I can hardly believe I'll never see Comodoro again, or wobble alarmingly across the road as a walloping wind takes me unawares on the short hop from there to Rada.

(The reverse is also true, of course. I absolutely positively cannot fathom how I ended up spending so much of my life in this blasted hellhole. But there you go).

And another thing. Here I am after all this time facing a road haven't seen before. It's been a while. More exciting still, for the first time since Ushuaia I'm not heading north. In fact -- and believe me I'd become acutely, relentlessly aware of the fact -- this was the first day since the run to Iguacu back in October that I wasn't travelling in a generally north-south axis.

Don't worry, it was still hideously, bone-chillingly, muscle-tearingly windy. But today I was riding directly into the storm. Fingers crossed, the bike would make headway, and with it I'd be making real progress. Out of Patagonia 'proper' and into the Andes themselves; short by only a couple of hundred kilometres of travelling coast-to-coast across the skirt of the entire continent.

All of that's ahead of me. Up and away from Rada in about the third flush of early morning -- no need to show off -- and halfway between Rada and Comodoro, at a low break in the hills take the only tarmac'd turning for 300km in either direction: Ruta 26 to Sarmiento and the interior.

A report in yesterday's paper: local lawyer loses control of his car on Ruta 26 close to this junction; car smashed to pieces; lawyer goes to heaven (or wherever it is lawyers go when they die). I looked out for signs of the crash aware that the more I looked for it, the likelier I was to reach the same grim end. In the end i survived (you noticed?) without spotting the crash site, hidden perhaps round a tight bend, over a hillock or behind a tree. I slowed down and smelled the roses.

Not much traffic. Petrol tankers that I left behind with a fick of the wrist. The road climbs a sand-coloured gorge at an ever increasing angle until it breaches the Pampa del Castillo an hour from the coast, the road belching its transitory cargo onto the edge of a vast plateau as you come out on the Top Of The World again -- and the wind hits you full on in the face.

Up here, nodding oil pumps huddle together in otherworldly encampments a million miles from humanity. There are few signs of life off the road -- a parked truck, an open window on the top floor of a low dormitory building -- and no reason to stop.

Through the oil field, the colours start to clarify into occasional spots of green or, to be more accurate, a greener shade of brown. No-one ever wrote a song about that, did they?

It's a tough ride. You guessed, the wind. It's all about getting from A to B because there is nothing here -- and no-one -- to distract from your purpose. The undulating landscape is ever-changing, which is a bonus. Specifically:

ITEM: a very wide, flat plain that I emerged into from low hills. The road snaked diagonally across (wind at 45 degrees) with nature's detritus blown across the floor at high speeds. The low grass is bent double under the force, buffeted violently in the gusts. It's sobering to see so clearly how fast they move.

ITEM: Entering a vast glacial valley that rises, imperceptibly at first then faster and faster, the road straight at first until it starts to meander through the contours. Barren, empty, but for the road, the telegraph poles that run parallel and then, without warning, remnants of an old, long forgotten railway line, off to the right.

Lunch in the isolated town of Sarmiento, hidden in woods and a gentle valley. Roadside signs just outside town commemorate the departure from here of the first airborne troops to land on the Falklands -- better make that Las Malvinas -- with no hint that those troops might have lost their war. The town appears ordered, gardens well-maintained, suburban. Not a hint in the air of the isolation or the stubborn relentless barrage nature throws their way.

A quiet gas station on the outskirts: a carful of soldiers troop out as I step inside to pay and buy a stale pre-packed sandwich (which was horrible and anachronistic). I don't volunteer my Britishness as a conversational gambit.

Onwards into the afternoon and that first, magical glimpse of the Andes - 60, 70, 100 miles away through this piercingly clear air? It's only now, finally, that the wind dies down. That's such a lovely thing to be able to write that I'll repeat it. The wind dies down. Thank the lordy, Miss Claudy.

Sarmiento is far behind me. There are ranches off to left and right, their crude handwritten signs nailed to sporadic, rickety gates, but there are few signs of life. No vehicles on the road, no herds of cattle or sheep within sight; only the fences that hug the asphalt like tramlines either side of the road, every mile of the way.

