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It's been a long day today and it was after dark when I found my way out of the city of San Rafael to where I now have pitched the tent.

This morning I was half expecting a gaucho on horseback to come along, as there was a well worn horse-trail through the grassy strip where I'd camped last night. But no such thing happens.

The tent is taken down unseen. All is packed on the bike. I push back to the road, which involves unloading the bike again, in order to slide it underneath the fence. All done without anyone apparently seeing me. Or if they do, not passing any remark.

This morning there's broken cloud overhead, but rain ahead. The road continually lined with tall elm tree windbreak. Soon I pass through the village of Paraditos, leaving which, route 40 turns off on the right. Decision time. Going right is shorter, albeit slower because it isn't tarmacked. Straight on, route 143 to San Rafael is tarmac. Its a choice easily made. I need to buy food today, so I continue straight for the city.

There is another small place ahead, a few houses and a restaurant. Beyond which the road goes out upon open moorland, going gradually uphill toward a level horizon where, the dark cloud and rain is closing in. Reaching the brow of the uphill where I think the road ahead will be level, only reveals another few kilometres straight uphill...

Its a dark green plain, almost black in the gloom of low cloud. Like a table with two legs significantly longer at the side I'm travelling toward. At a rough guest its a three per cent gradient, or thirty metres gained in altitude per kilometre. Eventually it continues uphill for thirty kilometres, thereby gaining nine-hundred metres. A high mountain in Ireland. Having reached the high point the cloud has descended with drizzling spots of rain. Obscuring the way in a fog with visibility down to little more than a hundred metres. I switch on the bike's rear flasher light, put on rainjacket and winter gloves because its freezing cold.

Luckily the fog soon clears when I descend, revealing a great hollow below with a dry river, a brown belt meandering through its thorny scrub middle, looking surreal.

The road drops down and crosses over a bridge across said dry-river and climbs up the other side to level out upon a plateau, gently undulating the rest of the way to San Rafael. The cloud breaking up with increasing intervals of sunshine.

Its an awful long way, ten kilometres on a cycle-lane from the outskirts to the city-centre, where I halt at a panadaria (bakery) to buy alfajoras. While waiting to be served an attractive blond woman approaches me from the side and asks "Adonde soy?" I don't normably like answering such direct questioning from strangers, but she is nice. She asks where I'm staying. Suggests a hostel. But I reply I'm riding on toward Malargue. She retorts, its 200km! Its actually 189km. I say, I'm finding a place to camp outside the city.

I fill up on five litres of water at a petrol station. The woman in the panadaria told me where there's a supermercado, a little further along the same street, where I buy enough to keep me going for two days to Malargue, making the bike feel like it has doubled in weight.

Then finding my way out of the city is troublesome.

I turn left when I see a Malargue sign pointing left along a narrow bumpy street. Then see no more signs for Malargue as the narrow bumpy street continues for a long way. The sun is now hovering low on the horizon so I'm anxious to find my way out of the city soon.

Stopped at traffic-lights I ask a scooter rider the way, who gives me complicated directions. Turn left, then right, then right, and so on. He seemed to be sending me the wrong way for a laugh. And later I find he most likely was when a few streets on where he'd directed me, I wave down an old man on a bicycle, who in a sincere tone sends me back the way I had came, taking me back a block on from the Malargue sign that points left. The sign pointing the wrong way.

The sun is setting, the sky a blaze through the trees as I ride hard along a cycle-lane along the Malargue road. Its another long way to the outskirts, but at last I reach open country and start looking for a place to camp.

I halt when I come to old railway lines crossing the road, getting off and pushing the bike off to the left along the railway into an overgrown paddock with trees at the far side where I head to.

Pitching the tent in the dark, I've company. A horse...