October 11
Entonces… Ernesto and I have officially ridden our motos to Argentina :0
The border crossing was our fastest and easiest yet at two hours and two pieces of paper. The only mild inconvenience was the parking situation… The Bolivia and Argentina migration offices are at the opposite ends of short and wide bridge, and all the cars and buses that are going through the border park along the side in the direction they are going. As the vehicle in the front of the line finishes, all the vehicles move up. This works great when there is a driver for the people doing their border paperwork, but not so well for individuals or people on motos. As usual, all the bits of stamping and copying and paperwork are done in different buildings, so when he could catch us going from one building to another, this cop would flag us down to move our motos up 10 feet. Hilarious. There also may or may not have been a really gross bano that Ernesto and I both had to use. Not hilarious.
La Quiaca, the border town on the Argentine side, is sleepy, worn down, a little dirty, and seemingly full of nice people. From the auto store, our lunch place, and the gas station, everyone we encountered was friendly and smiling. El Senor of our hotel is almost unbelievable nice. He let us check in early (as our border crossing was unexpectedly easy and fast), he called another hotel for us to make a booking, he told us where we could find things we couldn’t find in town (he even walked a block with me once), and he gave us great advice on some details ahead. And he had a real driveway parking area! All we had to do when we arrived was drive down a driveway to park for the day in a private, gated, flat, paved area. Ahh.
We were on the streets by 2 pm with our list of errands. Argentina, you have totally messed up business hours. Almost everything is closed from 1-4, speciality services like dentists are open from 6-10 pm, and restaurants that serve dinner don’t open until 9! 9 PM! So, people that show up at 10 to eat… when do they go to bed? When do they get up? Do they have a job and family? Do they sleep or just go into bouts of torpor throughout the day? We walked around like lost gringos for two hours, and having lots of time to know exactly where all the stores were that we needed and when they opened, we finished all the errands we could by 4:30. Then we had to wait for the insurance agent to open at 6. I got there early to make sure I was first in line, which I was by the time the agent showed up at 6:45 (grr). “No” she says, she only does insurance for Argentines. She does not sell insurance to foreigners. Fuck. She said there was a man named Gustavo who had an (unmarked) office on another (unmarked) street so I went on the hunt. With lots of asking and smiling I found him and his tiny office, before dark, and yes, he could get us insurance. But to do so he needed wifi and didn’t have wifi in his office. I said my hotel has wifi, so could he come do it there? Si siga claro! We agreed he would come at 8 am. What a load off my mind as there was a supposed police stop outside of this border town, and we do not want to be without our required papers!
Also, a bit of the pride and delight I was feeling for Bolivians and their community protesting was deflated this morning when we rode past the bloqueo; there were two new and huge piles of trash on the side of the road, one in each direction. Given that I had seen the sight just two days prior, there was no mistaken those piles were specifically from all the people living, eating, and leaving the protest.
October 12
We were totally packed, fueled with coffee, and ready for Gustavo by 8. I tested the wifi in the lobby and it was running great (unlike all of yesterday), so with any luck we would be on the road soon as we had a 300 km day and no idea what the roads were like. 8:00 came and went, then 8:30 came and went, then 9:00 came and went. I decided to walk to his office. His wife was there and I patiently waited in line behind two other men. I asked if Gustavo was around. She said no, he is home sleeping because he was working very late last night, wasn’t going to come into work until 2 or 4 pm, and he was absolutely not coming to my hotel this morning. A bit stunned I walk back to Ernesto and we talk about what to do (as Tara is of course suppressing massive stress and worry over not having our required papers). Fifteen minutes later we are still sitting there and Gustavo arrives! I ran out and gave him a hug in our hotel driveway. I think he was a bit stunned too ha ha. He gets right to work but for some reason the wifi went to crap right after he finished E’s paperwork, so mine was stalled (with the occasional “I’m not sure I can do your paperwork Tara” comment). The internet was brutally slow, and Gustavo just sat and stared… He wasn’t the least bit frustrated by it. Ernesto said it was almost like someone taking a nap. Eventually he finished all the online stuff at 11:00 and the three of us walked to his office for official paper copies. I’m still totally baffled as to how he could have paper copies of our online insurance stuff at his internet-less office, but whatever. Gustavo is the hero of the day and we were on the road by noon. It took at least 50 km for my stomach to un-knot itself.
