OK – I’m now a believer in the
Patagonia winds. The roads continue to
be straight and desolate to the point of being boring. What isn’t boring is fighting the relentless
winds coming from the west. The one
thing that probably kept Clint Eastwood from making his spaghetti westerns here
is that most of the equipment would still be floating around somewhere in the
sky, or possibly could have landed now somewhere in Africa. The interesting
part of the winds is how they beat you constantly from the right, but as soon
as you make a big turn to the left, with the wind to your back it becomes
quiet. Make a turn back to the right
again, and the noise returns. I finally
had to start using the ear plugs that I bought for this trip.
This place is just miles and miles of
desolation with roads that end somewhere in the far reaches of the hills that
you eventually reach without passing another vehicle for sometimes half an
hour. The south end of Ruta 40 is still
under construction, so the ripio was our road of travel today, while you could
see them working on the new pavement just to the left. I wasn’t sure how I would handle the ripio
for any length of time, but it has turned out to be a lot of fun. The skills I had learned as a youth have
returned, but a lot of fun turns into too much like work after about the first 80-100
km. I decided that if I had wanted my
back to take that much abuse, I would have continued to play polo.
The hotel is once again a
very basic Argentine style with an attached restaurant that had an excellent
dinner. One thing that struck me as I
prepared for bed is the emptiness that reverberates through the room. The dark, tiled hallways echoed even the
footsteps heard at night, and when coupled with the foreign language makes me
think of a very “Mafioso” sort of place and brought back images of “The
Godfather”.
Tomorrow is a rather short
day on our way to an established “Estancia” for an Argentine barbeque. Once I found out the BBQ was of lamb, and not
beef, all I could think of was “why”. I’m
supposed to get the recipe for the rub in the BBQ for our local farrier, Jim
Oliver, but I’m not sure it will translate to beef. For that matter, I’m not sure I can get a
translation from the owner of this place.
Guess I’ll find out later. As
they like to say at Compass Expeditions - it’s all about the journey.
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