Rio Mayo to Cuevas de las Manos and the first taste of “Ripio”…

I was up too early for the landlord, and even though I had paid for breakfast, the restaurant was still in complete darkness by the time I was loaded and ready to roll…

Main street, Rio Mayo... Gives new meaning to the term "Back of Beyond"...!! Althopugh by then end of the day, this place would seem like a bustling metropolis compared to the place we stayed in...!!

I shared my last packet of biscuits with this fluffy mutt who came over to greet me while I was waiting for The Three Amigos...

I had to ring the service bell outside the front door, so that I could pay for my stay…

He struggled out of a back room somewhere, clad in a old gray t-shirt, a woolly pair of long johns and socks…

“Que…??” he asked groggily as he stumbled towards me…

“Cafe….??” I asked hopefully…

“Sin cafe, cosina esta cerrada…!!” he replied (The kitchen is closed…)

The sight of my wallet seem to brighten up his day considerably, and a few minutes later I was standing on a nearby street corner, waiting for my three Argentine friends to appear…

Promptly at 8.00 am, I heard a bike start up nearby, and the first one appeared and came cautiously out onto the gravel strewn street…

“Hola…!!” I shouted across to them as they gathered together and waved back at me… We set off slowly, looking for a way out of town… There was a lot of road construction going on where the road out of town used to be, and we were directed to a nearby detour which took us up onto the bluff above town…

I could see that with the exception of Augustine, the other two riders were being just as careful as I was… I had let some air out of the tyres in preparation for the gravel road but they still felt too hard, the Big Fella spitting stones left and right as we motored up the steep ascent…

A short while after we crested the final rise, we came back onto Ruta 40… It stretched out ahead of us, right to the far horizon in a dead straight line… It was covered in loose gravel, badly rutted and corrugated in places, and the light wind kicked up dust from the passing construction vehicles headed to wards us…

“So it begins….!!” I said loudly to myself…

“Si…!!” came a reply from someone to my left… “This is the ripio, Ronnie…!! We must go carefully now…!!”

But before we could go anywhere, the guys decided they were not dressed warmly enough, so they piled off their bikes to add a few layers of clothing, and change gloves...

I stood watching them change and wondered how well they were prepared for what lay ahead of us… I knew I would have to change my riding style again to suit these guys… This was going to be “all for one and one for all” for a few days, and over the next few hours we would settle into a pattern that became the norm…

Augustine, who at first acted as translator, and seemed to enjoy being labeled "loco" or "crazy" by Pablo...

My new buddies all hailed from Beunos Aires, and were riding to Ushuaia on an adventure that they had planned for years… Once there, they were trucking their bikes back and flying home… Getting to their destination was all they cared about, and neither had the time to ride back home, as they all needed to be back at work in late January…

This was their own version of Che Guevera’s ride, and they were very proud to be finally living their own dream… Their excitement was infectious, and fired up my own again…

Augustine, the youngest of the trio would show the impetuousness of youth from time to time, tearing away on his own and disappearing into the far distance… Despite the Big Fella’s grumblings, I let him ride ahead most of the time, only occasionally showing him who had the most powerful and speedy bike…!! His Honda NX 400 was no match for us when we hit the tar, but the lighter bike handled well in the dirt…

Ezekiel on his little Honda XR 250... He and I would fare best in the dirt and outride the others over the longer distances...

Then there was Ezekiel, the oldest of them, and also the most relaxed and confident rider of the three… His quiet manner gelled perfectly with mine (ha…!!) and we both often took the longer view of a situation and came up with the same conclusions… “Ezie” as we called him, worked as a sound technician with a famous Tango group, who had toured Europe and Russia… His Honda XR 250 had the shortest range of all of us, barely 200 km to a tank, so he had to ride more carefully than we did in order to conserve fuel…

Then there was Pablo…!! A nutcase of note, and one of the funniest people I have met thus far… He spoke the least English, but after a few days, he and I could converse with ease, joking and laughing at just about any subject we chose…

Pablo (or Picasso, Tortoise, Caracoles (Snail) and a host of other names we gave him...) rides a Suzuki DR 650... Sometimes slow enough to make us believe he was pushing the damn thing...!!

When he couldn’t find the English word for something, he turned into a one man pantomine show, which had us doubled up in mirth… His facial expressions and hand movements were something to see…

He loved to make fun of Augustine and Ezie, who took all his ragging with good humour… His favourite jibe was to label them “gay” whenever they did something which was not deemed to be “tough enough”…!!

He was also as exasperating to ride with as Willi had been, and was always far behind the rest of us, sometimes by as much as 45 minutes on the dirt sections of our ride… While Augustine rode a bit recklessly at times (and paid for it on the second day…) Pablo was the exact opposite, and rode far too cautiously…

No amount of urging on our part would make him go any faster, and he rarely rode above 40 km/h on the dirt, and 80 km/h on tar, stopping frequently to peer around him as if lost…!!

Patagonia...!! I was up and riding the ripio I had dreaded and dreamed about for so long...!!