Today was a mostly unnotable ride… a few cool rock formations and some colorful bits, but mostly it was boring, dry desert. The only thing of note was the cold and thick fog that started our last ~50 km. Not the coldest or the thickest fog we have seen, but we both got the feeling it blocked some good scenery. It was also very windy, so we were both happy we had our winter clothes piled on beneath our moto jackets. We rode to San Salvador de Jujuy, which is the first big town in Northern Argentina. There seems to be a little money here, and we haven’t seen anyone in any sort of traditional dress. Many of the homes here can actually be painted a color. We didn’t get honked at once by a taxi as we walked around town, and the shoes were the same price as any mall in America. There were no perros on the streets, and we may or may not have eaten at Subway. Clearly Northern Argentina will take us a few more days to figure out.
October 13
Shit got really weird today. I used a public bano at a gas station and it had a toilet seat, toilet paper, running water, soap, and an electric hand dryer. As we rode into all the towns along Ruta 68 today there was minimal to no garbage piled on their outskirts. The scenic road to get to our destination had established pullouts full of tour vans where tourists got out and took the same pictures and the kids had skateboards and drones. The town we are staying in sells ice everywhere. And the coup de grace: we saw a man at a gas station sweeping up garbage into a large dustpan, and then he carried and emptied the dustpan into a waste basket. He collected and removed the trash from the street.
We did ~300 km today and it was three different rides. From San Salvador to Salta it is four lane fast pavimento. Salta is no Cuzco… we both thought it would be historic and charming, and it was not. We also got very lost. Salta to La Vina is equivalent to eastern Pennsylvania. Rolling hills, dairy cows, decent fences, decent structures, small power lines, and hay bales. One had to look for the cues that we were not in fact in the eastern USAmerica. Our last 100 km however, was pretty stunning. We saw some spectacular geology. At one point Ernesto called it a giant, broken layer cake. I’ve never seen so many layers of sedimentary rock piled so high above a river bed. And such a vibrant color of red. Most of the mountains of layers were fairly horizontal, but there were about a third of them that were oriented at a 45 degree angle or more. One of the coolest was “Garganta del Diablo”, which means “throat of the devil”. If you ask me, it didn’t look like a throat. And if you ask me, I”ll tell you what I thought it looked like… Our wildlife of the day included a half dozen Southern caracaras (including some feeding on roadkill), some streamer tailed tyrants (small bird, big name), and a pudu! The world’s smallest deer.
Cafayate is a rich and touristy town along Ruta 40 (so yes, we have officially ridden 2 km of 40 ha ha, and have seen at least 40 adventure riders bumbling around town). Despite being a Friday afternoon and having patio after patio on a cold but sunny day, Cafayate shuts down from 1-5 and the good restaurants don’t open until 7-8. Sigh. We found one place that was open on the main plaza, just off the row of streets that sells all the textiles, ceramics, and jewelry (apologies to all the women in my life as I bought you nothing…). At our sit down meal Ernesto again ordered and failed with burger (a.k.a. an Argentine egg McMuffin?). I ordered a plate of empanadas, and while they weren’t awesome, at least I ate something different. The funniest part of our afternoon was after we finished eating and all our cerveza was gone (which by the way, E ordered an “artisanal” beer and he said it tasted like fish piss. “The only positive thing to say about it was that it had alcohol in it”). Waiting for our check, he dips his finger into the sauce packets I had opened earlier, as one of the types of empanadas I was eating was a bit dry so I thought I’d try a sauce. It was awful (sugar and vinegar and weirdness), but I didn’t make a fuss and just put it to the side. I see Ernesto touch it and bring it to his mouth and I say “you don’t have anything to wash that down”, but it was too late. The sauce made it to his tongue and his face turned sour. I laughed and laughed… and poured the last drips of both our beers into his cup in hopes it might clean his palate. Ernesto said, “I just feel so betrayed again and again”.
On our walk home we see a perro sleeping in a dirt pile. We have empanadas left and were going to eat them for breakfast, but we are compelled to share them with the perro. Ernesto rips one in half and tosses it. The perro just lays and stares and does nothing, except give a look like “what the fuck you want me to do with that?” A woman laughs at the scene from within a dark doorway. It’s probably her dog, it’s probably well fed, and we may not have been the first gringos to try to feed her dog the corn and cheese empanadas we didn’t eat from the restaurant down the street. We mean well, but we are silly.
October 14
Parrots served as our alarm clock this morning. We weren’t sure how many as we awoke, but once we headed out of town we surmise there are tens of thousands of burrowing parrots living in Cafayate. When they aren’t in these agricultural lands gorging themselves on seeds and fruits, they fly to the Atlantic coast to breed and form the world’s largest colony of parrots (~200,000). With their deep green and bright yellow and blue hues they are very beautiful. And very noisy.
