September 12, 2016
Mon 12th Sep: Cafayate to Santa Maria
"How far are you going today?" asked one of a group of French youth at the hostel.
"As far as possible" I reply simply.
That's how it is. There's a town, Santa Maria about 90 kilometres south, I'll most likely stop somewhere to camp just before there.
A woman selling sandwiches from a wicker basket calls at the hostel just as I'm loading the bike in the courtyard. I buy what she discribes as a vegetarian sandwich, being filled with cheese and olives. It'll save me stopping at the supermercado before leaving town. Though later I wish I'd had bought two, because the cheese and the olives make such a good combination.
Cafayate is nationally welknown for fine wine, but not much known about abroad. All the wines from Argentina available in Europe come from Mendoza. Cayafate is also the highest cultivation of wine vines in the world at an altitude of about two thousand metres. Wine from Cafayate is expensive here, it's almost a premium wine, though they use much the same grape varieties as in Mendoza. There's one exception, a white wine grape unique to here, "Torronte". I drank it on a Cafayate vineyard tour once. Unlike other white wines it goes well with cheese and goat meat, a speciality in the region.
So the itinarery this morning since leaving town are bare sticks, rows of vines trained on wires upon a high desert landscape. The sand colour with skeletal rows broken often by white colonial style country houses with colonade arches: the bodega, or winery with names such as "Ercart" on big oak vats at the roadside.
Eventually the rows of vines peter out, replaced by thorny desert. I'm making fair progress when a car passes slowly and pulls over upon the verge ahead. "Oh no, not another person wanting to know all about me".
The occupants are out as I reach the car, a young man not much over twenty I instantly recognise and his girlfriend, the Argentine cycling couple who were staying in the hostel in Salta. There's a middle age couple with them, his parents that are up here on holidays; it's their car. Today he tells me his knee which he mentioned as troubling him in Salta, is still troubling him, so he's taking more time off the bike.
Later I pass from Salta into the next province to the south, Tucuman where the tarmac immediately deteriorates. There's what they call "Badenes". This is where the road sweeps down to cross a rough concrete section, where a rainy seasion stream flows across, then reverts back to rough tarmac climbing up the other side.
Further on the tarmac ends altogether, but there's a tarmac provincial road left turn, RP 307 that I take; where it's about twenty kilometres to Valle de Amaiche.
The surface is even worse on this road, like broken flagstones. Jolt, jolt, jolt, though it passes through a pleasant avenue of trees on either side, which after a lunch stop in among the trees, ends, the road going out into open thorny desert. Furthermore it's a steady gradual climb all the way to Valle de Amaiche.
I was hoping to pick up more food in said village, but every shop is shut for the afternoon, not to open until five, or half past. However on the way on, I come to a shop that is open, where I buy potatoes.
I ride on, climbing gradually all the way with the same old jolt, jolt, jolt over broken tarmac. Until at the top of the hill, I pass a sign "Benvenido La Provence de Catamarca", from where the road improves significantly.
I descend a few kilometres until a track on the left leading off into the desert, that I push the bike along to a clump of trees and thorns, in among which I pitch the tent.
Tomorrow morning I'll have to make a point of stocking up with a few days food in Santa Maria.
My legs, my whole body feel so tired after that road. I feel I need to sit down.
It's official, I'm a bollocks. Now for the road on.
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