Matt & Rob's Big Trek

Plan B: We are coming back to England but to live in tunnels underground like moles and with only tinned peas, Shippham’s paste and a lone copy of Razzle to sustain us. No, wait…oh, for Christ’s sake…Sorry chaps, this filing system is awful; that was plan D*. Here we go…

Plan A: We were to leave General Roca (lovely) and spend two days walking along the Rio Negro (lovlier) before a stop at Neuquen (always said Nay-ooo-Quen and with appropriate Street Fighter 2 hand flourishes) lead us walking out across the desert again for a turn south-west and a long walk to Bariloche, all just in time to catch a bus to Chile for a passport stamp and a return to Patagonia. Hope I didn’t lose too many there.

What we are now in the middle of executing is Plan B. About 50 yards before the turn south-west Matt said that he’d just been looking at the map and it was possible there was an alternative. At first my eyes rolled as it was a bit late in the day but the map was got out and the more and more we looked the better and better it seemed, so after half an hour and one pensive dump in some nearby bushes we threw Plan A right out of the window right there on the junction. So here we are in Zapala, headed directly west for the border and an entrance to Chile on foot in order to return to Argentina and walk south amidst the mighty Andes. It should be more beautifulier and means we’ll be in Argentina about another two months now. I think, no, I’m pretty sure, that such an on-the-spot change makes us true adventurers. Look it up.

We were rewarded for our dewwing doo with a night of hell. I went to sleep about 12ish after a bit of struggle. What I awoke to was turmoil: A massive wind storm had swept up; my front porch was half destroyed and sand was absolutely raining in on me, and my tent poles were bending over to such an extent it made me scream out. Matt, on hearing that I was now awake, shouted out that he was holding his from the inside. That was it, I had to not just sit there and try and brace it with something (man, I love jamming in these Star Wars references…), namely me. From 2:30 until 5:30am a sat with my hands or my back or my feet pressed resolutely and achingly against the inner wall in a desperate bid to stop its destruction. It called to mind a scene from the 1963 classic The Haunting (not the shoddy remake) where the ghost is relentlessly bellowing and bashing on the bedroom doors which bulge at its infernal insistence. I was the scaredy girl inside, my elongated cries of, “Please stop”, and, “Just fuck off!” only adding to the horror atmosphere. I can fully understand that in old religion the elements were ascribed personalities: when you’re tucked up inside your brick house a spot of bad weather is an upcoming inconvenience; when you live in a tiny hut all year round it is the great big bastard just outside that holds your fortunes in the balance; easy to magnify into the wrath or benevolence of a deity. Anyway, at about 5:30am and after a few failed attempts I managed to get out of the tent to repair the porch and secure a guyline that had been flapping uselessly and tantalisingly before my eyes for the past three hours. After that the tent was way sturdier (and here was I thinking that guylines were just for tripping up drunk people at festivals) and so, after another 50 mins or so I was able to crawl into my sand covered sleeping back and press myself into the back of the tent for just a few hours kip before another 25 km walk in the baking sun.

That’s the desert when it misbehaves, but when it isn’t, when the stars are out and you’re at camp with a Spielbergian sky, or when the daytime breeze is just enough to deflect the heat and you’re gazing out across thousands of acres of sand and shrubs stretching out under the clearest of blue skies, and with only a circling hawk (A Hawk!) and a few craggy rocks to disturb it, it is amongst the most beautiful places on Earth. So desolate, and pretty much everything I ever dreamed it would be. It iwas even more stunning a couple of days ago because as we topped a hill the first of the snow-covered Andes towered into view on the horizon. I nearly wept. Yes folks, we have finally reached the mountains. Bilbo would be proud.

Hey, talking of hobbits and perhaps with dragons in mind, the vale we have just walked through is rich in petroleum and with that they have found the dinosaurs that ate the veg (oil comes from old plants you see, kids : ) and then the ones that ate the ones that ate the veg, and in Plaza Huincal they had a fantabulous museum with loads of fossils and some life-size replicas of what was found there. It was brill and I was immediately reduced to schoolboy form. The other monster found was a scorpion right under my tent just as I was rolling it up. I will be shaking those morning boots extra hard from now.

