So here I am riding north on Ruta 3. In the great scheme of things, it's less than a blink of the eye since I was riding south on Ruta 3. This is Patagonia. It is empty. It is cold. I am the size of a pea in a land the size of, well, Patagonia. The landscape changes constantly yet there is nothing new for mile after mile after mile after mile after... you get the picture.
I had been dreading one area of low brush in particular, a relentlessly straight but sloping road where it took an hour to reach each the crest of each horizon, only for the new view unfolding to be exactly the same -- and just as far away. Don't get me wrong, I loved the monotony and the chance to celebrate the sameness as much as the small differences, but this one stretch proved almost too much. Maybe because I had fixed it in my mind on the way south as the place I would least enjoy on the return journey. It became a self-fulfilling nightmare.
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Yuck: There's more than guanaco droppings to catch the eye. The tiny number of people passing through leave more rubbish than you imagine. I counted - and photographed - XX bits of rubbish in 1000 metres of road in the middle of nowhere. No people = no binmen...
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I was heading for Comodoro Rivadavia again and the chance to have the bike looked over. In particular, the tendancy to cut out at low revs, and the increasingly bald back tyre. Luckily, because the wind was blowing from the west just as it had on the road south, I was now leaning the bike to my *left* in order to stay upright! In other words, the wear on my tyres was starting to even itself out. But the rear was starting to get a little slick.
The road weaves inland for much of its route through southern Patagonia. Not that it makes too much difference. Flat land is just as fascinating as flat sea (I'm being mildly ironic here). Shortly before the small town of Caleta Olivia it returns to the Atlantic shore, and I knew I was reaching the end of the day's travel.
Caleta is a small town of oilmen, dockers and drugs (if you choose to believe what you read on the Internet) and the only thing likely to keep me there was the wind.
Once again it was picking up as I headed towards Comodoro. These last 80km up the coast road were amongst the hardest of the entire trip.
Huge glacial bowls carved out of the hills give the wind one last downhill boost. With a final push it shoots out across the coast line (and the coast road) into the ocean -- like an athlete stretching for the finish line -- almost taking me with it.
What's more, the road between the towns of Caleta and Comodoro is relatively busy. I pass vehicles as often as once every five minutes. Like bloody Piccadilly Circus. I was going pretty slowly, leaning at prodigious angles into the wind, but whenever a truck appeared ahead of me I pulled off on the opposite side of the road -- upwind from the truck -- and planted my legs as solidly as possible. I repeated the manoeuvre a couple of times for a truck and a van coming up behind me as well.
If I had been downwind and hit by the massive turbulence of a passing truck there's no way I would have been able to keep the bike up. Nasty.
Bearing in mind the huge winds and the gruesome windswept stretch of highway between Comodoro and it's southern satelitte town of Rada Tilly, I chickened out and pulled off the road 10km south of the main town.
Rada Tilly itself looks nice enough if a little short of sentient life. (While I'm on the subject they could do with move paved roads too). There were plenty of garish, newly-built private houses suggesting someone had money, and the kids all appeared to have 4-wheel drive buggies, but the streets were empty by the time I had put up the tent: the campsite had a good write-up in my guidebook.
In keeping with first appearances I struggled to find anywhere to buy food, cooked or uncooked (I was eyeing the barbeque stand back at the campsite) before tracking down the least appetising cooked sandwich in Argentina -- which started to taste just fine by the time it was joined by a second large bottle of Quilmes beer.
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