October 7, 2016
Fri 7th Oct: Chos Malal to 19km < Las Lajas
There was one other thing I remenber.
When I'd lunched in the plaza yesterday, I took a walk across to the other side, to an interpetation board on the history of the place. Here's my rough translation.
The Plaza was laid out in 1892, together with adjoining streets, with a fence around enclosing a garden. Entrance to the garden was via a turnstyle for those that had first bought a ticket.
On Sundays a police band would play in a shed (I take that to mean a bandstand) in the middle, playing a mixed repetoir. The governor would watch and listen while sat on the sidewalk outside his residence....
I also read that Chos Malal was the first capital of the province of Neuquen. A status lost in 1903 when the railway had reached the confluence of Rio Neuquen and Rio Limay, a few hundred kilometres southeast, in a more central and easily accessable location where a city grew called Neuquen, that would become the new provincial capital. The terrain, apparently, was too ardiously difficult to continue the railway to the earlier capital, Chos Malal
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And so Chos Malal to this day remains a small town tucked away in the foothills of the Andes. The only tarmac road link to the outside is route 40.
This morning I reach the midway point of 40.
But first...
I am pedaling back out on a track over the gravel-bar to the road about half eight, when a man walking his dog becomes the first person of the day to stop me and ask me all where I'm from? Where I've cycled from? And so on.
A man with his wife and big cute white dog, that actually had come from the camper, a white Renault Traffic parked in the amenity area. They tell me they're from Mendoza, and are on their way south. They are nice people.
He says "I just drive in that camineta. But I've respect for you cycling."
Anyway, its only a few kilometres south of town when I arrive at a the sign "Ruta 40 Centro" Thinking at first it is some kind of tourist office for information on the 40. But soon see the meaning: the halfway point north to south.
There is also a big monument depicting the whole of America upside down, with South America at the top and Argentina at the very top. I thought this to mean Argentina's feeling of its importants. But not when I read the text interpetation. Which states that other maps usually distort things by putting Latin America at the bottom. While in reality, the world is drawn together by gravity. There is no top, nor bottom.
The thing here is distances are long between places. It is no picnic like Europe, where you can chose how far to ride as there are towns everywhere to buy food. Here the next town south is Las Lajas, 155 kilometres away.
Well, the wind remains nothing more than a soft breeze. Although sunny it isn't warm as I remain cocooned in jacket, wooly hat and gloves most of the morning.
On from the monument the road drops down and swings right, crossing over a long bridge over Rio Neuquen. Then swings left to follow the valley until a steep climb. A ten kilometre plus uphill drag. I can see a crown of a hill ahead with nothing but sky above, but once I've climbed as far, its disheartening seeing yet another long uphill ahead.
Eventually I drop steadily down, a long straight road across a thorny pampa enclosed by redish brown hills off o the left and hard by on the right. The road goes steadily down for ten kilometres or more, until the road swings right toward the hills to begin a second long climb of the day. Worse than the first.
I manage. The other side the road drops steeply to another, almost boundless pampa where I spend most of the afternoon crossing. Somewhere along here I lunch late by mounds of soil in off the road. And an hour or so on the the hills to the side close in as the road skirts a salt water stream on the right, which the road eventually swings down to and crosses over upon a long bridge.
From the bridge the road goes diagonally up the hillside the other side, over and around into another valley running at a right-angle to the road hitherto before the bridge, with rising ground to the right and a river ribboned with greenery far down a slope to the left.
About thirty kilometres on along this valley I've reached my goal for the day, having covered 120 kilometres.
This evening at the hundred and twenty K mark, I'm camped in off the road along a dry-stream well hidden by bushes.
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