As might be expected, the Australians have an acronym for it.  What, from the perspective of the steering wheel looks like “MAMBA“ or “miles and miles of bugger all”, can turn out to be something entirely different.  The stretch north of Mackie in Queensland, certainly received this appellation. The general advice to cyclists was to take the bus: you’ll only get bored. We didn’t on either score. The trans-Chaco has the same reputation and we got similar advice. Viewed through the limited scope of a windscreen I can understand why a degree of boredom might set in. Viewed from the perspective of a stubborn cyclists saddle, it is a slowly mutating, changing world.

In the east it starts the moment you roll off the bridge over the Rio Paraguay. Before that point, to the east, it’s been varying states of heavy sea swells; over the Rio and it’s into flat calm, the doldrums and the wet Chaco. It comes as a surprise after the exercising we’ve received since the Provincia de Corrientes, 1000kms of exercise, that, if we were to be honest, could at times become interminable. When the wheels felt like they were in treacle, and the odometer was on strike. Now suddenly we are sailing, bowling along. On a deserted road. I’ve not long re-read my entry for what we considered a quiet road in Uruguay. Now we will need to re-evaluate, recalibrate that equation. By the end of the Chaco, six lorries an hour constituted a normal day. There’s probably more traffic stuck on one mile of the M25 on a Monday morning than has passed us in the eight days it has taken to cover the 800+ kms of Ruta 81.

To the east is wet Chaco, to the east is dry Chaco. Over all it is level, with a near imperceptible decline to the east, rising at 0.004% as we cycle west. I’d like to claim it was noticeable, but as each day warmed up, a blessed tailwind would develop, mitigating any perception of a hill. What that flatness does mean is you pedal crank every single kilometre, there’s no freewheeling, no easy breathers out here. That’s a Wiki simplistic overview. The journey as a whole, is made up of a series of chapters, small paragraph moments in time.

Asuncion has come and gone, some days the clouds and rainbows do the same. As with all perfomances, as with many battles, there is a climactic finale. The last 200 km Paraguay is over rolling countryside, the road at times moderately busy, but as there’s a wide hard shoulder, it is safe. In many ways it’s a perfect road for the legions of small motorbikes and the few cyclists. Or it would be if they hadn’t added a full width strip of tar, near pedal high every 25 metres. I’ve done the math and hung the road architect who sanctioned this crime. Approach berm, apply brakes, bump front wheel, bump back wheel, panniers clatter on their carriers, now start pedalling all over again. Repeat 8000 times.

Hanging is to good. Tarred and feathered would be appropriate and a good start. The saddle has been battered and pummeled into submission, which hurt to a degree, however it was the constant concentration that gave the real tension headaches, and didn’t allow much time to appreciate what all was going on around about.



Spookily quiet road to Saltos de Mocona



This being an Argentine campground, there’s banos, wood fired shower, a fire pit and a tin shelter over tables and chairs.  We might be damp, the RH might have gone beyond saturation, but we’re dry, we’re safe, and with front row seats for a grandstand viewing of a climactic theatrical.  Thunder rolls around the hills, the sky starts to break up, going from high level monochrome to a rolling, boiling maelstrom.  The clouds gyrating, spinning around us, all the varying levels moving at differing speeds, differing directions.  A tumbling, turbulent tumult.  Shafts of sunlight suddenly pierce through, lancing rods, stabbing the far hillside, only to be extinguished moments later as the next clatter of thunder unleashes the next downpour.  Lightning flashes, steam and mist rise out from the valley floor, cutting the tall trees into pale cardboard outlines.

Throughout all these atmospherically theatrics, the gregarious weaver birds: yaka-torries, carry on their noisy discussions, building their pendulous nests in a single date palm tree.

Then it goes quiet, the rain stops, the thunder stops, the wind stops, to leave only the slow drip of water from the gutterless roof onto the red wet pitted soil.  That and the incessant squabling of the nest builders.

It’s now Friday afternoon and we’re still the only people on the campground, on the only campground in the park.  The only road in or out is within audio distance, we haven’t heard a vehicle in the last three hours.  I’m starting to question if it really is a Friday, if this waterfall really exists or is all this beauty the
figment of somebody else’s imagination.  The truth lies somewhere in the latter.  These saltos are suffering from big brother syndrome.  The iconic touristic honey pot of Cataratas de Iguazu are not far up the road.

