Day 63 Monday 26th November: Hitting the long dusty trail again

Craig the virgin blogger writes:

Fitting farewell sunrise for Doug who left after an early brekkie, as the smiling taxi driver turned up promptly at 7.30am, obviously with little foresight that Doug is not as generous a tipper as his previous clients.

The group now has a sick member as John suspects he may have shingles, but with a lot of ibuprofen and paracetamol he is soldiering on and even taking first driving duty .

With John in one car was Mike and Frankie , or should I say ” Frankie get with the programme “. Frankie’s daughter Lara sent him a WhatsApp message this morning impressed that her Dad can drive a VW pick up truck and not just Porsche 911s .

In the lead car was Chris as first driver and Craig. As we set off we went through the town of Tunuyan before settling into good pace on the RN 40 highway.

With 596kms to go we quickly whittled away a 100km, and then the road came to an abrupt halt as it had been washed away in parts.

Another car had obviously faced the same challenge. We got out to speak to them finding that they were actually University of Illinois students all doing either PhD or Masters in Atmospheric Science. (Randy, Holly , Jake and Amy).

They were about to launch a balloon into the stratosphere whilst measuring speed and size of storms.

NB. This region has the largest thunder storms in the world in terms of height and width!

As you can see Chris was the official balloon launcher for the day, and we were a tad worried that he may go up with the balloon as he has lost so much weight of late!! Luckily he had just enough ballast thanks to several dozen bottles of red on this trip so far.

The bad news is that we now had to retrace our steps about 30km back to Pareditas to take another road and all in all lost about an hour and a half in time and covered an extra 120kms. .

We eventually regained RN 40 and started to make good time. With about 160km left we came across Bardas Blancas and the road became a dirt road. Craig and Frankie had driven about 300km so handed over to Chris and Mike respectively for the remainder if the journey.

As the dirt road skirted the Rio Grande Craig felt like the co-driver in the Dakar Rally as Chris was in his element. Mike did well to stay in touch with us.

Driving in the Andes with the contrast of mountains, Rio Grande and occasional green pasture where some folks were dwelling was such a fantastic experience for this virgin blogger.

We found tarmac again with about 50km left to run into our destination, Buta Ranquil.

With 12 miles to run whilst writing this we expect to arrive in 15 mins and the first beer will not touch the sides!!

And here it is home for the night…

As you can see below this hotel was very efficient as the reception desk doubled as the bar and kitchen !!! We sat having a cold beer while the host played vinyls of Elvis and BeeGees for us!! 🙂