Yet for all his bluster and fun-making, he was probably the most sensitive of them all… He carried a picture of his deceased father on the inside of his windshield, and from time to time I would see him kiss his fingers and hold them to the photo…

I usually had to turn away when I saw this, as it evoked a deep longing in me to see my own father and mother again…The sense of “familia” runs strong here in Argentina, and these guys also made me understand and remember again the significance of sitting and eating together at mealtimes…

“Ronnie…!!” Pablo said when we first sat down together at lunch on that first day… He punctuated his first long speech to me by stabbing a finger at everything he mentioned…”Amigos, ….food, …drink…!! Muy importante…!!”

Introductions over, now for the details of our ride today…

Barely 20 km into the first section of marble strewn ripio, I suddenly felt the Big Fella go “soft” on me…!! I was doing about 50 km/h and the back end began fish-tailing, taking my out of the tyre tracks I was battling to stay in, and across the piles of pebbles and stones to either side of it…

I struggled to stay on the bike, trying to control the sliding by opening the throttle and simultaneously trying to bring the Big Bike to a gentle stop… It took about a 100 metres of heart in mouth, bucking and sliding to come to a stop…

I knew immediately when I was stationary, that I had a puncture in the rear tyre… I was riding alone up front, having overtaken Augustine a long way back…

By the time the others got to where I was, I had my helmet and gloves off and was trying to figure out what had happened… I had hit a number of “icebergs” over the past few kilometres, large rocks that were embedded in the surface of the road… I thought I had dented the rim and the air had escaped from the beading where the tyre is joined to it…

I was very lucky to be riding with my compeneros, as they all piled in and helped me repair the puncture, this after tying to inflate it with two “air bombs” and a can of “tyre weld”… Even my compressor failed to inflate the tyre…!! I rolled the bike forward and heard a loud hissing and Pablo who was on his hands and knees behind it found a 10 mm tear that we had not seen before…

There was never any question of leaving me alone to repair the puncture...!! Even though we had been riding for barely half an hour, and hardly knew each other, my new-found friends piled in to help...!!

I pulled out the repair kit and minutes later, Pablo had inserted the rubber plug that surprising closed the entire tear…!! I expected to use at least two with a hole that big…!!

While the guys packed their gear away, I used my compressor to pump the tyre... This was only the second puncture I have had in almost 132 000 km on the Big Fella...!! The first being in Tanzania in April 2010...!!

It was not the road surface or the sharp stones that punctured the tyre, but one of the many cattle grids that I had crossed earlier… There must have been a jagged piece of metal sticking up out of it which caused the damage… The tear was too clean for it have been anything else…

Plenty of signs to indicate that wind is a serious factor, but mercifully, we were hardly bothered by it at all on the first day...

Much of Ruta 40 that was once just a dusty, rubble strewn track, is being tarred, and the weird thing about it is that the contractors seem to start a piece in the middle of nowhere and pave a long section that also ends in the middle of nowhere…!! Why they don’t start from one town and work towards the next is beyond me…

After about 50 km on the dirt, we suddenly found ourselves riding on a brand new stretch of bitumen where we could pick up speed to make up for the time we lost on the dirt…

The road was tarred from Lagos Beunos Aires all the way to Perito Moreno, where we stopped to refuel and have coffee and a snack… It was here that Augustine suggested that rather than take the direct route to the next town, we should visit Cuevas de las Manos, (Caves of the Hands) a World Heritage Site that displayed rock art dating back thousands of years…

“Eet  is muy beautiful, Ronnie…!! We must go to see eet…!!” This was a phrase that he would use often in the next few days, and one that we would come to rue eventually…!!

I was used to covering long distances when I rode alone, and getting used to the frequent stops was taking it’s toll on my patience…We had only covered 140 km since we started out and I was itching to gobble up the miles in my usual fashion…

My interest in all things ancient got the better of me though, and I agreed to make the 90 km detour that would see us leave a perfectly good stretch of tar road, and ride on dirt…!!

And I am very glad I did, because the road leading to the caves was hard-packed gravel, and expertly graded, due to the high volumes of tourists that visit this site… We were able to ride at speeds of 80 km/h and more in some places, except for Pablo Pedestrian, of course…!!

Here’s a few pics of the area and road leading to the caves…

Multi-coloured soils make for an interesting landscape... Erosion in this area had brought forth orange, pink and sometimes deep red to go with the grays and browns...

After 80 km of much rougher dirt roads earlier that morning, this was a godsend....!!

Stretching out into the distance towards the canyon where the caves are located....

The road twists and turns, dropping down into arroyos and climbing back out over windswept , empty plains...

I stopped to check out this distance marker and had to smile to myself... I had completely underestimated just how long it would take to get to El Calafate...!! It would take another two days of hard riding before we reached the town...!! And I thought I could do it in one...!!

After 30 kms of superb “off-road” riding, we arrived at the ranger station, where we had to sit around and wait for an hour before the next guided tour took place.

©GBWT 2012