It’s now Friday evening, the generator is puttering somewhere of in the dark, the lights have come on. Three jungle fowl are fighting over a mate, still the nesters are squabbling, parades of moths start to congregate around the light bulbs, settling on our bags, shoulders, hands.  Still we’re the only people around.

Eight o’clock, full dark, no moon, still the only people around.  It’s going to be the quietest Friday evening yet, no dogs, no cockerels, no slamming doors.  That is until a pantheon of celestials take a hand.  They start with a light show.  Silent strobes of pale electric blue light etch out the silhouette of the forest, sudden profiles shuttering , flickering, too fast to identify.  Then the distant grumble of thunder catches up, rolling around the valleys, flowing over the vegetated mesas.  The coruscations come faster, the thunder thumps closer to their source.  The storm Gods: Thor and his mates up the ampage, and move overhead and settle down to hurling bolts of electricity across the sky.  A chaos of noise and flares.  Growing bored with their pyrotechnics, they decide to add a further percussion: a tympani of rain on the drumskin of the tent.  Now the lightning and the thunder come so fast, that it’s impossible to connect one flash to it’s crash.  A confusion of chaos, an anarchy of noise.  Slowly the clatter and the shambles settle down to one thunder flash tied to one thunder clap, that rolls like a drum roll, flowing out across the sky, seeming to wheel around and return.  The volume rising and falling, growing and diminishing, finally tapering away to black silence.

Why is corned beef called corned beef?

Since Anglo-Saxon times any grain, wheat, barley or oats, was known as corn. A salt crystal was of a similar size to these cereals and was used orignally in the preservation of meat, hence corned beef.

Two ants walking towards each other on a 3mm wire, meet, exchange chemical vocabulary, and then pass each other.  They will inherit the world, post apocalypse.

Presenting a 100 peso note [there’s 6.4 pesos to the pound sterling] causes consternation.  Generally the manager has to be summoned to authorise it’s use.  In Azara, a small sawmill town in southern Misiones, the shop is in darkness, you need to feel your around for provisions.  Being local must help as they don’t go in for the Tesco trick of rearranging the store, so as to entice some impulse buying.  On this occasion the high denomination note requires the offering of two red apples in lieu of change.  The healthy option, in comparision to the old days of the Italian sweetie lira.

A further 20 kilometers down the road in Conception, and the navigator gets 4 boilings as change for a bag of deep fried empanadas.  It doesn’t pay to count your chickens!

There’s a good reason why the grass and the wheat look so green.  It does rain: an average of nine days in October, so our road atlas claims.  When it does, the road can take on a whole new character, a complete personality change.

Coming in to Mercedes: a river town on the Rio Negro, a downpour starts.  Ruta 21 runs down into town, and what starts as an innocent rivulet in the gutter, engorges as each tributary join from each succeeding side street.  As we pass each new block it increases from stream, through spate to raging torrent, down which we are cycling.  Back up hill and the flow diminishes, up to the watershed.  Now a further few kilometers and we are over the Rio Negro, looking for a side road to take us to Paysandú . The sign says “Do not use on days of rain”.  That could be today, but we don’t have a great deal of choice, so on we push.  We’re working off a 1:2,000,000 map and the scripting for the town of Fray Bentos takes precedence over road detail.  Our excuse for not noticing the slightly longer hard topped route.  Plough would be a more accurate description. All the wash out has collected on the flats and in the dips in the rolling countryside.  The mudguards are the first to clog up, the brakes grind, and the wheels spin out at 4 kph,we slither and slide through each succeeding bog. We had anticipated this section of road to be over 80 kilometres of all weather gravel, and not slog through the bog.  However, due to navigational excuses it turns out to be a mere tenth of that.  The navigator stays upright to the penultimate slough, when she opts for the wrong line, ends up slumped, a total wipeout, whilst wearing sandals.  She’s not sure which is worse, the grit in the mudguards or the mud between the toes.

A lesson in believing road signs.  Also a timely reminder for later in the trip, as we had speculated taking a much longer earth road, one with no escape routes, a three day adventure in the dry, or a potential disaster in the wet.

It takes a sixth sense, a degree of luck and ever expanding knowledge base:  renewed for each country, to find a safe wild campsite.  In northern Canada it was the refuse bins that provided a bear proof cache for food; on east coast USA, it was the electicity pylon lines; in Australia: the high ground above road cuttings. We don’t always get it right.  A pick-up point for illegal immigrants on the Arizona: Mexican border wasn’t one of the best low adrenalin nights we’ve spent at the side of the road.

