After a plate of Meat (note the capital M: I don't think vegetables are available in these parts - maybe it's the altitude) and a wander through the streets last night -- they were still out jogging at midnight -- I'm refreshed and ready for the road this morning. The tepid shower was not enough to break my spirits. The threadbare towel? A challenge.

Avoiding such touristic temptations as another toy-town Welsh colony and a narrow-guage railway, I headed instead for the southern entrance to Los Alerces National Park. In a country that prides itself on natural beauty in extremis the park took the breath away. Stunning. Picturebook mountains straddle verdant valleys stuffed to the gills with larches ("alerces") as well as canelo, cipr�s de la Cordillera, mani�es, coihues, mutisias and liutos.

[Yes I found those names on an Argentine website. No I couldn't spot a 'coihue' if it bit me on the nose. But there were a lot of trees and plants!]

I was setting off on a 100-kilometre detour to take in these wonders, a decision I started to regret within minutes as the deeply rutted, loosely covered grit road was causing me real grief. Especially when the occasional 4-wheel drive super jeep piloted by some local hunter or tour guide flashed past (in either direction) in a cacophony of spinning wheels and spitting, spluttering gravel. I'm not built for roads like this, and a couple of times the bike teetered on the very edge of an embarrassing topple as uncertainty lead to inertia.

I shouldn't complain. If the roads were all asphalt there'd be queues across every pass. Gawkers like me would have no excuse not to see this wondrous place and it would swiftly become as clogged up as other areas of outstanding natural beauty like Yosemite or Piccadilly Circus.

The rewards for this sweaty, occasionally stomach-churning endeavour were views beyond the sublime, air as fresh as you like and a completely unreasonable sense of achievement.

The heart of the National Park is a lake, Futalaufquen, lieing blue and deep in the middle of all this beauty, an ice queen reclining on a carpet of red and orange flower petals. My little road negotiated the lakeside heading north, a triumph of considerate engineering that offered up incomparable sights without destroying all the beauty of the place.

The roadside was a riot of red. I wish I knew the damn flower's name. They went so nicely with the bike. A string of hostels, campsites and learning centres hug the lakeside: all empty, because there was no money left in Argentina for such fripperies as this.

Beyond the Park lies a hamlet called Cholila. Beyond the hamlet the road recovers its asphaltness, much to my relief, and proceeds up the valley.

A light scattering of humanity has fetched up here. There's a farmhouse off to the left and up a dirt track, much celebrated for their Welsh teas, of all things, and here I treated myself to scones, cakes and real tea, served in a Victorian cup from a Victorian pot under a Victorian dresser in an old - for this side of the world - farmhouse. The family have been here for generations.

On the wall is a framed scroll awarded to mark the retirement many years ago of the farmer's father. He had been, it was clear, a much loved education chief of the whole of Chubut province. His name was Vicente Calderon.

Wow! -- I thought, and questioned the farmer's wife further. Indeed, I'd passed a small rural school named after Senor Calderon a few miles back. The name had rattled round my head until I remembered where I'd seen it before...

Much to her amazement, I told the farmer's wife about the Spanish School in London (si! si! in England!) just round the corner from our flat. It's called the Colegio Vicente Calderon, I said. Amazing! His fame has travelled so far!

Well this was just the biggest coincidence! Worth several exclamation marks!!! I was stunned; she was beside herself. I promised photos, and that I would talk to the headmaster. Such a thing!

You've guessed? I got it completely, horribly wrong. The school on Portobello Road is the Colegio Vicente Canada Blanch. Named for "the first Spanish importer of oranges and vegetables in the UK".

I had heard the name of her father-in-law before - or rather, a completely different Vicente Calderon, the former President of Atletico Madrid who gave his name to that club's football stadium.

Oh, for shame... and I've never even written the briefest note of apology. I just hope she isn't saving up for a trip to London to see the school for herself.

If you ever find yourself in Cholila, please pop in and say sorry on my behalf. I can also recommend the Welsh tea - lovely.

And there's another reason for popping in to see Senora Calderon. Just next door, set back from the road, are the tumbling remains of a farm built in the first years of the 20th century. Few buildings of this age have survived here, even in an area as unspoilt as this. Time moves on. The walls of one old house might in turn serve as the firewood, shelving or floorboards of the next. But this one, built by an American immigrant called Harry Longabaugh, has somehow survived - sort of. Not as a museum, or in any fit state, but as living, breathing real history. Hold on -- Harry who?

