Kilometre Zero: Plaza de Mayo to near Ranchos.

November 8, 2015

Ready to go with the presidential palace "Casa Rosada" behind me.

I sit now in Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires' central square. I can't think of a more romantic start to a tour of Argentina. I could take a bus out of the city to a small town and start cycling there, but why would I want to do that. This is what I like. I start here in the heart of the city and spent the first day cycling through streets and eventually reach the outskirts, hoping to be in countryside by nightfall.

There are some thirty to forty kilometres of city street before reaching the edge of the greater city, then hundreds of kilometres of flat featureless pampas before I reach anywhere interesting. And before you ask why; quite simply, once I reach that first interesting place, it'll be all the more worthwhile having cycling all that way, than just having got off a bus and gone for a short ride to see the same thing. The challenge of the long monotonous road begets the reward of having ridden under your own steam, feeling the euphoria of having ridden a bicycle so far, having seen the countryside gradually change; pure undiluted by other means of transport bike travel; eventually to see what others have come easily in cars or buses to see.

The sky is cloudless and its warm sitting out of the shade. There are the usual tourists from all over the world milling around the plaza as I take in the moment. In the weeks ahead, when hundreds of kilometres from here, I'll think back on this time with fondness.

On Saturday the Avenida de Mayo was closed for the Gay Pride parade. Today the street remained closed with a stage in the street where a band is tuning up.

Always one to leave everything to the last moment, I've spent the morning packing and doing last minute stuff and so, it is now midday when I set off into the main avenue out of the plaza, Avenida de Mayo, still closed to traffic after yesterday's Gay Pride parada. There's a stage set up in the street where a string orchestra is tuning up and rows of plastic chairs are set out for an audience. I continue along the avenue empty of cars, occasionally weaving round the odd pedestrian that has spilled out from the pavement.

Reaching Avenida 9 Julio on a green light, I just about make it the whole way across as the lights go red and the five rows of waiting cars start moving, and turn left along the inside lane on the far side.

There are traffic-lights at every intersecting street in the grid, with country names such as, Mexico and Estados Unidos (USA): while waiting for the lights at the later, I look across to my left and see a grand nineteenth century hotel on the street corner in cream and pastel green, with a cafe at street level, and three stories above of shuttered french windows and a parapet flat roof, contrasting with a nineteen-sixties red brick and concrete panel high-rise block to the rear.

At a point a few kilometres along, there's an elevated junction, beyond which, the five lane either way 9 Julio becomes autopista raised above street level on concrete stilts. The two additional inside lanes where I cycle continues. There is the occasional large pothole that would badly damage a wheel should I ride into through lack of attention. Then there's a speed ramp, which I slow for, but not slow enough as the jerk causes the front right pannier to uncouple and bounce off onto the street. A kind passerby picks it up and hands it to me when I turn back to retrieve it.

The speed ramp slows traffic entering a large green plaza with a busy bus-rank and railway station along the whole south side, called "Plaza Constitution". From here, having scouted the way yesterday on the bike, I follow a busy shopping street leading to a long avenue, which takes me through what can only be described as a rough part of town, where ragged men are asleep on the pavement and a sunburned young man wearing only filthy shorts screams abuse as I cycle pass. For this reason its a bit worrying to have to stop at lights

This avenues ends and I turn left upon another avenue and immediately cross a narrow iron bridge over Rio Manzana. Then further the area is more a mixed working, middle class suburbs, with neatly dresses people walking dogs and couples visiting ice-cream parlours. Eventually I join national road 205, the road and streets to this point, I've carefully researched using Google map, so no time is spent stopped unsure of the way. It seems almost like a famillar daily commute. And having chose Sunday, there's no commercial traffic. no vans drivers in a hurry to make a living; just Sunday drivers.

I lunch at a roadside restaurant in Lomas de Zamora. Lomas means low hills, so low I hadn't noticed that I'd climbed. A town swallowed up by the suburbs of Buenos Aires. There still remains quite a way of commercial street of supermarkets, furniture shops, car showrooms, petrol stations and warehouses. Then sports playing fields and continuous scattered village of low houses, many houses with sizable plots of land, growing vegetables and keeping a horse or two. And eventually I'm out into open country with huge table flat pasture fields dotted with cattle.

There is one town I reach about five, with an English sounding origin name, "Brandsen". Here I pick up national road 29 toward "Ranchos".

I keep riding until well near eight. The traffic is light going my way, but approaching dusk, oncoming traffic returning to the city, is a constant convoy of cars, and the impatient cars are using the outbound lane to overtake, as if it were the fast lane on a motorway. Its scary to have cars drive head-on at me so fast. And I feel for my own preservation I've to get off the road as quick as possible and camp.

I check out an old cattle loading pen first, which would've been an ideal spot for the tent, but for access, as it would mean lifting the bike over a padlocked gate. Then a little further I come to a roadside grove of trees, providing cover from the road and so ends my first day.

Pampa. It rains here often. How else would it be so green.

I checked out this loading pen as a possible camp spot.

Today's ride: 97 km (60 miles)
Total: 97 km (60 miles)

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