Salta bus terminal is a big airy nineties built with lounge seating and busy people scurrying about in all directions and others weight down by baggage. There's a restaurant and no sooner does one tannoy announcement of a departure or an arrival end than a new announcement starts. Plus all along one side are booking desks with company livery surrounds, some with white maps of Argentina with colour-coded lines-like a city-metro map showing the destinations covered. I was there buying a bus ticket and tonight I'm off to Puerto Madryn, down in Patagonia. I opted to join a short queue of one for a bus company: AndesMar, whose name suggests the whole land between the mountains and the South Atlantic. The woman in front had spent much time querying the man behind the desk but at last picked up her tickets and took her small trolley case and wheeled away. It was my turn. The young dark skinned man, smartly dressed with company logo on his short-sleeved shirt, jotted details on a post-it slip but when I mentioned Is travelling with a bike, he slapped his hand on the desk, lifted the note, scrunched it up and chugged it down in the bin to the side of his chair, then folding his arms with a look of resignation. He didn't need to say: No Bikes. I looked along the row of desks at other companies. In the end I settled for a company with bright yellow and orange livery called: La Pampeana. The young navy uniformed woman behind the desk here tapped away on the keyboard and said when I asked that the bike wouldn't be a problem but I'd have to break it up; meaning, remove the wheels. When she'd finished the printer behind her came to life with a buzz and the ticket slowly issued out with a stalling electronic hum. I paid by credit card and she explained my intinary, telling me to be at platform 11 at lease ten minutes before the 20.00 departure.

At half nine in the evening, the bus pulled into the bus-terminal in General Guemes, here I would change buses. The luggage handler lifted out my bike and trailer and wheels, setting them down onto the platform. At the next platform the other bus was waiting, ticking-over, while other buses lurched forward-arriving and others backed out-leaving, producing one combined drone of deisel engines. The tannoy was calling "Empressa La Pampeano por Rio Gallegos..........." My bus; having looked at the route, it runs the whole way from the Bolivian border to the country's southern tip, Puerto Madryn being a stop on the way. The handler put my bike and wheels on top of all the cases and backpacks and Is anxious, hoping it would be OK or nothing would go missing.

20 Oct Tuesday: Yesterday afternoon in Salta, storm clouds gathered and big raindrops splotched the pavement and today, dark cloudy skies followed the bus south with instants of rain crackling and streaming down the outside of the bus-window: in places the bus moved through a slush of spray, while in other places the road remained dry. I slept well in the reclined bus-seat and awoke about six as it was getting bright out. Breakfast was served at seven, media lunas, a small plastic cup of juice and coffee; then followed a long morning looking out on passing vast stubble fields, sparse pasture dotted with cattle and areas of scrubland. A DVD was put on, an American action movie dubbed in Spanish but I remained looking out the window. The finishing credits finally came up and it was a relieve not to listen to barking voices anymore. It was then twelve and the bus was slowing on a busy highway approaching a city-centre. I saw the bus was in Cordoba when it pulled into the bus terminal. Passengers were stood-up collecting hand-baggage and then got off and new passengers got on. A man of around thirty with un-healthy complexion and scruffy blond hair came along clutching a ticket while checking seat numbers. He stopped at the empty seat next me as that was the number on the ticket. He said hello as he sat down and continued talking but Is finding it difficult following the Cordoba accent. Anyway he soon took a magazine from his bag and remained looking at it until he slept.

On the drive out of the city, lunch came round: Milanesa with a bread roll and cream carmel for desert with a choice of soft drinks. Then another DVD was put on; this one very watchable, being a Brazilian picture on a musical family: a story from humble rural beginnings, to rise to popstar-fame, then the tragic death of two of them in a car crash and the aftermath, then many years later with the one surviving sivling still producing music in middleage. That took the time round to four and the bus was in another city. A small place: this time the sign in the bus terminal read "Benvenido de Victoria" which is in the provence of La Pampa. The landscape onwards was rolling brown cultivated farmland as far as the eye could see without a tree or hedgerow in sight other than the occational treelined drive into a farmhouse, or grove crowned hilltop. At quarter past five a fleet of four brght red Massey Fergusson tractors with cultivators and seed-drills bumped along homeward on the servive road by the fence on the left. Further on a dark blue curtain of cloud was moving over from the right and there were flashes of lightening but rain didn't reach the bus.

21 Oct Wednesday: I slept well for the second night on the bus and awoke around quarter past five in the grey morning light. The bus was already in Patagonia, in a vast open scrubland, moving along towards a misty raised chocolate brown horizon. The bus laboured up and over and the straight road ahead stretched out to the next far off brown horizon. The metal grey ocean eventually openned out on the left after crossing a crest and Puerto Madryn was a white highrised seafront dwarfed by mighty brown hinterland. The bus was now on route 3 and it came to a big roundabout, were it lurched around pass route 3 onwards, turning downhill towards the city.

I was the only passenger to get off. Inside the terminal building there was a few minutes to go until the shutter would go up on the cafe for seven o'clock openning. Al noticed me and my bike and came over. He told me he's from the US and had cycled toured in Sweden and Finland and his most recent tour was Florida to Maine. The shutter rattled up and we moved in, and talked more over breakfast.