paraguay, one of the river steamers is ploughing it’s way up river, passing underneath us. It could be at that point that another possible journey was born: Colombia, Brazil, even French Guiana have roused our interest before, but to add in a major upriver trip that’s not the Amazon and come down through the Mennonite communities of the arboreal Chaco and camp out in the Jesuit ruins of San Trinidad.
Sometimes it’s fun to speculate, however it’s as well to remember to base it on a degree of fact and not on uninformed preconceptions, ignorant speculation, for otherwise bias and bigotry follow close behind.

The Discombobulated World of the Hotel Room

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It’s a strange inside world lost in an hotel room. The shutters will be closed, the windows painted shut- and that’s presupposing that there is a window in the first place. Oft times there isn’t. A world dislocated from the reality on the other side of a thin skin of brick and plaster, the environment controlled by aircon, fan and a lightbulb. When you’ve lived exclusively out of doors for over two months, where you’re in touch with every nuance of nature, attuned to the cycles of day length, moving indoors comes as a disturbing shock. We’ve closed ourselves into one of these cocoons, dropped the setting on the chiller to a Scottish summer and settled down to a siesta. “when in Rome……..” it makes sense. Roused sometime later I open the room door, only to let a blaze of violent hot bright light, a blast furnace of heat, in. My subconscious mind had assumed, because there was no natural light in the room, it must be dark outside. A mistake that you can never make in a tent. It’s a trade off, an unsynchronized body clock for a cool afternoon, sensory deprivation for a sweat free night.

Moments in Chaco Time: MAMBA Conclusion

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The Chaco and it’s antonym, Los Cordillera Andes are two parts to the same Argentine equation. For myself they are of equal status, only one requires a little more delving, a little more enquiry to be able to find a subtle interest, a deeper character, an inner beauty. The other is the super model. All is on the surface, open for instant inspection, flaunting her wares, grabbing the catwalk of a touristic trail.

Yet we too are voyeurs as we pass through the Chaco. How can I with a northern Anglo-Saxon experience and mindset come to understand the world of a family trying to survive on a patch of dry salty land with a herd of goats, a couple of pigs and a few hens. Living in a wooden slatted hut where the dust and grit blow in through the chinks, where neither the temperature nor the humidity can be controlled by chiller or fan. Then having to watch the daily procession of transfrontera car transporters hauling the latest imported model of chrome and steel past his front gate.

As an exercise in utter futility, I try to put myself into his shoes, maybe I would just ignore those loco gringos expending all that energy, all that pedalling effort, and for what? All that rushing around, slaving a life for the latest model to come off a BMW production line. No, I’m not able to even start to think in another person’s mind, to comprehend what living is truly like out here.

I console my conscience, by justifying that at least we put some cash back into the local economy. We have to buy food every day, we have to pay for accommodation every evening, which in this age of a globalised economy is at least locally owned.

So I might as well make the effort to look, to observe, to try to understand. That’s when you start to realise that this is not, and no countryside can ever be, MAMBA.

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Moments in Chaco Time: Leaving the Chaco

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Back onto the smooth hard top of the trans-Chaco, the sky vast, the horizon as flat as last night’s pizza. The road a notch on the distant periphery, a ribbon of grey giving way to a mirage of mirrors, the oncoming moto a mote of red, ten minutes away, floating, shimmering in mercury. The vegetation showing real signs of the dry. The prickly pear deflated, flacid and limp, the wild tomatoes fruiting, their leaves dead. The water holes mere slips of green scum, the Rio Seco living up to it’s name. Everything, you feel is just waiting for the rain, waiting for the wet to start.
The land gives a slight wobble, we manage a 10 metre climb, irrigated fields of maize occur, soya is waiting for the combine, which I take to mean that we are leaving the Chaco. Gone are the Ceibo trees, the rooting pigs in the petrol station, the herds of goats climbing through the thorn thickets, the stallion guarding the mare with her new born foal.