What there has to be is petrol, and sure enough the next supply appears in the middle distance, more or less where the map said it would. Not at the top of a hill or a turn in the road; marked not by hill or wood or river, but parked by the side of the road, one pimple on a particularly large and open plain.

This homestead is the local... everything . Petrol, hot and cold drinks, elementary vehicle parts, some confectionery and other nibbles. There's a telephone relay mast humming to one side. And a rudimentary football pitch; hard to tell if it's ever been used as there's no grass anywhere to be seen, just dirt.

There is petrol. The oil-stained, good-natured man who fills the tank for me is quiet and won't look me in the eye. He's also massive, muscled, could have been menacing. Indoors, an elderly woman takes my money and makes me a cup of (instant - but you can't have everything) coffee. She's far more talkative, and I swear I understood every word of her scattergun Spanish.

"Lived here all my life, I have. My father came here from Trelew to marry my mother. She was a beauty. Trelew? Yes, he was Welsh. I am too, Gwendolyn's the name. You're from England? Golly yes, well, now then. Have you been to Wales? To Cardiff, yes. Beautiful, isn't it? No, no, I never have. To tell you the truth I haven't actually been to Trelew. No, I know it's down there on the coast only, look around you, why would I want to leave? Yes, I've been over there to the mountains. That's where my mother's family come from. But look at my son --", the pump monkey, I believe they're known as, "-- went to Buenos Aires once. Didn't like it, didn't like it at all. All those people, like mice running around they were, he said, like mice, and all those buildings, what's all that about? He came back and who can blame him? You liked Buenos Aires, did you? And you've been where? Ushuaia, that's a long way. And Brazil? Very hot, you know. Cardiff, you said? So beautiful, and the valleys. Are they green like this? People, you say? Well, there are ranches all around us, isn't it? So they stop for a chat and coffee. It's the petrol that keeps us going. No chance to get lonely.

"But I tell you what. At night when the stars come up and the moon sits low in the sky..." She gestured up and out, and the vastness of the plain stretching to a distant low horizon felt suddenly like it was rushing away at a thousand miles an hour, yet everything was still. "At night, it's magical. And I could never be anywhere else in the world"

Moving north, and that means that the sun is going to go down noticeably earlier than it did in Ushuaia. It's off to my left as I reach the town I've been hoping to stop at. But there's nothing more than a scattering of dark wooden homes in a hollow at the side of the road. Barefoot children ignore the bike. There's no electricity -- or certainly none switched on. I can't see a store, let alone a campsite, though there is surely one somewhere.

Not for the first -- or last -- time I elect to press on into the fast descending night and the next (bigger) down. It's only another 100 kilometres. How hard could that be...?

The final run into Esquel is, you've guessed it, pretty tough. I'm tired after several hundred K's. The landscape is stellar, great cavernous valleys flanked by mountains that look as smooth as blancmange but are, in truth, as tough as old boots. This is a land of giants, and of dinosaurs.

The world changes once more and I'm on a long flat stretch again, the road winding alongside a river, I meet a road junction -- the first of the day -- and the traffic starts to pick up. Two, three then four other vehicles on the road and suddenly we're chasing the dieing sun along the valley floor, towards snow-tipped mountains.

A final twist as the road descends to Esquel. Lots of twisty roads. Then the town appears beneath me, several hundred feet beneath me, lights twinkling and shrouded in dusk. A mesmeric vision. I'm coming at it now through a pine forest; there's lots of snow on the mountain slopes and it strikes me this is an out-of-season ski resort. It suddenly feels cooler -- though that might be the lack of sunlight.

Past another army barracks and an impressive number of joggers attacking the steep roads, most of them wearing Regimental gym kit, an easy swing through town and around the houses (Alpine stylings everywhere), no cabins open at anything like my kind of price but a cheap hotel on the outskirts has a room available. OK, it has *every* room available, and the register confirms I'm the first guest for over a week. That's why the room and bedding smell so musty. And why the hot water's not switched on. Too tired to complain... Z-zzzzzzzz.

Just a couple of kilometres north on Ruta Tres before I get to do something I haven't needed to do for a very long time.

Turn.

Today I'm crossing a continent, and to do that involves leaving Ruta Tres behind for the last time and setting out on what the maps promise to be the far thinner and decidedly more wiggly Ruta 26. The maps are quickly proved right.