We passed through some wine country, which actually started yesterday. It was very clean and European looking, and both Ernesto and I thought that was what most of Argentina would look like. It didn’t last very long however; the road turned to gravel and the tourism seemed to end with the pavement. Within the first 1 km Ernesto spotted a South American grey fox! Short legs, very bushy tail. Bueno. The gravel wasn’t too bad, but that was probably because we went slow, were expecting it, and had plenty of time to reach our destination before dark. In fact we were expecting 80 km of gravel and we only had about 20km. The only part we weren’t expecting was when the highway switched sides. There was a sign that said “Fin de Pavimento” and pointed left to massive dry river bed. Trucks, cars, and motos alike were to just cross and meet up with the pavimento on the other side. Okey Dokey.
After that it was straight and… straight. Much of Ruta 40 hugs the Andes and while the road is safe and smooth, the scenery is dramatic and repetitive and the wind is strong and cold.
With less of a gravel stretch than expected we arrived in Belen by 2 pm. We went to the top advertised Mexican restaurant in town, “1900”. It was jam packed, we took the only open table, and it closed at 3, so we had to chow. It was Italian, not Mexican (but still not chicken), and we had another baffling moment. It didn’t top the man actually removing garbage from the street yesterday, but we got cloth napkins. For three months we’ve been using 4” squared half ply paper products to clean our hands, mouths, and asses. The only other cloth napkin we’ve had was in Cusco, but that was gringo-ville so we couldn’t consider it part of the real, local culture. Maybe that is what we had to figure out about Argentina: it is European. In hindsight, the bidet in our all our hotel rooms so far should have be a clue…
On our walk back we came across many people wearing “Celebra la Vida! Maraton 2017!” shirts. Indeed, as we found the main plaza there was a “marathon” going on. In Belen, Argentina this means something very different than a marathon in USAmerica. First, divide everyone by age group. We watched the first two races, which were six and under and then seven through ten (11-13 was up next). The six and under group had to run around the plaza square once, but the 7-10 year olds had to run around the plaza twice. Yep, twice around the block = marathon. I was tempted to hang around and see what happened come the 20 year olds and then 40 year olds, but I was more interested in putting my feet up at our hotel.
(Pause)
To the perro today who found us and followed us in the middle of the desert, I am so sorry. You weren’t even two months old. Your beautiful black and shiny coat revealed your starved skeleton. I am sorry I did not have any milk or meat to give to you. I am sorry I couldn’t take you with me and make you mine.
Entonces… Ernesto and I have officially ridden our motos to Argentina :0
The border crossing was our fastest and easiest yet at two hours and two pieces of paper. The only mild inconvenience was the parking situation… The Bolivia and Argentina migration offices are at the opposite ends of short and wide bridge, and all the cars and buses that are going through the border park along the side in the direction they are going. As the vehicle in the front of the line finishes, all the vehicles move up. This works great when there is a driver for the people doing their border paperwork, but not so well for individuals or people on motos. As usual, all the bits of stamping and copying and paperwork are done in different buildings, so when he could catch us going from one building to another, this cop would flag us down to move our motos up 10 feet. Hilarious. There also may or may not have been a really gross bano that Ernesto and I both had to use. Not hilarious.
La Quiaca, the border town on the Argentine side, is sleepy, worn down, a little dirty, and seemingly full of nice people. From the auto store, our lunch place, and the gas station, everyone we encountered was friendly and smiling. El Senor of our hotel is almost unbelievable nice. He let us check in early (as our border crossing was unexpectedly easy and fast), he called another hotel for us to make a booking, he told us where we could find things we couldn’t find in town (he even walked a block with me once), and he gave us great advice on some details ahead. And he had a real driveway parking area! All we had to do when we arrived was drive down a driveway to park for the day in a private, gated, flat, paved area. Ahh.
We were on the streets by 2 pm with our list of errands. Argentina, you have totally messed up business hours. Almost everything is closed from 1-4, speciality services like dentists are open from 6-10 pm, and restaurants that serve dinner don’t open until 9! 9 PM! So, people that show up at 10 to eat… when do they go to bed? When do they get up? Do they have a job and family? Do they sleep or just go into bouts of torpor throughout the day? We walked around like lost gringos for two hours, and having lots of time to know exactly where all the stores were that we needed and when they opened, we finished all the errands we could by 4:30. Then we had to wait for the insurance agent to open at 6. I got there early to make sure I was first in line, which I was by the time the agent showed up at 6:45 (grr). “No” she says, she only does insurance for Argentines. She does not sell insurance to foreigners. Fuck. She said there was a man named Gustavo who had an (unmarked) office on another (unmarked) street so I went on the hunt. With lots of asking and smiling I found him and his tiny office, before dark, and yes, he could get us insurance. But to do so he needed wifi and didn’t have wifi in his office. I said my hotel has wifi, so could he come do it there? Si siga claro! We agreed he would come at 8 am. What a load off my mind as there was a supposed police stop outside of this border town, and we do not want to be without our required papers!