However, here in Uruguay, things are generally a lot slower, a product of low population density, old cars and underpowered timber lorries.  The roads in the north can vary from overengineered highways with vast, smooth hard shoulders and few vehicles, through sand filled potholed carriageways and even fewer cars, to earth roads and no cars.  Our definition of a busy route might be two grain lorries, a timber wagon, three cars and a moto for each kilometer cycled.  Ponies and horse carts don’t count.  All the roads have a wide berm or grass shoulder, a haven of wild spring flowers, new bird spotting and good wild camping possibilities. All we need are a couple of judiciously positioned shrubs to hide behind, off a corner so as not to be caught in searchlight beams of trucks and, this being gaucho country, not astride the pony path.  Our tent is green and they don’t use lights: neither on the horse nor on cars, we witnessed the latter one night on the autopista and the former when the navigator was woken by three horses cantering past our hidden site.  She could feel the ground shake either from hoof fall or her heart beat.  No sleep for some time.

Last night’s choice was amongst Australia’s greatest export: the eucalyptus tree, in the commercial forestry that surrounds the town of Fray Bentos.  No bears, pumas are rare, and the only snakes we have seen have been road kill.  So I think we have ticked most of the safety boxes, which will give us a chance of a quiet night.  At some point I come to; it was very dark, the moon had gone down, the road was silent, but I could hear something very close to my head.  Those who have camped will already understand how noise can carry, expand and transmogrify.  A grazing ewe cropping grass in Glen Coe, raccoons scattering bin lids in Indian Springs or the humping hippos in the tent next door.  It’s information from a single sense, unsupported by any of the other four.  Noise without the visuals; now add in night time, strange surroundings, and the brain concocts a whole cocktail of scenarios, most of which become comical with daylight.  I’d guess that a small rodent was cleaning up in the rubbish bag that lies between the tent skins just a few inches from my head.  I really couldn’t be bothered getting up to do anything about it; there are mosquitoes out there, and anyway I fall asleep again.  I’m woken sometime later – it was probably an exhaustless moto going home – it’s still dark and the mouse is still eating.  It must one hungry or engorged animal.  The adrenalin subsides and I fall back to sleep.  At some point just before dawn; it’s an age and male thing, but still the mouse thing is eating, I’m convinced that I can hear individual jaws chomping and chewing on something.  I lie awake waiting for dawn, putting off the inevitable manoeuvre of extricating oneself from a sleeping bag and diving out of the tent flaps whilst the waiting mosquitoes charge in.  Waiting for dawn because I’m not so sure now as to what really is out there.  We’d been watching two foot lizards the day before.  I’ve tried shaking the tent skin, but to no effect, munch,munch,munch……..

I open the curtains and instantly all is revealed.  We’ve broken one of those cardinal rules and left food where animals can get at it.  The bread and last night’s tea of corned beef, were tied tight in a plastic bag: we were in Fray Bentos partaking of cultural and gastronomic tourism after all.  We had also pitched right between two colonies of ants and both had constructed motorways.  The vegetarians to shred the baguette , the carnivores to clean out the beef tin.  Both objected to my naked feet interfering with their industry, by sending out the guards to attack.  Nippy stuff, formic acid, so I retreat and up-grade from bare to boots.
That was last night; tonight will be different. We’re in Paysandu, it’s Friday evening, and the Los Brujos moto grup are having their 10^th annual rally.  We’re pitched right in the middle of a biker rally. That’s a tale for another entry, we do know that it will a different night noise wise from last night.

The observant among you will have noticed that The Chronicler’s stories do not run in the order of our route.  To avoid confusion, and to satisfy the map addicts amongst our friends, I’ve attached a map with placemarkers roughly outlining the way that we went.  You’ll find it at the bottom of the page, below the posts.  This is a new game for me, so if anyone has any hints or tips or bright ideas to make it better, please let me know – particularly how to get the infernal thing to centre on Argentina rather than the US of A!  I’ve tried to centre the map before saving it, but it still reverts.  Menwhile, you’ll need to drag the thing down to NW Argentina.  STOP PRESS: I did it by dint of using http://maps.google.com.ar/.  Seems to work.  The points shown are our overnight stops.

The Navigator