We must be getting old; that, or we’ve developed a malignant dose of ‘lluviaphobia’. Rain feart rather than water scared, a developing affliction that results in an affection for fair-weather cycling. The forecast is promising a storm drench over the next two days. A campsite sits to the left, an hotel stands to the right. A road traffic sign materialises between and insist that we must keep to the ‘right’.

We do.

Justification is really easy, we’ve collected a dose of washing that is resistant to drying… a place with some hooks in the wall from which to string a line would be an advantage, some heating useful. We do get the latter, albeit with melted Bakelite knobs and a blistered skin. Which is how we end up ‘room-camping’ in a steamie laundrette. A classic old-time Argentine Hospedaje, albeit with the PB inflection.

Three foam beds claim nine tenths of the floor space, an ancient cathode-tubed television monopolises the only flat surface, a solitary window perches high under the eave, it’s paucity of lumens out-matched by the meagre wattage from two incandescent bulbs only adding to the gloom score.

And yet, I just love these places. Relics from another age, another era. There’s no pretence, no ubiquitous hair dryer nor homogeneous trouser press, (although we did find one place with a motorised shoe polisher), it’s a refuge, a safe place to keep dry. Although that questionable heater started to infringe on a sub-conscience, then invades on a dream, only to create a nightmare. It creaks and croaks in the lost hours of the Stygian night, a monstrous Erebus that will grow fang flames, erupt from the wall and scorch all before it if I can’t quell it, if I don’t turn it off.

Kill the beast.

Turn the stop-cock.

Can’t find it.

Wake up.

Grovel before the hell-hag.

Hunt the stopper.

There isn’t one.

What had woken me was not that fire fiend, but the tympanic drumming of rain on the very immediate tin roof. A beautiful pink noise, a soporific staccato that happily dumbs all dog bark and washes away all gas fire angsts. Drops that cascade off the gutterless roof, ponding into rivulets, grubby braids finding their way to a culvert, along a gully, down a river, into a lake, across a continent, on to an ocean. We’ll get to follow those rain drops for the next thousand kilometres In much the same way as PNG did.

Percival N. Garrett was my brother-in-law Richard’s great-grand Uncle Percy, who is credited with helping to open up the Argentine Lake District to tourist development in the late nineteenth century. He also, along with his family hauled a grand piano from the Pacific Ocean, right across the Andes. Well, it was a wedding present, and they were Victorians. Then, four years later, they decide to continue their easterly passage by sailing a home-built craft and four tons of luggage down the rivers to the Atlantic Ocean. A sea to sea route not dissimilar to the one we end up covering, albeit ours had a shorter timescale, the benefit of black tar, fruit trees and only rare sightings of that river.

There’s an unpublished account within my extended family of this remarkable family’s travels, and what I need to keep reminding myself is that this happened just three generations ago. Much should have changed. Do they still rustle cattle over the Chilean border? Can you still ask the boss for a few days off, sail back to England to collect a bride? Yet some things haven’t. It’s still an arid, dry country, there’s still long distances between ‘facilities’, there’s still the high-energy Pampan storms and the angry, bruised sunsets. The snow-melt rivers still flow out of the Andean lakes, only now they’ve been captured behind dam walls and smothered in linear bands of flood lakes. Barrages that would thwart a Victorian family’s raft now breeds hydroelectric power to the city and agro-irrigation to fruit trees.

Check the fruit aisle of any European supermarket in April and the chances are that those William pears will have come from the orchards that we were riding through. Likewise, the Malbec grape for my favourite, if prophetic wine-label graphic.

And then there’s that river we rarely get to see. It’s not for want of looking. The main tarred highway is narrow, the lorries wide, such that we happily opt to escape onto the grid of side roads, anticipating dusty gravel and a riverbank.

Pure serendipity.

For, with no information or indication we find ourselves at the beginning of the ‘apple route’ on a Sunday morning in the company of every shape of recreational pedaller. Naturally, we are the entertainment. Reach a crossroads and it’s not obvious which way to turn; wait a few moments and, sure enough, around the bend comes María-Elena and Cary’. Some time later, we head off in the right direction. It’s not a fast progression, way too many right angle bends, chattering Argentinas as well as the roadkill distractions of grape fencing and windfall fruits. But still no river.

You know that it has to be there, for we’re riding over concrete lined canals that wander off across vast stretches of aridity, away to create another oasis town, whilst others are more decrepit, weeping water to form lagoons and marshes, flighting ducks and whining mosquitoes. But the most imperceptible manifestation of river has to be the high espaliered avenues of pear and apple. Grow just a dozen of those fruits and one tonne less water is going to make it to the coast. Now multiply that by four hundred square kilometres of orchards and then wonder as to how much of this river emigrates to the northern hemisphere.

A Scottish river is an accretion river. A burn might grow out of a peat bog, collect a few tributaries and strengthen into a stream, always growing on its short flow down to the seashore and the flood tide; where as this rio is sourced solely from the Andean mountains. Snow and glacier melt with an addition of our continuous downpour that we listened to so pleasantly in our highland lakeside town many riding days back to the west. Thereafter, it is all depletion, dehydration, and a compilation of wandering meanders and slow flow still waters. With all these towns, fruits and the long reaches of aridscapes, I had started to wonder if our rarely seen river, was in fact never-seen; had it been sucked dry? There’s precedence; we’ve followed the Rio Calchaqui, from source to desiccated stream-bed, from glacier spout to a bottle of Cafayete Malbec.

Rivers don’t always survive. But this one does. And with style. By the time this Rio Negro reaches Viedma and the Atlantic Ocean, it’s still a respectable river despite all that generosity of largesse. We walk the willow shaded waterside paths on a circuitous route crossing over the river on the long girder bridge intending to return on the passenger ferry. Or we would have had it not been siesta. An inconvenience that the Garrett family would have avoided, even if they were curtailed by their tonnage of luggage. They complete their continental crossing by being towed behind a steam-tramp up the coast to Buenos Aires, whilst we catch the last of those Patagonian winds and ride another three ‘century-days’ and a slow train into the capital.

Study a topological map and its obvious that both of our routes follow the obvious trans-continental line. What’s not quite so obvious is ‘why?’

Uncle Percy was from a well connected, successful middle class English family, and yet he traipsed his family in what was then wild frontier country, right across the Américas. And when I consider the possible ‘whys’, I get to look to our own condition for which I’ve yet to find a diagnosis and the ‘why’ persist.

So maybe chasing a raindrop and a piano down a river can be a justification in itself.