Day 371 Thursday 20 November Malargue to Las Lajas 519km

The town where we slept was a real little Tourist town and interesting place to walk around in.

I did not walk around as I was having problems doing the blog as the Server was off-line, or that is what I thought, so I had to waste an hour of my time trying to talk to a Robot, which obviously failed, so then I emailed the Support who told me there was no problem on their side. So I switched from the Hotel’s Wi-Fi to my cellphone’s Data and I could connect to the Server, a security problem they tell me.

If you wondered where Dog puts his hat while he rides:

My mattress last night was extremely old and most uncomfortable mattress I have ever had to sleep on. There were two pillows inside the pillow slip, but it was still a very flat pillow. I told the guys we need to get  a little better to standard of accommodation, and now we just stopped in a town without a hotel!!! But the locals told us we need to look for some “Cabanas” (little self -catering chalets.) So we found ourselves two colorful Cabanas.

We had a very hard day today, we knew it was going to be a long ride, but I did not expect the Famous Route 40 to switch into gravel after only 70km into the days ride. And it went on for 115km, which is a very long time of really concentrating. the road was wide, but has not seen a Grader in years, so there were these little lines of sand that had built up over time and at some places a proper “Middelmannetjie” in the middle of the road, which was too high to cross safely. But we were also riding in wind that was blowing at 40km per hour and gusting to 65km per hour (Proff Google tells me.) This was dangerous as the wind would push you off your line, over a ridge of sand which resulted into some serious snaking to control the bike again.

Here are some of todays photos:

In the photo below we stopped at a spot where the travelers stops to say prayers for safe travel, I said a few of these prayers for my safe travel along the way, not needing to stop at a little shrine:

When the gravel eventually ended we eventually found a little Spaza Shop where we could finally get something to eat as our hotel gave us just some coffee and toast this morning.

See how windy it was in the video below:

?????? OK, the wi-fi is too slow to do this, will show you tomorrow.

Tomorrow we sleep in a Ski Resort, we are hoping we will get great accommodation as it is Summer. It is also in the heart of the Lake District, so the landscape has to start changing soon. The landscape is still like the Karoo, dry dry, but at least we have started getting some serious hills, which comes with some bends and corners, which is usually great, but today the strong wind would get channeled between the canyon and the high embankment on the side, and then it would swirl and change direction, and that would catch you out as you are leaning into the wind and then the next minute the wind hits you from the opposite side, in the direction you are leaning, and then you have to be wide awake to correct, which usually happens as you pass out of the swirl, pushing you in the oposite direction.

Then we cross over into Chile on Saturday where we will meet up with Pie’s “Connection” (a guy who also collects Studebakers who asked Pie to come and see his collection of cars, and I hope he will show us around his town and give us all the important local info and stories.

Chat with you all tomorrow

Luv ja madly

Fleisch