Heart

0

Comment

0

Link

Log in to comment or reply

Heart

0

Comment

0

Link

Log in to comment or reply

Well, there were a few things I forgot to mention the last time in my haste to switch off the torch and lay down to sleep. The first, vegetation. When riding out of Chalten yesterday, the steppe was cropped bare. I think from long term overgrazing by sheep. There remains low thorny bushes, but the soil is bare for the most part. An environmental disaster that has come about with the settlement of Patagonia. Overgrazing and thereby soil erosion.

The second, I'd only a few empanadas and an alfahora for lunch. So it is imperative that I reach Calafate for lunchtime today. Third, we talked a lot about Butch Cassidy. Frances and Alex, I find as fasinated as me about the 1969 film, Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, about the legendary North American bank and train robbing gang who hide from the law in Patagonia. They mention an imfamous bank robbery in Rio Gallegos in 1905, alleged to have been carried out by the gang. Which brings up the matter that they may have well passed by the Parador Leona on there way back north to where they lived at Cholila. I suggested the journey after the bank robbery north would've taken months in 1905, as there were few roads then. There would've been migrational horse trails left from the nomadic people who lived across Patagonia until recently at that point. They would have perhaps covered at most ten miles a day on horseback before having to rest the horses, preferable having halted close to a river and pasture for grazing. And they couldn't possibly ride every day. Many days would be spend hunting, shooting gaunco and ostrich to eat. Though a factor not to be discounted is Patagonia was at the time in transition into settlements and sheep farms, so they perhaps relied much on people they met on these new farms and settlements; given that there perhaps wasn't telephones yet in these remote regions that would alert the few locals of the real identity of the strangers they fed.

There would've been the embro of most of the roads there are today, in horse trails and perhaps in places wagon tracks which would become the main lateral roads from the South Atlantic coast with it's ports: the entry point for people and goods to the area going west to the Andes, providing access to the new sheep farms and eventually long distance wagon tracks north-to-south, that would become the embryo of Route 40.

This morning I want to get to Calafate early for no other reason than to have a restful afternoon, and of coarse so I can eat lunch. The landscape in Patagonia looks it's best both early in the morning and before dark in the evening. Not far from where I'd camped the river fans out into a wide estuary as it flows into Lago Argentino, a green strip of water with scattered boxes of the town of Calafate on the far shore with purple barrancas beyond, the tops of which shrouded in low rain cloud.

It isn't much further than ten kilometres until reaching a deep cleft in the brown pampa and a drop down to cross the second big river, the Rio Santa Cruz. The turquiose water gliding along. This river is the outlet for the entire melt-water river system of this part of Patagonia. Downstream from the road bridge across, it goes round in a dramatic S-bend. It isn't far on from the climb up from the other side of the river, that the road drives toward a row of barrancas which indicates it not being much further to the left turn onto route 11. Turning west at that point, it could've been into a headwind but like yesterday, today is another calm day. Well so far.

When I arrive in Calafate I call by the Banco Patagonia ATM. No problem here withdrawing money. Then visit La Anomina, the prices so much cheaper in comparison to what I've been paying in Chalten. And finally find the campsite, where feeling hungry after 200km without much food, I cook a second breakfast at midday, eat and then crawl into the tent.