This morning in La Vina while returning out the door of a shop with my purchase, a two litre bottle of coke, four horsemen rode out at a canter along the main thoroughfare. Dressed in black and weather-worn with broad brimmed hats and smock-like ponchos flowing down on the horse's backs, I thought such scenes only exist in Spaghetti Westerns, but it seens a normal and a traditional sight in small towns in Argentina such as La Vina. Here there isn't mush of a visual link to the modern world, could be the nineteen twenties except for a few modern cars which give it away. Nothing looks to have seen paint in nearly a century: the white and pastilles of the house-walls are discoloured and dark green doors peeling. The street facade is two storey and flat roofed with parapets above the upstair windows, another reminder of the western.

I continued on Route 68 with a short eighty kilometre day ahead of me. I was already in the Lerma valley stretching north to Salta, with a range of hills to the east and a high wall of sylhouetted blue ridges, the Andes to the west; and flat farmland in between. Tractors moved across brown cultivated fields with a haze of dust in their wake. There was the vivid green of the tobacco crop. There were corrals full of cattle in winter quarters and dairy farms with rows of white silage-clamps.

Around half twelve Is riding through the small town Belgrano, passing along a street with colonade shop-fronts in white and pink either side and verdant palm trees in a play-park gap in the row. I came to a halt outside a cafe with a big sloping veranda and leant the bike to the side of open double doors. Inside there was one other occupied table and the president was speaking on the TV on the wall. The waiter in conversation with two men sat at the other table, broke off shortly after I'd sat down and came over. Looking at the card I chose Locro to eat and lemonade to drink and the waiter scribbled in a pad, then moved away, paused at the bar where he picked up a remote control and looking at the TV-screen, began clicking through the channels, settling on a panel-chat-program about football with clips from recent matches and lively discussion among the guests on what was happening...

The waiter soon returned with a litre bottle of lemonade and set a glass on the table then poured, the lemonade fizzing up to the brim. The program was over and the one o'clock news came on with a loud jingle. Two stern-faced presenters, a middleaged man and a young woman looked out from behind a desk with a view behind them out over the lunchtime traffic on a grey overcast Avenida 9 de Julio, Buenos Aires' widest street in the world main thoroughfare.

The Locro when it came was a soup bowl of brown stew with pieces of boned meat, lama or could've been goat, potatoe and sweetcorn, plus a smaller bowl of freshly chopped green herbs, plus an even smaller bowl of red paprika powder and a platter of sliced baguette.

After Belgrano the traffic had increased in volume and increased again after I passed through a roundabout where route 51 came-in on the left. There was though an ample shoulder on this side unlike the rough narrow margen I rode along when exiting the city on the other side last Thursday. Finally I went with the flow as the traffic entered a one-way-system into a narrow street leading to the centre; where, I'd to be on the lookout on the right for the little street turn-off which would take me cross to Calle Buenos Aires and the hostel.