Harry Longabaugh was the Sundance Kid. He and Butch and Katherine Ross -- I mean Etta Place -- arrived in this valley some time after 1900. The remote beauty of the place, fringed by high mountains, and the lack of prying eyes reminded him of the Old West, as it had already become back home in the States.

Sundance built the farm and the three of them lived here on and off for years. Old habits die hard and they ventured out as far as Rio Gallegos to rob the odd bank. What they didn't do is die in a sepia-tinted hail of bullets in a Hollywood backlot, or even in Bolivia, as the film would have it. Happily, for conspiracy theorists and romantics, no-one is quite sure how or where -- or *if* -- they died.

To complete my Vicente Calderon-induced mortification, I couldn't find Sundance's bloody house!

I got directions from the farmer's wife (or thought I did; the first fence I started to climb over was to a working farm. A leather-clad ranchero on horseback, possibly the coolest-looking old man on the planet, cantered over to enquire, ever so politely, as to why this apparition in slightly-less-cool orange motorcycle jacket, leather trousers and clunky boots was invading his property).

Two minutes down the track I found another gate. Over in a flash and through scrubby undergrowth looking for the dark wood of Sundance's home. There were animal tracks, a river curling lazily on my right hand side, a Big Bird Of Some Exotic Description calling angrily at this orange invader. The heat was getting hard to handle.

I wouldn't survive long in the wild. I hunted around for several minutes but found nothing. The damned house was supposed to be 50 metres from the fence. I stumbled alongside the river and cut back into the undergrowth: nothing.

Thinking I must have misheard the instructions even more badly than I'd first thought, I retreated to the road -- straddling the fence like an astronaut coming home from the pub -- and entered the wilds once more on the other side of the river.

Still nothing. Remember, this is a patch of scrub, shrubbery and trees a couple of hundred metres deep and perhaps twice as wide. Quite possibly all that is left of the original landscape before man first appeared in the valley and tamed it, just, for his own purposes. But I was defeated: unable to find a house the size of... the size of... well, a house.

Feeling very small, I stumbled back to the bike, fired her up and away. Twenty metres down to the road, a smart left and I'm riding alongside the copse of trees, huddled together against the elements in contrast to a gang of Andean peaks on the horizon. More poetic travellers than I would imagine those mountains as horseriders, a posse perhaps, come to track down Butch and Sundance, also there, haunting the outlaws thoughout their stay in Cholila.

I, on the other hand, stopped to snap the trees and mountains because I thought they looked pretty. It was only then that I saw, plain as day and plum in front of all the trees, Sundance's cabin.

I cursed and fumed and bashed myself about the ear (which hurt, as I hadn't taken my helmet off) but didn't retrace my steps. "You can never go back," I told myself ruefully. "Especially when it involves climbing over that fence again in your motorbike gear."

Let's keep that one to ourselves.

A rusty old Renault had passed me as I stood by the roadside, the massed ranks of passengers waving cheerfully if toothlessly at the gringo. Now, as I set off as fast as my little engine could carry me, I quickly came upon them, halfway up a short incline, the driver changing a puncture and the rest of his family scattered along the verge. More waves and silly grins from all parties but I chose not to stop. There was nothing I could do to help, (there was always the chance they weren't as friendly as they seemed - sad but true) and anyway I'd have had to 'fess up to my ignominy.

d on towards the crest of the Andes.

Getting there involved one of the most beautiful roads in the whole trip, dead straight for a mile up the spine of a long, low hill with the sun setting to my right and darkness descending over the lake to my left. A completely unpretentious road, not expecting to be anybody's favourite or to appear on a cyber journal, but it just 'got me'. I'm very glad I got to be there -- and then it was gone. Lovely for the moment, and a good memory thereafter. What more can you ask for?

The road bisected lakes, cleaved hills and ploughed deep into the forest. It got me to La Angostura, which lives for holiday makers, and serves them a superior brand of log cabin life. There were log cabins, but also log pizza parlours, a log tourist office and a log mall. Here, at last, were holiday-makers who had braved the economic crisis, or had at least escaped from it for a while. I checked in to a decent, homely pension a short walk from the centre of town (the only guest) and retreated to one of the log pizza parlours for a night of beer, football (live from distant Buenos aires) and, well, pizza. Should be more of a national dish, given the common Italian heritage, I told myself as I tucked in.

The pizza was fine, the football passable and beer tasted blooad spottng green. I rode on through lake and on towards the crest of the Andes.