24th November 2011
We are off! We said our goodbyes to the other couples and left for the mountains. We are heading up route 51 and towards San Antonia de los Cobres.
The first day was a combination of tarmac and dirt track which meant slow going. The tarmac went well and we covered the first half pretty quickly then we hit the dirt and we were slowed to a crawl. The corragations are the main problem and you have to use all of the road to get the smoothest line as possible. We only had 26km of this to do, but it was uphill, hot and it may as well have been 260km.
What really made up for this though was the spectacular scenery. It changed with every corner and the higher we climbed the greater the and higher the mountian became. The stuggle on the dirt started to pay off. We stopped on route to refuel and have a rest and we soon realised how quiet this road was. There were cars and lorries were around, but few and far between, but when we did see them we almost always got a wave and a toot.
The grind continued untill we reached the tarmac again and it wasn´t far from here we decided to look for a place to camp. We found one place which appeared ideal, but when I ventured down to join Sarah to have a closer look I stepped on a small snake which scared the crap out of me and I was certainly not camping there (for those of you who think I´m a big girls blouse, I did recognise it as one of Argentias venomous snakes)! We climbed back on the bikes and cycled a bit further and soon found what we thought was the perfect pitch, but when we tried to put our pegs in the ground was too hard. So we had to hunt around for a piece of ground where we could, which wasn´t ideal as it was more in the open, but no one seems to mind over here. The other plus to the pitch was it had a large pool which we could wash in, Sarah when in for the full monty, however, due to my allergy to cold water I had a good wash on the side.