Cafayate Que-Que Linda......

May 31, 2011

The last ten or eleven days riding up from the National Park Ischigualasto (Valle de Luna) to Cafayate can only be discripted as absolutely superb: the belated highlight of the tour. Totally memoriable looking down the long road in to the distance and a dreamy carefree atitude that had taken hold of me at last after an April and early May of shall we say not quite enjoying it. But enough said.

I had all but exhausted my food supply on getting here yesterday. There remained but a packet of biscuits and a few teabags. So shopping for the remaining two days to Salta was necessary. Cafayate is well endowed with traditional food shops and I found the whereabouts of a small family run shop which is a more human shopping experience than a big supermercado. I found all I needed easier. Only buying necessities. No junk whatsoever. I bought enough food for three days even though I'll only be cycling for two. As well as pasta I include tastie things like Tuna. You can buy Tuna in tomatoe sause here which is a perfect accompaniment with pasta. There is a wide range of prices in Tuna. The cheaper Tuna is awful. The can of Tuna in tomatoe sause is the most expensive which is just as well. I also bough both peanuts and walnuts, porridge oats, Dulce de Leche which is a runny toffee, ground coffee and a few other things.

The drawback of staying in a hostel is you cannot get away as early as you'd wish of a morning. At the hostel in Cafayate breakfast begins at eight o'clock or at lease that's what is stated on the notices. I came for breakfast at eight thirty but the lady still hadn't finished setting up the breakfast. It was eight thirty and not earlier as the others in the dormitory I shared were still fast asleep and I didn't want to be crashing around. In anycase the sun doesn't rise over the mountains till eight fifteen, so this time seems earlier than what is shown on the clocks so I don't blame them for still sleeping at this time.

With breakfast over I return to the dorm where my fellow hostellers are up and have taken-over the bathroom. They are young ladies and need lots of time to put on make-up and it didn't look as if I'd get in any time soon just to brush my teeth. Furthermore, later when I was finally ready to leave and wanted to pay, I couldn't as I'd only a one-hundred pesos banknote and the receptionist didn't have any change. I'd to wait twenty minutes until someone else paid with smaller denominations before I could eventually get going.

North of Cafayate I turn off Ruta 40 and take route 68 for Salta passing the last of the vineyards. There was a brisk wind seemingly from the East but later it swung around and manifest itself to be a good old westerly coming down off the Altoplano with fridget cold air. It came in gusts at times almost bringing the bike to a halt especially on the many short uphills where it suddenly caugh me and I dug in to counter it causing the chain to slip with a rough metalic click over the middle ring teeth. Yes the ring is worn to the point of needing to be replaced.

The road passes through the definitive provence of Salta red rock country with formations the result of millions of years of sculpture work by the wind revealing different colours in the mineral rich hillsides. The red is iron, yellow uranium and green is cooper.

It was to be a day when not a great deal of cycling was done and more a day of stopping to admire the scenery taking photos. I stop first for quite awhile at a place called Las Coloradas. A little later after the road had done a big horse-shoe figure, a perfect curve around and through a great long rib of redish crumbing rock rising above the pale green and grave dry river, I stop again. I got talking to the occupants of a car that had stopped too. They were two middleaged women on holiday with their local guide. I soon heard in the way they spoke English and their accent that they were from Norway. They spoke thus, "have you been on the road in a long time?"; translated word for word literally from Norgewan. When I told them I'd been on the road in South America for nearly two years, they raised their eyebrows and one took a whole stride and a semi-turn away shaking her head in disbelieve. I went on to tell them in short where all I'd been and things I'd seen. They were nice people. It was like talking with people from home as I've lived in Norway for ten years after all. The conversation settled on the view. "We don't find landscape like this in Europe", said one. "Yes" I agreed and said "that's I suspect what makes it so impressive to us europeans, though North Americans usually aren't so impressed as they've seen similar in places like Arizona.

While I cycled onwards, the wind still dictated that Is to make poor progress, and tomorrow, the final day of this tour, would be a long day distance-wise. The road was sinuous, twisting around vertical cuttings where suddenly on rounding the corner I came out off shelter into a headwind which blew along the valley almost stopping me in my tracks.

The road didn't have much traffic but what there was traveled incredibly fast. I felt vulnerable on the many blind corners. It was somewhat like waiting for the moment of screehing brakes when the speeding car doesn't see me until it's too late and ploughs on into me. The worse are the many excursion tourbuses late in the day. The tour and all the talking over for the day, the driver just wants to return to the city ASAP and drives impossibly fast for such a big vehicle.

The afternoon wore on. I had stopped for lunch along a track in a multicoloured valley with unusual chocolate brown escarpment contrasting with the more usual reds and yellows; sheltering from the wind amongst heaps of stones and gravel by the dry riverbed. Earlier; the local guide had mentioned the state of the road ahead and sure enough all afternoon I rode on tempory devertion roads around places where the road had been washed away during the past rainy-season. For most of the day the road had a river to the side wherein there was no water, but looking closer can be seen a fast flowing channel, small amongst a wide breadth of gravel bars, but during the rainy-season this becomes a great raging brown torrent. The rainy-season which had just past according to the guide, the rains came more than usual, and the river swoll so much, bursting it's banks, washing away the road in many places.

Approaching five o'clock, I found where an old road swung off to the left around a hill whereas the present road is cut straight on through. A place to camp. As I push the bike off along this road which is partly overgrown with thorns, I see bicycle wheel-tracks leading along to where I find scattered stones in a rough square the size of a tent floor. The wheel-tracks are of two bikes and fresh enough to say that the cyclists that had camped here had probably only left this morning.

Today's ride: 63 km (39 miles)
Total: 15,288 km (9,494 miles)

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