Day 39 - Don't dis the bikes!

Amiogasta to La Rioja (120km) - Monday 27th September



Wow what a day! Like really what a day! We knew it was going to be big, but didn't realise just how much grinding our teeth would be doing! After much debate of whether the hotel breakfast would actually be worth the half hour it usually takes (time would be precious today), we went for it - it was a nice (ish) hotel after all and our breakfast optimism was high.  3 butter puffs and a coffee later we wished we hadn't! Ok so there might have been a mini croissant thrown in this time too, but seriously guys, how much do you think two increasingly skinny gringos on bikes need to eat for breakfast? Come to think of it how much do you think the average Joe needs to eat for breakfast! Let me tell you... A damn sight more than 3 butter puffs and a mini croissant between two people!

Pleased we'd sourced cereal and milk last night, we gulped down breakfast number two in the room, then proceeded with our morning ritual that seems to take hours: Quick shower (make the most of it while its there and wet hair is good for cooling down), washed cereal bowl, packed up each pannier methodically, filled the bottles (so much easier now tap water's bug free), sun creamed our pasty white bodies, checked the room at least 3 times, paid the receptionist, checked the bikes (Alan! Seriously dude what's going on with your front paw!), put as much air into Alan's tyre as we could get away with (slow puncture), then headed into the square to get supplies.

The relief we feel when we find a town has something resembling a super market is huge. It has all the promise of saving the hours of traipsing around mini shops trying to find bread, sandwiches, crisps, sweets pastries, juice, Fanta (a new addition), all of which tend to come from different vendors. Ant skipped into the supermarket like a small child skips into a park... And dragged himself out of it like he'd fallen off a climbing frame... Fanta - Check; juice - Check; strange chocolate biscuits (interesting addition) - check... Oh, I guess we'll be cycling around the square for a bit then.

Ant found some dubious looking ham and salami sandwiches in a newsagent, and I found a dubious looking man outside the newsagent. When Ant joined us dubious man was so excited (there were two possible reasons for his excitement we thought: 1- he was gleaming at the thought of pinching an item or two from our shiny bikes whilst single handedly killing us on the main square in broad daylight; or 2 - he was actually pleased to see us).  Unfortunately his excitement meant he spoke at the pace that a nervous teenage girl might speak at a One Direction premier, which given we already find Argentinians the hardest of the South American nations to understand, made things a little difficult and somewhat awkward. In hindsight, how the next 5minutes panned out was amusing to say the least. He stood excitedly rambling questions at us, Dictaphone in pocket, probably excited to get his small little village town into the news. We stood listening hard, with blank, slightly concerned, faces, trying to decipher the knotted up language, that might give us a clue as to which part of the bike he would try to steal from, or which part of us he might stab first with whatever he had in his pocket (yes that means there were probably at least a few seconds when I was seriously worried an aging, enthusiastic man was going to kill me with a Dictaphone in broad daylight... Tum tee tum!). His disappointment was (again in hindsight) endearing, whenever he paused his conversation and held up his Dictaphone to each of us in turn to answer the highly complicated question he'd just asked and he simply got the only version of 'no comment' we could muster 'no entiendo' - I don't understand - I mean after all we had no idea what we were being charged with!! Eventually he settled with slowly giving us a sentence each to say slowly into the recording device that he repeated to us several times like you would if trying to teach a two year old to say "condensation"... Hello Daniel, nice to meet you, my name is Emma and I and from London, with bikes. I like this town. Satisfied and slightly exasperated, though no less enthusiastically, he shook our hands, wished us a good journey and vanished into the puff of smoke from which he came. Shell shocked and with a nervous giggle we quickly hopped back on our bikes, before anyone else could show interest and slid out of town finding a bakery on the road out.

Not quite the speedy exit we needed today if were going to get 113km done, but hills were unlikely and if the wind stayed low we could still be there in good time.  I can't believe it took us 2 months to realise it, but we could position my phone in my bar bags with its speaker peeking out enough to work our way through my Spotify play lists. This made the first 20km pass quickly and leant itself to some interesting singing and dancing atop a bike (a rare skill!).

As we made our way across the first huge plane: "Look at the wind turbines, there so graceful" said Ant... Then he looked at me, I looked at him... And after a moments pause he said "oh, cause there not known to build wind turbines in places that get windy are they!!"... 10minutes and two sandwiches later we were cycling heads down into a strong head wind that was gaining strength. Oh and we were cycling towards the massive mountains on the other side of the plain...