Also, a bit of the pride and delight I was feeling for Bolivians and their community protesting was deflated this morning when we rode past the bloqueo; there were two new and huge piles of trash on the side of the road, one in each direction. Given that I had seen the sight just two days prior, there was no mistaken those piles were specifically from all the people living, eating, and leaving the protest.
October 12
We were totally packed, fueled with coffee, and ready for Gustavo by 8. I tested the wifi in the lobby and it was running great (unlike all of yesterday), so with any luck we would be on the road soon as we had a 300 km day and no idea what the roads were like. 8:00 came and went, then 8:30 came and went, then 9:00 came and went. I decided to walk to his office. His wife was there and I patiently waited in line behind two other men. I asked if Gustavo was around. She said no, he is home sleeping because he was working very late last night, wasn’t going to come into work until 2 or 4 pm, and he was absolutely not coming to my hotel this morning. A bit stunned I walk back to Ernesto and we talk about what to do (as Tara is of course suppressing massive stress and worry over not having our required papers). Fifteen minutes later we are still sitting there and Gustavo arrives! I ran out and gave him a hug in our hotel driveway. I think he was a bit stunned too ha ha. He gets right to work but for some reason the wifi went to crap right after he finished E’s paperwork, so mine was stalled (with the occasional “I’m not sure I can do your paperwork Tara” comment). The internet was brutally slow, and Gustavo just sat and stared… He wasn’t the least bit frustrated by it. Ernesto said it was almost like someone taking a nap. Eventually he finished all the online stuff at 11:00 and the three of us walked to his office for official paper copies. I’m still totally baffled as to how he could have paper copies of our online insurance stuff at his internet-less office, but whatever. Gustavo is the hero of the day and we were on the road by noon. It took at least 50 km for my stomach to un-knot itself.
Today was a mostly unnotable ride… a few cool rock formations and some colorful bits, but mostly it was boring, dry desert. The only thing of note was the cold and thick fog that started our last ~50 km. Not the coldest or the thickest fog we have seen, but we both got the feeling it blocked some good scenery. It was also very windy, so we were both happy we had our winter clothes piled on beneath our moto jackets. We rode to San Salvador de Jujuy, which is the first big town in Northern Argentina. There seems to be a little money here, and we haven’t seen anyone in any sort of traditional dress. Many of the homes here can actually be painted a color. We didn’t get honked at once by a taxi as we walked around town, and the shoes were the same price as any mall in America. There were no perros on the streets, and we may or may not have eaten at Subway. Clearly Northern Argentina will take us a few more days to figure out.
October 13
Shit got really weird today. I used a public bano at a gas station and it had a toilet seat, toilet paper, running water, soap, and an electric hand dryer. As we rode into all the towns along Ruta 68 today there was minimal to no garbage piled on their outskirts. The scenic road to get to our destination had established pullouts full of tour vans where tourists got out and took the same pictures and the kids had skateboards and drones. The town we are staying in sells ice everywhere. And the coup de grace: we saw a man at a gas station sweeping up garbage into a large dustpan, and then he carried and emptied the dustpan into a waste basket. He collected and removed the trash from the street.
We did ~300 km today and it was three different rides. From San Salvador to Salta it is four lane fast pavimento. Salta is no Cuzco… we both thought it would be historic and charming, and it was not. We also got very lost. Salta to La Vina is equivalent to eastern Pennsylvania. Rolling hills, dairy cows, decent fences, decent structures, small power lines, and hay bales. One had to look for the cues that we were not in fact in the eastern USAmerica. Our last 100 km however, was pretty stunning. We saw some spectacular geology. At one point Ernesto called it a giant, broken layer cake. I’ve never seen so many layers of sedimentary rock piled so high above a river bed. And such a vibrant color of red. Most of the mountains of layers were fairly horizontal, but there were about a third of them that were oriented at a 45 degree angle or more. One of the coolest was “Garganta del Diablo”, which means “throat of the devil”. If you ask me, it didn’t look like a throat. And if you ask me, I”ll tell you what I thought it looked like… Our wildlife of the day included a half dozen Southern caracaras (including some feeding on roadkill), some streamer tailed tyrants (small bird, big name), and a pudu! The world’s smallest deer.
