I won’t lie to you. I’m totally phoning this one in. We’ve been in Buenos Aires for two days and the trip is officially over. Nina has been nagging me like mad to catch up with the report so she can post penguin photos. It doesn’t help that this is about the boring ride up route 3 on the eastern coast of Argentina.
This is the first section of the ride that was truly tedious. It’s all paved, flat, monotonous and windy. It has none of the remote, desolate, majesty of western Patagonia or Tierra del Fuego. It doesn’t help that the bike is running like crap and stumbles badly above 60 mph, limiting us to a painfully slow cruise. I feel like Han Solo making the jump to light speed – “Don’t worry. She’ll hold together…(Hear me baby? Hold together.)”. I never thought I’d welcome gravel, but a 2 km construction diversion actually provided some relief from the boredom.
Later the coast came in to view.
A welcome stop at imaginatively named Beautiful Beach rounded out our corker of a day.
We had trouble finding a place for the night in Comodoro Rivadavia. None of the more affordable hotels had parking. In the end Juan Carlos Guazzone spotted us sitting on the street looking at a map and enquired if we were looking for lodging. Conveniently, he owned a hostel across the way and had a courtyard to pull the bike into. Juan Carlos turned out to be a fantastic guy. We broke his lock when we came home drunk and got the key stuck trying to let ourselves in. Upon seeing the locksmith there the next day we tried to pay him for the damage but he was having none of it and instead made us a cup of tea to send us off.
Which brings me to my closer for this lame duck post. Tea. Or more specifically “mate”. The Argentines are mad for it. They drink it out of Hobbit-looking carved wooden cups with elaborate silver trim. It is brewed in the cup without a bag and drunk through a long curved metal straw that acts as the filter. They drink it constantly. Every gas station has a hot water vending machine and every Argentine has a thermos with them. At all times. We met motorcyclists carrying thermoses. Bicyclists have special thermos slings! Discarded, broken thermoses litter the roadside in the wilds of Patagonia. It is a national obsession. As if that wasn’t weird enough, you also share a mate cup whenever feasible. Families, of course, share a single cup, but so do office workers or even acquaintances on a motorcycle tour. There is one cup and usually someone in “charge” of it. The person in charge collects the cup when it needs refilling or when someone has had it long enough. They then refill the cup and pass it on. People get the cup for a few minutes before it moves on. Imagine sharing a single coffee cup at work – as I witnessed 5 customs officers doing at the Chile/Argentina border. Our mate pic was provided by the owner of a surprisingly modern mate cup. Most of them look like they are inscribed with “Property of Bilbo Baggins”.
Next up…Penguins!