...this set the scene for the day. It would actually be a very windy, fairly hilly, very long churn of the peddles, with upbeat music just about audible above the gusting wind. Whichever obstacle we overcame, the next one seemed bigger and more pronounced. We got to the end of the wind turbine plane after 30km, then entered the mountains - surely they would provide shelter? But no, now we're getting blown down hill at about 30km/h as we were trying to go up it at anything above standing still. After about 40years we reached the top, minds definitely deflated, and bodies feeling the strain.

The moderately undulating next few km turned into a frustrating battle with the wind that left us music free - well you couldn't even hear it over the gushing. But it wasn't quite as frustrating as the 10km downhill that we peddled hard down to get onto the next plain.

There the wind let up a little, but was still ever present and now the Sun had decided to play its part in the battle. It seemed to turn itself up a few notches between 2pm and 4pm, which had us pouring water on our heads and drained of energy. At about the half way mark we stumbled across a bunch of run down corrugated iron shacks, with what looked like a coke sign outside. To our surprise and delight, we bought a litre and a half of ice cold cola and drank it in the shade under a tin roof whilst chickens pecked at our bikes. 

Refueled and refreshed we pushed on and on and on. This time through more rolling mountains. It seemed from now on we would either have leg straining hills, or mind battering wind to contend with, but thankfully not both at once. Though with 60 tough km already in the legs and the knowledge of at least 50 still ahead, it didn't seem to make the day much easier.

We were hunting down a rare junction that would come at around 77km, but it seemed to be running away from us. Rumour (road signs and a map, usually fairly reliable as rumours go ) had it that there was a town there - a possible get out clause or at least somewhere to buy water, but when the turning eventually came all we saw was a couple of chickens!


Oh well 40km to go and the Sun was passed it's peak, and for some strange reason we were feeling strong and positive again. 40km seemed like nothing to us, we can do that easily... Surely. I fished out my Indie playlist and let Stereophonics and the Kings of Leon guide us into town, fuelled also by the km markers that had reappeared - 40 of these babies and we're there.

As we got closer and closer to La Rioja, the Sun got closer and closer to the other side of the Earth and we realised that La Rioja was not quite the relaxing city we'd been hoping for. Hotels were either vastly expensive, posh and poorly rated on trip advisor, or over priced dives. A few failed attempts and several km cycling around the city at dusk, we found a hotel with a room and almost acceptable pricing policy. Relief! Ant filled in the details at the Kings hotel then got told that bikes were not allowed in. Fair enough, some hotels can be like that, though typically the better the hotel the more amenable they are - customer service and all, its just the ones that think they're good who complain. In any case, mist hoteliers offer to put our bikes in a cleaning cupboard, in a court yard, in an office; though to be honest, most are more than happy to just help us get them in to a lift and up to our room whilst enthusiastically asking us if we're tired and hungry and aren't we cold??!!

But the Kings hotel was obviously too good for shabby cyclists - in fact it probably thinks it's too good for HRH Queen Elizabeth! When we asked where we could put the bikes, the overweight, abrupt, male, receptionist snatched the key off Ant and told him he wasn't welcome. Even if we were, by this point we weren't going to pay them even a penny, so we hoped on our bikes again, whilst I dreamed up the worst trip advisor review I could think of. (turns out this wasn't necessary, a quick search showed them to be the worst rated hotel in the city - seriously guys you've got to work really hard to only get a measly 1.5 stars - well done!).

A few more km and we found a smoky smelling business hotel, that just about let us in with bikes (thanks to an enthusiastic security attendant opening the cleaning cupboard), definitely didn't have WiFi despite its pricing strategy, but did offer an ok breakfast and comfy bed so we'll forgive them a little.

We were now conveniently far enough out of town to only be one km away from the bus station (no way we were staying here another night and we drastically needed a rest day!), but inconveniently far enough away from all the well rated restaurants and there was no way we were going to stray too far away from bed! So we went around the corner to the Argentinian equivalent of a naff caff and ate perhaps the best lasagne, empanadas, and lomito that we'd had for a while - all washed down with two litres of beer of course!

So San Pedro de Atacama to La Rioja - DONE! Our mission tomorrow: to get us and the boys to Mendoza and hope that the bus drivers in La Rioja are nicer than the hoteliers. Fingers crossed!