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| We had company for breakfast |
I was woken at 3am by a wind which sounded as though it wasn´t taking any prisoners. I fell back to sleep praying it would have abated by the morning. It hadn´t! Possibly a little bit lighter, but it was still coming from the same direction. We packed up with a sense of the impending slog and we weren´t wrong. As soon as we pointed the bikes toward Mendoza the grind began.
I put my head down and do what I always do when into a head wind, I picture a long climb and just start churning. The reward for this futile logic? 3 miles in 30 minutes! We arrived at another check point (they really like their check points over here) and it was here we both realised what sort of day was ahead and a re-think was needed.
Whilst we sat trying to decide I came up with the idea of thumbing for a lift. Yeah right! Who in their right mind would stop and load two heavy bikes into their vehicle? No-one. Our decision was simple, we turned our bikes around and utilised the very strong wind and started cycling back to San Juan.
What a tail wind! The 3 miles were covered in 10 mins and the ride from where we had camped back to San Juan took just over 3 hours, 1 1/2 hours quicker than yesterday. Our plan was in the form of heading to the bus station and finding where we could get a bus to? Sarah with her growing Spanish vocab went forth and organised a bus to a place we had previously dismissed due to the very active volcano situated on it´s door step.
Bariloche was our destination some 21 hours on our bus and what luxury it was. Our seat reclined almost flat and we had a evening meal of half a cow and veg. Which for an ´in-bus´ meal was delicious (our palates are easily pleased these days). We got to see what the road would of been like if we had carried on. What a good call this was, nothing but flat exposed desert and what plants we did see were being flattened by the wind and still from the same direction. 
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