Cafayate is a rich and touristy town along Ruta 40 (so yes, we have officially ridden 2 km of 40 ha ha, and have seen at least 40 adventure riders bumbling around town). Despite being a Friday afternoon and having patio after patio on a cold but sunny day, Cafayate shuts down from 1-5 and the good restaurants don’t open until 7-8. Sigh. We found one place that was open on the main plaza, just off the row of streets that sells all the textiles, ceramics, and jewelry (apologies to all the women in my life as I bought you nothing…). At our sit down meal Ernesto again ordered and failed with burger (a.k.a. an Argentine egg McMuffin?). I ordered a plate of empanadas, and while they weren’t awesome, at least I ate something different. The funniest part of our afternoon was after we finished eating and all our cerveza was gone (which by the way, E ordered an “artisanal” beer and he said it tasted like fish piss. “The only positive thing to say about it was that it had alcohol in it”). Waiting for our check, he dips his finger into the sauce packets I had opened earlier, as one of the types of empanadas I was eating was a bit dry so I thought I’d try a sauce. It was awful (sugar and vinegar and weirdness), but I didn’t make a fuss and just put it to the side. I see Ernesto touch it and bring it to his mouth and I say “you don’t have anything to wash that down”, but it was too late. The sauce made it to his tongue and his face turned sour. I laughed and laughed… and poured the last drips of both our beers into his cup in hopes it might clean his palate. Ernesto said, “I just feel so betrayed again and again”.
On our walk home we see a perro sleeping in a dirt pile. We have empanadas left and were going to eat them for breakfast, but we are compelled to share them with the perro. Ernesto rips one in half and tosses it. The perro just lays and stares and does nothing, except give a look like “what the fuck you want me to do with that?” A woman laughs at the scene from within a dark doorway. It’s probably her dog, it’s probably well fed, and we may not have been the first gringos to try to feed her dog the corn and cheese empanadas we didn’t eat from the restaurant down the street. We mean well, but we are silly.
October 14
Parrots served as our alarm clock this morning. We weren’t sure how many as we awoke, but once we headed out of town we surmise there are tens of thousands of burrowing parrots living in Cafayate. When they aren’t in these agricultural lands gorging themselves on seeds and fruits, they fly to the Atlantic coast to breed and form the world’s largest colony of parrots (~200,000). With their deep green and bright yellow and blue hues they are very beautiful. And very noisy.
We passed through some wine country, which actually started yesterday. It was very clean and European looking, and both Ernesto and I thought that was what most of Argentina would look like. It didn’t last very long however; the road turned to gravel and the tourism seemed to end with the pavement. Within the first 1 km Ernesto spotted a South American grey fox! Short legs, very bushy tail. Bueno. The gravel wasn’t too bad, but that was probably because we went slow, were expecting it, and had plenty of time to reach our destination before dark. In fact we were expecting 80 km of gravel and we only had about 20km. The only part we weren’t expecting was when the highway switched sides. There was a sign that said “Fin de Pavimento” and pointed left to massive dry river bed. Trucks, cars, and motos alike were to just cross and meet up with the pavimento on the other side. Okey Dokey.
After that it was straight and… straight. Much of Ruta 40 hugs the Andes and while the road is safe and smooth, the scenery is dramatic and repetitive and the wind is strong and cold.
With less of a gravel stretch than expected we arrived in Belen by 2 pm. We went to the top advertised Mexican restaurant in town, “1900”. It was jam packed, we took the only open table, and it closed at 3, so we had to chow. It was Italian, not Mexican (but still not chicken), and we had another baffling moment. It didn’t top the man actually removing garbage from the street yesterday, but we got cloth napkins. For three months we’ve been using 4” squared half ply paper products to clean our hands, mouths, and asses. The only other cloth napkin we’ve had was in Cusco, but that was gringo-ville so we couldn’t consider it part of the real, local culture. Maybe that is what we had to figure out about Argentina: it is European. In hindsight, the bidet in our all our hotel rooms so far should have be a clue…
On our walk back we came across many people wearing “Celebra la Vida! Maraton 2017!” shirts. Indeed, as we found the main plaza there was a “marathon” going on. In Belen, Argentina this means something very different than a marathon in USAmerica. First, divide everyone by age group. We watched the first two races, which were six and under and then seven through ten (11-13 was up next). The six and under group had to run around the plaza square once, but the 7-10 year olds had to run around the plaza twice. Yep, twice around the block = marathon. I was tempted to hang around and see what happened come the 20 year olds and then 40 year olds, but I was more interested in putting my feet up at our hotel.
(Pause)
To the perro today who found us and followed us in the middle of the desert, I am so sorry. You weren’t even two months old. Your beautiful black and shiny coat revealed your starved skeleton. I am sorry I did not have any milk or meat to give to you. I am sorry I couldn’t take you with me and make you mine.