So.. .back from the mountains. Uspallata is neat in a sense that apart from sports and the mountains, there is not much else left to do. Oh yes, barbecuing. the first five hour bbq (from start to eat) was there, and still seems to be the only place where patience is beyond tibetan monk levels.
Friday was a slow day for leaving town. Polo quit the trip 40 minutes before departure. Cristobal never turned up. That left Daniela as only person following through. The problem was that she doesn´t drive and I wanted very much to do a massive downhill on my bike from 3000 meters down to the pampa. Hmmm... what to do.
We drove through friday evening traffic snarls, passing by the shopping mall to exchange $. Good decision since Uspallata is not heavy on banks opening on weekends nor are they particularly big fans of credit cards.
We passed border control round 10pm. I chatted with an argentinean liviing in Chile for the past innumerable years, and he complained of the laws restricting how many days he could be in Argentina with his Chilean registered Elantra (max 90 days in a year), and how someone else who tried to break that rule had their car impounded without recourse.
He later overtook me after dark on a treacherous winding, potholed road, very possibly on a blind corner, entering a tunnel...
We came to Fabian´s place past 11:30pm. Fabian and his brothers own the Hostel Uspallata. As the name describes, it´s a hostel, but located about 10 km out of town. lots of land, with riverfront. They were barbecuing as we drove in. Hey!! where is Cristobal? ...
the gang was very interesting, and we met two new friends from the continent. Louise Reinke and Romain Loeser. She draws and he paints. They have been travelling through Chile and on their final leg in Argentina before going back to class. I invited them for a little drive the next day to Villavicencio.
We had some pisco with coke, wait, no, a lot of pisco with coke. talk flowed like proverbial water and I went to sleep near 5. Next day I woke up refreshingly late: 10 in the morning. Actually, Fabian woke me to say that the international rally was in town, fueling up at the local YPF station.
We piled in and drove to the crossroads. There enough, a school of racers was there, bobbing and weaving around with their stickered up motorbikes, jacked up rally cars, and giant 4WD trucks. I spoke with Nounosh, rallycar builder and team truck driver for Mitsubishi (Ralliart division). He showed me the extremely well organized cargo bay of the support truck. He was proud of having built her up, as well as having contructed the car (Oh yeah, they are the leaders of the race).
A few pics later, we were on the way to Villavicencio. Once we hit the high point, out came the bike, on went my Running Room kit (thanks Leo! ;-) and down went I. 3000 meters and a bit. The view is of high hills carved with a winding dirt road, 365 curves to the flatlands of Argentina. 1200 km to the next geographical feature (the Atlantic and Rio de la Plata)..
Few words can describe how nice it is to descend that road. Zenlike trance maybe.
Until I pinchflatted my front wheel, but as I waited for Romain and co. to drive to where I was, I had more time to practice meditation under a perfect blue sky.
We drove the remainder of the way down to the defunct Villavicencio hotel. A beauty ¨the Shining¨like place, closed in 1978 but with old world charm and maintained by the mineral water company of the same name. Nice. Lunch was even nicer. A tiny restaurant, with one of those old guard waiters who knows his way around everything, He hardly asked us what we wanted to eat, he simply knew. Just remembering that lunch makes me sleepy, we ate quite a bit. Wine, ham, main course, deserts, the works.
Return up the same dirt road, but we stopped at the Jesuit ruins. apparently built around 1680 by the missionaries, they are mines and foundries (silver, iron?) long abandoned, but surviving thanks to very low precipitation and not being on any map or marked by any signs (it´s a bit off the road). stone and mortar. As a giant moon started rising over the hills in the backdrop, and the sun setting beyond the Andes on the other side, Pink Floyd started playing (they were hiding over a ridge) and good times started flowing.. Oh yeah!
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