I'd read yesterday in the local paper gory reports of on accident on this stretch of the road, a local lawyer driving too fast who's car had left the road at a hilly bend and burst in to flames. The lawyer was dead. I saw no flowers marking the spot of the accident. Truth be told, though I rode slower than normal and really kept my eyes open, I didn't even see the site of the crash. Just another lonely death swallowed up by the scorched and inhospitable desert.

No more Ruta Tres. It was the strangest sensation -- like a teenager leaving home, I had broken free and was doing my own thing. No-one else was watching (the road was empty) and no-one could stop us. We had been on the coast road for 13 days straight, the bike and me, for all the times when the sea was actually hidden from view. Now the bike was nosing inland and into the mountains. The air was dry -- and windy, but at least I was riding into the wind rather than across it.

Not far from Comodoro the road entered a series of overlapping hills and we climbed quickly onto a prehistoric plateau punctuated by nodding donkeys, rhythmic, robotic dinosaurs drawing oil to the surface from somewhere very deep and long ago. With the exception of a pair of petrol tankers and the occasional rusty truck -- and what was that? could it be a face at the window of a forbidding building in the fenced-off distance within the oilfield? -- I was utterly alone. On and on, ever on.

150km inland, the town of Sarmiento has survived since the dog-end of the 19th century. The government needed white faces this far south in order to claim the vast nothingness for the nation. Not even the Welsh were tempted. It was down to the military and remains a garrison town to this day. On the outskirts I stopped to contemplate a heritage sign by the roadside honouring the parachute troops from Sarmiento who had been the first to land on Las Malvinas during the invasion. No mention of their fate.

Still pondering what reaction my passport might provoke here, I pushed on, skirting the town centre and making for the petrol station on the far end of town. Lots of big distances between refuelling today, and I wanted to make good time as well. A hefty-looking group of soldiers got into a 4x4 and drove off as I was pulling in close to the pump. They looked idly curious, as well they might at a Brazilian motorbike so far from home.

I refuelled too. A pre-packed plastic cheese sandwich, the taste and texture of which will stay with me 'til I die. You come all this way looking for a taste of authentic Argentina and... well, pre-packed plastic is the authentic taste of the modern age, no matter where you may be.

Sarmiento nestles in a green dale, stacks of trees transplanted to help break up the wind. It looked like a nice place, just not nice enough to make a 500m detour. On and on, ever on.

There is a dull green consistency to the landscape where tenacious grasses and mosses make a living of sorts clinging to the omnipresent rock. There are no people here. There is no life.

Cracks appear in the plateau where the first intimations of the approaching Andes stand tall and proud. Initially there are gullies, hills, little runs of undulation; I remember one passage of road that crept up on me at an increasing gradient until the road was forced to swerve from side to side, faster and faster, until finally the road merged at the crest of another anonymous pass. The land felt sculpted by something bigger than God: glacial, prehistoric landscapes. Echoing the road's tortured passage, off to my right, the remains of a long-dead path of electricity poles. Most remained standing, for there was nobody here to steal them for building, repairs or firewood. Every so often the wires had survived too, but most had been shredded in the wind.

I was grateful for my extra petrol. Two or three hours beyond Sarmiento I was able to fill up again at one of the most remote inhabited places I have ever found. A mother and son shared the responsibility of filling the petrol tanks of anyone seeking to get through and past their lonely home. The whole place, house, petrol pump, outbuildings and, bizarrely, a small asphalt football pitch, was camouflaged by trees, completely alien to this landscape but offering some cover from the sun and the wind and the rain. The horizon stretched for miles.

The son had been to Buenos Aires once, but didn't like it. All those people. His mother told me this. He was too shy, despite having the build of a WWF wrestler and hands as broad as my skull. Mother served up coffee and a chocolate bar to this temporary intruder, and filled my head with stories of the amazing beauty all around them. The nights are the best, she said, when the clouds disappear you can see Forever. She was Welsh, she told me, and fiercely proud of it. Her father had moved inland from Gaiman and married a girl from Chile - still a couple of hundred miles further west. Perhaps they had arrived here as a compromise -- halfway between each family? Perhaps they had come here precisely because it was so far from both families? But she had stayed, and her son was third generation wilderness.

I left this strange pair with a sense of regret (but boy, am I glad I don't have to live there).

[to be continued]