....drinking water until I have to go pee...haven't peed much..maybe once a day, morning and evening after and before bed. Clearly dehydrating riding a bicycle through the desert - seems unavoidable when you do...duh...
Our last days before getting to San Juan weren't very exciting ..landscape wise. It's tempting to hop a ride, bus or hitchhike and just skip it...people do, there really isn't anything wrong with that. I thought about it while sweating, pushing my pedals against the wind - yes, the headwinds - hot winds this time - are back, pissing me off (talking about peeing....). The straight line of the road into nothing ahead - just me and the wind and my mind. I started to listen to audio books in the last few weeks.......that feels more like cheating, because my mind has a "mind of it's own" and so I trick it into "something to do" this tricky enemy of mine. It helps, it truly does!
The Argentine desert is far from being done with us...there are a few oasis in between, but not done at all for another - at least- 1000 km and probably more after Mendoza, we learned.
Our riding friends from Peru called it quits at that point and headed home for other reasons too, but, I think, the unending desert, heat and --all that comes with it- gave them "the last push".
When ever we do hit an oasis though, we are - every time- pleasantly surprised how sophisticated, even the small towns, can be. There is always enough food, drinkable water from almost every faucet and reasonable, clean places to stay or camp. Friendly and helpful people mixed with the occasional jerk or jerklette, of course, but rarely do we meet them...only just yesterday when we went to the tourist info to get info about a campground near the city of San Juan and were send all the way - about 15km out of town -only to find a jerk telling us there is "camping" here, but not for overnighters. It was late, hot, getting dark and we had already ridden 120km. The place was cool, shady and EMPTY - he wouldn't even let us stay for one night and we had to ride back to town in the dark with an empty stomach - enough to get into a bit of a hissy fit with each other...James and I...trying to compete who is in worse shape, being dehydrated and exhausted. We had slept in the desert the night before. We had been very fortunate: a little rescue shelter with two picnic tables, pizza ovens a couple of walls around and a roof for shade next to a religious monument. We had stopped early in the day because we measured 46 degree C and we needed to eat. Laying in the shade we realized that we would not get up and keep riding the next 100km to San Juan with only the occasional cactus to give us shade.
Hardly any traffic on route 40, but who ever came by stopped and prayed, brought water for Defunta Correa (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difunta_Correa) in plastic bottles. - We waited until they were out of sight and snatched the water for our needs. We were convinced it won't do Difunta any good and helps us out enormously.
We had it made - ...another car came by and the friendly couple served us sandwiches, soda and beer.
Here I have to add that I might be the only German who does not appreciate beer, but James does...lucky for him!
As the day wore on, the traffic increased and so did the wind. By the time we build our tent the wind was trying to rip it out of our hands. Now there was a lot of traffic and every person in the car seemed to feel the need to pray (the water delivery had stopped for unknown reasons). It felt like a party was about to start. Timing in Argentina is different - siesta happens from about
1pm to 6pm and NO STORE is open....not even restaurants or cafes - even the bigger cities are pretty dead... but at night, hell breaks loose and on the weekends nobody sleeps during the night it seems. The music is on full blast and nobody gives any thought about other people sleeping. James and I have the hardest time to adjust and still have to figure out how to deal. -
So, back to the desert shelter...
The wind increased to about 80 or 90km an hour and I thought the tent is going to fly away with us in it......or rip it to shreds. We had some pretty dramatic winds, but they died down at night. Freaking scary!
We didn't sleep much as anyone can imagine and we were layered in fine dust..face, hair, sheet....tent...EVERYTHING while the people kept "visiting". I even heard small kids
at 5am. Seemed like everyone woke up as soon as the sun went down. In the morning we picked ourselves up, dusted us of and rode the last 100km to San Juan - glad to be here. Sweet town with lots of Sycamore trees lining the streets and pleasant people - except the monkey at the "camp" the night before. That's all for now..
