The Rio Percy's water is cloudy green. A swift current meltwater river fed by yearly snow in the mountains, as well as many groundwater streams which swell the flow along its course. From where I sit in the tent opening on level grass in among the willows of the water's edge, the river fans out into two braids around a large gravel-bar, before coming back together in one fifteen-metre wide waterway surging with a mute rattle echoing along the valley.

When I've packed up and am pushing the bike back up the steep bank to the road, I pass horses in amongst the widely spaced trees that lift their heads from grazing to stare at me. I didn't see them last night. Perhaps, that's the reason there's a fence closing the gap at the road. Anyway, I find a better place to get past the fence at the road, a little way along to the left. A big gap underneath the lowest strand of wire which I can slide the bike underneath without removing anything. Beats lifting over.

The road on climbs further up the hill, quickly warming me up. Cresting the top, the way ahead is pasture land to either side, with the same snow-streaked hills I saw at sunset yesterday evening to the left and a depression ahead where the city of Esquel is located.

It is only a few kilometres more until I come to a tee-junction with route 258, where I turn left, and nine more on narrow increasingly busy road into the city. The road surface deformed, namely there's a rut depression made over time by heavy truck wheels, with a continual slope up to a ridge with a slope down the other side of the ridge to an erradic edge of the tarmac and rough gravel shoulder. It's hard for the bike's two wheel to track, ie run in a single line on any part of this ridge. And riding in the trough left by truck wheels is far too far out in the road. Though releif comes when I reach a cycle-path.

I check into the same hostel I stayed in last year. I want to stay two nights. The receptionist says there's only the one dorm bed left tonight and there's no beds tomorrow because a big group is coming. But, a bed could become available in the meantime. With this in mind, I get to work getting the journal fictional radio program typed up today while I've wifi...

...look upon this as a brief read, summing up topical things from the area I'm cycle-touring through.

Anyway, by evening, the receptionist tells me there is a free bed tomorrow, so I'm here until Saturday.