Mendoza – Las Catitas – 106 km
After two days, Ernest and I left our bedbug-ridden accommodation and headed
east on Route 7 towards Buenos Aires, more than 1,000 kilometres across the
Pampas. The road was pancake flat and the temperature (I guessed) in the low
30s, making it a perfect day of biking.
Pitching the tents was reasonably early at a petrol station with a grassy patch and
showers. A Japanese cyclist, Nobu, who had been travelling for the past year and a
half, arrived from the opposite direction and joined us behind the petrol station.
Las Catitas – Alto Pencoso – 99 km
We awoke to a reasonably strong wind, maybe sounding worse due to the Poplar
trees camped under. The Pampas of South America is a vast, flat, fertile, grassland
plain covering roughly 777,000 square kilometres, stretching from the Atlantic
Ocean to the Andes Mountains. It’s, thus, an area entirely exposed to the
elements. Consequently, the countryside offered few exciting sights, simply low
shrubs and sandy soil and, of course, the pampas grass; a tall grass which grew in
dense clumps. At home, my mom used them in large flower arrangements. The
wind was from the front all day, but mercifully nothing close to the wind in
Patagonia.
A new country brings countless new and exciting things to discover. In Argentina,
road fatalities weren’t only indicated by a humble cross but by little shrines and
sometimes quite elaborate ones. The collection of empty plastic bottles at some
memorials baffled me. I, subsequently, discovered the shrines surrounded by red
flags had a fascinating history and understood paid homage to Antonio Gil.