One other point: As it is now after the 21^st of Sept then that means your days will be getting shorter than your nights whilst mine are getting longer. What I’m doing right there is turning the tables on you. I’m turning them. I’m doing it right now. They’re in mid-turn! That’s it, they’ve turned.

Cheers then. Love you, byee x x

*Plan C is to carry a small cat with us. Plan E involves each and every one of you, a great big thing of super glue and a giant Acme rubber band so let’s hope all goes well with the others.

El Scorpio!

The desert. What can I say about the place? “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times”? Yeah, possibly Dickens had it covered with that but it needs a little peppering: “It was a really thirsty to the point of nausea time times.” It was certainly among the most memorable of stretches so far.

We headed out from General Acha with rucksacks full of water and hope in our strides. I’ve mentioned on an earlier entry that the weather changes all the time in Argentina. Well, not in the Patagonian desert it doesn’t. Wind, sir? Would you like any wind with your sand? Or how about some wind? Are you sure you wouldn’t like some wind RIGHT IN YOUR FACE!? Yep, it gets windy here. All the time. Still, it dropped just enough in the evening to bring us our coldest night of the journey so far. Even my dreams were cold.

The following day was pretty much ruined by thorns. Oh, the thorns in this place. This isn’t the Dune Sea of Tatooine and there is vegetation but every single plant has a spike destined for your hand or your bum whenever you want a nice sit down. The worst of these are the spiky death balls that hide absolutely everywhere in your stuff, lying in wait to stab you right through to the blood when you slip your hand into their trap. Little shits. “Proof that there is a devil,” as Matt said.

After the first two days we were able to fill up some water bottles thanks to a little cheery dude in a random hut near the road. We felt a lot better having had a refill. It was not good enough. I was soon down to rations of water that I had to drag myself from glugging down in one. There is zero humidity and we were crossing miles of sandy, windswept terrain with under two litres per day. It was ‘orrible. Worse still was that it soon became clear that our tents were not particularly sand proof. Sand was raining in through the mesh because of the wind and every time I awoke there was a layer of the rotten shitty stuff over everything I possessed, including my face. Sand is bad. I grew to hate it.

But then we came across the views. After four days of either boring road or not being able to see half a mile for all the dust we suddenly saw Lihuel Cahel, the great rocky mass that we were aiming for, looming on the horizon. And wow! From then on we were crossing the most brilliant and dramatic scenery we’d seen. I was still bloody thirsty and sandy but it made it kind of worth it, most especially when we got to the services there and I could glug down lovely cold Sprite and eat something other than tinned crap and crackers.

We were going to take a room in the motel there but then the proprietor said something that made us chew our food a little more slowly: “No, there is no bank until General Roca.” General Roca was over 200 kms away and we had about £50 between us, nowhere near enough to make it. We had been so busy trying to ensure we had enough food and water, and so used to having a bank in each town that we hadn’t even considered such a thing. We were in the shit. We walked two more days to Puelches, the next town on the map, which is pretty much one street and a petrol station. Thankfully the station accepted cards and sold beer and sandwiches so we could survive and be merry, but it turned out to be so small that the buses didn’t stop there because there are not enough people, they just drive on through as if you were Dick Turpin. We stayed up until 4am trying to stop the buggers but they wouldn’t have any of it (actually, Matt says he saw me stop one while he was packing the tent away but I was pretty drunk so probably appeared like some ranting lunatic and the bloke drove off. I returned, clueless as to what had happened. I don’t remember it). After another full day of trying to hitch we had to ask if someone in the town would act as a taxi. They did and it was a very expensive taxi but here we are in General Roca after 8 days and 100 miles of stark and arid walking. The chances were that we were going to have to bus it at some point because we were still some way from the border with Chile and our little legs were not going to get us there in time. Now we should be able to and the next leg should take us right up to the mountains.

One weird thing: It was very disorientating to suddenly be in a city, the largest we have been to since Buenos Aires, and as I curled up in bed I had a huge pang of longing to be back there in the desert, amongst the thorns and the sand and the quiet. It turns out that in many ways I actually loved it. I shouldn’t have worried about missing it; as I unpacked my bag there was half of it still coating my stuff. Oh, sand…

Cheers then. Love you, byee x x