Most of the bike shops - hell, most of everything in Argentina - are in or around the capital, but I hadn�t wanted to get the work done in BA. You wouldn�t catch me admitting it to myself, but it scared me a little. The place seemed just too big, too strange, to negotiate by bike. I had developed a very real paranoia about riding without insurance so as soon as I had that slip of paper in my hand, I wanted to get out.

I walked north and south of my hotel by way of a morning constitutional, taking coffee on the hoof from a small caf� on the corner. The young man behind the counter seemed vaguely interested in this foreigner before him. I pretended to be faintly mysterious. He yawned.

The roads of Azul were beaten-down dirt in a strict grid. Quiet. I presumed most people were at work or at least under cover by the time I got up and out. I re-packed the bike on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, picked up some engine oil from a petrol station across the street and retraced my steps back to Ruta 3. Not that I was confident of knowing what to do with the oil, though I had worked out which hole to put it in. The owner�s manual was in Portuguese and I couldn�t decide what level the oil was supposed to reach. I guessed - and promptly flooded the reservoir. Better than no oil at all (... I hoped).

Coronel Pringles & Co: A majority of towns and villages are named after people, usually military figures. It isn�t until you reach the far south - Guer Aike, Tolhuin, Ushuaia - that even the occasional indigenous Indian name survives. Instead, I rode this day through, over or near Benito Juarez, Adolfo Gonz�lez Chaves, Coronel Dorrego and Valle Harding Green. Most of these places were a building or two by the side of the road, indistinguishable and unlovable.

I left the main road once, nipping in to the town of Tres Arroyos for a slice of beef - of course - and to call ahead to Bahia Blanca. In a small phone shop I found the numbers of not one but two official Honda dealers in the provincial phone book. I established that they existed, but not much more, via strangulated phone calls in faltering Spanish.

The difficulties I had on the phone proved to me that facial expressions, hand gestures and other visual stimuli were crucial to my grasp of the language, as I promptly had a comfortable, friendly conversation with the woman running the phone shop. She and her boyfriend had bikes too. I invited them to ride to Tierra del Fuego with me, which she really couldn�t get her head round.

It's 370 kilometres from Azul to Bahia. I made it into town by one o�clock, which in Argentina is lunchtime, a movable but very long feast. Everything closes for two or three or four hours. Luckily, the main road into town from Ruta 3 was Avenida Brown, where one of the Honda offices was situated.

However, even as I found the shop, a combination of tiredness, lack of concentration and misreading of the road surface: I stopped the bike by the pavement, tried to inch it backwards and the bike tipped right as a wheel caught the edge of the pavement. Over it went, slowly but surely, in an elegant and cheek-reddening crash to the floor.

I was mortified. Especially when a nearby pensioner came over to help me pick the bike up. I was glad of the anonymity of my helmet; cursing myself quietly as I inspected the bike and brushed myself down. The footrest and brake lever on the right hand side were both bent slightly out of shape. The only other damage was to my ego.

And -- of course! -- the Honda shop was closed for lunch. It also turned out to be the retail end of the operation. Servicing and anything else liable to get the hands dirty was performed at a second location several streets away. The accompanying map looked complicated.

A teenage biker pulled up next to me, spotting the baggage and foreign plates, introduced himself and happily led me across town to yet another Honda dealer. Closed, of course. But I had a better idea of the layout of town now and found my way to the first dealer�s second shop (are you keeping up?) and made it, albeit having got ridiculously lost. The roads may be laid out on a grid, but I hadn�t noticed that all the roads changed their names either side of the main drag.

I wasn�t at all surprised to see that the place was closed for lunch. And, if you've got this far, neither should you be. It was in a largely residential area and I had an hour or so to go before the place re-opened. Nothing else to do. I stretched out on the paving and read Kipling in the afternoon sun.

The boys who ran the shop didn't get back from lunch for nearly three hours. Nice life. But again I had found a friendly crew ready to work on my bike at the drop of a hat, and before all the other bikes booked in for a service. It needed a damn good seeing to, if you'll poardon the expression. A full service, change the filters, be gentle and loving and and far more technical than I could manage. I needed a new front tyre as well. Maybe not now, but it would be bald as a coot by the time I reached the next Honda dealer -- wherever that might be.

Not that the bike would be ready until the next day. Leaving the biker and as much of my gear as I could get rid of in the bikeshop, I walked back towards town. The boys in the shop had recommended a cheapo hotel. Cheap: yes. Recommendable: no.

What of Bahia Blanca -- 'white bay'? On foot I didn't now have the opportunity or frankly the incentive to explore far. The big central square was dusty, untended and more or less empty. Bars, shops and cafes around it were dusty, untended and more or less empty too.

In a tree-lined street behind the square I found a bar showing football and ate a tasteless pizza with the now regulation bottles of Quilmes. It was dark by the time I got out and a long walk out of the centre brought me no closer to anything exciting or interesting. There's a Navy port out there somewhere; perhaps that's where the interesting people hang out. I went back to my hotel instead and read some more.